Total Modernity And The Avant Garde In Twentieth Century Chinese Art

Download or read book Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art written by Minglu Gao and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking book that describes a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and a modernity that unifies art, politics, and social life. To the extent that Chinese contemporary art has become a global phenomenon, it is largely through the groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Gao Minglu: "China/Avant-Garde" (Beijing, 1989), "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" (Asia Society, New York, 1998), and "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art" (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005) among them. As the first Chinese writer to articulate a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and modernity—one not defined by Western chronology or formalism—Gao Minglu is largely responsible for the visibility of Chinese art in the global art scene today. Contemporary Chinese artists tend to navigate between extremes, either embracing or rejecting a rich classical tradition. Indeed, for Chinese artists, the term "modernity" refers not to a new epoch or aesthetic but to a new nation—modernityinextricably connects politics to art. It is this notion of "total modernity" that forms the foundation of the Chinese avant-garde aesthetic, and of this book. Gao examines the many ways Chinese artists engaged with this intrinsic total modernity, including the '85 Movement, political pop, cynical realism, apartment art, maximalism, and the museum age, encompassing the emergenceof local art museums and organizations as well as such major events as the Shanghai Biennial. He describes the inner logic of the Chinese context while locating the art within the framework of a worldwide avant-garde. He vividly describes the Chinese avant-garde's embrace of a modernity that unifies politics, aesthetics, and social life, blurring the boundaries between abstraction, conception, and representation. Lavishly illustrated with color images throughout, this book will be a touchstone for all considerations of Chinese contemporary art.

Download or read book Inside/out written by Asia Society. Galleries and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late twentieth century has been marked by momentous political, economic, and social change throughout the Chinese world. Deeply rooted cultural assumptions and ancient visual traditions have been challenged by rapid modernization and conflicting global, ethnic, and local identities. Inside/Out: New Chinese Art was the first major international exhibition to explore the impact of these challenges on artists in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and those of the 1980s Diaspora. The multifaceted exhibition and accompanying catalog encompass an extensive range of artistic forms, including installation, video, and performance art as well as more traditional media such as oils and ink. The art is grouped according to themes, some specific to regions and others that reflect widespread and overlapping trends. With the inclusion of ambiguous territories like Hong Kong and Taiwan, the exhibition opens up a perspective of modern Chinese art from the "outside" as well as a looking-out from the "inside." The catalog features essays by eminent Chinese art scholars and curators along with leading curators and historians of Western art. Together they promote Chinese art's rightful place in the contemporary global cultural arena and at the same time acknowledge the influence of its rich heritage. The diversity and freshness of the exhibition reflects the explosion of creativity among Chinese artists during the past decade. The ironic social commentary of Li Shan's The Rouge Series, no. 24, the "apartment art" of artists reacting against the traditional patronage of large museums and corporations, and Wang Jin's sly humor in portraying consumer fetishes in today's China are a few examples of the spirited artistry awaiting the viewers of Inside/Out.

Download or read book Origins of the Chinese Avant-garde written by Xiaobing Tang and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xiaobing Tang's "Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde "is much more than its title implies, for it is both a vivid account of the conflict between Chinese artistic conservatism, freedom of expression, and political commitment in the 1920s and 1930s and a deeply researched study of the origins and development of the woodcut movement. The author ranges widely over the controversial writings of this hectic period, showing how intimately art, literature, criticism, and politics were intertwined, but gives due prominence to such key figures as Cai Yuanpei and Lu Xun. This book will attract many readers for the vigor and lucidity of Tang's style and will become an essential source for anyone concerned with the cultural history of this turbulent era.--Michael Sullivan, author of "Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary" "Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde" is a genuine masterpiece of scholarship, an impressively documented cultural history of the Republican period. In five substantial chapters written in highly lucid and eloquent prose, Xiaobing Tang reconstructs, in detail, the art world of the Republican era, with all its different styles, organisations, institutions, and individuals, and provides cross-references to contemporaneous events in other fields, especially literature. Presenting the emergence of the woodblock printing movement in the context of other art movements, traditionalist and modernist, this book offers an art history of the period more comprehensive than any other, in Chinese or in English.--Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London "This is one of the first books in English to connect the literature and the fine arts of the early twentieth century. The author follows Lu Xun, one of the leading proponents of the revival of woodblock printmaking in early republican China, as the central thread in a narrative examining the intersections of art education, visual art, literature, and the cinema. Drawing on a wide variety of published materials, Tang successfully puts avant-garde work of the 1930s into a much broader cultural perspective."--Kuiyi Shen, author of "A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China"

Download or read book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents written by Wu Hung and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2010 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese art, one of the most fascinating art scenes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Download or read book The Total Art of Stalinism written by Boris Groys and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

Download or read book A Century in Crisis written by Julia F. Andrews and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen. Essays by Jonathan Spence, Xue Yongnian and Mayching Kao.

Download or read book Art History, Narratology, and Twentieth-Century Chinese Art written by Lian Duan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study constructs a framework of narratology for art history and rewrites the development of twentieth-century Chinese art from a narratological perspective. Theoretically and methodologically oriented, this is a self-reflective meta-art history studying the art historical narratives while narrating the story of modern and contemporary Chinese art. Thus, this book explores the three layers of narrative within the narratological framework: the first-hand fabula, the secondary narration, and the tertiary narrativization. With this tertiary narrativization, the reader-author presents three types of narrative: the grand narrative of the central thesis of this book, the middle-range narrative of the chapter theses, and case analyses supporting these theses. The focus of this tertiary narrativization is the interaction between Western influence on Chinese art and the Chinese response to this influence. The central thesis is that this interaction conditioned and shaped the development of Chinese art at every historical turning point in the twentieth century. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, critical theory, Chinese studies, and cultural studies.