Chinese Contemporary Art and Criticism in the Era of Globalization: Wu Hung’s Experimental Art vs. Gao Minglu’s Transnational Avant-garde

2011 ◽  
Vol null (29) ◽  
pp. 69-99
Author(s):  
Dong-Yeon Koh
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Chinese Contemporary Art ◽  
Experimental Art

Writing from the other side: Critical reflections on the calligraphy of Zhang Qiang

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-148
Author(s):  
Feng Jie
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Chinese Calligraphy ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Chinese Contemporary Art ◽  
Tate Modern ◽  
Specific Project ◽  
Critical Reflections

This article presents the specific case of a contemporary practitioner of Chinese calligraphy, Zhang Qiang, who is a notable figure within the current Avant-Garde movement. After outlining aspects of his practice, which has been controversial along gender grounds, the article turns to his specific project of ‘bi-directional’ calligraphy. It is argued this work opens up a more rewarding way into his work as an enquiry into writing, which bears connections with Derrida’s deconstructionist account of writing and trace. However, in a brief exchange at Tate Modern, Zhang offers a form of ‘writing lesson’, which both helps takes us towards the decontructionist account of general writing, yet equally reveals a reliance upon the cultural category of ‘Chinese calligraphy’, which takes us away again – arguably symptomatic of a wider struggle for Chinese contemporary art to gain recognition in the West.

Interviews and documentary sources in Chinese contemporary art research: Towards the critical use of polylogues

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-26
Author(s):  
Paul Gladston
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Chinese Contemporary Art ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Art Research

This article gives an account of the research methods and editing procedures used to inform the production of two recent books, Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists and ‘Avant-garde’ Art Groups in China, 1979-1989, focusing on issues related to the use of interviews and documentary sources in Chinese contemporary art research. As well as drawing attention to a range of contingent factors impinging on the reliability of interviews and documentary sources within the particular discursive contexts of China and to ways of mitigating their effects, it argues for the productive possibilities of the serial use of interviews in combination with other texts as critical polylogues.

Screening Statues

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Jacobs ◽  
Susan Felleman ◽  
Vito Adriaensens ◽  
Lisa Colpaert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Film History ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Extensive Reference

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are the basis for a range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. Sculpture motivates cinematic movement and film makes manifest the durational properties of sculptural space. This book will examine key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through seven chapters and an extensive reference gallery, dealing with the transformation skills of "cinemagician" Georges Méliès, the experimental art documentaries of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Henri Alekan, the statuary metaphors of modernist cinema, the mythological living statues of the peplum genre, and contemporary art practices in which film—as material and apparatus—is used as sculptural medium. The book’s broad scope and interdisciplinary approach is sure to interest scholars, amateurs and students alike.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

Pop as Translation Strategy: Makishi Tsutomu's Political Pop in Okinawa

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-71
Author(s):  
Hiroko Ikegami
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
The Vietnam War

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi's Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom as a new lingua franca for contemporary art, Makishi's work did not reach either mainland or international audiences as the artist exhibited almost exclusively in Okinawa. By comparing Makishi's artistic strategies with those of a representative Okinawan novelist, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, especially as articulated in his 1967 novella The Cocktail Party, the essay situates the significance of Makishi's project within the emerging discourse on the global neo-avant-garde.

On the “Odoresque” and “Aero-Perfumes”: Smell Related Neologisms in Avant-garde and Contemporary Art and Scholarship

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2021-2) ◽  
pp. 120-133
Author(s):  
Caro Verbeek
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Hague

For her doctoral dissertation “In Search of Lost Scents,” art and scent historian Caro Verbeek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum, The Hague) collected olfactory neologisms or newly invented smell related words from (art) historical sources ranging from 1855 to 1975, which she categorised according to the themes poetry, mind, concepts, material and synaesthesia. Three never-before-published artistic illustrations by the author help establish a more embodied cognition of the meaning of some of these concepts, as including “smell images” is impossible. In addition, she has created a “synaesthetic odour wheel” based on literary sources (2021).

scholarly journals Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Institutional Power ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Singular Event ◽  
Unknown Control ◽  
Second World

In what follows, I will point to theorization of concept of the experimental film. My main thesis is that experimental art is based on the project, research practice, innovation and open transgressive or subversive artworks. Art focused on subversion of institutional power features as a singular event performed within a particular social relationship, as a critical actionist, engaged, or activist practice. Transgression – literally – refers to: infraction, violation of a law or an order, while in geological terms it implies penetration and expansion of the sea over the mainland. The notion of transgression relates to excess, overrunning or, more precisely, departing the familiar for the unknown, control for freedom. Experimental art was created in different disciplines such as experimental music, experimental film, experimental theater, etc. John Cage’s concept of ‘experimental music’ has been the starting point for new experimental art and artistic practices since 1950. Experimental film (experimental, new, avant-garde or neo-avant-garde cinema) has featured since the Second World War. The concept and term describe a range of filmmaking styles which are generally quite different from, and often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking and entertainment-oriented cinematography. In the second and third part of the essay, I will present an analysis of the experimental films of the artists the OHO group and Neša Paripović. Article received: December 2, 2017; Article accepted: December 18, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Šuvaković, Miško. "Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies no 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.225

‘Playing the Chinese card’: Globalization and the aesthetic strategies of Chinese contemporary artists

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 567-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Zhang ◽  
Taj Frazier
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
Chinese Contemporary Art ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
And Control ◽  
Art Industry ◽  
Contemporary 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.

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