Abstractions in Chinese Aesthetics and Visual Culture

Curator and gallerist Johnson Chang is the founder of Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, is a co-founder of the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong, and a guest professor of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He has been active in curating Chinese exhibitions since the 1980s, and was co-curator of Farewell to Post-Colonialism, the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, the Shanghai Biennale in 2012, and East Meets West at Saatchi Gallery in 2014. Recent projects include Jia Li Hall, a series of research on Confucian rites and aesthetics; West Heavens, Sino Indian exchange in art and social thought; and Inter-Asia School, which organized the Inter-Asia Biennale Forums at the Shanghai Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Taipei Biennial, and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014 and 2016.

Art historian Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University. Karmel is the author of two books, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and he has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues, as well as the New York Times, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, New York, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).

Art critic and curator Carol Yinghua Lu is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Melbourne. She is a contributing editor at Frieze, is on the advisory board of The Exhibitionist, and was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She also served as co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen and in 2013 she was the first visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program at the Tate Research Centre. In collaboration with the artist Liu Ding, she is in the process of researching the legacy of Socialist Realism in the practice and historical narrative of contemporary art in China.

Award-winning critical theorist and cultural historian Paul Gladston is the Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney and a distinguished affiliate fellow of the UK-China Humanities Alliance, Tsinghua University. He is co-editor of the book series Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics and was founding principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His recent publications include the collected edition Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China (2021) and the monograph Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019). He was an academic adviser to Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward Gallery, London (2012).