SFMoMA: China on My Mind

Art and China After 1989 at SFMoma. Museum Link
This painting by Wang Xingwei from 2001 (from 6.4.89) is banned in China for its reference to the famed journal photo in which bodies rather than penguins are transported.  

A beautiful map re-imagining borders as a board game.

Ding Yi, b. 1962, acrylic and paint on canvas, much like the Brooklyn painter Rob de Oude.

Yu Youhan, Abstraction 1990-4 from 1990, acrylic on canvas. He is "widely considered the father of abstract painting and Political Pop in China," to give the range of artistic output by a single individual in a momentously changing society.

Lieu Wei, Two Drunk Painters, 1990 by a conceptualist painter born in  1972 with no uniting aesthetic to his work. Contemporary painting in China did not get started until the 1980s, so there is an enormous range of social realism, Pop, abstraction and other stylistic fusions, which focus on community in a rapidly changing world.

Yu Youhan, b. 1943, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Modern, So Appealing? 2000, collage. Youhan is a godfather of painting in China.

Yu Hong, 2001, Deng Xiaoping's Tour in the South of China,  "China Pictorial," p.2, no. 6,  1992 and Twenty Six Years Old, A Still of the Film "The Days," 2001, From Witness to Growth. Ink jet print, left, oil on canvas, right. 66 x 79 inches.

Sequence of the filming of To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain,  1995--a groundbreaking performance work filmed secretly in Beijing's East Village created by artists Cang Xin, Duan Yingmei, Gao Yang, Ma Liuming, Ma Zhongren, Wang Shihua, Zhang Binbin, Zhu Ming, and Zuoxiao Zuzhou, courtesy Zhang Huan.

Revisiting Chinese landscape in a large-scale ink work.

Lu Xiaodong paintings of young soldiers in the middle east and Beijing barracks defending their territory. The quotes are from the soldiers: their names, ages, and military affiliations.

The revamped Xu Bing installation from 9/11/01 dust.

This show was beautiful, moving, poignant, with so much more than shown here. Like the Guggenheim, SFMoMA declined to show the famed dog racing film by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, or the insect installation despite the ferocity and violence of these works reflected the artist's experience.