The CCVA Symposium, Beijing Dangdai Art Fair

Call for papers

The CCVA Symposium, Beijing Dangdai Art Fair, the National Agricultural Exhibition Centre, 22 May 2025

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Volume 13, Issue 1, Spring 2026

Building History: Collecting Chinese Contemporary Art 

In the past three decades, the collection of contemporary Chinese art has undergone a profound evolution with the development of the market economic system and the deepening of globalisation. From local collectors, such as Song Wei, an entrepreneur in Beijing who ‘sponsored’ 1989 China Avant Garde Exhibition by collecting the works exhibited, to overseas connoisseurs, who organised diplomatic residences and overseas exhibitions in the 1990s, collecting art has played an instrumental role in the formation of China’s contemporary art scene. In the 2000s, these transnational exchanges and the burgeoning art market catalysed the museum boom in China. Later, in 2012, the remarkable donation of major Chinese contemporary art collector Dr. Uli Sigg’s to M+ Museum in Hong Kong and the subsequent presentations of this collection after M+’s opening in 2021 were groundbreaking for developing the concept of art collections. Specifically, the practice of collecting art allowed the historicisation of contemporary art.

As art historical research is conducted by analysing and investigating visual materials, in this sense, art collections, like time capsules, retain the appearance and characteristics of art production in a specific period; they become a key element in shaping art history.[1] At the same time, contemporary art collections aim to capture a contemporary zeitgeist, usually reflecting the collector’s knowledge about the past, judgment on the present, and vision of the future.[2]

In light of the core characteristics of Chinese contemporary art, including its evolving concepts, innovative approaches, diversity and openness of different forms and media, what are the complexities and even challenges to contemporary art collections? What are the economic, political, sociological and psychological factors that generate impacts on the art collection of contemporary China? Reviewing the existing contemporary Chinese art collection, how do we preserve and display them? How does performance art developed in the post-Mao China suggest new ways of collection, and how can artworks that are site-specifically produced for particular places and projects developed through rural or touristic construction and art festivals (e.g., Fuliang, Qiaoshan, Wuzhen) be collected – without compromising their conceptual and strategic integrity? What are the difficulties of collecting Chinese contemporary art considering the constant development of technology? How can we interpret the collection of Chinese contemporary art in a context in flux?

This special issue of aims to examine the art collections of Chinese contemporary art – public and private, institutional and those scattered in minjian (amongst the people). The following set of areas is encouraged, as examples, but not limited to the discussions:

• The role of collection in making Chinese contemporary art history;
• The interrelationship between the art collections of Chinese contemporary art and its system;
• Strategies and methodologies in collecting Chinese contemporary art;
• Case studies of major private collections of Chinese contemporary art in China and beyond (e.g., Long, Taikang, Sigg, Ullens, White Rabbit, etc.);
• The symbiosis between private collections and private art institutions in China;
• Chinese contemporary art collections in world leading museums;
• The display, interpretation, and research around the collections of Chinese contemporary art;
• Sponsorship and connoisseurship, taste-shaping related to art collecting in China;
• The challenges of collecting and preserving Chinese contemporary art.

Timeline

• 7 March 2025 - abstract due (300 words)
• 12 March 2025 - applicants accepted to develop full paper for journal special issue publication and invited to present at the CCVA Symposium*
• 22 May 2025, the CCVA Symposium at the Beijing Dangdai Art Fair
• 1 November 2025 - full manuscript due (7–8,000 words)
• Publication: Spring 2026

Please send one document that consists of both an abstract (please make a note if you would like to attend the CCVA Symposium, in-person only) and a brief bio (100 words) to Guest Editor Wu Mo (mo.wu@mplus.org.hk) and Principal Editor Jiang Jiehong (joshua.jiang@bcu.ac.uk).

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is an associate journal of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at Birmingham City University.

* Please note that this one-day CCVA Symposium will be hosted on the first day of the Beijing Dangdai Art Fair (22–25 May 2025), the National Agricultural Exhibition Centre, Beijing. Participant in the Symposium is complimentary but individuals will need to arrange their own travel.

[1] For example, Whitney Museum of American Art was established to house Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s collection of American Art, with the aim of embracing modernism and changing the idea that American art was largely rural. Peggy Guggenheim Collection located in Venice also documents the development of 20th-century modern art and modern American art, especially the interactionsbetween surrealism and abstract art.

[2] Pi, Li (ed.) (2021), Chinese Art Since 1970: The M+ Sigg Collection. London: Thames and Hudson.