Can the Creative Subaltern Speak? Dafen Village Painters, Van Gogh, and the Politics of ‘True Art’ (original) (raw)

Migrating Subjects: The Problem of the "Peasant" in Contemporary Chinese Art

2018

My dissertation, Migrating Subjects: The Problem of the “peasant” in contemporary Chinese Art presents the narrative of contemporary artworks in China made about marginalized communities, as exemplified by migrant workers and rural inhabitants, from the 1990s to the present. These groups, often referred to as nongmin in popular discourse, were upheld as revolutionary heroes throughout much of the 20th century, but lost their cultural valence with the onset of China’s integration with global market mechanisms in the late 1970s. By examining artworks involving nongmin participation from the 1990s to the present, this study explores, for the first time, the ways in which Chinese artists have continued to make art with the goal of helping these communities against the background of contemporary artists’ own cultural marginalization in the early 1990s, their acceptance into the international art arena over the turn of the century, and their provisional embrace by the Chinese central gove...

In(dependence), Industry and Self-Organization: Narratives of Alternative Art Spaces in Greater China

Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia, 2015

New attempts to define and expose uncharted territories have only time and again found themselves in blind service of hegemonic structures. The "natural" character of Chinese characteristics, and even its introduction into the contemporary lexicon, has been carefully handed down as a predetermined strategy and ideological principle based upon economic development. The fantastic rise of the Chinese art market parallel to such top-down molding in the last thirty years may be seen in certain senses as part of the success story, but the increasing complexity of socio-economic relations grounding contemporary artistic creation also appears to follow a path of the mappable, with keywords such as added-value, cultural district development and art superstars highlighting its legend. Underneath this map, however, is the enormous fissure between such top-down initiatives and another topology of grassroots intervention. Marked by ruptures in physical space and an ongoing play between autonomy and heteronomy, the perspective of a socalled "alternative arts practice" in China offers instead an image of the "unmappability " circumscribing a political, cultural, and economic flux. The following analysis seeks, therefore, to embrace the very contradiction that occurs with its production. Case studies of several artist-initiated practices will explore a politics and aesthetics in the making; that is to say, one which has yet to be, or one that defies the certainty of mapping and an art market categorization. What emerges therein is a politics of exception, whereby the complexities of Mainland sociopolitics cannot delineate a formula for artistic production but only be navigated as a realm of singularities, affects, and encounters. The particular circumstances which have led to the creation of spaces such as Womenjia Youth Autonomy Lab (Wuhan), WooferTen (Hong Kong), Lijiang Studio (Lijiang), and HomeShop (Beijing) exemplify such spontaneous modes of artistic practice. Their genealogies are traced here to highlight a micropolitics embedded within and counter to the prevailing forces of a socialist market economy. It is from within these structures that a meta-analysis will look beyond these groups as a pegged phenomenon and rather as a series of narratives involving practices, engagements, and relations that undo a common thinking of resistance.

WHEN ARTISTIC FIELD MEETS ART WORLDS – based on the case study of occupational painters in Shanghai

Art, with its thousands of faces, often remains mysterious in terms of its value. The Kantian aesthetic perceives the value of art as lying in itself and independent of any external judgement. Bourdieu's analysis, using 'the field of cultural production', however, considers that the value of art embodies the symbolic capital of producers and the relevant genres, schoolsin a word, hierarchy of the social space of cultural production. Moreover, the field of cultural production, with its relatively autonomous existence, has homologies with the field of power rather than being its own enclosed domain . If the Kantian aesthetic places art in a pure and eternal state for human perception, then Bourdieusian analysis brings art to the social conditions and structure in which art is produced and consumed.

The Wasteland of Creative Production: A Case Study of Contemporary Chinese Art

With the new magnitude for the relatively unhindered production and circulation of artworks, galleries and contemporary art museums are burgeoning across the larger cities of China. This article provides an empirical example of how contemporary and avant-garde art is produced and valu-ated in the art communities that thrive on the recent international recognition of Chinese artworks. It addresses some of the effects that occur when art production becomes mediated by cultural entrepreneurs and propelled by resourceful investors. Challenging notions of autonomy and independence in the sphere of aesthetics and contemporary art, the article addresses some of the ways in which art becomes co-opted, not only by commercial agents, but also by official ambitions. The commercialization of the cultural sphere reveals a paradigmatic shift, giving a stronger emphasis to the intangible notion of creativity as a new driving force for economic development in China.

"Playing the Chinese Card": Globalization and the aesthetic strategies of Chinese contemporary artists

This article examines the art and travels of two contemporary Chinese artists – Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang – to explore how each of them successfully navigates the rapidly shifting terrains and interests of the Chinese state and the global high art industry while simultaneously articulating a distinct politics and practice of creative ambivalence. We argue that these two artists’ creative productions and strategies: (1) refute various western critics’ critique of Chinese artists as inauthentic imitators of western art who produce exotic representations of China and Chinese identity for western consumption; (2) call into question the Chinese government’s numerous efforts to simultaneously promote and control Chinese contemporary art for nationalist/statist purposes. Furthermore, we unpack how both artists deploy various resources to produce complex works that interrogate and demonstrate the clashes of power, culture and identity in global spaces of encounter.

Keepers of the Waters: Experiments in xianchang art practice in 1990s China

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2021

The environmental art project, Keepers of the Waters, organized by the American artist Betsy Damon, invited artists from the United States and China to create artworks in and around a polluted urban river in Chengdu in 1995 and again in Lhasa, Tibet the following summer. The site-specific event occurred outdoors-outside institutional spaces of art-and showcased experimental performance and installation, formats that had previously been excluded from state-run museums in China due to state censorship. Although recent scholarship has examined socially engaged projects of the early 2000s that drew from global trends of social activism, relational aesthetics, and site-specificity, little work has been done on this nascent moment in the 1990s when Chinese artists began to draw connections between going outdoors, working in a site-specific manner, and advancing broader social commitments through their art. This study examines Keepers as a test site for a newly developing xianchang (on-site) aesthetic based on outdoor, site-specific engagements with social spaces. By situating Keepers within the specific historic concerns of the mid-1990s, I suspend the overly robust interpretive frameworks around art activism to uncover the nuanced ways in which xianchang art operated. As I demonstrate, the tensions and contradictions surrounding xianchang art challenge imported models on art's social efficacy and continue to inform contemporary art practices in China into the twenty-first century.