'Avant-garde' Art Groups in China, 1979-1989 , livre ebook

Intellect Books Ltd - Paul Gladston

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

160 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

'Avant-garde' Art Groups in China gives a critical account of four of the most significant avant-garde Chinese art groups and associations of the late 1970s and ’80s. It is made up largely of conversations conducted by the author with members of these organizations that provide insight into the circumstances of artistic production during the decade leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. The conversations are supported by an extended introduction and other comprehensive notes that give a detailed overview of the historical circumstances under which the groups and associations developed.

Introduction

China’s Post-Maoist ‘Avant-garde’ in Context: Modern and Contemporary Art in China, 1911–2011

The Stars – The Northern Art Group – The Pond Association – Xiamen Dada

The Stars (Xingxing)

Conversations with Members of The Stars

– Yan Li

– Qu Leilei

The Northern Art Group (Beifang yishu qunti)

Conversations with Members of the Northern Art Group

– Wang Guangyi

– Shu Qun

– Ka Sang

The Pond Association (Chi she)

Conversations with Members of the Pond Association

– Zhang Peili

– Wang Qiang

– Song Ling

Xiamen Dada (Xiamen Dada)

A Conversation with Members of Xiamen Dada

– Huang Yongping, Yu Xiaogang, Lin Jiahua and Jiao Yaoming

Sujets

Arts visuels

Histoire des Arts

HISTORY

Histoire

History of art

General officer

History of Asia

General

Asia

China

ART

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	06 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783200528
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Publication supported by the ShanghART Gallery
First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Cover image: Members of the Northern Art Group in 1987 – courtesy of Shu Qun
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Bethan Ball
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-715-6
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-052-8
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-053-5
Printed and bound by Bell & Bain, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Introduction
China’s Post-Maoist ‘Avant-garde’ in Context: Modern and Contemporary Art in China, 1911–2011
The Stars—The Northern Art Group—The Pond Association—Xiamen Dada
The Stars (Xingxing )
Conversations with Members of the Stars
– Yan Li
– Qu Leilei
The Northern Art Group (Beifang yishu qunti )
Conversations with Members of the Northern Art Group
– Wang Guangyi
– Shu Qun
– Ka Sang
The Pond Association (Chi she )
Conversations with Members of the Pond Association
– Zhang Peili
– Wang Qiang
– Song Ling
Xiamen Dada (Xiamen Dada )
A Conversation with Members of Xiamen Dada
– Huang Yongping , Yu Xiaogang , Lin Jiahua and Jiao Yaoming
References
Index
Acknowledgements
Above all, I would like to thank the artists who participated in the making of this book for their enormous generosity and patience. I would also like to thank Lorenz Helbling and Laura Zhou of the ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai and Johnson Chang (Chang Tsong-zung) of the Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong who assisted in contacting some of the artists whose thoughts, impressions and recollections are represented here, as well as the Asia Art Archive for providing some of the images included in this book. Thanks are also due to my former research assistant Xu Sujing for her work in transcribing and translating the conversations contained in this book and to my PhD student Yao Yung-Wen for her assistance in checking the factual accuracy of the artists’ statements. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Nottingham and the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, for providing research funding and a period of study leave in support of this project. Finally, I would like to thank Keith Wallace at Yishu for giving me a platform for my early writings on contemporary Chinese art.
About the Author
Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Culture, Film and Media and Director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies (CEACS) at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). Between 2005 and 2010, he was inaugural Head of the Department of International Communications and Director of the Institute for Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. He has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art with particular reference to the concerns of critical theory. His book-length publications include Art History after Deconstruction (2005), China and Other Spaces (2009), Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists (2011) and Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality (2012), a special edition of the Journal of Visual Art Practice , co-edited with Katie Hill.
Dr. Paul Gladston
The University of Nottingham, Trent Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK E-mail: paul.gladston@nottingham.ac.uk
Introduction
