Zhang Wei, Wang Luyan : a conversation = ein Gespräch

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Between them, Zhang Wei (born 1952) and Wang Luyan (born 1956) have witnessed and co-written the story of Chinese contemporary art, which begins in 1976, with the death of Mao and the wider opportu...

Between them, Zhang Wei (born 1952) and Wang Luyan (born 1956) have witnessed and co-written the story of Chinese contemporary art, which begins in 1976, with the death of Mao and the wider opportunities opening up after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Like many of their later friends and colleagues, the two were in their early 20s, self-taught, and setting out to discover art out of an inner urge. Zhang Wei went to the Beijing parks to paint and met similarly-minded young men and women with whom he would form the core of the No Name Group, then mainly an association of plein air painters in a roughly impressionist style. Wang Luyan became an early member of the more political Stars Group. When both groups staged their influential first exhibitions in 1979, Zhang Wei was already on his way to abstraction, while Wang Luyan went on to develop his own kind of conceptual art founded on paradox in the late 1980s. The one emigrated to New York in search of greater artistic freedom, the other stayed in Beijing, where he played an active role as an artist, collector, and curator. Today, both of them are based in Beijing, enjoying international success amid the rising interest in Chinese contemporary art. In this book, they discuss their shared history, their bodies of work as well as their larger ideas on art with Jia Wei, an expert in Chinese art and managing partner of Beijing's Boers-Li Gallery. Their conversation makes us follow them on their own artistic path as both a collision and a fertile dialog between their personal roots and a global world.

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