Person
Artist
Wu Shanzhuan
吴山专
Date of birth
1960
Place Of birth
Zhoushan, Zhejiang, China
Biography
Wu Shanzhuan was born in 1960 in a remote fishing village in the Zhoushan Archipelago, off the coast of Zhejiang Province. He graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (now the China Academy of Art) in 1986, and later moved to Germany, where he gained a master’s degree from the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg (the Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in 1995. Wu is considered a pioneer of 1980s Chinese conceptual art; like his contemporaries, Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, he began to use textual references derived from Chinese characters in his work. His work has been shown in significant group and solo shows internationally since the late 1980s, from the earliest exhibitions bringing contemporary Chinese art to the attention of world audiences to Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2017. His significant position as a pioneer in the adaptation of Chinese calligraphy to contemporary art practice was acknowledged with his inclusion in Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 2013. Since 1991 he has frequently collaborated with Icelandic artist Inga Svala Thórsdóttir. Wu Shanzhuan lives and works in Hamburg and Shanghai.
