Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection is a breathtaking and insightful survey of post-Tiananmen Square Chinese art and culture. As this richly illustrated work reveals, contemporary Chinese art—often discussed as a cynical reaction to emerging consumerism or as a satiric response to the academic patriotism of socialist realism—is more haunted than cynical, more a matter of a nation's suppressed psychic expression than of pop iconoclasm or ironic detachment. The paintings, sculptures, and installations of such Chinese artists as Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaodong, Zhang Xiaogang, and Lin Tianmiao convey the shadows that trouble their nation as it undergoes a rapid process of modernization. Half-Life of a Dream, companion book to the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the museum's first sustained examination of Chinese artistic practice since the acclaimed publication of Inside Out: New Chinese Art. Beautiful in its presentation and fresh in its tone, Half-Life of a Dream gathers a distinguished group of art historians and critics to assess the Logan Collection and to capture this important moment in Chinese art.

Copub: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Jeff Kelley is an independent curator and art critic. He is the author of Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow and the editor of Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life by Allan Kaprow, both from UC Press. Copub: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art