The Corpse and Humanist Discourse: Dead Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art (original) (raw)
Related papers
Chinese Bodies in Philosophy, Aesthetics, Gender and Politics: Methodologies and Practices
Chinese contemporary art series, 2020
In the fields of gender studies, body theories and aesthetics, comparative studies that involve both Western feminist and Chinese philosophical discourses deserve greater attention. My work addresses the meaningful revelations that have come through these comparative studies, which in return, should provide methodological innovations and advances in Chinese philosophy. This chapter was originally published as "Chinese Bodies in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics: Methodologies and Practices." In Tan, Sor-Hoon (ed.) The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 257-270. The original article has been revised, re-edited and published with the permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Hypatia Reviews Online
Eva Kit Wah Man has compiled a volume that advances current endeavors toward a truly global vision of philosophy as a discipline. Her stated intent is to offer "new conceptual models that feminist scholars are seriously investigating that might displace dualism and emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian mechanistic models and metaphors" by engaging "Chinese philosophy as a critical intervention for reframing the existing scholarship on gender issues and aesthetics" (ix-x). Simultaneously, she poses crucial questions about Chinese philosophy, and more specifically Confucian philosophy, in relation to patriarchal value systems. For example, can women be recognized as moral objects and aesthetic subjects?
Recognizing the Body 认得身体: on Liu Xiaodong’s Figurative Paintings
Centre for Contemporary Art - Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends., 2022
Liu Xiaodong’s paintings are moving not because he makes us conscious of something we previously did not notice, but because we gain a new perception. Consciousness is judgment; perception is recognition. Consciousness corresponds to the I-self 自我; perception corresponds to the body-self 自身. The I-self signifies a clear, stable consciousness, but also implies self-deception. The body-self, the product of a blend of biology, history, and society, is the most solid form of existence.
2014
Zhang Huan (b. 1965) can be considered a pioneering contemporary performance artist in China. His position on the Chinese art scene is highly regarded not only from a historical perspective. The use of the artist’s body as a means of expression can serve multiple purposes, which can touch upon, e.g. social or political issues, and seldom reflects the role of the human body as a vehicle for mediation. Through his artistic activity, the artist tries to discuss this issue based on the Chinese philosophical intuitions of this aspect of human existence. In our paper, we shall try to examine the theoretical foundations of the artist’s approaches to performance and illustrate them with selected works.
The Invention of Body Representation in Modern China: Case Study of Liu Haisu and the "Model Event"
Comparative Literature Studies, 2019
This article analyzes the “Model Event” that shook the Chinese art world around the 1920s in order to investigate the issue of aesthetic modernity by comparing two different épistémès of Chinese and Western culture. Totally different from Western culture, in China’s premodern mainstreams culture, the naked human body was hardly represented except for pornographic purposes. In the West, the nude human body has been a frequent subject of representation in painting because it corresponds to ideas about form and perfection, making these ideals or the “essence” of a person or idea visible and concrete. Possibilities for bodily representation depend on the respective épistémès to which cultures, such as Chinese and Western cultures, are linked. In early twentieth-century China, Liu Haisu’s use of naked models incurred great censure from many members of the gentry because he intended to represent the human body objectively in the name of art. But Liu Haisu and his allies won the battle at last by illuminating and convincing their opponents of the self-explanatory superiority of Western culture. Worth notice is that during this debate, Liu and his friends tactically replaced the difference between the épistémès of Chinese and Western cultures, one emphasizing practical wisdom, and the other truth, with that between premodernity and modernity, which undermined their victory because the crucial Western épistémè did not play its due role to reform Chinese culture. This further implies that representation of the body will again become impossible if the values of modernity are called into question.