New Silk Road artworlds: The art of the hybrid and the marginal at the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum

Since the early 2000s many second-tier Chinese cities have begun to cultivate contemporary art scenes. Ürümchi, the capital city of the north-west province of Xinjiang, is no exception. Following Xi Jinping’s announcement of the New Silk Road Economic Belt in 2013, a group of artists from the city received support from the Xinjiang Cultural Ministry to transform a decommissioned government building into the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum. Many of the exhibitions hosted in the space focus not only on themes of Silk Road revitalization but also representations of migration, frontier marginalization and the spectacle of rapid capitalist development. One outcome of this is the emergence of contemporary art rooted in the ‘hybrid’ traditions of Uyghur artists. In addition, a school of Han migrant documentary photography and figurative painting, which the art critic, curator and painter Zeng Qunkai has called ‘black and white marginality’, has begun to emerge.