BIG TAIL ELEPHANT: BUILD AND RESIST
Edited by Xi Bei, Hou Hanru, Yu Hsiaohwei
Published by Les Presses du Réel
Dijon, 2022
After economic reforms began in China in 1979 that allowed businesses to operate autonomously from the central government in “special economic zones,” the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region rapidly urbanized and industrialized, becoming a major manufacturing and export hub. At the same time, a generation of independent artists emerged, many of them graduates of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and organizers of the 1986 and ’87 editions of the Experimental Show of Southern Artists Salon. From these multiday festivals of experimental art and conversations emerged The Big Tail Elephant Working Group, originally a trio comprising Liang Juhui (1959–2006), Chen Shaoxiong (1962–2016), Lin Yilin, and, later, Xu Tan, whose exhibitions together from 1991 until the mid-2000s came to define a new approach to making art in response to the
