Experimental Beijing

"In this exquisite ethnography Sasha Su-Ling Welland charts shifting debates over contemporary art as a zone of encounter. Welland evokes her own moving encounters with especially women artists who highlight the Other visions of imagined worlds that exist around the edges of 'the Chinese dream.' They are artist ethnographers who, in their fraught encounters with Western feminist artists like Judy Chicago, demonstrate how feminist art is an epistemological field of practice rather than a label for static objects. This book is one of a kind and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand not only China and contemporary art, but gendered perspectives on globalizing visions." - Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

“Sasha Su-Ling Welland has written an emotionally complex book about women who make contemporary art and their intricate, tiring, and sometimes treacherous environment. In a world of commodities, apartments, W. E. B. Du Bois icons, Ai Weiwei, and Picasso brand cars, violently gifted women manufacture disturbing political art. Intellectually compelling and cast in deceptively fluid prose, Welland's ethnography shows creative logic in the remarkable ways that a feminist critic makes a difference and women artists' choices are ungovernably complex. This is a stunning book.” - Tani E. Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

"Drawing on her own ethnographic fieldwork, Welland investigates the power dynamics (traditional versus modern, male versus female) that played out in China as the role of experimental art was negotiated and new cultural institutions were erected." - Art in America

"For all readers, including non-specialists, Welland should succeed in making lost lives and camouflaged histories visible and palpable. The limpid prose, theoretically informed structure and expanded multimedia materials available on the book’s accompanying website would make it a captivating textbook for an advanced undergraduate course or a stimulating methodological text for graduate seminars. Marking a major contribution to the field, this is a masterful, thought-provoking and luminous text." - Ros Holmes, Journal of Gender Studies

"A much welcome addition not only to the expanding scholarship on contemporary Chinese art, but also to Chinese feminist art, and gender studies." - Meiqin Wang, The China Quarterly

"Experimental Beijing is a complex book that demands close reading not only by scholars interested in gender issues in art, but also those who wish for a multi-dimensional picture of the worlds of Chinese contemporary art." - Doris Sung, China Perspectives

“Through interviews and communications on other occasions with a broad range of people, including artists, curators, officials, and urban planners, Welland shows convincingly the particular world of those almost forgotten artists and their creative strivings. … In so doing she creates a space for dialogue and cultural encounter in the text, averts the reader from the trap of translation and situates them in this admirably detailed account of the Chinese contemporary art world.” - Siying Duan & Jun Zeng, Visual Anthropology

“Experimental Beijing is excellent at revealing the complex complicity between Chinese contemporary art and the new Chinese market economy and the heavy price that is paid by Chinese women artists for it.” - Chris Berry, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

"Situated at the intersection of art history, anthropology, and gender studies, Experimental Beijing enacts incisive interventions in histories of Chinese contemporary art, global contemporary art, and feminist art.… Engagingly written with fluid and lyrical prose." - Peggy Wang, The Art Bulletin

"Welland's book shows that beyond art historical study, artists and works of art can be valuable sources for interrogating contemporary society." - Hilary K. Snow, The China Journal