RAS Art Focus

Vitalisms: The "Historicity" of Contemporary Painting in China

Sunday, 8 June 2025

1:45 pm registration

2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Organized and curated by Julie Chun, Art Historian and Art Focus Convener, we continue our insightful 2024-2025 series China's Arts and Aesthetics of the Past by delving into the material culture of the recent and distant history to assess how objects ranging from imperial patronage to utilitarian handicrafts have shaped China's aesthetics through the ages..

This month's session will take place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai with the founding director and curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun, where we will have the opportunity to explore the current painting exhibition Vitalisms.

Vitalisms is an exhibition-as-experiment initiating a long-term research and education project on the "historicity" and "value" of contemporary painting in China. The basis of the exhibition is a launch of a new research project gathering a group of artists, born in the 1980s and 90s in China and mostly educated in Chinese art academies, whose practice focuses on figurative paintings made in the past five years (i.e., since 2020). This exhibition will be an experiment with the presentation of the paintings in a shared space and time, to ask: How are they situated in history? What could they tell us about the time and place in which they were made? Could we anticipate their historicization as documents of personal and/or collective memory in the future? In what ways could they become a counter-hegemonic archive?

Throughout painting's history, various vitalistic fantasies have been projected onto the painting as a material object: an image of liveliness, an agent with divine power to bring dead matter to life, an artifact of the artist's life and presence, and a living subject itself.

Could we possibly extend these vitalistic fantasies to think further of paintings as a reflecting subject – a knowing and thinking agent capable of effecting change in our modes of understanding the world? Could painting, when made and understood as socially and historically contingent, also act upon the world itself? Moreover, how might these paintings retain their impetus or lose them altogether in the coming decades, far removed from our present era?

For more info about ICA of NYU Shanghai, please visit: https://ica.shanghai.nyu.edu​

About the Speaker:

Michelle Yeonho Hyun makes exhibitions and events with artists and others. She sometimes writes and talks about art, among other things. She is the founding director and curator of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai since 2018. She worked previously as a curator for Shanghai Project (2015-16), Gwangju Biennale (2014), and the University of California San Diego (2012-14). She has also organized projects for the New Museum (New York, 2012), Creative Time (New York, 2011), and What, How & for Whom (WHW) (Zagreb, 2010).