Chinese Art - Modern: Encyclopedias & Exhibitions

Most comprehensive art encyclopedia available in English; useful for scholarly overviews and excellent bibliographies.

Art Radar is the only editorially independent online news source writing about contemporary art across Asia (through the end of 2018). Art Radar conducts original research and scans global news sources to bring you the taste-changing, news-making and up-and-coming in Asian contemporary art.

Covers one of the most tumultuous and catastrophic periods in recent Chinese history⎯the three decades following the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. During this time, the government, led by Mao Zedong (a.k.a.Mao), sought to modernize all aspects of Chinese society. This process included suppressing or destroying much traditional culture while simultaneously creating a new visual culture representing the goals and ideology of the new government.

Traces the development of Chinese art throughout the turbulent decades up to and throughout the twentieth-century (1859 - 1998) a period marked by great social upheavals and a struggle between modernity and tradition. The exhibition catalogue (available online) includes reproductions from traditional scroll paintings to literati paintings, woodcut prints, and social realist paintings of the Cultural Revolution.

A website documenting and expanding upon an exhibition of Chinese (mainland China and Taiwan) art created from the early 1980s through 1998. Includes more than 20 images; a full checklist of every work in the show; information on specially commissioned pieces; a chronology of the development of contemporary Chinese art; biographies of the artists; and a selected bibliography citing more than 150 articles, books and catalogues. See also a link to Chinese Type Contemporary Art (www.chinese-art.com), an online, nonprofit magazine published out of Beijing that profiles, in imagery, articles and criticism, the contemporary art of China.