Chinese Studies Seminar, University of New South Wales
Date: Tuesday 10 November 2020
Time: 11:00 am – 12:30 pm AEDT
This online event is free and open to the public. Join the Meeting Here:
Zoom details: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/2856762999
Contemporary Chinese art was assimilated into global discourses of contemporary art as a result of several group exhibitions in Europe and America in the 1990s. In the logic of modernisms and contemporaneities, non-Western art has to be recognized through visual languages that resonate with conceptualism and experimental practices in the liberal world. Current social and cultural histories examining art of the post-Mao period have focused on how the formation of art groups has reflected local and international notions of the avant-garde. A dearth of research has explored the tension between groups and individuals, which is key to understanding the socialist legacy and transitional period of post-socialism, or the question of the role played by autonomy in creating contemporaneity.
In this talk, I suggest that we should consider the art of postsocialist China as a transitional process that addresses the delayed affect of socialism and creating its own autonomy. By examining conceptual art and socially-engaged practices by Wu Shanzhuan, the New Measurement Group, and Jing Y. Ng, these creative practices reveal tensions between individual genius and collective affect. The methods and discourses developed by these artists created a kind of instrumental automatism that is on the one hand divergent from the purpose of socialist realism while on the other appropriating its visual language. This paradigm reveals a tension, and possibly a transition, between the socialist legacy and neoliberal globalization.
About the speaker:
Yu-Chieh Li 李雨潔 (PhD Heidelberg) is the inaugural Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art and Design, Sydney. She was an Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013-2015) and adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia (2017-8) in London. Her research focuses on two areas: performance art and artist-led research responding to decolonial struggles in the Sinosphere, and the tension between locally-generated art discourses and neoliberal globalization. Her publications appear in Art in Translation, Art Monthly Australasia, and post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, with an edited volume Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the Sky recently published by Springer. Currently she is working on a book project examining the artistic autonomy of post-socialist China.
Contacts:
Prof Jon von Kowallis, Series Convenor (j.vonkowallis@unsw.edu.au) tel 61-2-9385-1020
Dr Wah Guan Lim, Panel Organizer (wglim@unsw.edu.au)