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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019
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The spectral interior: Gender and representations of household objects in the work of three Chinese artists
By Mengyao LiuBoth obscured by and submerged in the widely accepted chronology of China’s seemingly frictionless entrance into capitalist modernity, the history of Chinese socialist feminism haunts the present moment. In their subjective and circuitous quality, imbued in specific moments or materials as opposed to developing in a linear fashion, memories contain the potential to reread the present. Drawing from Tani Barlow’s formulation of Chinese feminism as operating in the ‘future anterior’ tense, this article examines the work of three contemporary Chinese visual artists whose works explore the memory of maternal figures through their portrayals of household objects. The first installation, Song Dong’s Waste Not, meticulously assembles five decades worth of family possessions taken from his mother’s Beijing home. Song’s installation underscores such objects as out of place in the present moment, existing beyond their projected use-value. Embroidered sculptures of household items comprise the second installation, Gao Rong’s The Static Eternity. The materiality of Gao’s work makes the intersection of gendered labour, artistry and reproduction visible. Her choice of medium stands in critical comparison to contemporary valuations, which prioritizes product over process. The third installation is Dong Yuan’s A Short History of Everything: Grandmother’s House and Bosch’s Garden, an exhibition made up of photorealistic oil paintings. Her work depicts ordinary kitchenware, furniture and decorations juxtaposed with her isolated replications of Hieronymous Bosch’s surrealist creatures. This combination reflects contemporary understandings of China’s socialist feminist history, represented by her grandmother’s belongings, as imagined and aberrant. But Dong’s work attests to just how fruitlessly the constructed present attempts to cast off its phantoms.
Taken together, the works of these three artists constitute a refusal to depoliticize the quotidian, critiquing a surrender to the lure and logic of endless capital accumulation. This article assesses the urgency and stakes of such an endeavour in postsocialist Chinese visual art.
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Soft archives: Motherhood and daughterhood in post-socialist China
More LessThe mother–daughter relationship is important to an understanding of the changing configurations of gender politics from Mao to post-Mao era. This article explores female artists’ articulations of their gendered self in relation to their mothers in post-socialist urban China. Focusing on Ma Qiusha, Qin Jin and Huang Jing Yuan’s practices, I see the intersubjective experiences of mothers and daughters as ‘soft’ archives that illuminate how younger generations of Chinese artists face up to the reality of their mothers’ socialist histories and their own post-socialist situation, and how in this process, a non-official and non-dissident feminist space achieves visual and verbal forms.
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The hypercultural universe of Chen Tianzhuo
By Petra PoelzlChen Tianzhuo’s theatre performances, video installations and sculptures are infused with the iconographic vocabulary of divinities, ceremonies and rituals of a variety of cultures. His puzzling and immersive installations, surroundings and creatures question belief systems in the Post-Internet Era, mingling Buddhist cosmology and the visual language of corporate identities with the ecstasy of club nights at Berlin’s Berghain. The artist creates experiential spaces that are equipped with creatures that seem to be in a constant state of transformation, a state of in-betweenness.
Chen Tianzhuo is a master of sampling and his oeuvre is often labelled as queer, especially in a western context. As stated by scholars (Zhao, Engebretsen) when discussing the term queer in the context of China, this needs to be done in the complex and dynamic political and cultural context of the country. Chen Tianzhuo’s work discusses non-heteronormativity throughout the country’s history and how it has shaped what it means today, in the age of the Internet. Byung-Chul Han and his writings on hyperculturality seem to be an appropriate approach when reviewing Chen Tianzhuo’s oeuvre. Han claims that through forms of new media (particularly the Internet), the exchange of information and forms of expression are exponentially dispersed. He sees hyperculturality as the dissolving of previously defined cultural boundaries; celebrating the newfound freedom with which interconnected works can be passed through an unlimited network.
This article aims to investigate Chen Tianzhuo’s artistic practice, focusing on his stage performances An Atpyical Brain Damage and Ishvara, and zoom into the hypercultural universe he opens up to create queer, hybrid and often godlike figures and surroundings.
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Queer eye for Chinese women: Locating queer spaces in Shitou’s film Women Fifty Minutes
By Hongwei BaoThis article offers a critical analysis of Chinese lesbian artist, filmmaker and activist Shitou’s 2006 film Women Fifty Minutes (nüren wushi fenzhong). Focusing on the representation of queer women in the film, I discern the existence and conditions of queer subjectivities and spaces in a postsocialist Chinese context. This article aims to disentangle different discourses of women and feminism in contemporary China as represented in the film and, in so doing, unravel the importance of sexuality in understanding feminism and women’s experiences. By looking at Chinese women through queer eyes, Shitou’s film brings queer public space into existence through representational and activist strategies; it also introduces sexuality and queerness into feminist debates.
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Troubling the gaze: The writers and zhiyin of ‘Women’s art’
By Yvonne LowWomen-centred exhibitions and discourses, which often grew out of a feminist response to male-dominated collections and art histories, have been criticized for committing the pitfall of perpetuating canon production rather than problematizing it. Yet, locating women artists is fundamental to the recovery of women’s subjectivity and their histories and contributions, without which, no claims for intervening or destabilizing male-centric discourses can begin. This article assesses two such examples of recovery projects, Indonesian Women Artists: When the Curtain Opens (Bianpoen et al. 2007) and Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China (Guest 2016) that served as testimonies to the making of modern and contemporary art as artistic outlets that are unique to female artists. Both texts, as this paper argues, testify to the rise and emergence of ‘women’s art’ as an expressive category, gendered female by its objective to speak to and for the shared conditions and experiences of women in Indonesia and China, respectively. Employing a range of strategies, from the destabilization of the male gaze to the redefinition of femininity, the women artists discussed in the texts – both authored by female writers – were framed as agents that arguably served an ‘othered’, ‘female’ gaze. Thus, this article argues for a new interpretative approach to recover and locate female agency, as articulated not merely through the artist’s hand, but concomitantly through the receiving and knowing gaze.
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Flipping through a magazine: The consumed and consuming ‘woman’ in contemporary Chinese art
More LessThe turn of the millennium marked China’s full engagement with globalized capitalism, the fulfilment of the contemporary turn in Chinese art and an increase in representations of women and female bodies in contemporary Chinese art. The ‘consumed and consuming’ body had arrived in China via, amongst other means, glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. This article produces a comparative textual analysis of two artworks, the single-channel video installation Yue Jing Jing, (2002) by Chen Lingyang and the photographic installation Summer, (2009) by Yang Zhenzhong. Both artworks feature glossy women’s magazines. The two works will be compared in how they represent ‘women’, and the question asked, what do the differences in the artists’ treatment of the female body and glossy magazines suggest about gendered subjectivity?
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