Lü Peng (critic)

Lü Peng (, born 1956) is a Chinese curator, critic and art historian.

He has engaged extensively with Chinese modern and contemporary art for over thirty years.

Lü was born in 1956 in Chongqing, Sichuan.

"In the course of China’s reform and opening, I read Herbert Read’s Concise History of Western Painting (Frederick A. Praeger, New York 1959). As for H.H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1978) and Ernest H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (Phaidon Press Limited, 1983, 1984), I did not read them until a few years after graduation. These western works of art history had a big influence on me. But when confronting China’s ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ art, I felt the need to adopt a different method more suited to the subject. In view of the uniqueness of Chinese art and its context, I established a method of historical judgment based on a special background of politics, economics, culture and clashing civilizations. In my ‘Preface’ to the first Chinese edition I wrote of this in detail."

He graduated from the Political Studies Department of Sichuan Normal University in 1982, and was awarded a PhD in Critical Art Theory from the China Academy of Art in 2004.

Lü was Editor in Chief of the journal Theatre and Film from 1982–85 and subsequently served as Vice-Secretary of the Sichuan Dramatists Society from 1986–90.

He then held the position of Executive Editor at the magazine Art & Market.

In 1992, he was Artistic Director of the Guangzhou Biennale (officially titled the First Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair).

His curatorial work includes: “A Gift to Marco Polo” (an event for the Venice Biennale, 2009), which showcased eight of China’s most prominent contemporary artists; “Reshaping History” (Beijing, 2010), a large-scale exposition presenting more than one thousand works by nearly two hundred of the most innovative Chinese artists of the first decade of the 21st century; and “Pure Views: New Painting from China” (Louise Blouin Foundation, Frieze, London, 2010), “Pure Views: New Painting from China” (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2011); and the 2011 Chengdu Biennale.

Lü is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu, Director of ChinART, the management agency of Chinese art institutions, and is Associate Professor of the Department of Art History and Theory at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

He is a consulting authority for a number of Chinese government organisations and mainland Chinese companies.

In 2017, he took on the roles of the President of L-Art University, Professor of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts.

The book A History of Art in 20th-century China is Lü Peng's monograph of modern Chinese art.

In the preface, he confessed that he was influenced by many Western art history books and methodologies, while viewing and writing about Chinese art especially modern Chinese art in the age of globalisation, a set of localised theories was necessary: