Leng Lin

b. 1965, Nanjing

Art critic, curator

Graduating from the Art History Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (1988), Leng Lin was an editor, from 1988 to 1990, of Wenyi yanjiu, a bi-monthly magazine sponsored by the Chinese Art Research Institute. In 1993, he obtained his MA degree in Art History, again from the Central Academy, and got a job as an assistant researcher at the Institute of Literature Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. In the mid 1990s, Leng started writing broadly on Chinese contemporary art and in particular on the younger generation of oil painters and installation artists. In the meantime he organized several exhibitions of recent works by young artists, two of which—‘Shishuo xinyü’ [A New Account of Tales of the World] (1995) and ‘Shi wo’ [It’s Me] (1998)—attracted great attention. Leng has also promoted contemporary Chinese art on the art market, organizing with other artists, critics and curators auctions that feature emerging artists.

Leng Lin’s writing focuses mainly on emerging artists of the 1990s and especially those art-school graduates who have had few opportunities to show their work in public exhibitions. In much of his writing, Leng promotes the notion of ‘selfhood’, which is a significant issue in the works of artists like Liu Ye, Hong Hao, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan. He believes that the pursuit of social ideals in art before the 1980s has been replaced by the self-conscious expression of individualist values in the art of the 1990s.

Further reading

Leng, Lin, (2000). ‘Shi wo/It’s Me’. In John Clark (ed.), Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium. Hong Kong: New Media, 142–4.

——(2000). ‘Hong Lei and Wu Xiaojun’. In John Clark (ed.), Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium. Hong Kong: New Media, 204–6.

Wu, Hung (2000). Cancelled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, Chicago: The Smart Museum of Art.

QIAN ZHIJIAN