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- Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 6, Issue 2-3, 2019
Volume 6, Issue 2-3, 2019
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Past as future: The discourse of Chuantong in twentiethcentury China1
By Pi LiAbstractThis article discusses the approaches of Chinese intellectuals and artists to tradition throughout the twentieth century. Tradition in China is understood, on the one hand, as a notion born in a framework constructed by twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals and their realm of senses and concept of time, on the other hand as a notion driven by modernity and capitalism to anchor a work of art to a distinguishable point of time. Hence, the article will first review a series of debates on old and new culture that have taken place since the May Fourth Movement. It will then move on to discuss how contemporary artists made peace with tradition since the '85 New Wave, a new era when artists are also subject to market forces of supply and demand.
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Tradition and transmission: Shifting epistemological and (art-)historical grounds of contemporary art's relation to the past
More LessAbstractThis article takes artworks by Ai Weiwei that engage with traditions, art historical, art critical and curatorial receptions of these works, and (art-)historical discourses on the 'critical problem of tradition' as the starting point to re-consider contemporary art's relationship with tradition. It adopts a critical global art historical perspective decentring universalized modern western frameworks and uncovering how contemporary art's relation to the past in today's spatially and temporally disjunctive global world has to be read from multiple and transculturally entangled historical, epistemological and geo-cultural perspectives.
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Translation, transformation and refiguration: The significance of Jingdezhen and the materiality of porcelain in the work of two contemporary Chinese artists1
By Luise GuestAbstractIn December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity2 and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.
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Chasing the sun: Qu Leilei's serial images in early post-Mao China
More LessAbstract'You always treat the sun as though it were yours.' Lining the frame of a pen-and-ink sketch, these words reflect conditions of possibility particular to the contemporaneity of early post-Mao China. Included in his Visual Diary series from the early 1980s, Qu Leilei's image-text turns inward the heavily socialized forms of visual and political expression from the revolutionary era. As instances of the artist's emerging private practice, such works, including etchings, line drawings, and fragments of prose poetry, are seldom addressed in existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese art. This article takes up a selective examination of Qu's diaristic ephemera from this historical moment following the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to explore how Qu's entries both maintain and transform aspects of revolutionary-era media and visuality. The article further considers the following questions: In what ways does Qu's Visual Diary reconfigure the serial images of revolutionary state-driven practices in the social landscape of still-Maoist Beijing? How do Qu's transfigured image-texts complicate the rejection of Maoist visual vanguardism in cultural practices after the revolution?
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Metamorphosis of a butterfly: Neo-liberal subjectivation and queer autonomy in Xiyadie's papercutting art
By Hongwei BaoAbstractCelebrated as 'China's Tom of Finland', Xiyadie is probably one of the best-known queer artists living in China today. His identity as a gay man from rural China and his method of using the Chinese folk art of papercutting for queer artistic expression make him a unique figure in contemporary Chinese art. As the first academic article on the artist and his works, this article examines Xiyadie's transformation of identity in life and his representation of queer experiences through the art of papercutting. Using a critical biographical approach, in tandem with an analysis of his representative artworks, I examine the transformation of Xiyadie's identity from a folk artist to a queer artist. In doing so, I delineate the transformation and reification of human subjectivity and creativity under transnational capitalism. Meanwhile, I also seek possible means of desubjectivation and human agency under neo-liberal capitalism by considering the role of art in this picture. This article situates Xiyadie's life and artworks in a postsocialist context where class politics gave way to identity politics in cultural production. It calls for a reinvigoration of Marxist and socialist perspectives for a nuanced critical understanding of contemporary art production and social identities.
