Above Sea

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Lin
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Buried Layers ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Shanghai, long known as mainland China’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, has recently re-emerged as a global capital. Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai offers the first in-depth examination of turn of the twenty-first century Shanghai-based art and design – from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. This book offers a counter-touristic view of one of the world’s fastest developing megacities that penetrates the contradictions and buried layers of specific locales and artifacts of visual culture. Informed by years of in-situ research including interviews with artists and designers, the book looks beyond contemporary art’s global hype to reveal persistent socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai’s explosive transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Analyses of exemplary design projects such as Xintiandi and Shanghai Tang, and artworks by Liu Jianhua, Yang Fudong, Gu Wenda and more reveal how Shanghai’s global aesthetics construct glamorizing artifices that mask historically-rooted cross-cultural conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity versus anti-colonialist nationalism, and the city’s repressed socialist past versus consumerist present. The book focuses on Shanghai-based art and design from the 1990s-2000s, the decades of the city’s most rapid post-socialist development, while also attending to pivotal Republican and Mao Era examples. Challenging the “East-meets-West” clichés that characterize discussions of urban Shanghai and contemporary Chinese art, this book illuminates critical issues facing today’s artists, architects, and designers, and provides an essential field guide for students of art, design, art history, urban studies, and Chinese culture.

Biennialization-as-banalization, promotion, and resistance

Above Sea ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 96-116
Author(s):  
Jenny Lin
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
First Century ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Global Expansion ◽  
Contemporary Chinese Art ◽  
Global Positioning ◽  
Current Concerns ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Chapter Three investigates the turn of the twenty-first century global expansion of Shanghai’s contemporary art vis-à-vis the first international iteration of China’s premier contemporary art event, the Chinese Communist Party-sponsored 2000 Shanghai. The chapter theorizes biennialization-as-banalization vis-à-vis contemporary exhibition practices and the promotion of contemporary Chinese art. The chapter argues that Shanghai Biennial’s curators’ hopes of harnessing the spirit of Shanghai were ultimately supplanted by a generic brand of global contemporary art that neglected the city’s unique historical features and current concerns. This chapter then examines critical responses to the 2000 Shanghai Biennial and critiques of the global positioning of Shanghai’s contemporary art as seen in Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi’s counter-exhibition “Fuck Off,” and in two related works by artists Zhou Tiehai and Yang Fudong.

Translation, transformation and refiguration: The significance of Jingdezhen and the materiality of porcelain in the work of two contemporary Chinese artists1

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-223
Author(s):  
Luise Guest
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
First Century ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Research Project ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Historical Discourses ◽  
Post Cultural Revolution ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Abstract In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity2 and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.

From Shanghai to New York by way of conclusion

Above Sea ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 147-153
Author(s):  
Jenny Lin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Metropolitan Museum ◽  
Corporate Sponsorship ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Design Projects ◽  
Looking Glass ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

The conclusion considers the continued, widespread proliferation of the staid East-meets-West trope through a critique of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Ruminating on the afterlives of East-meets-West exoticizations, the conclusion synthesizes the preceding ones by analyzing the exhibition’s loaded cross-cultural hybrids of art-fashion-celebrity culture and Sino-US corporate sponsorship. The chapter argues that “China: Through the Looking Glass” might have countered the critique that the exhibition did not adequately present contemporary Chinese culture by including some of the art and design projects presented throughout the book, summarizing the vital issues these projects raise.

In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture

2000 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 418
Author(s):  
Charles W. Hayford ◽  
Geremie R. Barme
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Regaining Ground

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Herlihy ◽  
Matthew L. Fahrenbruch ◽  
Taylor A. Tappan
Keyword(s):  
Central America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
First Century ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Demographic Trends ◽  
New Strategies ◽  
Indigenous Land

This chapter describes the geographies of indigenous populations and their territories in Central America, past and present. A brief discussion of previous archaeological research provides a context for the region’s pre-Columbian populations and settlement distributions prior to an examination of the territorial and demographic collapse precipitated by European conquest. The chapter chronicles a twenty-first-century resurgence of indigenous populations and their territorial rights in Central America, including the emergence of geopolitical units that we call indigenous territorial jurisdictions (ITJs), the likes of which represent new strategies for accommodating indigenous land ownership and governance within the context of modern states. Archival and census research, in situ field experience, and geographic information system (GIS)-based land use and cadastral mapping inform the understanding of indigenous peoples’ past and contemporary demographic trends, settlement patterns, and territorial challenges.

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