Art

posts related to Chinese art

Shangyuan Art Museum: A Demolition

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Last week the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published my text about the demolition of Beijing Shangyuan Art Museum in June. It is available online, maybe for free by the time you read this. I have assembled screenshots with some commentary in English on my blog (https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/08/20/shangyuan-art-museum-in-the-faz/). What follows is the English version. Please email me if you have any questions. Thank you!

Best,

Martin Winter 维马丁 <dujuan99@gmail.com>

Shangyuan Art Museum. A Demolition.
Martin Winter

How can I write about it? Write down what I know. In detail. How did it start. On June 3rd suddenly there were people measuring buildings. Three or four people. Then one of us artists asked them what they were doing. These houses will be demolished. What? Yes, all of these. Our studios. Why? It’s all illegal. We are just measuring, they sent us. Who? The village committee. And those above. On June 4th too, other people. Where is Cheng Xiaobei? Does she know? She is coming to Beijing. Next week. She is the boss. One of the founders of Shangyuan Art Museum and the only person around willing to take charge, able to negotiate and decide.

I am one of the artists. Every year they invite artists to live and work there. Over thirty, sometimes 40 people. From early April to late October, sometimes late March till early November. Trees bloom in March, some bloom in February. But there’s no heating. Each year water is freezing somewhere in the walls. Doors and windows are not made for winter. The one really solid building, the big exhibition hall, is now gone. Continue reading Shangyuan Art Museum: A Demolition →

Liao Bingxiong’s ‘Slippery Poem-Pictures’

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Source: Associaton for Chinese Animation Studies (7/13/24)
A Parting Shot: Liao Bingxiong’s “Slippery Poem-Pictures” and the 1957 Rectification Movement
By John A. Crespi

The Hundred Flowers Movement, launched in May 1956 and culminating in Mao Zedong’s call to critique the Chinese Communist Party during the Rectification Movement of May and June 1957, was a bonanza for China’s manhua. During that span of about a year, China’s cartoonists were granted free rein to take aim at the favorite target of satirists everywhere: their own ruling regime.

Or so it seemed. Today, of course, we know that the Rectification Movement ended abruptly with the Anti-rightist Movement, when Mao cut off the flood of criticism he had himself summoned by persecuting untold thousands of intellectuals. How far did China’s manhua artists push the boundaries of critique when responding to the call to “rectify” the party? It is hazardous to generalize; an extensive study of manhua through this period is waiting to be undertaken. Here I offer a brief look at just one prominent example of a manhua caught in the ideological crossfire: Cantonese artist Liao Bingxiong’s 廖冰兄 (1915-2006) “Slippery Poem-Pictures” (dayou cihua 打油词话), published on page 5 of China’s leading satirical art magazine, Manhua Semi-monthly (Manhua banyue kan 漫画半月刊), on July 8, 1957.[1]

Continue reading Liao Bingxiong’s ‘Slippery Poem-Pictures’ →

The Conformed Body book launch

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Book Launch: The Conformed Body: Contemporary Art in China

The book launch for Professor Jiang Jiehong’s The Conformed Body: Contemporary Art in China, published by Brill, will include a presentation by Professor Jiang Jiehong (Birmingham City University), remarks by Professor Chris Berry (King’s College London) and Dr Wenny Teo (The Courtauld Institute of Art), and a panel conversation moderated by Dr Panpan Yang (SOAS University of London).

Sample books will also be available.

The event is part of SOAS East Asian Research Seminar (EARS). It is free and open to all. But booking is essential. The event is in-person only.

Time
Monday, July 8, 5 – 6:40pm London Time

Location
The event will take place at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre (BGLT) within the SOAS Brunei Gallery.
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ

About the new book
Through the perspective of the ‘conformed body’, this groundbreaking book examines the role in art of everyday conformist practices in the People’s Republic of China, such as mass assemblies and bodily trainings and exercises, as well as their impact on people’s perceptions and collective memories. It identifies related artworks, reassesses artistic interpretations with critical reflections, and explores a key origin of artistic productions in post-Mao China. Featuring 200 colour illustrations, the book discusses works by more than 30 internationally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artists, including Ai Weiwei, Geng Jianyi, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Zhang Peili and Zhang Xiaogang.

Register/More info
https://bit.ly/3QZVxgW

We look forward to seeing you.

Panpan Yang <py6@soas.ac.uk>

Who is Hua Mulan?

