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It’s My Party
None
The Spirit of Individualism
This book is about avant-garde art in Shanghai in the 1980s which challenges the narrative in the current discourse on the appearance of contemporary art in China. Offering fresh perspectives and new insights into the art and the artists of this period, the book includes critical events in Shanghai, that will attract the serious attention of art professionals and collectors. The emergence of the Shanghai art scene in the 1980s mirrors the revitalisation of Shanghai that was tasked to lead China’s economic development trajectory onto the world stage. Shanghai, with its semi-colonial, political, economic and cultural history, including the strong legacy of the early twentieth century modernist art movement, has played a vital role in China’s modernisation and presents itself as a unique case in the evolution of contemporary art in China.
Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art
The book presents a range of articles and discussions that offer critical insights into the development of contemporary Chinese art, both within China and internationally. It brings together selected writings, both published and unpublished, by Paul Gladston, one of the foremost international scholars on contemporary Chinese art. The articles are based on extensive first-hand research, much of which was carried out during an extended residence in China between 2005 and 2010. In contrast to many other writers on contemporary Chinese art, Gladston analyses his subject with specific reference to the concerns of critical theory. In his writings he consistently argues for a “polylogic” (multi-voiced) approach to research and analysis grounded in painstaking attention to local, regional and international conditions of artistic production, reception and display.
A History of Contemporary Chinese Art
Chinese art has experienced its most profound metamorphosis since the early 1950s, transforming from humble realism to socialist realism, from revolutionary art to critical realism, then avant-garde movement, and globalized Chinese art. With a hybrid mix of Chinese philosophy, imported but revised Marxist ideology, and western humanities, Chinese artists have created an alternative approach – after a great ideological and aesthetic transition in the 1980s – toward its own contemporaneity though interacting and intertwining with the art of rest of the world. This book will investigate, from the perspective of an activist, critic, and historian who grew up prior to and participated in the great transition, and then researched and taught the subject, the evolution of Chinese art in modern and contemporary times. The volume will be a comprehensive and insightful history of the one of the most sophisticated and unparalleled artistic and cultural phenomena in the modern world.
Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art
How contemporary Chinese art is creating “a philosophy of life, a philosophy of politics, and a natural philosophy,” as artist Qiu Zhijie says it must, is explored in this collection of essays by philosophers and art historians from America and China.
A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China
Globalization euphoria and enthusiasm for the West are on the decline in contemporary China. Critical voices make themselves heard in artistic and cultural circles, turning towards their personal everyday lives to take stock. Their questions revolve around concrete experiences in the radical upheaval of lifeworlds, the continued significance of traditions after many of them have been thoroughly uprooted, and the paradoxes produced by the predominance of neo-liberalism. The 17 positions assembled in this volume provide a vivid illustration of such a »new thoughtfulness« in a wide variety of aspects ranging from aesthetics and art to theatre and photography.
Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China
This edited collection brings together essays that share in a critical attention to visual culture as a means of representing, contributing to and/or intervening with discursive struggles and territorial conflicts currently taking place at and across the outward-facing and internal borders of the People’s Republic of China. Elucidated by the essays collected here for the first time is a constellation of what might be described as visual culture wars comprising resistances on numerous fronts not only to the growing power and expansiveness of the Chinese state but also the residues of a once pervasively suppressive Western colonialism/imperialism. The present volume addresses visual culture related to struggles and conflicts at the borders of Hong Kong, the South China Sea and Taiwan as well within the PRC with regard the so-called “Great Firewall of China” and differences in discursive outlook between China and the West on the significances of art, technology, gender and sexuality. In doing so, it provides a vital index of twenty-first century China’s diversely conflicted status as a contemporary nation-state and arguably nascent empire.
A Grand Materialism in the New Art from China
In A Grand Materialism in the New Art from China, Mary Bittner Wiseman shows that material matters in the work of Chinese artists, where the goal is to call attention to its subjects through the directness and immediacy of its material (like dust from 9/11, 1001 Chinese citizens, paintings made with gunpowder, written words) or the specificity of its sites (such as the Three Gorges Dam). Artists are working below the level of language where matter and gesture, texture and touch, instinct and intuition live. Not reduced to the words applied to them, art's subjects appear in their concrete particularity, embedded in the stories of their materials or their sites. Wiseman argues that it is global in being able to be understood by all thanks to its materials and the stories that accompany it, and the art is contemporary in having to make the case for itself that it is art. Finally, it satisfies Arthur Danto’s characterization of art as any representation that puts its subject in a new light by way of a rhetorical figure that the viewer interprets. The material art from China is the paradigm for an art that is global and contemporary.
The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China
This book is concerned with socially engaged art projects in the Chinese countryside, with the artists and intellectuals who are involved, the villagers they meet and the local authorities with whom they negotiate. In recent years an increasing number of urban artists have turned towards the countryside in an attempt to revive rural areas perceived to be in a crisis. The vantage point of this book is the Bishan Commune. In 2010, Ou Ning drafted a notebook entitled Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. The notebook presents a utopian ideal of life based on anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid. In 2011 the Commune was established in Bishan Village in Anhui Province. The main questions of this book thus revolve around how an anarchist, utopian community unfolds to the backdrop of the political, social and historical landscape of rural China, or more directly: How do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside?
Utopia in Practice
This book is a collection of texts on one of China's boldest social experiments in recent years: the rural reconstruction project in Bishan. The Bishan Project (2011-2016) was a rural reconstruction project in a small village Bishan, Anhui Province, China. The writings describe and criticize the social problems caused by China’s over-loading urbanization process and starts a a contemporary agrarianism and agritopianism discourse to resist the modernism and developmentalism doctrine which dominated China for more than a century, answering a global desire for the theory and action of the alternative social solution for today’s environmental and political crises.This practical utopian commune project ran for 6 years and caused a national debate on rural issues in China, when it was invited to be exhibited and presented abroad. This collection of writing will be of interest to artists, China scholars, architects, and the cultural community at large.
