Center for the Art of East Asia

This fall, UChicago’s Department of Art History alumna Nancy P. Lin, current Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, and Ellen Avril, chief curator and the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, curated the exhibition Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China at Cornell University’s Johnson Museum of Art. This exhibition brought together works from the Johnson Museum’s collection and archival video footage from Cornell Library’s Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-garde Art with loans from artists, private collectors, and other institutions, including UChicago’s Smart Museum of Art. Featuring a wide range of works, the exhibition explored multifaceted histories of contemporary performance, photography, and video in China, while showcasing emerging artists who continue to push the boundaries of performance and mediation in radically new ways.   

A two-day symposium was held November 16-17 in conjunction with the exhibition. Programming included a performance event conceived by exhibition artist Lin Yilin, who engaged in a site-specific performance in the Johnson Museum’s Appel Lobby, joined by a group of volunteers. CAEA Director Wu Hung presented the symposium's keynote lecture titled Contemporary Chinese Photography and Contemporary China (1970s-2000s). Symposium speakers included Ellen Larson, PhD, CAEA Postdoctoral Instructor of Art History, Madeline Eschenburg, PhD, Washburn University, and Jessie Taieun Yoon, Cornell University, with Christopher Phillips, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, serving as a moderator. A subsequent roundtable discussion, featuring artists Xing Danwen, Pixy Liao, Lin Yilin, Miao Ying, and Song Dong, was moderated by Nancy P. Lin.