Huang Yong Ping (original) (raw)
This is what Nanyang art looks like
ThinkChina, 2023
This essay examines the characteristics of Nanyang art, highlighting the distinctive approaches taken by a generation of artists in Singapore who sought to integrate Chinese and Western art traditions and aesthetics in their practice.
Western Modernity's Influence on the art of Chen Wen Hsi
This academic paper analyzes the artistic evolution of Chen Wen Hsi, a prominent Singaporean artist, focusing on the influence of Western modernity on his work. The author examines three of Chen's paintings—The Ferry, Sea Palace, and Herons—from different periods of his career, applying Panofsky's iconographic and iconological methods. The analysis considers Chen's artistic training in Shanghai, his interactions with other artists, and the socio-political context of Singapore's development. The paper ultimately argues that Chen skillfully integrated Western and Eastern artistic elements to forge a distinctive style reflective of his experiences. The conclusion emphasizes Chen's unique blending of Western and Eastern artistic traditions, resulting in a style that is both innovative and uniquely his own.
Review: Peggy Wang. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art.
China Review International, 2022
The dissident in post-Tiananmen Chinese art history has been fetishized by the West. Peggy Wang highlights in The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art that this misplaced attention shoehorns artwork, neglects artistic agency, and ignores how artists in the s responded to a wide swathe of cultural and intellectual dialogues. Addressing this dissident trope, chapter , titled "Spaces of Self-Recognition," probes art criticism and major debates in the s and uncovers new lines of inquiry that indigenize the understanding of post-Tiananmen Chinese art history. One debate was the how and why of bridging the distance and differences between contemporary Chinese art and established centers of the art world. Art critics contended that Chinese artists must develop their own standard and objectives. Rather than emulating Western styles and modes of making art, Chinese artists, critics held, should embrace the history and culture of minzu or Chinese ethnicity. "New Realism," exemplified by the oil paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b. ) and Yu Hong (b. ), gained appeal among critics who found that realist ideology embraces minzu and orients the future of contemporary Chinese art. By focusing on China's social reality and local environments, Chinese artists, as critics hypothesized, could bring lived experience to the center of their art, embrace contemporaneity without succumbing to Western art, and profess "Chineseness" (p. ) without being fettered to the past. Such direction could make China a new contemporary art center. Pivoting on this sentiment in the art circle in the s, Wang, in subsequent chapters, spotlights five artists whose works have largely suffered from well worn, limited interpretations derived from the dissident lens and explores how they used their works to claim agency in their own world. These five artists are Zhang Xiaogang (b. ), Wang Guangyi (b. ), Sui Jianguo (b. ), Zhang Peili (b. ), and Lin Tianmiao (b. ). Titled "Zhang Xiaogang: Bloodline and Belonging," chapter focuses on how the early works in Zhang's Bloodline series (begun in ) speaks to the artist's shifting engagement with the world and artistic explorations, as well as an art historical lineage in representing "relationship." During his study at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in , Zhang's works were greatly inspired by Review
Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2012
In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? The article focuses on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China. It suggests that artworld art (encompassed by the artworld institutions of commerce, museums, and the academy) is far from the only art currently produced. Art beyond the artworld, whether commercial or religious, is important to many people worldwide. It describes four kinds of art currently made in China. Three are artworld art (Modernist, traditional, and avant-garde), one is non-artworld (mass commercial). Connections exist among them. Further, it argues that practices in all four conform to expectations globally that Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed 'staging Chineseness'. The article concludes with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it. 1. Although I hope to cast some light on aesthetic globalization, my focus is on one country: China. In recent years, many people outside China have had opportunities to see considerable quantities of contemporary Chinese art. The epicenter of what has become a global phenomenon was the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Art Gallery, Beijing in 1989, co-organized by the critic and art historian Gao Minglu, now chair of the
Contemporary Chinese artists in the globalized art world
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2018
The end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution opened an entirely new chapter for modern Chinese history, and certainly, for Chinese art too. China opened its door to the rest of the world, but it did not happen over night. In the late 1970s and 1980s, there was still a lot of oppression in China with only a limited range of knowledge or information available. Within such a circumstance, a dynamic avant-garde movement took place in this resistance of all the difficulties, and an incredible group of artists emerged and became to China what the 1960s cohort including Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys was to America and Europe. 1 This group of artists formed as a new generation of artists for China, who are committed to break the boundaries of 'Chinese art', and to extend their artistic and cultural understandings to the world. There are two sides of the factors, external and internal, for the development of Chinese contemporary art from local to global. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, externally, Chinese art started to attract the world's attention by artists' frequent participations in the international exhibitions. Notably, in 1993, as a section of the 45 th Venice Biennale, Passaggio a Oriente (Passage to the Orient) marked one of the first 14 Barmé, Geremie, China'
A leading figure in modern/contemporary ink painting, Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong) is best known for innovative techniques with tools other than the brush. He is often identified as an artist from Taiwan, but in fact his footprints and legacy span the Sinophone world, including mainland China and Hong Kong. In this article, Liu's lesser-known but critical period in Hong Kong in the 1970s to early 1990s is examined in relation to the postwar debates that led to the term guohua (national painting) being replaced by shuimohua (ink painting).
