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

Köppel-Yang, Martina 2008-01-19
Guangzhou

Conducted in Mandarin

“How do you define ‘enough’? I think sometimes ‘lacking’ is a good thing, because with an overflow of information [the Chinese artists] would have had no sense of distance and would have ended up reproducing what people did before. In order to understand Western art, they relied heavily on magazines and catalogues. These magazines were often in Japanese, and they were particularly fond of this publication called Bijutsu techo. The images were, however, usually very small and sometimes blurry. They could only read Kanji (Chinese characters) too, and so they might not have fully comprehended the content. But I think that this distance, this lack, allowed them to blaze their own way.”

Biography:

Martina Köppel-Yang is an art historian and curator based in Paris, Germany and China.

Köppel-Yang studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the mid-1980s and received her Ph.D. in East Asian Art History and Sinology from the University of Heidelberg.

A member of the advisory board for Yishu Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art, Köppel-Yang has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art and in 2003 published Semiotic Warfare: A Semiotic Analysis of the Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989. In the past 15 years, Köppel-Yang has curated numerous exhibitions relating to contemporary Chinese art. Together with her husband, Yang Jiechang, she established Mühlgasse 40: Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, in Heidelberg, Germany (2003).

Köppel-Yang, Martina 2008-01-19 Guangzhou

Köppel-Yang, Martina 2008-01-19
Guangzhou