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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 1, Issue 2-3, 2014
Volume 1, Issue 2-3, 2014
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Badiou in China?: Re-translations of French Maoism and inaesthetics
By Colin WrightAbstractThis article explores the origins of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of art in his engagements with Maoism in order to speculate about the potential impact of that philosophy on contemporary Chinese art and art criticism. Utilizing the broad concept of ‘translation’, the article first situates Badiou’s position on art in relation to the translation of Maoism in France and his personal participation in France’s experience of May 1968. It is then argued that French Maoism was interpreted through pre-existing avant-gardist models of aestheticized politics that largely departed from what was happening in China during the Cultural Revolution. By understanding Badiou’s critique of the depoliticizing effects of this avant-gardist conflation of art and politics, it is possible to understand more clearly his later concept of ‘inaesthetics’. Although it is a theoretical piece, this article aims to encourage a mutual ‘translation’ between Badiou’s work and contemporary Chinese art and art criticism.
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Tracing the body aesthetics in contemporary Chinese art: Hong Kong sculptor Ho Siu Kee as a case study
By Silvia FokAbstractThis article attempts to define body aesthetics in contemporary Chinese art. By tracing the body aesthetics in Hong Kong Sculptor Ho Siu Kee’s artistic development in the past two decades, it will argue that Ho’s artworks exploring the body and extension of the body as themes and mediums entail a certain kind of body aesthetics that is unprecedented in the history of contemporary Chinese art. It will also examine how Ho’s adoption of contraption parallels his western counterparts. Most importantly it will examine the ways he has developed his sculptural forms emphasizing modification of the body, bodily movement, contraptions, the art of measurement with regard to the body, materialization of bodily measurement and fine craftsmanship that transcend his western counterparts. His art as a whole can be interpreted in a fluid manner that goes beyond the boundaries of performance art, installation art, conceptual art, photography, video art and sculpture.
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The ‘post-human’ Internet dimension: Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei online
More LessAbstractThis article presents an argument for the Internet as a novel ‘post-human’ dimension where individuals around the world can explore possibilities for social engagement in a virtual environment beyond the confines of their ‘real’ lives. Artists take to the Internet to conceive original forms of aesthetic expression outside of ordinary objective existence; the diversity encountered within the Internet realm reflects the complexity of our human condition in the twenty-first century. While the authorities in mainland China continue to patrol cyberspace in an effort to maintain control over actual society, some Chinese artists are finding ways to engage the digital sphere to create virtual communities, political opportunities and sensual experiences that transcend corporeal and ideological borders – ostensibly the post-human environs of the Internet surpasses our human reality. Through their dynamic use of social media and other online platforms, artists such as Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei are redefining social activism and artistic praxis in China today.
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Transforming human and beast: Hybridization and diasporic identities in Daniel Lee’s art
By Ming TurnerAbstractChina-born and Taiwan-educated artist Daniel Lee has been based in New York since the early 1990s. He became internationally well known for his 1993 series Manimals, which comprised hybridized forms of humans and the signs of the twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac. Through utilizing technology and computer programs, Lee creates powerful images and videos with a strong reference to his cultural heritage and the symbols of modern life. Manimals resembles different personalities through hybridized images of people and animals, and this kind of artistic technique demonstrates the artist’s sense of nostalgia towards his homeland and the roots of his culture. The concept of hybridity has been widely argued by Homi Bhabha, and it can be visualized in the transformation of conflicting, yet powerful, images by Lee. In 2004, Lee created the series Harvest, through which he personified different farm animals as musicians, dancers and performers who seemed to be having a party. Lee manifests his diasporic identities and cultural heritage in his art, but it is only in recent years that he has gradually begun to dilute the references to oriental aesthetics in his work. With a theoretical consideration of hybridity and diasporic studies, this article explores the different themes throughout his career as an artist and also examines selected series of his works.
