The Representation and Agency of Artistic Interventions in Community in Mainland China

Based on immersive participatory observation of the curatorial practice of the 2019 OCAT exhibition Rural Construction through Art in Shenzhen, we identified two modes of community-based artistic interventions: a cultural “governance/capital” intervention deeply embedded in the social structure and a collective experimental art production intervention dissociated from the social structure. However, both forms of “production art” are essentially “unities of opposites” integrating incorporation and resistance, consistent with the socialist art policy of promoting the flourishing of all types of arts. Though the aesthetic divide between “art for society’s sake” and “art for art’s sake” positions these artistic interventions in different places in society, we argue that the domain of Chinese contemporary art is shifting away from the studio and toward scenes, events, experience, and dialogue. The approach of “the era of mass art” also means that “art-as-resistance” is being legitimized as “art-as-incorporation” in a subtle but unremitting way.

A Cultural Man in the Market Jin’s Art

Li Jin, a contemporary Chinese ink and wash artist, participated in the Eighth Five-Year Movement of Thought in China. Li Jin’s art can be divided into three stages. The first stage is during the Eighth Five-Year Movement, Chinese artists turned to Western modern art and post-modern art. The process of learning, and Li Jin’s artistic style presents expressionism, such as Tibetan group paintings. And the second stage is that after 1989, Chinese art has undergone a new turning point. The lofty and philosophical avant-garde art of the 1980s has declined, because intellectuals throughout China clearly understand that the right to speak is always in the hands of the power, and power is Justice and discourse, the brush for writing history is not for the general public, so after 1989, there was a gap in culture and a decline in spirit. He spoke with a hippie smile and a cynical attitude, so cynical realism, political pop art, female art, with the emergence of gaudy art, the artist’s perspective has changed from a macro perspective to a daily trivial matter, generalized and secularized. At this stage, Li Jin’s art expresses the things of family life, presenting private space. The third stage is after 2000. Due to the changes of the times, market capitalism has allowed Chinese contemporary art to gain some official status. In this modern China where consumerism and pragmatism are popular, Li Jin directly intervenes in his self-image to express his feelings and memories of this social fragment. Even though there are many personal sensibility elements, the artist is using his own eyes and beating heart to feel that it is a kind of reality, not the real nihility in the socalled history textbook. These are the three stages of Li Jin’s art. The main topic of this thesis is Li Jin’s daily expressions based on the theme of gourmet beauties from the 1990s to the present, writing market culture from the first perspective of ordinary people. The thesis is divided into three parts: the first part is to discuss Li Jin’s expression of beautiful food. The second part discusses Li Jin’s perfect integration of traditional ink painting and contemporary society. The third part is to discuss the turning and criticism of Li Jin’s art in the global context.

The Evolution of a Consolidated Market for Neo-Traditional Chinese Contemporary Art

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there is an incipient market in China strong enough to replace the global market for Chinese contemporary art. The (informal) market I have identified supports traditional methods of transaction and practice. It charts a course twixt slavish emulation of the past and unqualified acceptance of the present. To demonstrate the contemporary application of this trend, I introduce three case studies, which examine the attitude and behaviour of three Chinese artists active between 2005 and 2015. This period marks the transformation of China from an aspirant economic power to a self-confident advocate of Chinese values. The premise of this paper is that the China market today is moving towards a harmonious ideal rooted in Chinese thought. In the nineteenth-century art movement known as the Shanghai School, I have found a precedent for the evolutionary transformation of Chinese art from the traditional to the modern. This study will reveal how the Shanghai School market might be an exemplar for today’s Chinese contemporary art market. I will refer to this historical model to show how conventional methods of creation, distribution and consumption can effectively be modernised. Another effort to culturally transform China was attempted a generation later in the southern city of Guangzhou. The movement, known as the Lingnan School, attempted to fuse Western-style realism with Chinese techniques and media. I argue that these two early attempts to amalgamate the traditional with the modern failed to metamorphose into a consolidated Chinese contemporary art market model. They have, instead, resulted in the co-existence of two corrupted models; the one, a diffident fusion of the past and the modern world, and the other a concerted alliance of nationalism and globalism.

Materialising Markets: The Agency of Auctions in Emergent Art Genres in the Global South

For the last two decades, the international auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been at the forefront of global art market expansion. Their world-wide footprints have enabled auction house specialists to engage with emerging artists and aspiring collectors, most notably in the developing economies of the Global South. By establishing their sales infrastructure in new locales ahead of the traditional mechanisms of primary market commercial galleries, the international auction houses have played a foundational role in the notional construction of new genres of art. However, branding alone is not sufficient to establish these new markets; the auction houses require a network of willing supporters to facilitate and drive marketplace supply and demand, be that trans-locational art market intermediaries, local governments, and/or regional auction businesses. This paper examines emerging art auction markets in three Global South case studies. It elucidates the strategic mechanisms and networks of international and regional art auction houses in the development of specific genres of contemporary art: Hong Kong and ‘Chinese contemporary art’, Singapore and ‘Southeast Asian art’, and Australia and ‘Aboriginal art’. Through examination and comparison of these three markets, this paper draws on research conducted over the past decade to reveal an integral role played by art auctions in the expansion of broader contemporary art world infrastructure in the Global South.