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- Volume 9, Issue 3, 2022
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Transcultural Curation and the Post-COVID World, Nov 2022
Transcultural Curation and the Post-COVID World, Nov 2022
- Preface
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The flow interrupted: A preface
More LessThis preface sets a brief background to introduce transcultural dialogues, or the flow, between Chinese contemporary art and the international world. This flow has been interrupted significantly by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, whilst new strategies and art diplomacies are to be developed.
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- Editorial
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Transcultural curation and the post-COVID world
By Nuria QuerolNew and complex forms of entanglements and power dynamics have taken place via a transcultural curation ethos of Chinese contemporary art in recent decades – the frictions of which have amplified during pandemic times. This Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCCA) focuses on curatorial research and debates on the transcultural and the post-COVID world in China and beyond. The editorial sets out the key conceptual framework for assessing the significance of transcultural curation and Chinese contemporary art, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The editorial unpacks key concepts and ideas such as transculturation as theory, method and practice; interrogates the processes and challenges of curating Chinese contemporary art in a transcultural context and the post-COVID world; and maps the issue content and structure. The Special Issue invocation to transcultural curation in a post-COVID world serves as a provocation to think carefully about the connections between past, present and future, and what continues and what is new for curatorial imaginaries.
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- Articles
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Introducing and practising ‘curating’ for contemporary Chinese art: The transnational trajectory of Lu Jie from London to China and the development of Long March: A Walking Visual Display
By Nie XiaoyiThrough a close reading of the curatorial project Long March: A Walking Visual Display (2002), this article considers that Long March was an experimental curatorial response to the conditions of contemporary Chinese art and contributes to introducing the discourse and practice of ‘curating’ to China. Tracing the main curator Lu Jie’s curatorial motivation, this research looks into what Lu has termed ‘the dilemma of contemporary Chinese art’ during the 1990s – the division of discourses from realities and artistic practices in the curating of contemporary Chinese art, which led to invalid transcultural communication in international exhibitions. This research paid special attention to Lu’s study in the ‘Creative Curating’ MA programme at Goldsmiths, University of London (1998–99), which encouraged Lu to experiment with alternative exhibition formats and review art in visual culture. These inspired Lu to relocate ‘contemporary Chinese art’ from the institutional context to its original realities in China along the historical route of the Long March. Analysing the development of Lu’s curatorial proposal Long March: A Walking Exhibition from 1999 to 2001, this research shows how the main elements of Lu’s curating shifted from objects to participants and argues the project’s curatorial intention to provoke participants was a process of localizing ‘curating’ in the Chinese context. Instead of assuming that ‘curating’ was imported into China from the West, this article views the introduction of ‘curating’ as a new discipline which helps local practitioners identify the artistic values and authorship in making art public.
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Curating the international profile of contemporary Chinese ink medium art: The Third Chengdu Biennale (2007) and The Met’s Ink Art (2013–14)
More LessThis article aims to shed light on a curatorial momentum that was generated at the turn of the 2010s in the broader international art world, allowing contemporary Chinese ink works for the first time within the context of the new century to have a more geographically widespread spotlight of attention under a dual label of the Indigenous and the international. Indeed, in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the curatorial approach to ink art in both China and North America and Europe began to change, emphasizing not only ink’s cultural uniqueness but also its transcultural applicability. The pioneering event to do this was the Third Chengdu Biennale in China, following which there was a noticeable escalation in similar exhibitions across countries like the United States or the United Kingdom. These ranged from the ground-breaking Ink Art: Past as Present inContemporary China (2013–14) at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) to exhibitions at international auction houses and commercial galleries, such as Christie’s or the London-based Saatchi Gallery. By focusing on the Third Chengdu Biennale and The Met’s Ink Art exhibition as the two case-study examples, this article elucidates in what specific ways present-day Chinese ink works were framed by these two significant internationally oriented exhibitions, as well as what kind of critical reception this attracted. Drawing from this analysis, the article also provides a reflection on this curatorial momentum’s both achievements and limitations, suggesting that altogether they present an important foundation for present-day curators to devise new constructive ways of positioning Chinese ink as the global contemporary medium of artistic expression.
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Curating queerness and queering curation: Exhibiting queer Chinese art in Europe
By Hongwei BaoThis article examines the curatorial strategies of the Secret Love exhibition, the biggest queer Chinese art exhibition outside Asia to date. The exhibition brought together 150 works created by 27 queer Chinese artists. It first took place at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (MFEA) in Stockholm, Sweden, from 21 September 2012 to 31 March 2013, and subsequently toured to other museums in Europe. The exhibition raises the critical question of how one can curate queer Chinese art when definitions of queerness, Chineseness and art remain unstable and contested. This article proposes queer curating – that is, collecting and exhibiting genders, sexualities and desires in an art gallery or museum setting without reinscribing social norms and reinstating identity categories – as a critical curatorial method. Queer curating challenges fixed identity categories and dominant power relations; it also explores a non-essentialist and anti-identitarian mode of curatorial practice. As an example of transnational and transcultural curating, the Secret Love exhibition compels us to consider how curators can work with the structural constraints of exhibition and discursive spaces to create new curatorial possibilities.
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From gunshots to hashtags: Transcultural curating in the #MeToo era
More LessAfter the #MeToo movement kicked off in the United States in 2018, it found its way to China and has triggered a number of exhibition projects around the country, organized by young activists, artists and curators, which have galvanized transnational feminist exchanges in the past few years. The article analyses exhibitions such as The Voiceless Rise Up: #MeToo in China, Her Story: Eliminating Gender Violence 2020, Above Ground: 40 Moments of Transformation and Stand by Her, which consisted of works documenting sexual assault and the #MeToo movement in China, as well as of artworks that are dealing with issues concerning sexual assault, the One Child Policy, motherhood, queerness and empowerment. These exhibitions and the #MeToo movement, respectively, demonstrate a growing transnational interconnectedness among activists fighting towards common feminist goals. What is more, these exhibitions are under constant scrutiny and fear of being cancelled, which is evidence of an exhaustive struggle for the official acceptance of women’s rights and ‘radical’ artworks. This article gives an overview of these projects, their transnational interconnectedness, as well as their perception and reaction of the general public, the press and censors. The article argues for a shift from women-centred exhibitions to exhibitions with a strong activist/feminist agenda that are also part of an unprecedented transnational framework.
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Spectres of orientalism: Patty Chang and Chinese American art in the pandemic
More LessThis article addresses the work of Chinese American interdisciplinary artist Patty Chang over a 25-year period that begins with her groundbreaking short form videos in the 1990s, and considers transitional works in the mid-2000s that led the artist to create two major bodies of work connecting identity issues with climate change since 2009. I discuss Chang’s influence on subsequent generations of Chinese American and Asian American artists, her prescient use of online aesthetics and her complex engagement with the political, social and ecological realities of mainland China and neighbouring Uzbekistan. After contextualizing Chang’s influence through the lens of her inclusion in the group exhibition Wonderland with nine other Chinese Diasporic artists, I consider the impact of COVID-19 and anti-Asian violence in the United States and globally on the direction of Chang’s work and discuss the experience of curating her recent project during the pandemic shutdown.
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- Conversation
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Impermanent inhabitations: ‘The everyday’ as a catalyst for transcultural curation
Authors: Jonathan Watkins and Julia JiangWhat spaces do we inhabit? How do we become integrated within an unfamiliar community in an unfamiliar territory? Can we ever be fully immersed in a foreign place during art production and exhibition? As I think about the notion of transcultural curating, I start to interrogate questions of belonging and borders.
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