Materials of the future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art From 1980-1990

Huang Zhuan 2009-06-18
OCAT,
Shenzhen

Conducted in Mandarin

“When Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibition came to Beijing, in the context of that time, people called his works modernist art, Dadaist art, destructive art, even protest art. They thought it was very straightforward. Normally people saw the museum as a place only for showing official, mainstream painting. Suddenly, you could put a piece of trash in there and call it art. At most, people understood it as Dadaist art, but never really comprehended the thought behind it or the force of structuralism in the works. The exhibition was misunderstood back then; people just went and saw it happily. I think the misinterpretation of Rauschenberg’s exhibition is connected to the large amount of works in the 1989 ‘China Avant-Garde Exhibition’ that had no logic or were completely destructive.”

Biography:

Huang Zhuan (b. 1958, Hunan Province) is Associate Professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Director of OCAT Shenzhen.

A graduate of the Department of History at Huazhong Normal University in 1982, Huang worked on the editorial team of Art Trends magazine (Meishu sichao) between 1985 and 1987. He received his M.A. degree in the History of Chinese Art from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1988 and was also granted an M.A. thesis award by the Wu Zuoren International Art Foundation.

Between 1994 and 1996 Huang worked as an editor of Art Gallery (Hualang) magazine, and from 1997 has been working at the contemporary art space affiliated with the He Xiangning Museum, known as OCAT, where he has been Director since 2005.

Since the 1990s, Huang has been active in curating exhibitions. Some of these exhibitions include the first Guangzhou Biennial (1992), the third Contemporary Art Triennial (Brisbane, Australia, 1999) and the first Guangzhou Triennial (2002), as well as numerous shows at OCAT Shenzhen.

Huang Zhuan 2009-06-18 OCAT, Shenzhen

Huang Zhuan 2009-06-18
OCAT,
Shenzhen