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Source: Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton (6/10/24)
Who is Hua Mulan?
By

So you think you know who Mulan is? Perhaps you know the feisty girl from the eponymous cross-dressing warrior of the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. She is the rebellious teenager who escapes the suffocating social expectations for a maiden and heads to the battle zone, where she finds peace with who she is. Or, if you are a Chinese speaker, you may have first learned about the weaver-turned-soldier from the “Ballad of Mulan,” the lyrics of a folk song first preserved in writing in as early as the sixth century. In the memorable rhyming text she is the filial and brave daughter who is determined to shield her aging father from a perilous military life.

Mulan’s story is included in an advertisement booklet titled Women’s Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars in Color Pictures 女子二十四孝彩圖, published by a pharmaceutical company in Shanghai in 1941. Whereas the historic figures featured in the classic Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars were nearly all male, the booklet focuses on young Chinese girls’ and women’s filial piety. The caption emphasizes that when Mulan returns home after serving eleven years in the army, she is “apparently still a virgin” (page 7). The facing page advertises fish liver oil, said to have ingredients supplied by an American vitamin company. In Nü zi er shi si xiao cai tu. Shanghai: Xin Yi Pharmaceutical Company, 1941. (Cotsen 75832)

China’s Bravest Girl: The Legend of Hua Mu Lan, told by Charlie Chin 陳建文; illustrated by Tomie Arai 新居富枝; Chinese translation by Wang Xing Chu 王性初. Emeryville, CA: Children’s Book Press, 1993. (Cotsen 17732)

Have you ever wondered, however, what kind of Chinese girl Mulan was? Weren’t women in ancient China supposed to have their feet bound? How could Mulan have gotten away from the crippling practice? Was Mulan’s family rich or poor–and does it matter? Did Mulan really grow up in those circular communal buildings portrayed in Disney’s live-action adaptation of 2020? If not, where was her hometown? [CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE]

Shangyuan Art Museum demolition

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Below is a link to a very good documentary by Chen Jiaping 陈家坪. He climbed in to join us at the demolition site of Shangyuan Art Museum last Saturday, June 15. The local powers were paranoid that day. Invitations to a party on the ruins had been circulating. So they tried to block off exit and entry. But they could not prevent this excellent film:

https://www.xiaohongshu.com/discovery/item/66717a1d000000001c0374e2

I have been documenting the demolition with poems and photos on my WeChat. The poems can be found on the following blog posts:

SOUND 声音
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/18/sound-%e5%a3%b0%e9%9f%b3/
美 BEAUTIFUL
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/17/%e7%be%8e-beautiful/
躲 HIDING
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/16/%e8%ba%b2-hiding/
SHANGYUAN ART MUSEUM 上苑艺术馆
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/14/%e4%b8%8a%e8%8b%91%e8%89%ba%e6%9c%af%e9%a6%86-shangyuan-art-museum/
IT HAS BEGUN 开始了 DAS IST DER ANFANG
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/13/anfang-%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b%e4%ba%86/
DEMOLISH 拆
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/04/%e6%8b%86-demolish/

Thank you for watching, reading and circulating!

Martin Winter 维马丁
in the ruins of Shangyuan Art Museum

Shangyuan Art Museum to be demolished

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They say the mayor’s office of Beijing city has made this decision to demolish the Shangyuan Art Museum. No reason given, no plan, no date. Could be tomorrow. Please tell anyone you can think of, ask anyone and ask people to ask about this. Thank you!

Martin Winter

拆

没心情写诗
反正要拆
拆艺术馆
拆工作室
拆画廊
拆图书馆
拆国际交流
二十年来
所建立的
统统都拆
没说理由
没说日期
没说计划
一直这样
今天通知
非常适合

2024.6.4

DEMOLISH

What is the opposite
of soft power?
Burning bridges?
Beijing Shangyuan Art Museum
has been a bridge
for international relations
in art and culture
for twenty years.
Yesterday and today
here at the museum
people came to measure buildings
slated for demolition.
Everything must go!
Everyone!
This hill is for goats
anyway.
No reason given,
no exact date.
Nothing new in this country.
Today’s date
fits rather well.

MW June 4th, 2024

U of Oslo positions

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University of Oslo Positions in Art History

Postdoctoral Research Fellowships associated with the ERC- funded project “ECOART” (1-2 post-doctoral positions, 3,5 years each).

Doctoral Research Fellowships associated with the ERC-funded project “ECOART” (1-2 doctoral positions, 3 years each plus more if completed in time)

Associate Professorship in History of Art (2025-2029).

