Li Xianting 2007-11-06
Li Xianting's Home,
Songzhuang, Beijing
“Only in the mid-’90s did Chinese artists have an opportunity to come face to face with Western artists and participate in the same exhibitions. It wasn’t open in this sense before. From the late ’70s through the mid-’90s, the so-called ‘open to the West’ was open to Western art history rather than the Western art world.”
Biography:
Li Xianting (b. 1949) is an art critic and curator based in Beijing.
Li graduated from the Department of Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1978. The following year, he became an editor of Art (Meishu) magazine, and in this capacity, encouraged the publication of articles about the 'Stars' exhibitions and other experimental art events. However, following the magazine’s January 1983 issue in which several articles about abstract art appeared, Li was criticized as a radical and suspended from his post.
In 1985, Li Xianting became an editor of Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishubao) and spearheaded reporting about the ’85 New Wave. Li was a major organizer of the ‘China/Avant-Garde Exhibition’ at the National Art Museum of China (Beijing, 1989).
Since 1989, Li has worked as an independent art critic and curator. In 1993, Li Xianting co-curated ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’ in Hong Kong. A selection of Li’s articles entitled The Significance is Not the Art (Zhongyao de bushi yishu) was published by Jiangsu Art Publishing House in 2000.