This book focuses on four of the most significant ‘avant-garde’ art groups active within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) between 1979 and 1989: the Stars (Xingxing ), the Northern Art Group (Beifang yishu qunti ), the Pond Association (Chi she ) and Xiamen Dada (Xiamen Dada ). By the mid-1980s, scores of similar self-organized groups had come together (Gao 2007a: back cover notes)—many in little more than name only—as part of the liberalization of society that had begun to take place within the PRC following the death of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), in 1976, and the acceptance of Deng Xiaoping ’s (1904–1997) programme of Reform and Opening (Gaige kaifang ) at the XI Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in December 1978. These ‘avant-garde’ groups were an enormously important part of the development of contemporary art in China during the ten-year period from 1979 to 1989. They offered a collective as well as protective platform for artistic practices, which diverged markedly from the established conventions of Maoist socialist-realism, by combining aspects of indigenous Chinese cultural thought and practice (both modern and traditional) with images, attitudes and techniques appropriated from Western(ized) modernist and postmodernist art. In 1989, public actions by all ‘avant-garde’ art groups in China were suspended as part of the conservative crackdown that followed the Tian’anmen protests of the same year, thereby effectively drawing a line under a period of widespread collectivism within China’s ‘avant-garde’ art world. By that time, most of the groups in question, many of which were only loosely organized, had in any case already drifted apart not least because of an increasing sense of individualism among their members brought about in large part by China’s post-Maoist liberalization.
In spite of their importance, published writings about ‘avant-garde’ art groups active within China during the late 1970s and 1980s have, up to now, been extremely limited in scope, confined for the most part to relatively brief passages contained within narrative histories tracing the wider development of contemporary Chinese art (e.g. Lü and Yi 1991; Köppel-Yang 2003; Erickson 2005; Gao 2005; Berghuis 2006), biographical studies of contemporary Chinese artists (Smith 2005), related anthologies of documentary sources (Wu 2010) and texts posted on websites. Moreover, much of what has been written has tended to rely heavily on contemporaneous accounts of the activities of the groups in question and to accept those accounts more or less at face value, thereby perpetuating numerous factual inaccuracies. Absent from the literature are more focused critical readings based on detailed research involving the critical triangulation of a variety of primary and secondary sources. This book is an attempt to present a series of such critical readings accompanied by transcripts of in-depth conversations with artists who were formerly members of ‘avant-garde’ art groups during the period in question; it also presents an introductory essay contextualizing the development of ‘avant-garde’ art in China.
One of the methodological challenges presented by the use of conversations as a means of gathering and presenting data is that interviewees may not always be able to recall past events accurately. Moreover, the accounts of interviewees may be subject to the effects of ‘reconstructive memory’; that is to say, conscious or unconscious attempts to reframe the significance of past events. Reconstructive memory stems almost invariably from a desire on the part of interviewees to present their past actions and, perhaps, those of others in a favourable light. Within the particular context of the PRC, where there are continuing governmental restrictions on freedom of speech and action, it is also important to recognize that artists speaking ‘on the record’ may choose consciously or unconsciously to temper their accounts for fear of government reprisals and, perhaps, to cover the tracks of their own previous political indiscretions. To lessen the effect of these potentially distorting factors, much care has been taken to cross-reference what was said by the artists with information gleaned from other sources. Furthermore, artists involved in the conversations were often asked to respond to follow-up questions both as a means of clarifying initially vague responses and, where possible, to resolve/explain discrepancies between their accounts and those contained in existing documentary sources.
The conversations, whose edited transcripts are presented here, were conducted within the PRC between 2006 and 2010 in English and Mandarin Chinese with the assistance of a native speaking Chinese interpreter. They were recorded digitally in situ before being translated and transcribed into English. As anyone familiar with the making of transcriptions of recorded conversations will readily acknowledge, recorded speech is often repetitious, contradictory, elliptical and grammatically incorrect. As a consequence, transcriptions of recorded speech more often than not require careful editing so that they can be made comprehensible while adhering as closely as possible to the traces of what was actually said. The transcripts presented here should therefore be seen, like most other published conversations, not as verbatim records but as considered constructs after the fact.
No amount of careful translation, editing or footnoting will, however, negate entirely the slippages of understanding that take place as a result of the translation of meaning from one cultural/linguistic context to another. Not only is the translation of meaning from one cultural/linguistic context to another subject to problematic absences of conceptual/idiomatic equivalence between differing language systems, but, as post-structuralist accounts of linguistic signification have shown (e.g. Derrida 1972; Ulmer 1985 [1983]; Bhabha 1994), linguistic utterances/acts of signification are also subject to the continual possibility of deconstructive re-motivation (that is to say, the generation