Modern Chinese Painting and the Mass Audience Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific launch lecture and drinks reception

Modern Chinese Painting and the Mass Audience marks the launch of the Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific, which has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Research Centre will undertake a research programme focusing initially on aspects of Chinese, Japanese and Korean modern and contemporary art and will organise an annual seminar series, develop new research grant proposals and oversee an international exchange and secondment programme for Visiting Fellows from the Asia-Pacific region.

This lecture draws on material presented in the 2012 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, under the title, Chinese Painting and its Audiences.  In the lecture, Professor Clunas looks at the ways in which a transnational audience for modern Chinese painting was constructed in the People’s Republic of China and beyond after 1949, and addresses the historical context of ‘modern Chinese art’ as a global phenomenon.

Craig Clunas has been Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford since 2007, having taught previously at University of Sussex and SOAS, University of London, and worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  He is the author of Art in China (second edition 2009) in the series ‘Oxford History of Art’, and of numerous other books and articles on Chinese art and culture; he is the first historian of Asian art to hold the Oxford professorship.

Please note doors will open from 18.30 and the lecture will start promptly at 19.00 followed by a drinks reception 19.45–21.00.