BREAKING THE INK – ABSTRACT INK ART IN MAINLAND CHINA

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Zhang Cziráková
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
High Standard ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The 1960S

Chinese art is mostly presented at foreign exhibitions from a different perspective and abstraction is represented modestly or completely absent. However, abstract art, which to a greater or lesser extent based on the roots of Chinese semi-abstract tradition, finds its firm place in the works of Chinese artists in different countries or regions. After giving a fundamental analysis of the possible inspiration for abstract ink painting from Chinese art history, and modernist art movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong during the 1960s, which had a significant influence on the formation of modernism in mainland China, and the historical overview of Chinese avant-garde, such as the 85 New Wave, the author focusses on abstract ink art in mainland China. As far as the situation in abstract painting is concerned, all important movements, exhibitions are preceded chronologically. Artists' opinions on abstract painting, their contradictions and the questions that this work raises, are observed, too. Abstract ink painting began to develop with the influx of ideas of modernism in the 1980s, and it was in important factor during the movement of Experimental ink and wash movement in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. This movement has organised exhibitions, conferences, publishes catalogues dedicated to the work of its representatives. Then the attention turns to other movements and individual artists devoted to abstract ink art. Some of the artists come to a greater extent from tradition; others try to escape the limitations of ink painting, more or less adhere to traditional Chinese art or calligraphic strokes and techniques. Some of them are more influenced by Western techniques or are attempting to synthesise. What is essential is that they create works that are often of a high standard and in their search, open new ways for Chinese ink painting in general. Special attention deserves the artists standing at the birth of the movement and to those who have so far significantly influenced the whole atmosphere in Chinese art world.

The branding of contemporary Chinese art and its politics

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Preece
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Marketing Research ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the branding of the Cynical Realist and Political Pop contemporary art movements in China. The trajectory this brand has taken over the past 25 years reveals some of the power discourses that operate within the international visual arts market and how these are constructed, distributed and consumed. Design/methodology/approach – A review of avant-garde art in China and its dissemination is undertaken through analysis of historical data and ethnographic data collected in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Findings – The analysis exposes the ideological framework within which the art market operates and how this affects the art that is produced within it. In the case of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, the art was framed and packaged by the art world to reflect Western liberal political thinking in terms of personal expression thereby implicitly justifying Western democratic, capitalist values. Research limitations/implications – As an exploratory study, findings contribute to macro-marketing research by demonstrating how certain sociopolitical ideas develop and become naturalised through branding discourses in a market system. Practical implications – A socio-cultural branding approach to the art market provides a macro-perspective in terms of the limitations and barriers for artists in taking their work to market. Originality/value – While there have been various studies of branding in the art market, this study reveals the power discourses at work in the contemporary visual arts market in terms of the work that is promoted as “hot” by the art world. Branding here is shown to reflect politics by circulating and promoting certain sociocultural and political ideas.

scholarly journals The Mama of Dada: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the original mastermind behind Fountain, 1917

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Schartner ◽  
Fran Bidwell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art History ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
Art World ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
German American ◽  
To Come ◽  
Contemporary Artist

The most disruptive sculpture that broke the art world and the notion of art itself; the notorious Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp changed art history forever. Since the anonymous submission to the salon of independent artists in New York 1917, art lovers have never been able to come to a consensus about the piece. Debates and disputes polarized the opinion of the public. As a result, the name Duchamp had become synonymous with the term Readymade, Dada and the avant-garde. Absurdly, sufficient evidence suggests that the French artist Duchamp was not the artist behind Fountain. The female Dada poet and German American contemporary artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, was the mastermind behind it. 

