Semiotic Warfare “The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989. A Semiotic Analysis”

Semiotic Warfare is the first detailed study of one of the most exciting decades in contemporary Chinese art, the 1980s, which culminated in the Tiananmen incident. As author Martina K ppel-Yang argues, Chinese avant-garde art was a factor in the radical political and social changes that existed in that first decade after the cultural revolution. The relationships between and art and post-revolution social changes are here revealed through her analysis of the visual signs present in ten controversial works from that period. Included are discussions of multi-media work by Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan, Wang Guangyi, Luo Zhongli, and others.