A giant among artists of his generation, Wu Guanzhong is celebrated for his distinctive synergy of Western oil painting and Chinese ink aesthetics, as well as his modernisation of Chinese ink painting. This catalogue accompanies the National Gallery Singapore’s exhibition that showcases Wu’s oeuvre over five decades and inaugurates the permanent gallery dedicated to the artist. Accompanying essays within expand upon themes of the exhibition and offer insight into Wu’s beliefs regarding the function of art. A bilingual publication in English and Chinese.

Ever since Singapore became an independent nation in 1965, its government has been intent on transforming the island’s environment. This has led to a nearly constant overhaul of the landscape, whether still natural or already manmade. Not only are the shape and dimensions of the main island and its subsidiary ones constantly modified so are their relief and hydrology. No stone is left unturned, literally, and, one could add, nor is a single cultural feature, be it a house, a factory, a road or a cemetery. Given one of Singapore’s unique feature, namely that the state is the sole landlord, all types of property in all parts of the island, rural as well as urban, were and remain subject to expropriation, fortunately always with due compensation. This atlas illustrates, essentially through diachronic mapping of the changing distribution of all forms of land use, the universality of what has become a tool of social management. By constantly “replanning” the rules of access to space, the Singaporean State is thus redefining territoriality, even in its minute details. This is one reason it has been able to consolidate its control over civil society, peacefully and to an extent rarely known in history.

Artists: John Baldessari, Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Bloom, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Tony Brauntuch, James Casebere, Sarah Charlesworth, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Jouise Lawler, Thomas Lawson, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo Allan McCollum, Paul McMahon, MICA-TV (Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen), Matt Mullican, Tom Otterness, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Smith, James Welling, Michael Zwack.

Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978-80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.

"How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China? Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there."

Text by Jason C. Kuo.