01 / Aug / 2026
In 1988 I was a student in the 1988 graduation class of the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art)1 and had embarked on the tense period of creating my graduation work.
Speaking on the basis of its lack of an avant-garde directing theory, the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition does not have an avant-garde character.
On 5 February 1989, on the traditional Chinese New Year’s Eve, about two hours after the China/Avantgarde Exhibition at the National Art Museum of China Beijing opened, the female artist Xiao Lu, who was 26 at the time, fired two shots in quick succession at her own installation work Dialogue. The sound of …
Although Xiao Lu’s Dialogue is written in the form of a novel, it is based on a true story. However, it is not only the story of a single individual. At the same time it presents a particularly important event in the history of Chinese contemporary art.
01 / Oct / 2006
This is because we see in these two telephone booths a red telephone placed on a table, but the telephone’s mouthpiece is not atop the telephone, but rather dangles there, unanswered, suggesting that the “dialogue” has been cut off.
20 / Apr / 2004
First letter from Xiao Lu to Gao Minglu about the shooting of her work Dialogue at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, in 1989.
Greetings! Thank you for your account of the shooting and your three letters. I apologise for not answering promptly. I have indeed been very busy recently, and also been unwell for a while.
03 / Mar / 2004
This time I spent all my time in a hotel. I couldn’t see any green shadows outside the window, but just shut myself inside my room, except for an occasional long walk outside, and I seemed isolated from this world.
01 / Mar / 2004
On Aug. 21, the “Country Life Plan” exhibition was scheduled to open at the National Gallery in Beijing. Though the paintings were indifferent, and had to the ordinary eye no hint of political significance
As a matter of my overall conception of art, I believe that art is a process of testing (or perhaps, supplementing this word with words of similar meaning: a practice, practical experiment, attempt, possibility of discovery and so on).
27 / Feb / 1989
Concise situation account of the “Shooting Incident” of 5 February, 1989 at the China/Avant-Garde in Beijing. Naturally, the facts in my account are selective and have a motive, namely to draw people’s increased attention to the facts of these events. Our original object in this action was to let the situation speak for itself.
