A Story of Ruins

Curator and professor Wu Hung tells the history of ruin aesthetics from Chinese art traditions to present-day representations and lays the basis for a discussion on Chinese art in the context of global art history. The book covers notions of ruins as they stand apart from Westerm art conventions and how Chinese imagery was once used by Western art to evoke a sense of the exotic and foreign. Wu outlines the concepts of erasure and remembrance, known in Chinese as Qiu and Xu. The earliest mention of erasure is cited in the writings of a royal diviner named Gu, during the 13th Century B.C. The word is again found in a poem emblematic of "ruin poetry" around 300 B.C. In contemporary Chinese aesthetics, Wu says that the ruins have come to signify both despair and hope. During the seminal Stars Exhibition of 1979, ruin-related images were found in the Yuanming Yuan paintings. Wu argues that the overall sentiment among avant garde artists and writers have reflected a sense of surviving calamity. Images of ruins were used to capture a sense of death and rebirth. The path of development in ruin aesthetics continues in the works of contemporary artists such as Rong Rong and Zhan Wang, in which demolition images are used to signify invasions of privacy.