Makavejev, Dušan (1932–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Artistic Freedom ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
Sexual Repression

Dušan Makavejev is an avant-garde Marxist Serbian filmmaker whose film techniques, exuberant black humour, and sexual and political transgressive themes made him one of the most radical directors of the European New Wave during the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Belgrade, Serbia), he was a member of the first generation of anti-Stalinist communists, and he studied psychology at Belgrade University (where he began making short films). While some of Makavejev’s documentary shorts and a 1962 stage-play were politically suppressed, he was nonetheless permitted to advance into feature production. Along with his earlier writings and shorts, his first feature, Čovek nije tica [Man Is Not a Bird] (1965), established him as a leader in the novi film [new film] movement, which championed artistic freedom and experimentation within a Marxist context. Makavejev’s films were characterised by violent outcomes of sexual repression, outrageous humour, variety/carnival acts, satires of both western capitalism and Soviet authoritarianism, surreal images, a philosophy linking sexuality with politics, and a multi-layered mixture of styles and forms which included documentary, found footage, and clips from older features.

Jeanne Lee's Voice

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Porter
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Music ◽  
The Political ◽  
Art World ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
Social Visions ◽  
The 1960S

This essay attempts to recuperate the legacy of Jeanne Lee, an important artist whose work has gone largely unnoticed by scholars, while simultaneously examining the broader social and cultural significance of her work. Using Lee’s 1979 performance of her poem “In These Last Days” as a point of reference, I explore her multidisciplinary artistic practice that extended the parameters of improvised vocal music. “In These Last Days” exemplifies a cultural politics that was both a product of the political moments in which she lived and her interactions with a variety of thinkers and artists. This piece helps situate Lee’s work within the post-nationalist and post-cultural nationalist imaginary —an ethical, political, and cognitive remapping of the world -- informing the creative work and social visions of other African American improvisers during the 1970s. The recording showcases the ways that her incorporation of elements from intermedia performance practices enabled her social vision while implicitly commenting upon the deracinating incorporation of improvisation by the avant-garde art world during the 1960s. Additionally, Lee’s performance of gender on the piece raises a host of issues pertaining to the terrain female improvisers had to negotiate in different improvising communities and ultimately disrupts the privileging of masculinity when defining improvisational artistry. I also consider the ways in which her work encourages us to rethink jazz history as field and method.

Related rhythms: Situating Zhang Peili and contemporary Chinese video art in the globalizing art world

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Orianna Cacchione
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Single Channel ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary Chinese Art ◽  
Global Art ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Despite being considered the first video artist to work in China, the majority of Zhang Peili’s earliest video works were originally exhibited abroad. In many of these exhibitions, his videos were displayed in different installation formats and configurations. One of the most evident of these changes occurred at the travelling exhibition China Avant-Garde. In Berlin, the opening venue of the exhibition, two videos were displayed in ways that differed from their original presentations; Document on Hygiene No. 3 (1991) and Assignment No. 1 (1992) were presented as singlechannel videos on single monitors instead of the multiple monitor installations previously used to show the works in Shanghai and Paris, respectively. Water: Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary (1991) premiered in Berlin as a single-channel, single-monitor work. However, when it was installed in the exhibition’s Rotterdam venue, the work was shown on a nine-monitor grid. This article explores what caused the flexibility in the display of Zhang Peili’s early videos. I argue that these transformations demonstrate Zhang Peili’s conceptualization of video as a medium for art and his navigation of the rapidly globalizing art world. While the initial examples of this flexibility in installation were often caused by miscommunications with international curators, later exhibitions provided a regular venue for Zhang Peili to develop his approach to the ‘scene’ (chang) and ‘content’ (neirong) of video installation. Furthermore, as one of the most active Chinese artists working and exhibiting abroad in the 1990s, Zhang Peili was placed within the middle of domestic and international debates about the globalization of contemporary Chinese art. He responded to these debates by expelling signifiers of national identity in his videos and by forcefully deriding these discussions as a form of nationalism. Considering his video work from the perspective of its international presentation provides an important example of how artists working in China situated themselves in relationship to global art production in the 1980s and 1990s.

Abstract Painting

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-306
Author(s):  
Josef Novák ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Phenomenological Method ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Natural Forms

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, abstract art has formed a central stream of modern art. To attain purely aesthetic goals, many avant-garde artists turned painting in particular into a pursuit of breaking off the relations with natural forms. Instead of copying them, they have merely relied on their inner visions. When externalizing these visions directly on the canvas or sheets of paper, the practitioners of abstract art have inadvertently used the phenomenological method and its epoché. In this essay I argue that the philosophies of Kupka and Husserl are largely compatible. This is not because the two use the same terminology, but because they virtually mean and do the same thing in their respective fields. Even where there are significant differences between them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. In the essay’s conclusion I sum up some of the most significant implications their compatible theories have for the philosophy of art and for various theories of art today.

