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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017
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The Guangdong Times Museum and the institutional critique: A new curatorial approach
More LessAbstractThe museum devoted only to art is a relatively novel concept in China. Nevertheless, in the last few years, thousands of contemporary art museums have flourished all over the country. Today, this sector is facing different challenges and the institution of the museum itself is searching for its own identity. Within this context, some artists, curators and museum directors are exploring new ways of conceiving the museum, and are attempting to develop new strategies of exhibiting and curating. One such example is the Guangdong Times Museum. Some of the museum’s most interesting projects are focused on the institutional critique, conceived as a way of exploring anew the relationship between artists, curators, artworks, museums and the public. This article aims to examine this new curatorial approach, and some of the most recent and innovative exhibition projects will be described as a case study.
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New Silk Road artworlds: The art of the hybrid and the marginal at the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum
By Darren BylerAbstractSince 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.
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A museum a day: New private art museums in Shanghai
More LessAbstractThe People’s Republic of China is experiencing a dramatic rise in museum building. Among the new institutions, privately owned museums comprise an ever growing part, their number having more than doubled from 2008 to 2013. Seemingly, art-collecting and building one’s own museum has become a fashion among the super-rich of China. I analyse how three new private art museums in Shanghai are branding themselves in a variety of ways in order to increase their visibility, create an image and build a reputation. These institutions are: the two branches of the Long Museum created by collector-couple Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei; and the Yuz Museum built by Chinese Indonesian Budi Tek. All the collectors discussed were first businesspeople, before becoming art collectors and subsequently opening museums. Therefore, it is only natural that they stick to their most recent profession and run their museums like companies, relying on marketing communications and other business skills, and applying these to museum management. In contrast to the many museums run by the Chinese state, the new private art museums discussed in this article take up a different stance. Thanks to their larger independence from the government and its slow system of administration, they represent a younger, quicker, more flexible conception of a museum.
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Between global models and local resources: Building private art museums in Shanghai’s West Bund
More LessAbstractIncreasingly, the establishment of museums has developed as a strategy for improving local attractiveness and economy. Recently, in China, art museums – often in private form – have witnessed a rapid development. However, despite enhanced governmental support, some of these new art endeavours still face challenges in their operation. I argue that a major factor contributing to these obstacles can be found in the relation between local governments’ ambitions to design museums similarly to other world-renowned ones (isomorphism) and the availability of local resources and expertise. In particular, my case study on the Long Museum and the Yuz Museum (in the Shanghai West Bund) shows how focusing on the achievement of globally favoured aesthetic standards vis-à-vis local resources to enhance the credibility of these new undertakings (legitimacy) has occasionally obstructed organizational efficiency, specifically in this case, of the museums’ function to store and display art.
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Hong Kong’s M+: A museum of visual culture at a time of political unrest
More LessAbstractPart of the yet to be completed complex of cultural institutions called the West Kowloon Cultural District, M+ (i.e. ‘museum plus’) has been a topic of heated debates in Hong Kong for over a decade. Being a museum of visual culture, defining its curatorial mission was from the onset a difficult task since the very idea of what constitutes visual culture is far from clear cut. This task was in fact rendered all the more complex by the emphasis it almost accidentally had to put on the visual arts because of the first great donation this museum benefitted from. Although its collections are extremely varied, the attention of the local public as well as the international art press has often focused on the bequest made by the Swiss collector Uli Sigg of his vast selection of contemporary Chinese art. This article will first address the history of this donation and its potential source of ideological tension with the Beijing authorities in the changing political environment of Hong Kong. This environment was rendered particularly complex in the atmosphere of political polarization generated by the pro-democracy demonstrations (called the ‘Umbrella movement’) of late 2014. The last part of this article deals with the objects generated by the participants of the Umbrella movement that are presently at the heart of the latest controversy about M+, a controversy where the nature of local politics and the very existence of freedom of speech in Hong Kong are at stake.
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From context to subject: The poetics and politics of creating and exhibiting artworks in the National Museum of China
By Tongyun YinAbstractPrior to its renovation and reopening in 2011, the National Museum of China, originally the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of Chinese Revolution sharing the same building structure, has been the official trustee and the authoritative voice of Chinese history since 1949. However, in the past five years, the Museum has significantly shifted its focus from history to art as the pace of the nation’s socioeconomic transition accelerated, a tendency summarized in its mission to transform the Museum into the “largest art and history museum” in the world. Based on the studies of the exhibitions held at the Museum in the past few decades, this paper examines the transformation of the exhibitionary practices of the NMC first through the lens of artworks created by official commissions in Socialist China and by reconstructing cultural relics into ‘Chinese art’ in post-Socialist China. Then, it analyses the altering interpretative narratives and presentational approaches used to exhibit artworks against the nation’s rapidly changing social-cultural and economic contexts. The article aims to analyse the changing roles played by art to foster and uphold shifting discourses to justify the Party-State’s political legitimation and promote cultural nationalism for nation-building. It further reveals how power, politics and ideology operate in exhibitions in contemporary China.
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