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China’s Reform Era

China’s Reform Era

Over the last thirty years, the People’s Republic of China has undergone a series of dramatic economic and social reforms and consequently developed at an unprecedented rate. An estimated 500 million Chinese people have been brought out of poverty during this period, and an increasing number now count themselves among the country’s growing list of millionaires. At the same time, with China’s increasing prominence on the international scene, especially in its relation to its largest trading partner, the United States, the country’s influence on the world is the strongest it has been in over two hundred years. This dynamic promises to be a defining feature for international relations in the 21st century.

Along the Yangzi River

Regional Culture of the Bronze Age from Hunan

With every archaeological discovery of bronze age artifacts throughout China’s vast territory, we gain a more complete and complex picture of this formative period of Chinese civilization. At the heart of these important discoveries are the bronze ware artifacts that lend this age its name.

Woodcuts in Modern China, 1937-2008

Towards a Universal Pictorial Language

Woodcuts have a long history in China dating at least from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 BCE), and for centuries they have contributed greatly to Chinese print and folk cultures. In the 20th century, woodcuts as an artistic medium underwent a dramatic renaissance that introduced expressionistic and realist techniques into traditional Chinese folk traditions in order to communicate stark messages about China’s social and political states of affairs in an attempt to forge a new nationalistic identity throughout China. Modern Chinese woodcuts provide a dramatic record to chart the 20th century revolutionary causes that profoundly changed Chinese society and culture. The modern woodcut movement of the 1930s introduced an avant-garde expressionism of early revolutionary zeal, whereas woodcuts of the mid-20th century would eventually return to more traditional Chinese folk aesthetics in order for the Communist Party to use woodcut prints as an effective propaganda tool to reach masses of illiterate citizens throughout the countryside.

Confucius

His Life and Legacy in Art

One would be hard pressed to identify a more readily recognizable figure in Chinese history than Confucius—his ideas, as transmitted in the Analects and some other documents and then later elaborated upon by other philosophers (such as Mencius and Xunzi), have profoundly shaped Chinese civilization and culture. Given his imposing stature in Chinese history, it is somewhat ironic how little verifiable information is actually known to historians and scholars about the historical Confucius; much of what is commonly presumed about Confucius in the public imagination is distorted by centuries of accumulated legend, veneration, and iconography. The spring 2010 China Institute exhibition, Confucius: His Life and Legacy in Art, assembles a collection of visual representations of Confucius informed by such veneration as well as presenting objects related to the state cult that grew up around him.

Humanism in China

A Contemporary Record of Photography

For Fall 2009, China Institute Gallery has selected one hundred works from the groundbreaking collection of documentary photography at the Guangdong Museum of Fine Arts in Guangzhou. This exhibition, Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography, features modern masterpieces produced by Chinese photographers between 1951 and 2003. These images express an extraordinary range of human emotions and activities in dramatically different settings – urban and rural, public and private – and are of a high aesthetic order.

The Noble Tombs at Mawangdui

Art and Life in the Changsha Kingdom, Third Century BCE to First Century CE

For the first time ever in the United States, China Institute’s exhibition Noble Tombs at Mawangdui presents over sixty rare artifacts excavated during 1972-74 from one of the most important archaeological sites discovered in the 20th century. Consisting of three tombs in the hill named Mawangdui located near the modern provincial capital of Changsha in the Hunan province, the site has provided a unique window into the beliefs and cultural practices of the early era of the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-9 CE). The Mawangdui tombs are the resting places of Li Cang, the Marquis of Dai (d. 186 BCE), his wife, Xinzhui, Lady Dai (d. ca. 163), and a third person who is thought to be their son.

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