Posted by: Anna Grasskamp <anna.grasskamp@ifikk.uio.no>

Zodiac, a Graphic Memoir review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Sean Macdonald’s review of Zodiac, a Graphic Memoir, by Ai Weiwei, with Elettra Stamboulis, illustrated by Gianluca Constantini. The review appears below and at is online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/zodiac/.

Enjoy, Kirk Denton, MCLC

Zodiac, a Graphic Memoir

By Ai Weiwei
With Elettra Stamboulis, illustrated by Gianluca Costantini

Reviewed by Sean Macdonald
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2024)

It is too often forgotten that some if not all symbols had a material and concrete existence before coming to symbolize anything . . . Another example is the zodiac, which represents the horizon of the herder set down in an immensity of pasture: a figure, then, of demarcation and orientation. Initially- and fundamentally- absolute space has a relative aspect. Relative spaces, for their part, secrete the absolute.[1]—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

If so far in this book the word “dissident” has been used sparingly, it is because the vast majority of intellectuals who desired change and a shift towards a more democratic and open system did not perceive themselves as “dissident.” [2]—Gregory B. Lee, The Lost Decade

Figure 1: The cover. Zodiac, a Graphic Memoir (Ten Speed Graphic, 2024). 176pp. ISBN: 978-1-9848-6299-0.

Ai Weiwei 艾未未 is a true postmodern artist. When Ai started producing art in New York City in the 1980s, Andy Warhol was still alive. But Ai did not just pick up techniques from contemporary Western art, he entered into it headfirst through a kind of performance of personality. In traditional Chinese visual culture, personality is as important as individualism is in the avant-garde.[3] Ai Weiwei’s personality is an important component of his art. In some ways, this gives the impression that his role is analogous to that of a film director, organizing performances and happenings to remind the public he has not gone away.

For many scholars of contemporary Chinese culture, Ai Weiwei is a presence, even a cultural icon of dissident culture. As Xiaobing Tang noted almost a decade ago, Ai was “the darling of Western mainstream media and art establishments.”[4] And his influence has only grown with social media, of which Ai is a very savvy and capable user. For anyone who has followed Ai Weiwei’s work, the overarching narrative of Zodiac—his recently published graphic novel memoir—is familiar. It tells of his father Ai Qing’s life as a poet arrested and imprisoned in 1932 by the KMT for his revolutionary activities. Under the CCP, Ai Qing was arrested as a “rightist” and class enemy of the state in 1957 and subsequently exiled to Xinjiang. Ai Weiwei accompanied his father on his exile (12-14). Following his work on the Sichuan earthquake in August 2009, Ai was beaten by police. In 2010, he would be placed under house arrest. In April 2011, he was arrested at the Beijing airport and prosecuted for tax evasion, among other charges, and lost the ability to travel outside the country until 2015 when he was given a passport. Ai’s politics is very public, and he has become a global citizen, perhaps one of the most identifiable contemporary Chinese artists, or contemporary artists period. He is a celebrity avant-garde artist, who has already made a historical impact and has a globally-known personality. Continue reading Zodiac, a Graphic Memoir review →

The Nomadic Artist in the Chinese Diasporas

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“The Nomadic Artist in the Chinese Diasporas” Virtual Conference
April 18, 2024, 2-5pm EST
April 25, 2024, 5-8pm EST

Information and Registration

Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has increasingly demonstrated the need to highlight the social heterogeneity of multiple Chinese diasporas instead of a singular Chinese diaspora. Established and emerging scholars from Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States will discuss the artworks of Xiao Lu, Song Ling, Li Yuan-Chia, Richard Show-Yu Lin, Kim Lim, Cai Guo-Qiang, Hong Xian, Huang Yao, Hung Liu, Tehching Hsieh and others. The presentations are intended to contribute to an examination of such critical but contested concepts as migration and transmigration, displacement, exile, homeland, mobility, transnationalism, nationality, coloniality, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism in cultural and art historical studies.

Co-organized by

Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland
The Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Co-sponsored by

Center for East Asian Studies & Center for Global Migration Studies, University of Maryland
The Endowment of the Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Speakers

Paul Gladston, Eleanor Stoltzfus, Lydia Ohl, Nan Zhong, Wenny Teo, Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, Dorothy Moss, Yu-chieh Li

Aesthetics in Contemporary China–cfp

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Dear all,

I am delighted to share with you the theme of the 17th CCVA Annual Conference (Extra)ordinary Living: Aesthetics in Contemporary China, convened by Dr Federica Mirra and Prof Jiang Jiehong, in collaboration with Nanjing University of the Arts.

