Feng Boyi
Feng Boyi is an independent art curator and critic in China. His work focusses primarily on contemporary Chinese art, working with museums and displaying art collections. He has worked several times with artist Ai Weiwei, publishing his journals illegally or working with him in exhibitions and has organized many controversial art exhibitions in China. He has been assistant editor of the China Artists' Association newsletter Artist's Communication since 1988. He has also edited and published numerous catalogues and papers on art and established the Artists' Alliance, a major online forum for contemporary art in China.
Feng Boyi has been known to be an instigator to the up-and-coming contemporary art movement in Beijing, starting with publishing articles and journals from artists Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing.
Early life
Feng Boyi was born in 1960 in Beijing, China, where he is still living today. During 1980 to 1984, he attended and graduated from the Department of History at Beijing Teachers' College in Beijing. After his graduation in 1984, he was assigned to work as an editor of The Artists' Bulletin, which was an internal publication for the Chinese Artists' Association. His interest in art led him to study in the Art History Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991.Early career
Feng Boyi joined art visionaries in the early 1990s in Beijing as an independent art curator. This was also around the time he was learning at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Despite being a curator, he admitted it was a difficult job: "'Nobody wants to curate shows, it's gruelling work,' he mumbles, tossing his ever-ringing cell phone from hand to hand."He co-published a series of three books about the new generation of artists with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: Black Cover Book, White Cover Book, and Gray Cover Book. This series not only dealt with the topic of modern, contemporary art but also reflected the political ideas of Ai Weiwei.
Feng Boyi worked in Japan in 1994, where he played a role in a couple of exhibitions organized by the Fukuoka Art Museum, one of which being the 4th Asian Art Show. He was also part of a contemporary art exhibition in the Saitama Modern Art Museum.
In 1996, Feng Boyi was one of five organizers of one of the first contemporary art shows that was associated with the auction market. This show was called "Reality: Present and Future." It attracted much attention and led the way to more and more contemporary art shows and exhibits, which were not popular or open to the public.
Feng Boyi saw a pattern with new artists that were born in the 1980s, and he explained the possible reason why many of the contemporary Chinese artists today were born around the 1980s: "The fact that many artists born in the 1980s grew up as the center of attention and without brothers and sisters is one of the reasons why much of their work focuses on their inner minds." Young artists end up focusing on themselves and their inner emotions and are in need of trying to find ways to express themselves. As an art critic, Feng Boyi sees their art as a way for their emotions to be understood by others. Part of the reason was due to the fact that families could only have one child in China. All these only-children were often lonely and needed new mediums of expressing themselves, which eventually resulted in the attempting contemporary art that challenges society.
Current career
Currently Feng Boyi is the art director and curator of the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen.Feng Boyi has also edited and published catalogues and articles about art, and established an online art forum called The Artists' Alliance, which discusses contemporary art, which has become very well known and popular with netizens.