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A richly illustrated exploration of Ai Weiwei's installation and architecture projects, focusing on the artist's use of space. Outspoken, provocative, and prolific, the artist Ai Weiwei is an international phenomenon. In recent years, he has produced an astonishingly varied body of work while continuing his role as activist, provocateur, and conscience of a nation. Ai Weiwei is under “city arrest” in Beijing after an 81-day imprisonment; he is accused of tax evasion, but many suspect he is being punished for his political activism, including his exposure of shoddy school building practices that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2009, he was bad...
Kristine Stiles has played a vital role in establishing trauma studies within the humanities. A formidable force in the art world, Stiles examines the significance of traumatic experiences both in the individual lives and works of artists and in contemporary international cultures since World War II. In Concerning Consequences, she considers some of the most notorious art of the second half of the twentieth century by artists who use their bodies to address destruction and violence. The essays in this book focus primarily on performance art and photography. From war and environmental pollution to racism and sexual assault, Stiles analyzes the consequences of trauma as seen in the works of artists like Marina Abramovic, Pope.L, and Chris Burden. Assembling rich intellectual explorations on everything from Paleolithic paintings to the Bible’s patriarchal legacies to documentary images of nuclear explosions, Concerning Consequences explores how art can provide a distinctive means of understanding trauma and promote individual and collective healing.
This book argues that ideas first take shape in the human body, appearing on stage in new styles of performance.
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...
When Sunny is born in rural China, her parents leave her in a slop bucket to die because she's a girl. She survives, and at 14 leaves for the city, where she works a low-paying factory job and attends self-help classes to improve her chances at securing a coveted office position. When Sunny's attempts to pull herself out of poverty lead to dire consequences for a fellow worker, she is forced to question the system she's spent her life trying to master – and stand up against the powers that be. Savage, tragic and desperately funny, The World of Extreme Happiness is a stirring examination of a country in the midst of rapid change, and individuals struggling to shape their own destinies.
Invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese art, one of the most fascinating art scenes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
How China's art students develop their aesthetic styles and enter the nation's creative economy The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosio...
This book contains multiple short critiques, reflections and manifestos, affording each contributing architect and intellectual the time and space to imagine new social paradigms in China. Emerging from a tumultuous history of high culture and complex territorial conditions, there is nothing straightforward about the social development of China. The complexity of the social practices developed by architects and shapers of the built environment can be explained in part by the last three decades of an intensified adoption of the market economy by the Communist Party of China, after an equally short three decades of closed-door communist control. There is no political meltdown like the democrat...
Until the end of the Cold War in 1990, building projects and architectural icons played an important role in the self-portrayal of the competing systems. However, as the current research shows, we also find a large variety of forms of cooperation between the East, the South, and the West, not to forget the manifold cross-border entanglements within the South or the East. This book explores the intersection of two strands of research. On the one hand, interaction in the field of architecture and construction between actors from socialist countries and from countries of the Global South have increasingly won interest amongst historians of architecture and planning. On the other hand, in the context of the strongly emerging Cold War Studies, scholars have explored cooperation and circulation across the Iron Curtain with a focus on economic and research planning. This book connects perspectives of planning, construction and architectural design with those on economic interests and conflicts in projects and networks. Furthermore, it opens the view to the hubs of communication and exchange, and on patterns of longterm transformation and appropriation of architecture.