The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (1750 13th Street, Boulder, 303-443-2122, www.bmoca.org) hosts a panel discussion tonight (April 24) called “Mickey, Mao and the State of Contemporary Chinese Art.” It will take up the topic of why and how Chinese art has become such a major force in the U.S.
BMoCA currently has four shows on display featuring the work of four Asian or Asian-American artists. There’s Susan Lee-Chun, a Korean-American who works with photos, videos, performance and installation art exploring herself, often in a humorous way. Yumi Janairo Roth, who is partly of Philippino descent, works with installations based on everyday objects like barricades and traffic cones. Japanese-American photographer Hiroshi Watanabe does character studies of people, while Wang Jing concentrates on pop-related paintings like “What! No Rat on the Menu Tonight?” (pictured), an acrylic on canvas from 2007.
The Wang exhibit was curated by David Raddock who was among the first American scholars to explore and write about vanguard art in China. The three other shows were pulled together in-house at BmoCA. All of them close on May 4.
Thursday’s panel include Raddock and Jing; Boulder’s own Jennifer Heath will serve as the moderator. The event gets underway at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public. — Michael Paglia
