EASTON, Pa.(www.lafayette.edu), March 14, 2008 — The exhibition Look at Me! The Performative Impulse in Recent Chinese Photography will be on display in the Williams Center for the Arts Gallery from March 24 to May 24.
The guest curator for the exhibition is Dan Mills, director of the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University. He will give a talk on the exhibit at 4:10 p.m. on Monday, April 7 in Williams Center 108. A reception will follow.
The exhibition will present the work of 15 artists who serve as the subject of their own works in a variety of ways. With the world’s growing curiosity toward China, the artists in the exhibit are also looking at China and themselves and use their artworks as an expression of their personal views.
Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, and from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. when there are public performances at the Williams center. The gallery is located at the corner of Hamilton and High Streets. For more information, contact the Williams Center Art Gallery at (610) 330-5361.
The exhibit includes a wide range of contemporary works by artists who document performances of extreme endurance, pose philosophical questions, and raise issues about Chinese society and the individual. Works in the exhibit include those by Ai Weiwei, who photographed landmark symbols representing authority while extending his middle finger in his Study of Perspective Series; Chen Qiulin, whose Ellisis’s Series No. 3 depicts highly choreographed performances in demolished cityscapes and industrial landscapes in northern China; Zhao Bandi, who created photographs of her with a stuffed panda bear as a play-off of Chinese Socialist propaganda posters; and Zhang Dali, China’s first graffiti artist.
Other artists are Chen Lingyang, Cui Xiuwen, Hai Bo, He Yunchang, Hong Hao, Qiu Zhijie, RongRong & inri, Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, and Xiao Lu.
The photographs are loaned courtesy of Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, Chambers Fine Arts, Max Protetch Gallery, and ChinaSquare, all in New York City, and the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University.
“When Michiko Okaya [director of Lafayette art galleries] invited me to curate an exhibition on Chinese photography, I thought about photographers I admired and about photographers whose work I was interested in getting to know better,” says Mills. “Most had one thing in common: they were often the subject of their photographs. This seems befitting. Chinese artists, too, are looking at China, and at themselves.”
Mills has written an essay, “Chinese Artists Focus the Lens on Themselves,” for the accompanying catalogue for the exhibit.
Okaya stressed the importance of Chinese art. The College’s Grossman Gallery is also currently featuring works by Chinese conceptual artist Xu Bing. “Chinese artists are creating some of the most interesting work being made today, and interest by scholars, curators, museums and galleries, and collectors is intense. It is very exciting to have the work of contemporary Chinese artists in the two college art galleries. We can get a glimpse into some of the issues being explored through the arts.”
The Williams Center gallery is funded in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
