Danwen Xing
born 1967 in China,
lives and works in Beijing.
Studied painting but at the end of the 1980s turned to photography as an autodidact to become one of the renowned artists working with this medium in her country. Her artistic practice revolves around globalisation, urban studies and current social problems.
The works form part of a series of 250 photographs made between 1993 and 1998. They document the Chinese artistic avant-garde, emerging at the beginning of the 1990s, not only in visual arts but also in modern dance, underground film, experimental theatre and new music. After the collapse of the student-led revolution in 1989, the artists portrayed by Danwen Xing – who are often her colleagues from the studies at the art academy – began to reject traditional media, such as painting or sculpture and started to use their body in art to look for new forms of expression. For them, those new forms were more suitable to convey the contradictions and conflicts of social life at the time, but also to express their own position as artists. Thus, “A Personal Diary” is not only a portrait of a generation, but also a record of the birth of performance art in China and a very personal handbook of Chinese contemporary art history.
