EventsThe New Social Environment#775
Eco-Art in the Sinosphere
Featuring Meiqin Wang, Chang Tan, and Paul Gladston, with Brandan Griffin
Monday, March 27, 2023 6 p.m. Eastern / 3 p.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
This panel will critically discuss art related to nature and ecology produced by artists within the Chinese-speaking cultural sphere. We conclude with a poetry reading by Brandan Griffin.
In this Talk
Meiqin Wang

Dr. Meiqin Wang received her doctorate degree in Art History from SUNY Binghamton and is currently a full professor at California State University Northridge. Currently, her research focuses on socially engaged art and its related categories such as public art, artivism, and ecological art in East Asia. Her major publication includes two research monographs Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art (Routledge, 2016) and Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2019), and two edited volumes, Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia (Vernon Press, 2022).
Chang Tan

Chang Tan is an Associate Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at Penn State University, specializing in Chinese, East Asian, and Asian diasporic art of the 20th and 21st century. Her upcoming book The Minjian Avant-garde: Contemporary Chinese Artists in Search of the Public (Cornell, 2023) studies how experimental artists mixed with, brought changes to, and let themselves be transformed by minjian, the volatile and diverse public of the post-Mao era, and critically assesses the rise of populism in both art and politics. Dr. Tan has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Art Journal, Diacritics, World Art, and Third Text. Her curatorial and editorial activities explore the connections between Asian and Asian American art.
Paul Gladston

Award-winning critical theorist and cultural historian Paul Gladston is the Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney and a distinguished affiliate fellow of the UK-China Humanities Alliance, Tsinghua University. He is co-editor of the book series Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics and was founding principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His recent publications include the collected edition Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China (2021) and the monograph Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019). He was an academic adviser to Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward Gallery, London (2012).
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