Angie Baecker has been awarded an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. The Arts Writers Grant supports emerging and established writers who are writing about contemporary visual art. She has been awarded a grant in support of the article “The Art Group and the Avant-Garde: Collective Practice and the Socialist Legacy in Contemporary China,” which will demonstrate how art groups from the movement known as the ‘85 New Wave, such as the Stars, Xiamen Dada, the No Name Painting Society, the April Photographic Society, the Northern Art Group, and the Southwest Painting Research Society drew from collective models of the socialist period for organizing and practice, connecting discourses of contemporary visual art practice in China with the socialist experience. Baecker’s writing aims to challenge the temporal boundaries of the “contemporary,” both as a concept and as a label, in order to create a more complete account for how the mantle of avant-garde practice was passed from the revolutionary guard to its political and cultural dissidents.
Angie Baecker is an arts writer and scholar based in Hong Kong, S.A.R. China, where she works as a lecturer in the department of Art History at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan (2020) and a master’s degree in modern Chinese literature from Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on the cultural and material history of Maoist China, the politics of the aesthetic, and the postsocialist legacy in contemporary China. She has been published widely in venues including Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, frieze, LEAP, The New Statesman, and Vulture, and she was editor of the Chinese-language edition of the Artforum website from 2012-3. Baecker has worked as an art book editor and translator of classical and modern Chinese, and has edited monographs for artists including Ai Weiwei, Yang Fudong, Zhan Wang, the art historian Wu Hung, and the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.
