Chinese art news stories on Newser

Rare Chinese Artifacts Stolen in Museum Heist

Rob Quinn — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 01:30:00 CDT

A gang who broke into a Cambridge University museum after hours made off with some small but incredibly valuable Chinese artifacts. The 18 items stolen, most of them made of jade, were worth close to $30 million in total, the Daily Mail reports. The items, including a 16th-century carved buffalo,...

Antiques Roadshow Makes $1.5M Find

Rob Quinn — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:00:05 CDT

An Oklahoma man has shattered Antiques Roadshow records with a set of Chinese teacups carved from rhinoceros horn. The show's experts appraised the cups, believed to be from the late 17th or early 18th century, at between $1 million and $1.5 million, making them the most valuable antiques uncovered...

Chinese Police Beat, Detain Artist at Earthquake Trial

Jason Farago — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:49:00 CDT

Ai Weiwei, China's leading artist and a prominent critic of the country's government, said yesterday he was beaten and detained when he tried to testify at a civil rights advocate's trial. Ai told the New York Times that dozens of police officers barged into his hotel room in Chengdu, the...

China Censors Artist Leading Quake Inquiry

Jason Farago — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:45:08 CDT

The Chinese artist who has made investigating the deaths of children in the Sichuan earthquake a personal crusade is facing a government crackdown, reports the CBC. Ai Weiwei's widely read blog has been deleted, and plainclothes police officers are staking out his studio in Beijing. Ai has relaunched his blog...

Chinese Museums Confound Western Expectations

Jason Farago — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:45:00 CDT

These days China feels "both older and newer than any place on the planet," writes New York Times art critic Holland Cotter. And nowhere is that tension more palpable than in the country's museums, which use antiquities from the millennia-old civilization in service of a rising world power. In a...

Meet China's First Global Pop Star

Kevin Spak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:45:00 CDT

China may be storming the world right now, but it’s never had good luck with pop starts. That could change with Sa Dingding, a half-Mongolian singer/songwriter, who sings entirely in Tibetan over a velvety mix of traditional instruments like the zither and modern electronica. Universal’s hoping the whole eclectic, ethnic...

The Man Behind the Smile

Jonas Oransky — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:38:47 CST

It's contemporary Chinese art's most indelible image—the smile so huge it becomes false, accusatory—and it belongs to Yue Minjun, the artist who uses the grinning self-portraits, often many of them, in his paintings. The New York Times chats with Yue, who is enjoying his first US show in...

Can Chinese Art Stay Hot?

Sarah Seltzer — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:35:42 CDT

After a year of high excitement and higher prices, Chinese artists are hot at influential European fairs. But the bubble may have grown too fast, and Portfolio's Alexandra Wolfe reports on speculation that it's about to burst. One curator says Chinese art is "a consumer category, not a collector category....