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Contemporary Chinese ink paintings: The dawn of a rock renaissance
By Olivia WangAbstractThis article focuses on eight contemporary Chinese ink artists who paint scholars’ rocks. Their interpretations of the rock demonstrate the diversity of their perspectives and talents. Although each artist has his or her unique interpretation of the rock, they are united in their desire to revitalize ink painting and its associated literati tradition. This article will first present a brief introduction of the history of collecting and painting rocks in literati culture. This will be followed by discussions of the work of each of the artists in question. It shall be argued that while these artists use the rock – a traditional object of scholarly contemplation – and brush and ink as their main point of reference, they are actively engaged in bringing their work into the present. The work of these artists demonstrates that image and technical skills do not need to be entirely novel to be contemporary.
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Jizi and contemporary ink art: ‘Re-Chineseness’ and unification with nature
More LessAbstractCan Chinese ink-wash painters make art that is contemporary? Can contemporary art be made by accepting traditional Chinese aesthetics as an influence? Some contemporary Chinese artists hope to find some principles from Chinese aesthetics so that they can make global art that is authentically Chinese. To evaluate such questions and searches, some ink-wash paintings by Jizi are selected as test cases for the application of an experimental cross-cultural interpretation of Jing Hao’s aesthetic of qiyun/rhythmic vitality and authentic images. The results suggest that Jizi does express specifically Chinese thinking about self in unification with nature, others and universe in a way that can be appreciated by individuals in audiences around the world.
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Indie art books in China
More LessAbstractThis article describes the development of independent art books in China over roughly the past decade. By exploring selected examples it attempts to sketch broad categories of independent book-making, from designer- and publisher-initiated projects to artists’ books, and their different characteristics and creative aims within the general context of publishing in China.
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Measures of Distance (to HomeShop): A conversation with Elaine W. Ho and Edward Sanderson
More LessAbstractIn this conversation artist Elaine W. Ho and critic Edward Sanderson discuss contemporary independent artistic initiatives and collectives in the People’s Republic of China. In particular, Ho and Sanderson focus on the activities of HomeShop, a community-oriented art collective that occupied a shop front space in Beijing between 2008 and 2013 of which Ho is a founder. A key aspect of the discussion is the difficulty involved in sustaining and measuring the impact of collective practices that not only problematize the boundary between art and community, but that also challenge as well as occupy space within conventional sociocultural structures.
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In such a lonely history, what on earth are we afraid of?: On attempts to imagine being in the past as being in the present and being in the future
Authors: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua LuAbstractThis article presents the text of a paper given by the curator and writer Carol Yinghua Lu and the artist and writer Liu Ding at Shadows: Attempts at Re-examination and Re-evaluation of Socialist Realism in the Practice and Discourse of Art in China from 1950 to the Present, a seminar held at Tate Modern in London on 4 December 2013. The seminar, which was staged as part of Lu’s residence as the first Visiting Fellow at the Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific in 2013, was supported by Tate and the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. Lu and Liu’s paper, which is published without significant editorial intervention, discusses the pair’s struggle to develop a critical, research-led history of contemporary art in China in the face of significant public criticism from established art historians and critics.
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Teaching contemporary art history in China
More LessAbstractIn 2009, the author spent a semester teaching western art history to Chinese students in Beijing. And he was also able to review contemporary art exhibitions in that city. He has published books on the methodologies of art history, on the art museum and on a world art history. Therefore, this article draws some lessons from that experience, in light of these publications. To what extent can histories of art in China be modelled on narratives about western art? And, in what ways, does the art historian need to consider the distinctive features of Chinese culture? When the possibilities for misunderstanding by a foreigner are so obvious, how is it possible to develop plausible interpretations of contemporary art? A great deal of recent English-language art writing is being translated into Chinese. And yet, the availability of such cultural exchanges does not necessarily answer these questions. But here it is necessary to consider political issues, which are not easy to resolve.
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Reviews
Authors: Katie Hill, Paul Gladston and David CarrierAbstractBook from the Ground. From Point to Point, Xu Bing (2014) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 128 pp., ISBN: 9780262027083, h/bk, £17.95
The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, Mathieu Borysevicz (ed.) (2014) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 160 pp., ISBN: 9780262027427, h/bk, £17.95
Modern Poetry in China: A Visual-Verbal Dynamic, Paul Manfredi (2014) Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 244 pp. ISBN: 9781604978629, h/bk £35.00
Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 11 December 2013–6 April 2014
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