Date: 9-10 November 2024 (tbc)
Venue: Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing, China (in-person only)
Deadline for abstracts: 1 March 2024

(Extra)Ordinary Living: Aesthetics in Contemporary China
非比寻常：当代中国的生活美学

From pre-dynastic rites and music to literati art and volumes on the pleasures of life, the notion of living has long inspired Chinese works of art and objects of design, which, in turn, document and inform diverse modes of society and culture, broadly conceived. More recently, an interest in everydayness re-gained momentum between the 19th and early 20th century. Later, during the Maoist era, life in the countryside and the labour of the masses was brought to the fore with the collective production of paintings, woodblock prints and propaganda posters. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese artists still drew inspiration from living, as suggested by the pioneering work by artist collectives such as the Pond Society (Chishe) and the Polit-Sheer-Form Office (Zheng chun ban), or the early works by contemporary artists in the 1990s, e.g., Geng Jianyi, Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhuang Hui. Continue reading Aesthetics in Contemporary China–cfp →

Hillenbrand interview

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Source: China Digital Times (2/14/24)
Interview: Margaret Hillenbrand on Her Books “On the Edge” (2023) and “Negative Exposures” (2020).
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Margaret Hillenbrand, professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, joined CDT to discuss her two latest books: “On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China” (2023) and “Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China” (2020).

“On the Edge” examines antagonistic cultural forms generated in response to the expulsion of hundreds of millions of China’s precariat from mainstream society, effectively condemning them to “zombie citizenship,” which Hillenbrand describes as “a state of exile from the shelter of the law.” The book covers a kaleidoscopic range of art: assembly line poetry, shit-eating livestreams (literally) on short video apps, and documentaries on trash, to offer but a sampling. Our conversation focuses on two forms: delegated performances, in which charismatic artists recruit vulnerable workers to participate in staged site-specific installations that often include degrading, even sadistic, elements; and “suicide shows,” in which workers stage dramatic protests on high-rise edifices and tower cranes to demand their unpaid wages. The first half of the interview is a wide-ranging discussion on the dark feelings generated by the “cliff-edge” of precarity and expulsion, and the potentially socially transformative powers of abrasive behavior, despite its obvious destructive potential.

The second half of the conversation focuses on “Negative Exposures,” a study of the relationship between “photo-forms”—photographs and their remediated renderings in other media—and “public secrecy” in China. The book makes a dramatic challenge to popular narratives of an “amnesiac China” forgetful of its traumatic past, proposing instead that the silences of the past are, at least in part, conspiratorial. (For more on “amnesia,” see CDT’s recent discussion with Perry Link on Liu Xiabo.) While readily acknowledging the state-engineered project to silence the past, Hillenbrand argues that photo-forms capture “the paradox of things that are fully known but are totally unacknowledgeable.” Silence about China’s past, in Hillenbrand’s telling, is part therapeutic, exculpatory, and self-interested—not so much a product of forgetting but rather, at least in part, of active choice. Our discussion of “Negative Exposures” focuses on photo-forms related to Bian Zhongyun, former vice-principal at an elite girls’ school in Beijing and the victim of the capital’s first recorded murder by Red Guards on August 5, 1966. In 2014, Song Binbin, daughter of a founding father of the Chinese Communist Party and former lead Red Guard at Bian’s school, stood before a bronze bust of Bian erected on the campus they once shared and tearfully apologized for her role in the vice-principal’s death. We discuss whether Song’s controversial apology “created ripples of sound” that have punctured public secrecy in China, or whether the silence of the past continues to hold. Continue reading Hillenbrand interview →

Anxiety Aesthetics

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NEW PUBLICATION
Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985
By Jennifer Dorothy Lee
University of California Press, 2024

Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978–80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the ’85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists’ engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Dorothy Lee is an associate professor of East Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Anxiety Aesthetics is her first book. Lee’s article on socialist abstraction and the painter Wu Guanzhong will be out in positions: asia critique in May 2024.

Posted by: Jennifer Lee <jlee241@artic.edu>

ChinaComx doctoral positions

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Call for Applications for ChinaComx

The Institute for Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University (Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies) invites applications for three PhD positions within the framework of the ERC funded research project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” to start in September 2024.

