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Mar 31 2014

Chinese Artists Fire Up the Armory

by Claire Sabel

Contemporary Chinese art was the undisputed belle of the ball at this year’s Armory Show. The largest art fair in New York hosted 205 galleries from around the world, including 17 from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. The Armory’s “Focus” section, now in its fifth year, highlighted three decades of contemporary Chinese art, under the discerning eye of curator Philip Tinari, the Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Clustered along the corridor connecting the modern section of the fair to the contemporary one, fairgoers could not transition between the two periods without encountering the many facets of the Chinese art scene—which, as Tinari emphasized, is making its own inroads that are too often overlooked by Western audiences. The following are a selection of the fair’s highlights.

Photos by Claire Sabel for ArtAsiaPacific.

As part of the “Focus” section, Tianrenheyi Art Center, from Hangzhou, presented “Unrestricted Warfare” coupling Jin Feng’s portraits of Socialist dictators with a traditional Buddhist sculptural form composed of bondage tools by Xu Zhen.
As part of the “Focus” section, Tianrenheyi Art Center, from Hangzhou, presented “Unrestricted Warfare” coupling Jin Feng’s portraits of Socialist dictators with a traditional Buddhist sculptural form composed of bondage tools by Xu Zhen.
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This year’s Armory Show took place March 5–8, 2014.

Claire Sabel is a writer based in New York.