Carol Yinghua Lu is a Ph.D. candidate of the University of Melbourne and the director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. She is an art critic and the contributing editor of Frieze Magazine. Lu was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Art Biennale, and also a jury member of the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture of 2018. She was the co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015 she had been the artistic director and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen. She is the first visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship Program at the Tate Research Centre in 2013, and she was among the first recipients of the ARIAH (Association of Research Institute in Art History) East Asia Fellowship in 2017. She has also been on the jury for the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, Hugo Boss Asia and Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In collaboration with Liu Ding, she is in the process of researching into the legacy of socialist realism in the practices and discourses of contemporary art in China, entitled“From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: Echoes of Socialist Realism.”

11.28 China as an Issue: The Practice of the Inside- Out Art Museum as an Example

This talk situates the practice of the Inside-Out Art Museum, a Beijing-based private art museum in the social, political and cultural context of China. For a long time in China's art world, many art practitioners yearn for and wish to learn from Europe and North America's art, art historical narratives, theories, institutional practices and system construction, which are regarded as effective reference and universal experience. In the current practice of many Chinese art museums, similarly, it has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon to import star artists, curators, or ready-made practices effective in the Western context, and to worship them as a classic.

"China as an Issue" is a concept that underlines the museum's programme. It is neither a nationalist viewpoint nor an ambition driven by the imagination of nation-state. It is an issue we have taken up in the formation of the practice in the museum in consideration of the specificity of our practice, because China, as the place and settings where our practice takes place, is our existence and reality. Confronted with the reality that our peers within and without China have displayed excessive indifference towards the issues of China as well as the thoughts and practices generated here, we question and criticize the revelry and fantasy resulted from the flattening of history and cultural relativism in global discourses.