Art After Deskilling

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Ideology Critique ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Transformation ◽  
Artistic Skill

The absence of would-be palpable skills in contemporary and modern art has become a commonplace of both conservative and radical art-criticism. Indeed, these criticisms have tended to define where the critic stands in relation to the critique of authorship and the limits of ‘expression’ at the centre of the modernist experience. In this article, I am less interested in why these criticisms take the form they do – this is a matter for ideology-critique and the sociology of criticism and audiences – than in the analysis of the radical transformation of conceptions in artistic skill and craft in the modern period. This will necessitate a focus on modernism and the avant-garde, and after, as it comes into alignment with, and retreat from, the modern forces of production and means of reproduction. Much, of course, has been written within the histories of modernism, and the histories of art since, on this process of confrontation and exchange – that is, between modern art’s perceived hard-won autonomy and the increasing alienation of the artist, and the reification of art under the new social and technological conditions of advanced capitalist competition – little, however, has been written on the transformed conditions and understanding of labour in the artwork itself (with the partial exception of Adorno). This is because so little art-history and art-criticism – certainly since the 1960s – has been framed explicitly within a labour-theory of culture: in what ways do artists labour, and how are these forms of labour indexed to art’s relationship to the development of general social technique (the advanced level of technology and science as it expressed in the technical conditions of social reproducibility)? In this article, I look at the modern and contemporary dynamics of this question.

Art, abstract

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Colour Properties ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Decorative Art ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Artistic Values

The widespread use of the term ‘abstract’ for a category of visual art dates from the second decade of the twentieth century, when painters and sculptors had turned away from verisimilitude and launched such modes of abstraction as cubism, Orphism, futurism, Rayonism and suprematism. Two subcategories may be distinguished: first, varieties of figurative representation that strongly schematize, and second, completely nonfigurative or nonobjective modes of design (in the widest sense of that term). Both stand opposed to classic representationalism (realism, naturalism, illusionism, mimeticism) understood as the commitment to a relatively full and undistorted depiction of the subject matter and construed broadly enough to cover the traditional ‘high art’ canon through to post-Impressionism. Analytic and synthetic cubism are model cases of the first subcategory while Mondrian’s neoplasticism and Pollock’s classic drip works are paradigms of the second. Though the effect was revolutionary, the positive motivations for this degree of abstraction in visual art were not wholly new. What was new was the elevation of previously subordinate aims to the front rank and the pursuit of certain principal aims in isolation from the full pictorial package. Thus abstract art variously celebrates structural and colour properties of objects, scenes and patterns; effects of motion, light and atmosphere; aspects of perceptual process, whether normal or expressively loaded; and forms expressing cosmic conceptions, visionary states or utopian ambitions. With a few exceptions (for example, the Futurists) the founders of abstract art were far from lucid or forthcoming about the significance of their work, and viewers have found successive waves of abstraction initially baffling and even offensive. But abstract art now forms a secure part of the ‘high art’ canon, though generally its appeal is less well understood than that of the classic modes of representation. Criticisms of abstract art have also become more lucid. Issues concerning abstract art include the definition of the concept itself and the delineation of subordinate types; the relation between abstraction and other modes of avant-garde art that superficially resemble it; the magnitude of the artistic values so far achieved by the various forms; and the theoretical limits of significance attainable by abstraction as compared with the limits encountered in nonabstract figurative art. Abstract art merits attention from philosophers more than do traditional types of figurative and decorative art for at least two reasons: philosophical theories played a significant role in engendering abstraction and subsequent art-world discourse purporting to elucidate abstractions often operates with concepts requiring philosophic analysis to clarify and assess.

Cinema as Idea

2020 ◽  
pp. 439-521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Delayed Response ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Prior Art ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document