The Wall

The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The most ambitious exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art to travel beyond China will be presented this fall by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries after its debut in Beijing this summer at the Millennium Art Museum.

The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art is the first collaboration between U.S. art museums and a significant Chinese art museum to focus on contemporary Chinese art.

Because of its size and scope, The Wall will be installed at three venues: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on UB’s North Campus in Amherst, and the UB Anderson Gallery on Martha Jackson Place in Buffalo. The exhibition will open to the public on October 21, 2005 and remain on view through January 29, 2006.

Gao Minglu organized The Wall during his tenure as assistant professor in the Department of Art History of the UB College of Arts and Sciences. A leading authority on twentieth and twenty-first century Chinese art, Gao was curator of Inside Out: New Chinese Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998 and the Chinese section of the Conceptual Art: Point Of Origin 1950s-1980s exhibition, sponsored by the Queens Museum in New York in 1999.

While the Great Wall certainly will come to the minds of visitors to the exhibition, Gao says there are several interpretations of walls in Chinese culture. “The Wall can be interpreted as a physical or architectural form such as the Great Wall or other various walls in a living space; as a modernization project that has posed a challenge in China such as the Three Gorges Dam Project; or as a cultural and social boundary experienced by Chinese citizens,” said Gao, Associate Professor of East Asian Modern and Contemporary Art in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh. “These three interpretations provide the intellectual framework for the exhibition.”