A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture

摘要

A Story of Ruins is a great contribution to the understanding of visual articulations of remembrance and nostalgia in Chinese visual art, a subfield that gained momentum with the recurrent presence of demolition and debris in Chinese contemporary art. As Wu Hung's pioneering efforts (as curator, scholar and critic) evidence, the subject offers some conceptual difficulties, the major being how should ruination be situated in relation to an aesthetic tradition that allegedly had not indulged in ruins, either for the material (preference for ephemeral timber structures) or the symbolic (perceived continuity of history/culture) conditions of Chinese art.