Beijing Xingwei Contemporary Chinese Timebased Art

About this book

From cannibalism to light calligraphy, from self-harming to animal sacrifice, from meat entwined with sex toys to a commodity-embedded ice wall, the idiosyncratic output of Chinese time-based art over the past twenty-five years has invigorated contemporary global art movements and conversation. This book engages with artworks created to mark China's rapid social, economic, cultural, intellectual, and environmental transformations in the post-Deng era. The book, itself a critical artwork with text and images unfolding through the author's experiences with the mutable medium, contemplates the conundrum of creating site-specific ephemeral and performance-based artworks for global consumption. Here, the author shows us how art can reflect, construct, confound, and enrich us. And at a moment when time is explicitly linked with speed and profit, this book provides multiple alternative possibilities for how people with imagination can spend, recycle, and invent their own time.