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Immutability and impermanence in Qiu Zhijie's work: From Buddhism to New Confucianism to Mainland New Confucianism
More LessAbstract'The need to go back to the past' is central to Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969)'s understanding of human agency, and in consequence is central to his artistic endeavour. By 'the past' Qiu means Chinese (immutable) history and identity, based on a sense of impermanence. Chinese philosophy has informed his work from its beginning in the 1990s, as he imagined calligraphic performances, infused his installations and photographs with explicit references to Buddhist sutras and Koan. Since 2000 he has peppered his discourse and curating practices with implicit references to Confucianism (such as the celebration of the master/student relationship, the search for social harmony). Initial works used a mix of western contemporary and Chinese traditional art forms, and were concerned to the cultivation of the self. The latter have become associated with social aims such as diffusing art to the masses, promoting ancient arts and crafts in curated projects that link the artist's individual development with that of the collective. Qiu designates this holistic aim as 'Total art'. Critics explain Qiu's concept of Total art using the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk or of post-structural criticality of history. Others compare Qiu's endeavour to Republican New Confucianism. Still others consider it as part of Chinese literati tradition, in an ahistorical perspective. We want to emphasize rather its relation to Mainland New Confucianist philosophy that emerged since the millennium, which is characterized by a will to use ontological Chinese values to defend a political vision of Confucianism that is both social and authoritarian, essentially Chinese and opened to the world. This explains how Qiu reconciles his view of 'going to the past', with his participation in the Government's sponsored international programmes. We shall question its consequence on Qiu's position as global 'avant-garde'.
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Back to the future? Chinese artistic tradition and topologies of urban modernity
More LessAbstractThe radical nature of China's urban transformation has become a key subject in contemporary Chinese art. The ruthless eradication of material remnants of the past, moreover, has reinvigorated an urgency in Chinese art to look to the past for inspiration in the envisioning of a better future. This article examines three works that combine these two important strands of artistic production in China as they negotiate contemporary urban transformation via a return to China´s artistic tradition. This article will look at the imaginary and fantastical topologies of modernity in both analogue and new media, including the installation and oil painting of Shen Yuan and Wang Mingxian, respectively, and the digital ink painting of Miao Xiaochun. In examining closely the artists' choices of medium and their representations of architecture and urban space, this article probes some of the key social, environmental and aesthetic predicaments that underlie China's developmental process. It will argue that responses in Chinese art counter the officially sanctioned grand narrative that equates urbanization, urban renewal and modernization with unequivocal social betterment. Instead, these works create in-between spaces that lie between the material and the idealistic.
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Which tradition is mine? Chinese women artists and cultural identity
More LessAbstractReferences to native culture are frequently in the foreground of works by Chinese women artists. When they make contact with different cultures, although not necessarily connected with leaving their place of birth thanks to the transfer of information and cultural heritage that has developed extremely efficiently in the era of globalization (Gordon Mathews), they see their own entanglement in the cultural tradition. In the process of constructing their identity they try to find answers to the following question: which part of the cultural tradition is mine? Which one do I identify with? In the case of Chinese women artists, is it the legacy of literati? Classic ink painting and calligraphy? Or perhaps women's crafts that bear no name? Or perhaps a mixture of inspirations? Such questions about material heritage might also be augmented by others that consider aspects of the immaterial heritage of China. This article explores how Chinese women artists such as Chen Qingqing, Qin Yufen, Shi Hui, Wang Xiaohui, Cheng Caroline, Lin Tianmiao, Zhang Yanzi, Man Fung-yi, Liu Liyun, Peng Wei, Chen Lingyang, Chen Qiulin, Zhang Ou and Liu Ren refer to their cultural tradition.
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China's ancient past in its contemporary art: On the politics of time and nation branding at the Venice Biennale
By Jenifer ChaoAbstractThis article examines the China Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale through an exploration of temporality. It argues that the pavilion's deployment of a politics of time – by mobilizing China's dynastic past and its traditional arts to enhance the present – constructs a mode of cultural timelessness that sustains a stultifying visual and discursive regime. Touting the theme of 'Continuum – Generation by Generation', the pavilion paid a lofty tribute to folk-art practices such as embroidery and shadow play, elevating two paintings from the Song Dynasty as the fount of contemporary artistic imagination. This recourse to the past mirrors a predictable and safe representational strategy often mobilized by the country to shape its own public and media image on the global stage. In view of this, the pavilion can be more constructively investigated as an exercise in image and perception management, or nation branding, which reveals the self-narratives that the country embraces. Nation branding serves as a complementary analytical lens that probes the instrumentalization of Chinese traditions, history and past, while crystallizing some parallel visual logics and aims of contemporary art. Aesthetics and nation branding are, therefore, conjoined to question the shared visuality that perpetuates, to borrow a term from Rey Chow, the 'affect of pastness' that obscures a more timely and inventive imaginary of the country.
