The young Chinese feminists shaved their heads to protest inequality in higher education and stormed men’s restrooms to highlight the indignities women face in their prolonged waits at public toilets.
Beijing-based artist Liu Yi is working on a series of black-and-white portraits he knows will never be shown in a Chinese gallery. His varied subjects — men and women, young and old, smiling and pensive — have one thing in common: They are Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest repressive Chinese rule.
KASHGAR, China — They come for the camel rides, the chance to dress up like a conquering Qing dynasty soldier or to take selfies in front of one of the most historic Islamic shrines in Xinjiang, the sprawling region in China’s far northwest.
On November 26, 2012, about ten college students “flash mobbed” the front of the human resources and social welfare department of Hubei Province in central China. "Refuse to take off pants for inspection," "Ask about menstrual history, what does it have to do with being a civil servant." According to the current admission regulations, female candidates for civil service positions must go through a detailed gynecological examination.
In early January, constructions workers in Wuhan, China staged a Gangnam Style protest in front of their employer's building. Using the Gangnam Style dance, the men sought to bring media attention to their mounting unpaid wages.
The 9,000 bottles of water on display at an art gallery in Beijing last month appeared identical to those of Nongfu Spring, one of China’s most popular spring water brands, with one jarring difference. Inside each bottle was brown, murky groundwater collected from a Chinese village.
Two pairs of dusty, pastel-orange roller skates. A ram's skull. Several meters of tangled, bright red rope. They aren't the sort of items you'd find in the great fashion houses of Europe or on North American catwalks.
But, for unconventional Chinese designer and performance artist Wan Yunfeng, they are perfect.
From his small apartment in eastern Beijing, Wan makes fashion that only he wears.
Exhibition visitors have expressed feelings of uneasiness or even pain and nostalgia when seeing Colored Vases by Ai Weiwei1. The 51 vases that make up the artwork are originally treasures from the Neolithic Age (5000–3000 BCE) and the artist has dunked them in common industrial paint.
Why did Ai Weiwei do it?
"May you live in interesting times" is the familiar Chinese saying, usually spat out as a curse. You can see why in "A Touch of Sin," a film by renowned director Jia Zhang-ke. That kind of time is now, in the history of his country. With four vignettes inspired by real-life "ripped from the headline" events, he shows what the great economic expansion of China is doing to the majority of its people.
Yu Hong’s Female Writer, a painted and photographic portrait of the writer Zhao Bo 趙波 (b. 1971), recalls courtly images of idealized beauties. Yu, however, deliberately complicates the perspective in her composition: she asked the sitters for her She series to select photographs of themselves that could be paired with her paintings, meaning that the images together convey dual female perspectives, both the artist’s and the subject’s.
"Stand Up, Sisters" tells the story of a rural girl who journeys to Beijing for a family visit, only to be deceived and forced into prostitution, suffering unthinkable hardships. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, these women are rehabilitated. The narrative reaches its peak with her and her younger sisters' victorious achievement of self-reliance.
In her 2021 graduation project from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Chinese performance artist Zou Yaqi staged a provocative social experiment titled “21-Day Survival Challenge.” For three weeks, Zou assumed the persona of a wealthy socialite, using counterfeit luxury items, strategic self-presentation, and social engineering to access elite spaces in Beijing—such as five-star hotel lobbies, first-class airport lounges, and high-end restaurants
A minibus is parked on the side of the road with a series of pipelines wrapped around it. One end of the pipeline is connected to the exhaust port of the minibus, and the other end is put into the car, so that the exhaust gas can be directly introduced into the car, forming a " Street gas chamber".
The New Culture Movement was initiated by Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Cai Yuanpei, Qian Xuan and other writers who had received Western education (called the new-style education at the time). It is an ideological and cultural innovation and literary revolutionary movement.
The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.
By NAZANIN LANKARANI
PARIS — Five years after his rise to the top of the Chinese contemporary art market, Yue Minjun has something new to smile about.
Best known for his large-scale paintings depicting his own smiling face, Mr. Yue, who is based in Beijing, has long been a star of the Chinese contemporary art scene, having achieved commercial success through a highly singular aesthetic.
Students at art colleges across China are taking a strong stance in the midst of the largest wave of protests to have gripped the country since 1989. As demonstrations against the government’s strict Covid-19 policies erupted across the country over the weekend, students rallied on campuses to create protest art and graffiti.
A photography project on China's marriage market has recently reignited the debate about marriage in China, and the phenomenon of women deemed too old to marry, or "leftover women" in the country.
On January 17, 2011, Hong Yuping (洪玉萍), from Fujian Province, contacted Yu Jianrong (于建嵘), at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), about her family’s plight and requested assistance: In June 2009, their son, Yang Weixin (杨伟鑫), then age six, was abducted from their hometown, Quanzhou, and they had been searching for him ever since.1 In early 2010, Hong had recognized Yang Weixin in a photo of three children begging outside a Xiamen train statio
“There are many problems in rural areas. For example, agriculture is declining, no one is farming, traditional things are falling apart, farmers are brainwashed by the idea of urbanization, and they don’t like their hometown. They all want to move to the city.”Activist Ou Ning said. Rural construction is an important issue. As an activist, he chose Bishan village in Anhui, China as the field to start his experiment, which is “Bishan Project”.
Female students from the Guangdong University of Technology in Guangzhou called for equal job opportunities and for people to "pay attention to the value of women" while protesting on the school's campus, shirtless and covered in body paint.
The photos, taken by ogling passersby, have been circulating on Weibo and naturally netizens stand divided on whether the semi-naked protests were empowering or counterproductive...
One of the most critical artists on the contemporary art scene is Zhang Huan. His works are of great social insight and unique in how he applies his artistic expression. He thus makes them an almost visual feast with a peek into the multilevel structure of modern society. One such work is the masterpiece "Family Tree," which shows how art can mould our social cognition through multilayered symbolism and profound imagery.
China's only seaside theater festival has been held in the resort town of Aranya in north China's Hebei Province. Artists from around the world traveled there to take deep dive into the world of dramatic performance. For theatergoers, there were interactive activities including cross-border installations such as seaside talks, environmental drama readings, screenings, theater houses, parades and bonfires by the sea.
In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance.
In Beijing, students at Tsinghua University raised signs showing a math equation devised by the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, whose surname in Chinese is a homonym for “free man.”