Panel Discussion
“Between Anton Kandinsky and Ai Weiwei: China-ism in the Contemporary Art World”

Panelists:
Jonathan Goodman is a New York-based writer and teacher at Pratt Institute. He has been writing on Chinese art for nearly seventeen years-his first piece was on the conceptual artist, Xu Bing, for ARTnews in 1994. Since then, he has written many articles and reviews on Chinese art and he has traveled to China five times for extended periods, including one visit in 1999 funded by the Asian Cultural Council, which allowed him to meet many young artists.  His experience and travels have helped him develop an overall view of the contemporary Chinese art phenomenon, particularly as it occurs in Mainland China, and among the Chinese art diasporas. 

Yong Huang was born in China but is currently working in New York as an associate/architect at Aedas. He formerly worked as a senior architect with the Swiss architects of Herzog de Meuron for a number of notable projects, such as the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. He immigrated to New York from Beijing in 1993, and received his Master’s degrees from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Pratt Institute.

Ming Fay was born in Shanghai, raised in Hong Kong, and is currently based in New York City. He is a sculptor and has had extensive solo exhibitions as well as public art projects in the United States, including a public school, a pedestrian park, an airport, a subway station, a ferry terminal, a convention center, a townhouse and courthouses. Recent solo exhibitions include: Butters Gallery, OR, 2011; Leslie Heller Workspace, NYC, 2010; Eight Modern Gallery, NM, 2008; Shanghai MOCA, 2007. Selected recent group exhibitions include: MOCA, NYC, 2009; National Academy Museum, NYC, 2008; Hong Kong Museum of Art, 2008; He Xiangning Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2006; Lodz Biennial at the International Artist Museum in Lodz, Poland; 2004; Ming Fay's sculpture. He was also featured in recent books, such as Unsettled Visions, Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists, Along the Way (MTA Arts for Transit), City Art: New York’s Percent for Art Program, Facing Sculpture, Contemporary Outdoor Sculpture, among numerous other reviews.

Anton Kandinsky was born into a family of artists in Crimea, Ukraine in 1960. Kandinsky studied at Simferopol Samokisha Art College (1975-1979). He was a private student of artist Yevsey Yevseyevich Moiseyenko in St. Petersburg before entering the Ukrainian Art Academy (Kyiv State Art Institute), where Kandinsky studied at the Monumental Department, studio of V. Chekaniuk and M. Storozhenko (1980-1986). In 1986, which is also known as the Chernobyl year of graduation, Kandinsky graduated from the Academy with a Master’s in Fine
Arts. In 1998, Kandinsky immigrated to the United States of America. In 2004, New York, Kandinsky founded a movement called “Gemism,” which refers to the artist’s application of realistic images of luminescent gemstones onto his canvases. The gemstones are intermingled with flags, ideograms, political figures and celebrities along with symbolism from China, the former Soviet Union and American pop culture. Yet this is not straight Pop, nor is it Chinese art or some pastiche of Soviet-era propaganda; “Gemism”is a tip of the cap to all three. Kandinsky’s most recent art projects include the Meditation of Weapons (2007), I don’t want to be a Russian Artist (2008), and China-ism (2009). The artist lives and works in New York.

Ming Xia is a Professor of Political Science at the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of International Politics, Fudan University, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from Temple University, where his dissertation won the Bernard Watson Best Dissertation Award in 1997. He once taught at Fudan University and served as a residential fellow at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University (2003), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2004) and the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore (2004 and 2011).

He is the author of The Dual Developmental State (Ashgate 2000) and The People’s Congresses and Governance in China (Routledge 2008; paperback edition 2011); co-editor of The Crown of Thorn: Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize (Hong Kong: Morning Bell Publisher, 2010). He was included to the "Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals” of 2009 and 2010. He is a co-producer of an HBO Oscar-nominated documentary movie, "China's Unnatural Disaster, The Tears of Sichuan Province" (2009), which also won the 2011 CINE Golden Eagle award. He maintains a column on China in Perspective magazine and contributes regularly to the BBC World News Chinese Service. He is also an associate editor for The Journal of Modern China (Dangdai Zhongguo Yanjiu). He has published dozens of articles and frequently commented on U.S.-China trade and financial relations, political economy in China, organized crime, global issues and globalization.

Moderator:
David Rong was born in China and graduated with a Master’s degree in Aesthetics of Arts from Peking University in 1988. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University for Cultural Studies in 1996-1998, and he was the founder and the director of Art Next Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Recent shows he has curated and/or co-curated include China-ism I (2009), Over the Wall (2009 and 2010), Make Love Not War (2010), Connection: Nature (Hillwood Art Museum at LIU, 2010) and Demolition: Second History (Connecticut College, 2011). David Rong is currently working as an independent curator for contemporary art based in New York City.

Co-moderator:
Mai Mang (Yibing Huang) was born in Changde, Hunan, China and inherited Tujia ethnic minority blood from his mother. After receiving his BA, MA and PhD in Chinese Literature from Peking University, he moved to the US in 1993. He holds a second PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Mai Mang's work of poetry has been published in China since the 1980s and can be found in many anthologies. As a "blindist," he is the author of two books of poetry: Stone Turtle: Poems 1987-2000 (2005) and Approaching Blindness (2005). Most recently, he published Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), a book that presents case studies of the generation of Chinese writers that spent its formative years during the Cultural Revolution and focuses on this generation's identity shift from "orphans of history" to "cultural bastards." As a world-traveler who has given poetry readings in both China and in the U.S., Mai Mang is currently an associate professor of Chinese language at Connecticut College.