Over 20 art projects conceived and organized by independent curator Luca Zordan, in collaboration with international art galleries, cultural centers, museums, and embassies, on view at the site of the art fair as well as around Beijing, presenting the work and perspectives of foreign artists in China. In these past years globalization has created tremendous opportunities for global collaboration among different countries. At the same time, it has also generated a unique set of problems and issues relating to the effective daily relation with different cultures. We are finding ourselves more and more involved in communication across cultures, between cultures, among cultures. For this reason, understanding other cultures and relating to them is now fundamental. Foreign artists in China want to examine the work of those foreign artists who have decided to take the cultural challenge of confronting themselves with a new culture, entering in contact with China, and making direct experience of the local environment. The projects presented at Art Beijing examine the perspectives and visions of over 20 artists from different nationalities, ages, and cultural backgrounds, who have been living in China, working here, or at least coming here to produce work. Many of the presented artworks are strongly related to China as they are produced here using local materials; some of them might even appear documentations of social and environmental conditions of China; some others reveal their inspiration from this cultural environment. There are also some works which seem not to have any connection with our surroundings, as if they could have been done elsewhere. Looking at the exhibited artworks, we also have to consider all the cultural relations, human experiences, collaborations and interactions with local people, environment, society, culture, which constitute their process of production. They can be truly appreciated only considering the context in which they are produced and to which they intrinsically relate at the point that we could say that many of these works in a certain way belong to China and are not at all foreign. In fact, confronting with different artistic perspectives and cultural points of view can also help us to learn more about ourselves. The contact with what we consider foreign can stimulate us to understand ourselves more, to know deeper the reality around us, to change our mind on some aspects of this reality, to look at things we have never noticed before, to discover new imaginations. Walking next to each other, we can understand better ourselves and the reality, and contribute together to its development. Exhibited artists: Igor Baskakov (Russia), Francisca Benitez, Maartje Blans (The Netherlands), Antonio Gomez Bueno (Spain/USA), Felice Candilio, Francesco De Grandi (Italy), Julio De Matos (Portugal), David Evison (UK/Germany), Anne Graham (Australia), Guo Jian (China), Elisa Haberer (France), Kristiina Koskentola (Finland/The Netherlands), Ewa Kuras (Poland), Manuel S. Rodriguez Loayza, Gabriela Maciel (Brazil), Ioannis Marinoglou (Greece), Alfredo Martinez (USA), Nicoykatiushka (Chile), Vanessa Notley (Scotland/France), Milla-Kariina Oja (Finland), Viktor Popov, Li Qiao (China), Eugenia Raskopoulos, Bianca Regl (Austria), John Reynolds (New Zealand), Alessandro Rolandi (Italy), Gustavo Rugeles G. (Venezuela), Felipe Santander, Tony Scott (Australia), Varvara Shavrova (Russia/Ireland), Jiří Straka (Zcech Republic), Wang Zhiyuan (China), Martin Wehmer (Germany), Xu Shuang (China), Karla Zapata (Venezuela), Sandor Zsila (Hungary). Partner institutions: Dell'Arco Gallery (Italy), Antenna (Chile), Atelier#2 Gallery (Russia), CINU (Bolivia), Delegation of the European Commission ( EU) to China, Embassy of Brazil, Embassy of Bulgaria, Embassy of Greece, Embassy of Hungary, Embassy of Ireland, Embassy of Poland, Embassy of Portugal, Embassy of the Czech Republic, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Hippolyte (Finland), Italian Institute of Culture, Lukas Feichtner Galerie (Austria), Michael Schultz Gallery (Germany), Moriarty (Spain), Starkwhite (New Zealand), Embassy of Venezuela, French Cultural Institute (France), University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts (Australia).