Curated by Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari, Hou Hanru, Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell, Kyung An

Like a world’s fair, a survey exhibition is a dinosaur—yet its appeal remains irresistible for curators and audiences alike. And the stakes are exponentially raised when the art on display inhabits the eye of a political hurricane. “Art and China After 1989”—the first major survey of contemporary Chinese art in almost two decades—seeks to ignite its own blaze with a sprawling display of more than one hundred works in the fields of film, video, painting, photography, installation, Land art, and performance art by some seventy artists and collectives. Bookended by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the exhibition unfurls all the usual heavy hitters, including Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Chen Zhen, and Zhang Peili, while bringing context to bear with a display of archival materials and an accompanying three-hundred-page catalogue. Travels to the Guggenheim Bilbao, spring 2018; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fall 2018. 

— Joan Kee