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Contemporary Chinese art is still a young field now being opened up to critical academic research. Negotiating Difference is a pioneering collection of articles which engage with contemporary Chinese art in a global context. The contributions collectively address the urgent methodological question of how to describe, contextualize and theorize artworks and artistic processes in and beyond the People's Republic of China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. The studies break new ground as they chalk out the transcultural entanglements of which art and its practices partake and which they in turn reconfigure. The book features 20 essays written by a select group of international junior and senior scholars engaged in ambitious and methodologically innovative research on contemporary Chinese art. Their multi-faceted, in part interdisciplinary approaches are complemented by four contributions by distinguished practitioners in the field, who - as art curators and critics - are located in China and explore key developments within Chinese art and the changing art scene of the last three decades.
A trailblazing look at the historical emergence of a global field in contemporary art and the diverse ways artists become valued worldwide Prior to the 1980s, the postwar canon of “international” contemporary art was made up almost exclusively of artists from North America and Western Europe, while cultural agents from other parts of the world often found themselves on the margins. The Global Rules of Art examines how this discriminatory situation has changed in recent decades. Drawing from abundant sources—including objective indicators from more than one hundred countries, multiple institutional histories and discourses, extensive fieldwork, and interviews with artists, critics, cura...
Founded in 1841 and located since October 2019 in a striking new building by celebrated Spanish-Italian architects Barozzi Veiga, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (MCBA) is one of Switzerland's major public art galleries. It is home to an impressive permanent collection spanning eight centuries of art history that comprises manifold works by Swiss and international artists. This compact guide introduces 212 works from all periods represented in the collection with image and a concise text about its history and reception. An essay on the museum's development over 170 years as well as an index of artists round out the book.
An illustrated examination of laboratory architecture and the work that it does to engage the public, recruit scientists, and attract funding. The laboratory building is as significant to the twenty-first century as the cathedral was to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The contemporary science laboratory is built at the grand scales of cathedrals and constitutes as significant an architectural statement. The laboratory is a serious investment in architectural expression in an attempt to persuade us of the value of the science that goes on inside. In this lavishly illustrated book, Sandra Kaji-O'Grady and Chris L. Smith explore the architecture of modern life science laboratories, and...
How the valorization of artistic and political dissidence has contributed to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West. Interest in Chinese contemporary art increased dramatically in the West shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Sparked by political sympathy and the mediatized response to the event, Western curators, critics, and art historians were quick to view the new art as an expression of dissident resistance to the Chinese regime. In this book, Marie Leduc proposes that this attribution of political dissidence is not only the result of latent Cold War perceptions about China, but also indicative of the art world's demand for artistically and politically provocative...
China has an age-old zoomorphic tradition. The First Emperor was famously said to have had the heart of a tiger and a wolf. The names of foreign tribes were traditionally written with characters that included animal radicals. In modern times, the communist government frequently referred to Nationalists as “running dogs,” and President Xi Jinping, vowing to quell corruption at all levels, pledged to capture both “the tigers” and “the flies.” Splendidly illustrated with works ranging from Bronze Age vessels to twentieth-century conceptual pieces, this volume is a wide-ranging look at zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery in Chinese art. The contributors, leading scholars in Chines...
"Featuring 70 works in various media--paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture--that were created during the past three decades, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China will demonstrate how China's ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path. Although all of the artists have transformed their sources through new modes of expression, visitors will recognize thematic, aesthetic, or technical attributes in their creations that have meaningful links to China's artistic past. The exhibition will be organized thematically into four parts and will include such highlights as Xu Bing's dramatic Book from the Sky (ca. 1988), an installation that will fill an entire gallery; Family Tree (2000), a set of vivid photographs documenting a performance by Zhang Huan in which his facial features--and his identity--are obscured gradually by physiognomic texts that are inscribed directly onto his face; and Map of China (2006) by Ai Weiwei, which is constructed entirely of wood salvaged from demolished Qing dynasty temples." --
This collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of East German art, film, literature, music, and museum studies, seeks to renegotiate the artistic legacy of the German Democratic Republic. Combining a range of theoretical and practical perspectives, the volume challenges the narrow frameworks of totalitarianism and Ostalgie that have dominated discussions of art produced in the GDR. It explores the diversity of art produced in the state and contests the long-held perception that socialist realism and artistic innovation were mutually exclusive. Crucially, the collection puts art itself to the fore; GDR art is considered not simply as a political by-product, as is so often the case, but as an entity of innovation and aesthetic value in its own right.
How Chinese is contemporary Chinese art? Treasured by collectors, critics, and art world cognoscenti, this art developed within an avant-garde that looked West to find a language to strike out against government control. Traditionally, Chinese artistic expression has been related to the structure and function of the Chinese language and the assumptions of Chinese natural cosmology. Is contemporary Chinese art rooted in these traditions or is it an example of cultural self-colonization? Contributors to this volume address this question, going beyond the more obvious political and social commentaries on contemporary Chinese art to find resonances between contemporary artistic ideas and the indigenous sources of Chinese cultural self-understanding. Focusing in particular on the acclaimed artist Xu Bing, this book looks at how he and his peers have navigated between two different cultural sites to establish a third place, a place from which to appropriate Western ideas and use them to address centuries-old Chinese cultural issues within a Chinese cultural discourse.
Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Auction Market charts the rapid emergence of a multi-million-dollar global market for Chinese Contemporary art by revealing the strategic activities of art world agents in promoting the work of ‘avant-garde’ Chinese artists to a Western audience.