The China Project

311 Contributing authors Dr Thomas Berghuis is Senior Research Curator at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, and at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, in Sydney. He is Associate Lecturer of Asian Art in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney, where he completed his PhD dissertation in 2006 on performance art in China, following a Master of Arts in Sinology at Leiden University (the Netherlands). From 2003 to 2004, he was a visiting scholar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He was Associate Curator of the ‘6th Sharjah International Biennale’, United Arab Emirates (2003); the ‘3rd Israel Video Art Biennial’, Tel Aviv, Israel (2006); and was Curator of the ‘1st Dashanzi International Arts Festival’, Beijing (2004). Berghuis has published widely, including the book Performance Art in China (2006). Anne Carter is Acting Senior Paintings Conservator, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. She has a Bachelor of Applied Science in the Conservation of Cultural Materials, Paintings (University of Canberra), and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History (University of Queensland). After graduating, Carter undertook a two-year internship in paintings conservation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was involved in the establishment of the Queensland Art Gallery’s Centre for Contemporary Art Conservation, and continues to research the conservation of contemporary art materials. She has presented papers at conservation conferences, and has written for publications including The Melbourne Journal for Technical Studies in Art Volume 2 (2005), and Modern Paints Uncovered (2006). Feng Boyi is a freelance curator, editor and art critic who has been at the forefront of contemporary Chinese avant-garde exhibitions since the 1990s. He graduated from Beijing University of Education in 1984 and currently lives and works in Beijing. In the 1990s and in 2000, Feng Boyi worked with Ai Weiwei to organise several key exhibitions and publications, including Black Cover Book , a compendium of artist statements, proposals and notes by contemporary Chinese artists, published alongside texts by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.In 2000, they co-curated the controversial exhibition ‘Fuck Off’ (a response to ‘The Third Shanghai Biennale’), which is now regarded as one of the most prescient exhibitions of contemporary Chinese avant-garde art. Abigail Fitzgibbons is Research Assistant, Asian and Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. She is currently completing a PhD through the University of Melbourne, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History (University of Queensland). Fitzgibbons has been the recipient of research grants from the Getty Institute in Los Angeles and the University of Melbourne. She has written on contemporary Asian and Australian art for a range of publications, including The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006), Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966–2006 (2007), and Contemporary Australia: Optimism (2008). Professor Nicholas Jose is an author, and currently holds a Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney. He worked in China from 1986 to 1990, where he was in contact with many artists involved in the cultural and social transformations of those years. Jose has written widely on contemporary Asian and Australian culture, and acted as curatorial advisor on the exhibitions ‘Mao Goes Pop: China Post-1989’ (1993) and ‘Art Taiwan: The Contemporary Art of Taiwan’ (1995). His publications include Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989), The Rose Crossing (1994), The Red Thread (2000) and Original Face (2005) — highly regarded novels that deal with Chinese subjects — and a collection of essays, Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays (1995). Leng Lin has worked as a leading critic and curator of contemporary Chinese art since the 1990s and, with Suhanya Raffel, is co-curator of ‘Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul’. He completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1988 and a Master of Arts in 1993 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. In 2004, he founded Beijing Commune, an alternative centre showing Chinese artists such as Zhang Xiaogang, Ma Liuming and Song Dong. He has curated a number of key exhibitions inside and outside China, including ‘Reality, Today and Tomorrow: An Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art’ (1996), ‘It’s Me! A Profile of Chinese Contemporary Art in the 90s’ (1998), ‘Weightlessness’ (2001), ‘Only One Wall’ (2005), ‘The Game of Realism’ (2006), and ‘Home’ (2006). Leng Lin is President of Pace Beijing, a new gallery opened by Manhattan-based PaceWildenstein, and is also an Associate Professor of Art Theory and History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Gillian Osmond is Conservator, Paintings, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. She has a Bachelor of Applied Science in the Conservation of Cultural Materials, specialising in painting conservation, from the University of Canberra. Osmond has a particular interest in the contribution that technical examination and cross-sections of paintings can make to our knowledge and understanding of art work. She has published on the deterioration of artists’ oil paints, as well as on innovations in techniques for cleaning paintings. Suhanya Raffel is Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, and lead curator of ‘The China Project’. She has been a member of the curatorial team for the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibitions since 1999. Raffel has worked on contemporary art projects in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Asia. She was the lead curator for the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘Andy Warhol’ exhibition in 2007, and is lead curator for ‘The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, which opens at the Gallery of Modern Art in late 2009. Dr Claire Roberts is Senior Curator, Asian Arts and Design, at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and a Research Fellow with Geremie Barmé’s Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship Project at the Australian National University. Roberts studied at the Beijing Languages Institute in 1978–79 and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 1979–81. She has published widely on Asian art and material culture, including The Great Wall of China (2006) and Other Histories: Guan Wei’s Fable for a Contemporary World (2008). Russell Storer is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, and curator of ‘William Yang: Life Lines’. He was formerly at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, where he curated ‘Interesting Times: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art’ (2005), ‘Situation: Collaborations, Collectives and Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin’ (2005), and ‘Video Logic’ (2008), as well as solo exhibitions by Simryn Gill, Matthew Ngui, Paddy Bedford, Juan Davila, Ugo Rondinone and Kathleen Petyarre. He was a visiting curator at ‘Documenta 12’ and a ‘curatorial comrade’ for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and has written widely on contemporary art.