Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art

By Meiling Cheng

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. In Beijing Xingwei , Meiling Cheng engages with such artworks created to mark China's rapid social, economical, cultural, intellectual, and environmental transformations in its post-Deng era. Beijing Xingwei-- 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, Cheng shows us how art can reflect, construct, confound, and enrich us. And at a moment when time is explicitly linked with speed and profit, Beijing Xingwei provides multiple alternative possibilities for how people with imagination can spend, recycle, and invent their own time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0857420879
• ISBN13: 9780857420879
• Release Date: January 2014
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Length: 510 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.5" x 9.1"