Defamiliarizations in Chinese Visual Cultures and Aesthetics

Award-winning critic and curator Drew Hammond is based in Berlin. He is a graduate of the department of East Asian Languages at Columbia University, specializing in Neo-Confucian thought under Wing-tsit Chan. He has lectured on Contemporary art subjects for the University of Michigan, University of Toronto, the Academy of Art, Póznan (Poland), the University of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), and, in Mandarin, the Graduate Faculty of the China Academy of Art, Beijing. His recent publications include James Hayward: The Non-Secular Paintings, St John’s Art Center: Collegeville, Minnesota (2019).

Born in Beijing (1979), Jia (嘉) graduated from an architecture faculty in 2003. She went on to work as an architect, magazine editor, and curator of exhibitions in China after her early work was exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale in 2002. Since moving her studio to Berlin in 2009, her artwork has become the subject of twenty publications and has been exhibited in numerous museum exhibitions in Europe and the U.S, and in solo exhibitions in galleries in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Paris.

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).