ChinaComx investigates the intellectual, political, social, historical, and transcultural dimensions of a medium still heavily understudied: lianhuanhua, literally “linked images” 连环画. It studies them as a medium from the People’s Republic of China and its place within the larger Chinese and global comics culture. Studying the conditions of comic art’s production, distribution and consumption, the project sheds light on how comics contribute to the project of nation building, to the creation of a new socialist human and to the continued legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In addition, it investigates how these at times highly propagandistic texts were read by ordinary citizens—and how, at the same time, lianhuanhua were one of the most popular reading materials presenting stories loved by children and adults alike. In providing more knowledge about comic culture from China and in contributing to theoretical debates, ChinaComx aims to delineate the term “lianhuanhua” as a distinct genre and area of academic research that bears specific characteristics, being embedded in a particular context of origin, yet, changing across time and space as Japanese manga, Korean manhwa or Franco-Belgian bandes desinnées.

Your tasks:

  • Conceptualization and execution of a doctoral project within one of the three focus areas delineated below
  • Active participation in the joint activities of the project (including seminars and workshops, joint writing projects and translations; (digital) exhibitions)

Continue reading ChinaComx doctoral positions →

The Moving Image in Contemporary Chinese Art–cfp

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Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
When the Shadow Flickers: The Moving Image in Contemporary Chinese Art
A special issue co-edited by Yang Panpan and Jiang Jiehong

Call for Papers

At a time when the moving image has become a ubiquitous presence in museums and galleries in China and the Sinophone world, the studies of the moving image in the sphere of contemporary Chinese art remain surprisingly scarce. The shadow that flickers on the walls of museums and galleries or on other surfaces has transformed what we understand as the art of curating today. In addition, documentary footage shot by Wu Wenguang, Wen Pulin, Chi Xiaoning and others retells the story of contemporary Chinese art.

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art makes a radical gesture towards studying the moving image as an art object, as a curatorial method and as a new form of art historical writing. The collaborative, interdisciplinary endeavour participates in – and hopefully contributes to – what Georges Didi-Huberman, speaking of Aby Warburg’s thought, terms ‘an art history turned towards cinema’: ‘to understand the temporality of images, their movements, their “survivals”, their capacity for animation’.

Possible perspectives for proposals include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Case studies of contemporary artists across Greater China and the Chinese diaspora working with the moving image
  • Curating the moving image and the moving image as a curatorial method
  • Documentary in relation to contemporary Chinese art
  • Discourses across Greater China on yingxiang yishu, and its partial semantic overlaps with video art, new media art, and artists’ film
  • Animation as contemporary art
  • Issues of acquisition, preservation and access surrounding the moving image
  • The market of the moving image

Publication Timeline

1 March 2024, abstract due (300 words)

1 November 2024, full manuscript due (7,000-8,000 words)

Publication: Spring 2025

Please send an abstract, along with a brief bio, in the same file, to Guest Editor Yang Panpan (py6@soas.ac.uk), Principal Editor Jiang Jiehong (joshua.jiang@bcu.ac.uk), and Assistant Editor Lauren Walden (ccva@bcu.ac.uk)

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is an associate journal of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at Birmingham City University.

China’s rebel influencer is still paying a price

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Source: NYT (12/12/23)
‘I Have No Future’: China’s Rebel Influencer Is Still Paying a Price
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
Li Ying used social media to help tell the world about last year’s protests. Now in exile, he has been threatened and lost his livelihood for his defiance.
By Li Yuan

An illustration of a set of stone feet on a stone platform facing a chaotic scene that includes flames, candles and flying papers.

Credit…Xinmei Liu

In November 2022, Li Ying was a painter and art school graduate in Milan, living in a state of sadness, fear and despair. China’s strict pandemic policies had kept him from seeing his parents for three years, and he was unsure where his country was heading.

In China, after enduring endless Covid tests, quarantines and lockdowns, people staged the most widespread protests the country had seen in decades, many holding roughly letter-size paper to demonstrate defiance against censorship and tyranny, in what has been called the White Paper movement.

Then Mr. Li did something that he never anticipated would become so significant: He turned his Twitter account into an information clearinghouse. People inside China sent him photos, videos and other witness accounts, at times more than a dozen per second, that would otherwise be censored on the Chinese internet. He used Twitter, which is banned in China, to broadcast them to the world. The avatar on Mr. Li’s account, his drawing of a cat that is both cute and menacing, became famous.

His following on the platform swelled by 500,000 in a matter of weeks. To the Chinese state, he was a troublemaker. To some Chinese, he was a superhero who stood up to their authoritarian government and their iron-fisted leader, Xi Jinping.

When the government abruptly ended the Covid policy last December, Mr. Li and other young activists faced a question: Was their protest a moment in history, or a footnote? Continue reading China’s rebel influencer is still paying a price →