Paul Gladston has contributed a scholarly essay to the catalogue accompanying the major career retrospective of the artist Yu Youhan currently being held at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. Yu is a major contributor to the development of contemporary art from China. He first came to prominence internationally during the 1990s as one of the initiators of the movement known as Political Pop (Zhengzhi bopu), which juxtaposes images representing the Maoist revolutionary period in China with aspects of western(ised) popular visual culture. The Power Station of Art is one of China’s leading public art museums and the site of the Shanghai Biennale. Paul’s essay, ‘Critical Reflections on Yu Youhan’s Paintings as a Locus of Aesthetic Modernity’, examines the relationship between Yu’s painting and trans- cultural interactions between the ‘West’ and China as part of the construction of aesthetic modernity since the eighteenth century. The essay appears alongside others in the exhibition’s catalogue by the internationally respected critics Gao Minglu and Li Xianting.
The invitation to write for the SPSoA follows the publication of Paul Gladston (2015) Yu Youhan, Shanghai: ShanghArt and 3030 Press, the first comprehensive fully illustrated monograph on the work of the artist. The monograph was published in close collaboration with ShanghArt, China's leading contemporary art gallery, who provided £20,000 in support of production costs.
Find out more: http://www.powerstationofart.org/en/exhibition/Yu-Youhan.html
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