Conceptualism and China

About the speakers

• More details about Genevieve Trail

  Genevieve Trail

  In 1979, two Hong Kong-born artists travelled to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and, unbeknownst to one another, undertook conceptualist photography projects. Eva Yuen Man-wah (b. 1952) created Two Faces in Nanjing and Hong Kong and John Young Zerunge (b. 1956) carried out Manchurian Snow Walk in a forest in Jilin. In the late 1970s, China had become newly accessible for tourism and Yuen and Young were among a number of Hong Kong-born artists who took up the opportunity to travel to China. Using principles of conceptual art, each explored their relationship to China and to the Chinese identity as the PRC was poised at the brink of extraordinary social and economic transformation. In the years prior to 1979, both artists had been closely engaged in parts of the post-object art scene in Australia and New Zealand, including exhibiting at the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) in Adelaide. This paper will discuss their early conceptualist projects in China, to shed new light on histories of Chinese conceptualism from an Antipodean perspective. Genevieve Trail is an art historian of modern and contemporary Chinese art. She teaches at the University of Melbourne, where her PhD research concerns the early contemporary period in Hong Kong art, c. 1970-1989.

• More details about Yu-Chieh Li

  Yu-Chieh Li

  This paper examines the moving image work of Jiang Zhi (b. 1971), problematising the visual exploitation of the human body and the complicity of spectators in digital capitalism. Belonging to the generation of autodidact moving image artists who transitioned from DV experimental documentary to HD video installation, Jiang emerged from the Post-sense Sensibility milieu of the late 1990s, in which Chinese conceptualism turned away from text-based idealism toward a direct, often unsettling engagement with flesh, sensation, and bodily presence. Initially documenting marginalised communities in Shenzhen and Beijing, his practice shifted in the 2000s toward a critique of the commodification of gendered bodies in public media — a move that reflects a complex narratology exploring individuality, autonomy, and affect while embracing a new realism that challenges the idealism of conceptual artists of the 1980s. In 0.7% Salt (2009), Jiang presents celebrity Gillian Chung weeping silently in an advertisement-like setting, generating an artificial affect devoid of narrative depth, contrasting canonical socialist-era works such as Zhang Peili's 30 x 30 (1988), which foreground duration and repetition over narrative effect. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s account of affect as mediation and recent scholarship on the cultural politics of emotion in Chinese media, the paper argues that Jiang's close-up aesthetic performs an intimate deterritorialisation of the commodified body. Dr Yu-Chieh Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Approaching Autonomy: Post-socialist Conceptualism in Chinese Art (De Gruyter Brill, 2025) and is currently working on a monograph examining crisis and affect in Sinophone video art.

• More details about Sueann Chen

  Sueann Chen

  Canonical histories of Chinese conceptualism have frequently privileged language, systems, measurement, dematerialisation, and institutional critique. Shaped predominantly through the practices of artists associated with the New Measurement Group and related experimental practices of the late 1980s and 1990s, these accounts have largely understood conceptualism through its linguistic, procedural, and institutional operations. This paper argues that one productive way of understanding the continuing legacy of Chinese conceptualism is through its methodological inquiry into organisation. Measurement organises relations through numerical systems, classification through categories, language through signs, institutional critique through structures of value, and procedural practices through artistic production. Seen in this way, conceptualism is united less by a shared aesthetic than by an investigation into the conditions through which thought and meaning are organised. Taking the contemporary practice of Jing Ao 经傲 (b. 1993, Beijing), this paper argues that this methodological inquiry continues through a different field of operation. Her installations organise relations between found objects, materials, architecture, bodies, and exhibition space, configuring the conditions through which conceptual meaning emerges through perception, movement, and contingent encounter. This paper argues that Jing Ao extends the organisational inquiry of conceptualism by relocating it from language, systems, and institutional critique to the material, spatial, and perceptual organisation of experience. By reframing conceptualism as a methodology of organisation, the paper offers a new framework for interpreting its continuing legacies in contemporary Chinese art. Sueann Chen is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne researching contemporary Chinese art and Chinese philosophical thought. Her work examines the intersections of aesthetics, artistic practice, and intellectual history in contemporary Chinese art.

• More details about Minerva Inwald

  Minerva Inwald

  In 1988, artists and art critics around the PRC received an unusual bureaucratic form in the mail. Although apparently sent by the organising committee of a major upcoming conference, the form contained unusual fields, asking respondents about their birth weight and favourite animal. These questionnaires were, in fact, the creation of the young artist Geng Jianyi (b. 1962). The completed forms would become part of his landmark conceptual work Forms and Certificates (Can be Confessed) (1988). Geng Jianyi’s participatory piece posed one of the fundamental questions facing the PRC art world in the 1980s: who was the postsocialist artist? In the 1970s, the party-state abandoned its staunch commitment to class politics, eventually dismantling the system of class classification that had defined both socialist society and artistic identities in the Mao era (1949–76). In the wake of party-state’s renunciation of class, artists and administrators endeavoured to fashion new artistic identities beyond the conventional frameworks of class analysis. This paper explores how, both mimicking and lampooning Mao-era class registration forms, Forms and Certificates (Can be Confessed) deployed conceptualism to interrogate the problem of inventing new artistic identities and subjectivities under the new conditions of postsocialism. Dr Minerva Inwald is an Assistant Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of Melbourne. Her research uses visual art and material culture to explore the history of the People’s Republic of China. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, Minerva held the Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in Contemporary Art at UNSW, Sydney.

• More details about Claire Roberts

  Claire Roberts

  Claire Roberts is an art historian and a curator with an interest in modern and contemporary Chinese art, and cultural flows between Australia and Asia. She is Professor in Chinese Art History, School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her most recent books are Fairweather and China (2021); Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters (edited with John Thompson, 2019), Photography and China (2013) and Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (2010).

• More details about Paul Gladston

  Paul Gladston

  Paul Gladston is the inaugural UNSW Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art. He was previously Chair Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham UK and Head of the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. His book length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (Reaktion 2014), which received ‘Best Publication’ at the Awards of Art, China (2015), and Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury 2019). Among publications co-edited by Gladston is Rethinking Displays of Chinese Contemporary Art: Diversity and Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan 2024). He has curated or co-curated several exhibitions internationally, including most recently ‘In-/Visible Spectrums: Contemporary Video Art from the Sinosphere’ staged at the SOAS Gallery, University of London (2026).

• More details about John Young Zerunge

  John Young Zerunge

  John Young Zerunge AM (杨子荣) is one of Australia’s foremost senior contemporary artists. Born in Hong Kong and moving to Australia in 1967, he has developed a five-decade practice investigating Western late-modern and postmodern art from a bicultural perspective. Beginning in art criticism and conceptual practice in the late 1970s, Young has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. His artworks are the focus of a current exhibition, Inside the Mirage at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art; a group exhibition shaped by the imaginative and philosophical worlds of Young and Ian Fairweather (1891–1974). 

• More details about Peter Tyndall

  Peter Tyndall

  Contemporary artist

• More details about Carol Yinghua Lu

  Carol Yinghua Lu

  Carol Yinghua Lu is an art historian and a curator based in Beijing. She holds a Doctorate in art history from University of Melbourne. She is the director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. She was a recipient of the ARIAH (Association of Research Institute in Art History) East Asia Fellowship (2017) and visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship Program at the Tate Research Centre (2013).