Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation

In the spirit of an ongoing legacy of cultural exchange between China and the West, LACMA has partnered with the Yuz Foundation in Shanghai to curate collaborative exhibitions and to share access to the museums’ diverse collections of artworks. Legacies of Exchange is a celebration of this partnership, and the first major showcase of works from the Yuz Foundation Collection in Los Angeles. The exhibition centers around encounters, exchanges, and collisions between East and West by bringing together works of Chinese contemporary art created in response to global capitalism, international political conflict, and the Western art historical canon.

China has a rich history of material, intellectual, and cultural exchange. Beginning in the second century BCE, the “Silk Road”—a loose collection of trade routes—was famed for transporting the most luxurious goods of its time across Eurasia and the outside world. These routes allowed for the communication of new technologies and resources, but equally made way for destructive forces. They served not only as transportation routes for goods such as silks, gold, and porcelain, but also as pathways to war and imperialism, contributing to a multifaceted legacy of exchange with China that has been centuries in the making.