Professor and artist Xu Weixin shared the importance of contemporary Chinese art and his own work in a speech at the Chazen Museum of Art Wednesday.
Weixin, current associate Dean of the School of Arts at Renmin University of China, is known for his contemporary portraitures that paint a detailed description of a person. He is currently working on a memorialization project featuring a sequence of mega-size portraits and Chinese historical pictures.
Throughout Weixin’s presentation, he showed slides of different contemporary works as well as his own works of art.
Weixin said many of his paintings include large portraits of men and women from important time periods in China’s history that serve to tell the stories of victims and victimizers of China’s past.
He stressed the development of Chinese Contemporary Art. He said this is something he would refer to as all works of art produced in contemporary China that specifically value independent thinking.
Characteristics of contemporary art, according to Weixin, include a reflection on social problems, questioning of the status quo, inclusion of resources from popular culture and an emphasis on the hear and now, or the problems that exist today.
Weixin said China’s new global position as an economic power is creating contemporary portrait art tha reflects the struggles and hardships facing China today.
“China has become a main focus of the world over the past 30 years because of the rise in the economy and in art and humanities,” Weixin said.
Weixin said he would put an emphasis on the fact that Western and European culture are not in touch with the difficulties in Chinese history.
Despite the attempt by Western artists to understand Chinese contemporary art, Weixin said Chinese artists have their own set of goals and problems that are distinct from the issues that Western artists address.
“The Western audiences view the contemporary art that suits their tastes and artistic imagination but does not reflect the cruel realities of China,” Weixin said.
Contemporary art, according to Weixin, is meant to help people reflect about the issues that are at hand. He said contemporary art is also becoming a symbol of entertainment, as artists are conforming to society rather than rebelling to make people think outside of the box.
