Paul Gladston's ‘Avant-Garde’ Art Groups in China is a compilation of in-depth interviews with members of important art groups who were active in the 1980s. An accompanying essay opens these interviews to set out Gladston's understanding of modern and contemporary Chinese art's complex relationship to its inspiration and alter ego, the West. The groups researched in this volume, namely Stars, the Northern Art Group, and the Pond Society, were key players in an art scene that barely had any infrastructure in this decade of its emergence, yet ultimately became one of the most sought after and prolific art scenes in the world. Gladston's interviews will be of value to readers seeking to understand the roots of contemporary Chinese art. A cultural theorist, Gladston has recently made strong contributions to the study of contemporary Chinese art, writing and publishing on the subject with considerable energy and focus after spending five years in China at Nottingham University's campus in Ningbo. His interest in revisiting the 1980s clearly stems from a dissatisfaction with the available published literature, and the book reads as a kind of working through of this history, retracing the motivations and events of the art movements at this moment of emergent modernity in the immediate post-Mao period.

Focusing on the emergence of the Chinese avant-garde is a valuable pursuit, because much of the available written material from the period is dispersed and fragmentary, held in personal collections or hidden within unpublished doctoral theses. For those new to the field, it is often difficult to understand the environment that many of these artists had to grapple with when they were pushing for artistic autonomy, and some of the artists in the book, such as London-based Qu Leilei, are important figures for understanding these dynamics even though they are not big names in the art world. The interviews are particularly of interest for revealing more fully the specific artistic interests that drove earlier forms of individual and collective activity. The book succeeds in giving a sense of the discursive and social environment that shaped artists' work, particularly in the interview with the members of the Stars and Northern Art Group. It also usefully gives voice to artists, showing how their work was driven by debates over issues that have since then been effaced in what is now a commercially and celebrity-driven Chinese art world.

Some twenty-five years on, with the benefit of hindsight, one can better appreciate the art historical significance of this decade. As Gladston points out in his introductory essay, there is a good deal of slippage in the making of contemporary history, where issues of memory and cultural translation are constantly in flux, ridden with problems of subjectivity and multiple perspectives. This book's great contribution is the way that its interviews reveal how art and politics were inextricably linked within the fairly gray but contentious areas of a world of fading Maoism. Yet at times, Gladston's interview questions appear rather dogmatic and overly biased by a Western theorist's perspective. Questions such as “How many were in this or that group?” or “What were the audience numbers for the first officially sanctioned Stars exhibition?” are no further resolved by Gladston than by earlier researchers tackling the same subject more than a decade ago. A more reflective approach might have elicited different answers from these artists and thus enabled new perspectives on their remembered past.

Gladston's application of Western theory to Chinese art is also problematic given that there has been more than twenty years of increased globalized positioning in the Chinese art scene, now reflected in the huge diversity of Chinese artistic practices and in the inclusion of Chinese art in large-scale exhibitions globally. Furthermore, the problematic relationship of art to the political in China is one that remains highly debatable and relevant to the present day. The difficulties of characterizing these interactions are exemplified by the book's discussion of the period immediately following the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Gladston clearly believes that artists have often been stereotyped as being politically transgressive in their motivations and that this stereotyping lives on in the highly regulated environment of the PRC's authoritarian state. But as many historians of China who study this period would concur, most intellectuals were indeed responding to the very localized cultural politics of the time. Embedded as artists were in immediate concerns, one could argue that their small, yet significant struggles were indeed about civil rights and freedom of speech, provoked by the sheer implacability of the Chinese Communist Party, which constantly impeded their ability to maneuver. In effect, Gladston's discussion shows that it may be as difficult to articulate the artistic circumnavigation of the political in the twenty-first century as it was two decades ago.

Although Gladston's choice to frame these debates from a Western theorist's point of view can be limiting in certain ways, his book is useful as a platform for research and as a resource for researchers and students wishing to engage in debates about the relationship of Chinese art to the West. Arguably, art history has failed until more recently to grasp the broader issues at stake in contemporary art in China, and a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary approach is helpful to tackle its entangled nature. For new cohorts of students and researchers, this will be an excellent sourcebook through which to discover the contentious, politicized discourse of Chinese artistic modernity in the 1980s.