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Continuum Generation by Generation: The representation of Chinese traditions at the China Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale
More LessAbstractThis article focuses on the China pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale as a case study. The theme of the pavilion, Continuum – Generation by Generation, revolved around the long history of Chinese tradition and offered a visual re-elaboration of it by means of contemporary art and folk art. The works exhibited drew on Chinese mythology, masterpieces of Chinese art history, philosophical concepts and handcraft traditions, hence presenting a variegated image of (contemporary) Chinese art. This exhibition offers opportunities for a critical reading of the relationship between contemporary art and tradition implied by the theme Continuum, and I will explore the narrative and curatorial discourse it presented to the audience.
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Beyond the cinematic: Reinventing Chinese martial arts through new media art practices
By Wayne WongAbstractThis article argues that the reinvention of Chinese martial arts through new media art practices reveals new aesthetic potentialities not readily available in the conventional cinematic medium. While martial arts cinema has captivated the global audience with visual and visceral excitements, most notably through the new-style wuxia films of the 1960s and the kung fu craze of the 1970s, it focuses on representational strategies characteristic of imaginative irreversibility and passive immersivity. The former refers to the rigid segregation of reality and fantasy that discourages the possibility of reversal, whereas the latter describes the immersive wuxia and kung fu spectacles as a disembodied experience, contrary to the core of martial arts learning and practice. To address the above issues, martial arts-inspired new media artworks, such as susuan pui san lok's RoCH Fans & Legends (2015) and Jeffery Shaw, Sarah Kenderdine and Hing Chao's Lingnan Hung Kuen Across the Century (2017), look for alternative approaches to represent martial arts imaginations for the goals of preserving an intangible cultural heritage and promoting an intellectual reflexivity. In so doing, not only do the new media artworks help to reposition Chinese martial arts as an everyday art form via conventional art spaces worldwide through the transnational and transregional flow of cinema, but they also establish the subtle connection between traditional martial art and contemporary art in the context of globalization.
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Reverie through Ma Yansong's shanshui city to evoke and re-appropriate China's urban space
More LessAbstractMeandering rivers, elevated walkways and high-rise buildings revive traditional landscape paintings in an attempt to re-establish a connection between Chinese citizens and their urban space. Since the Open Door Policy in 1978 and the consequent period of reforms, introduced by Deng Xiaoping, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been focusing on the economic and urban development of the nation to affirm its modernization and global role. Particularly, since 2001, urbanization has been driven by economic and political goals that have overshadowed Chinese cultural and historical specificity and residents' needs. Cities and metropolises have become the symbol of the country's modernization and globalization, attracting foreign capital and visibility. At the same time, the frenetic and unprecedented scale of urbanization in Mainland China has caused the loss of historical and cultural areas, forced evictions, social instability and worsened pollution, among other issues. By presenting the case study of Beijing-based architect and artist, Ma Yansong, I will illustrate how tradition and culture could be reinvented and implemented in the contemporary urban realities. To do that, Chinese painter Xie He's treatise on the aesthetics of traditional landscape painting will provide with an original framework to understand Ma's urban concept of shanshui city. Aiming to re-connect everyday individuals with their urban space and cultural and historical background, this article responds to the urgency to envision future cities that are conceived by and for Chinese citizens and stem from China's ancient tradition and cultural specificity. Moreover, it intends to question the current urbanizing process and foster alternative urban imaginaries for future Chinese cities.
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