By Nicole Wang ’26

I have been working with the Zhou Yan Contemporary Chinese Art Archive (ZYCCAA) as a Visual Resources Assistant (VRA) since September 2023. When I started, I had little to no practical experience in cataloging and assessing artworks. All I knew was that I loved visiting art museums, especially those featuring contemporary art from Asian diasporic areas. The revitalizing feeling of coming across exciting and inspiring artworks gave me the courage to apply to the ZYCCAA. Thankfully, Professor Zhou recognized my passion, and I have since been working on documenting and captioning various artworks, correspondence records, and critique papers made by, and related to, contemporary Chinese artists relevant during the 1990s.
This job has been an incredibly rewarding experience for me. Each week, I spend time focusing on a specific artist by analyzing each individual art work. The artwork in the ZYCCAA are mainly reproductions in the form of photographs or slides. If the copy has been warped in some way, it is part of my job to crop and edit for alignment purposes. Then, I meticulously caption and geolocate the artwork. This requires not only visual assessment of the piece, but also an understanding of the artist, achieved through research and analysis of personal essays and critique papers. Then, my final descriptions get posted to the digital archive. Correspondances, critiques, newspaper articles, or other documents get filed with equal fastidiousness under the Documents section of the archive.

My time at the ZYCCAA has been incredibly inspiring. I have the privilege of encountering brilliant artworks. Without the ZYCCAA, I likely would not have come across many of the artworks in the archive due to their gradual slide into obscurity over the decades. Therefore, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with the ZYCCAA and share the archive’s records with a broader audience. I am grateful to be a part of something that commemorates and celebrates Chinese contemporary artists, highlighting them as an important and influential group in the modern art scene. Furthermore, working at the ZYCCAA has allowed me to learn more about myself and my cultural background. As a Chinese-American, I have often felt disconnected from my ethnic background, but the ZYCCAA has provided an avenue in which it is necessary to increase my knowledge of Chinese history, languages, folklore, society and culture. Through this work, I have learned not only a great deal about art, but also more about myself and my personal history.

This semester, I have mainly been working with artwork by Yang Ke-Qin (b. 1963), a female Chinese contemporary artist who specializes in oil painting, but also experiments with photography and sculpture. The ZYCCAA has over thirty-five artworks by Yang, plus dozens of articles and critiques assessing her artwork. Due to my prolonged time poring over her artwork, I have felt a strong connection to the artist despite never meeting her in person. She often deals with the existential question in tandem with the woman question and the definition of art. In her paintings, brutish, erratic brushstrokes, extremely vibrant or dramatically dim colors, and light play are often used to conjure up incredibly haunting but also touchingly gentle images. In her paintings, I often feel as if I am joining her in her journey through the existential, rediscovering the definitions and the significance of our shared identities as women, humans, and artists.

In a personal statement, she has stated that all of her artworks share a similar theme of “solitariness”, “a grinning beautiful flower”. Most of my days spent at the ZYCCAA has been spent alone, channeled into Yang’s artwork. This solitude has revealed so much information to me, both of the art and of myself. Thus, I believe that through her works I have been able to understand the beauty of the solitary. I love Yang’s artworks and I hope that viewers of the Zhou Yan Contemporary Chinese Art Archive do too.

From ZYCCAA:

This oil painting depicts an image of a woman in a position of surrender. It is likely to be a part of Yang’s oil painting series of women sleeping in various positions. The chaotic coloring of this painting conveys an uncomfortable feeling. The woman has collapsed — bent over with her head to her raised, crossed arms. What she is yielding to is unknown, but it looks as if she is giving up after a long struggle. She appears to be ashamed, ducking down her head into her shoulders, afraid to pick up her head. Her arms appear bruised due to its pale blue-green colorization. The brightest and warmest part of her body appears to be her stomach. She is completely naked and has short-cropped hair. Another similarity between this painting and others of the series is that the background seems dark, chaotic, and boundary-less. It is a darkness capable of enveloping the woman completely. Her only defense against this darkness seems to be her own vibrancy and nuance, but the meaning of this painting, as well as all of Yang’s works, is up to individual interpretation. (Nicole Wang ’26)

Nicole Wang ’26 is majoring in English and Art History with an Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Joint-Major.