The New Social Environment#545
Realisms in Chinese Visual Cultures and Aesthetics
Featuring Carol Yinghua Lu, Meiqin Wang, and Paul Gladston
to
8 p.m. Eastern / 5 p.m. Pacific
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Curator Carol Yinghua Lu and scholar Meiqin Wang join Rail contributor Paul Gladston for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Emily Lee Luan.
In this talk
Carol Yinghua Lu
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.
Meiqin Wang
Dr. Meiqin Wang received her doctorate degree in Art History from SUNY Binghamton and is currently a full professor at California State University Northridge. Currently, her research focuses on socially engaged art and its related categories such as public art, artivism, and ecological art in East Asia. Her major publication includes two research monographs Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art (Routledge, 2016) and Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2019), and two edited volumes, Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia (Vernon Press, 2022).
Paul Gladston
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).
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Emily Lee Luan reading today.
Emily Lee Luan
Emily Lee Luan is a Taiwanese American poet and essayist. Her debut poetry collection, 回 / Return, won a Nightboat Poetry Prize and will be published in 2023. She is also the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a 2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2019, American Poetry Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Brooklyn.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.