Asianart.com | Associations | Articles | Exhibitions | Galleries | Message Board | Calendar


Asian Art Calendar of Events

Friday, March 29, 2024


Exhibition Public - USA & Canada

Inspired by the Opera: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video

Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue Chicago,
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Feb 13, 2014 To Jun 15, 2014


Detail: Since the mid 1990s, a number of Chinese artists have incorporated the visual vocabulary of Chinese opera into new art forms. This concise exhibition reveals the continued relevance of opera, both within contemporary Chinese society and within the experimental work of individual artists.

It features: The Forbidden City (Zijincheng) by Liu Wei, a lyrical video of theatrical “glove puppets” (budai kuilei) shown publicly for the first time; two videos by Chen Qiulin that make use of traditional opera characters to respond to changes wrought by the Three Gorges Dam; a series of black-and-white photographs of elderly actors by Liu Zheng that play with conventions of ethnographic and opera photography; and videos by Cui Xiuwen that connect to opera in more oblique ways, through performative elements and symbolic props, gestures, and costumes.

Together, the works help illuminate the relationship between contemporary art and China’s cultural heritage.

Phone No.: 773.702.0200
Fax: 773.702.3121
Contact Email: [email protected]
Site URL: http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/inspired-by-the-opera-contemporary-chinese-photography-and-video/

Asianart.com | Associations | Articles | Exhibitions | Galleries | Message Board | Calendar