Videographer Wen Pulin.

An archive of some 360 hours of digital video footage documenting the history of contemporary Chinese art since 1985 has found a home at Cornell University.

The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-garde Art traces the transformation of Chinese culture in recent years, through previously unseen coverage of artists, art events, installations, performances, interviews and studio and exhibition walk-throughs.

"We found some extraordinary things in this footage," said Thomas Hahn, curator of Cornell's Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia. The Wason Collection and the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media, curated by Timothy Murray, are the joint holders of the Wen archive at Cornell.

Among the events documented in Wen's footage is the opening at the National Gallery in Beijing of the 1989 exhibition of avant-garde art, which was closed down by the Chinese government, precipitating the protests in Tiananmen Square.

The raw, unedited live footage includes 400 to 500 individual segments, and because of their content, Wen told the Cornell curators the tapes were not entirely secure in China. Hahn made several trips to Beijing to organize the digitization of the original tape recordings, some of them in now outdated formats. The result is a collection of 145 DVDs, as well as a 400-gigabyte computer hard drive filled with high-resolution, DVD-quality video.

Wen, a noted videographer in China, is the founder of the Dongtai Academy of Arts in Beijing. This is the first of several planned collaborations between Dongtai and Cornell, Hahn said. Murray said that Shin-Yi Yang, associate director of Dongtai Academy, first introduced him to Wen in Beijing.

"This wouldn't have happened without Shin-Yi," Murray said. "After the three of us initially discussed this possibility, Thomas Hahn went out of his way to bring it to fruition."

Painting by Liu Xiaodong, "Through the Ages" (2000)

Murray, a professor of comparative literature and director of graduate studies in comparative literature and film and video, also organized a related event for artists and curators. "Future Perfect: Contemporary Chinese Art and the Question of the Archive" was held Sept. 23-24 at Kroch Library and Goldwin Smith Hall. The conference began with the unveiling of the Wen archive, and talks and presentations centered on the challenges of curating new media and art amid political and cultural change.

The event hosted several curators and artists from the United States, Europe and Asia, including Yang, Xu Bing, Chen Yin-Lang, Lin Yan, Du Zhenjun, Feng Mengbo, Barbara London of the Museum of Modern Art, Cornell art professor Xiaowen Chen and Lin Yilin, who premiered a new performance piece at the event, "Adult/Education."

Participants also included Gao Minglu of the University of Pittsburgh, who spoke about curating "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," an exhibition of 100 works by 49 artists, opening Oct. 21 in Buffalo at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries.

Wen had planned to attend the Cornell conference as its guest of honor, but his interpreter and his wife encountered problems at the visa department of the American embassy in Beijing. A video of the conference proceedings will be sent to him, Hahn said.