Editors: Uta Grosenick, Caspar H. Schubbe

Much like the rest of China, Chinese artists have exploded onto the international scene and, the world over, gallery owners, art collectors, museum curators and hipster aficionados are desperately trying to figure out who these unknown artists really are.

Enter Dumont, one of Europe’s premier art book publishers, which has just come out with the groundbreaking China Art Book, the first comprehensive overview of Chinese contemporary art. Edited by Uta Grosenick and Caspar Schübbe, this mammoth tome, weighing in at 670 pages, highlights 80 of the most influential artists from all over the mainland. Most importantly, it does so from a lay perspective. Uta Grosenick, who showed up last month at the HART Center for the Arts in Beijing’s 798 to launch the mighty volume, is a widely-recognized expert of Western art. But she’s only been in China for just over than a year. She came into the scene “feeling stupid, I didn’t know much about Chinese art.” She brings this relative naivete to bear on the complex subject, resulting is a perspective that is informed without fawning.

More importantly, there are no references to famous Western artists, a problem endemic to works purporting to contextualize the Chinese contemporary art efflorescence. Labeling Yue Minjun as the Chinese Andy Warhol obfuscates as much as it contextualizes. Grosenick maintains that “this can limit someone’s perspective on the art.”

Her tabla rasa approach resulted in a broad range of artists chosen for the book. In an art world known for its nepotism, Grosenick is quick to point out that they “only picked from the artists who were already well-known, and used their resumes of exhibitions and publications as a basis, rather than personal preference.”

–Elyse Ribbons