Qu Leilei: The Stars and After.
Qu Leilei, Friendship, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist.
We are pleased to invite you to the conference Qu Leilei: The Stars and After, linked to the exhibition Qu Leilei: A Chinese Artist in Britain on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (7 Nov 2017 - 15 Apr 2018).
The invited contributors are: Shelagh Vainker, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Eric Lefebvre, Cernuschi Museum, Paris; Katie Hill, Director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art, Oxford; Alexandra Munroe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Franziska Koch, University of Heidelberg; Yan Liu, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Katie Hill’s lecture is titled Chinese Art in Britain. Reflections on three decades of artistic migration in the British-Chinese context:
Several times recently I have been asked the question: ‘why don’t Chinese artists in the UKsucceed in the same way as those living in Paris? What is different about them? What about their circumstances?’ The question deserves some consideration and exploration, despitethe obvious over-generalised implication in the word ‘them’. Histories of Chinese art inBritain are fragmented due to the diverse experiences and backgrounds of artists who have come to live and work in the UK, experiences that often elude a straight art historicalnarrative within an East-West dichotomy. I will attempt to map out a picture of this diversityto draw out the idea of ‘Chinese Art in Britain’ within this history of migratory artisticexperience over the past three decades through a selection of works that can be situatedmost effectively via a web of complex cultural interactions. It is argued that by tracing thesehistories we can begin to understand the works of artists caught up in the enunciative spaceof the in-between. The question of artistic language and its relationship to the institution inthe problematic sphere of a ‘globalised’ art world is also discussed alongside the perpetualneed to translate.
Date: Friday, 24 November 2017
Time: 10.30 am (Registration) - 4.45 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont St, Oxford OX1 2PH, United Kingdom.
