China/Avant-Garde Exhibition

[1][2] Widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of contemporary Chinese art, the exhibition provided a comprehensive view of the experimental works that emerged in mainland China after 1985.

"[7] The exhibition was shut down only two hours after it opened, when artist Xiao Lu shot her own work, Dialogue, with a pellet gun.

[8] After the exhibition, with the assistance of art critic Gao Minglu,[9] an individual businessman in Beijing—who had contributed part of the funding for the exhibition—purchased works from over a dozen artists, including Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, Ding Fang, Mao Xuhui and Zhang Peili, at a price of 10,000 renminbi (approximately $1,200) a piece.

Song Wei, who later set up one of China's first private art galleries, has since disappeared and it is unclear whether the works he acquired survived.

[11] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).