In such a lonely history, what on earth are we afraid of?: On attempts to imagine being in the past as being in the present and being in the future

This article presents the text of a paper given by the curator and writer Carol Yinghua Lu and the artist and writer Liu Ding at Shadows: Attempts at Re-examination and Re-evaluation of Socialist Realism in the Practice and Discourse of Art in China from 1950 to the Present, a seminar held at Tate Modern in London on 4 December 2013. The seminar, which was staged as part of Lu’s residence as the first Visiting Fellow at the Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific in 2013, was supported by Tate and the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. Lu and Liu’s paper, which is published without significant editorial intervention, discusses the pair’s struggle to develop a critical, research-led history of contemporary art in China in the face of significant public criticism from established art historians and critics.