Shu Junhuan and His Portrait Oils of Leaders

S hu was born of a peasant family. Supported by the state scholarship, he nished his academic art training in the Central Academy of Fine Arts and became the third-generation oil painter of modern China. Talented and diligent, Shu has steadfastly pursued his artistic ideals and perfected his skills. While versed in such a wide range of subjects as portrait, body, landscape and still life, he has gained reputation as an accomplished artist thanks to his virtuosity in portraits of leaders. Sh…     

When feminism encounters New Documentary Movement: an uncompleted academic discussion

This article starts with the “encounter” between feminists in the “International Symposium on Chinese Women and Visual Representation” and Chinese documentary filmmaker Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, and explores the viewpoints and standpoints of feminist actors. With the analysis of the similarities and differences between the independent documentary perspective and the feminist stance, the author elaborates more deeply on why Chinese female directors do not have the consciousness of “feminism.” China’s independent documentary shows how the issue of feminism in China is intertwined with China’s various complex socio-political issues. The way of Chinese documentary filmmaker as “living with the bottom rung” is a kind of practical behavior that seeks truth by integrating itself with it. This requires great courage and idealism, as well as social experience. The bottom layer is where the dark side of the society exists which is beyond the law and morality. The question raised is precisely how to promote the development of feminism and documentary together to work for an equal and just society itself. The more urgent task of Chinese feminism is how to rethink the relationship between the reality of China and feminism, and how to re-establish effective dialogue and cooperation with various critical forces in this society. In the historical perspective of the feminism development of China over one century, gender and women's issues have never existed in isolation, but have moved forward with various social and political movements. How to re-examine this historic heritage to face China's problems and crises today is an uncompleted answer that China's feminism must hand over.     

Play in the house of order: The Necessary Stage's BrainStorm

Abstract

This article opens up the question of modernity in relation to Yan’an woodcuts by recounting the Matisse debate among artists in Yan’an circa 1942, during the War of Resistance against Japanese occupation. Yan’an woodcuts did not move in a direction akin to the stylistic reform engaged by Western modernism; instead they pushed modern Chinese woodcuts to develop according to the requirements of ‘national form.’ Yan’an woodcut artists’ exploration of ‘national form’ involved a synthesis of folk aesthetics and woodcut techniques with the creation of modern‐style woodcuts, and a synthesis of revolutionary content with the artistic expression of national form. In this way a new kind of artistic ideal was realized. Compared with contemporary artistic questions in the West, the formal questions of Chinese revolutionary art surpassed the artistic as such to support rich social content and revolutionary discourse. The establishment of national language in art accords with the desire and imagination to construct of a new kind of modern nation‐state.     

The trajectory of the “Third World” in early modern Chinese thought

In this essay, I trace two aspects of the thought on the “Third World” in early modern China: how to understand the world revolution, and how to create a new China. While focusing on two trendy notions at that time, i.e. “Chinese revolution” (Zhongguo geming), and “nong country” (nongguo), I argue that the thought on the “Third World” in early modern China breaks free of the shackle of fashionable theories and draws upon local circumstances and China’s own repertoire of power when exploring an ideal of a new world. While the difficulty in confronting the “Third World” consciousness in today’s China is still overwhelming, the fact that we now remember “the spirit of Bandong” signals some progress.     

Labour relations in Korea between crisis management and living solidarity

Abstract

This paper examines the ambiguous nature of Murakami's criticism toward the postwar Japanese condition – as the artist most effectively captured in his phrase ‘A Little Boy,’ which was also the title of his curated exhibition at the Japan Society of New York in 2005 Murakami, Takashi. 2005. “‘Earth in my window’”. In Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, Edited by: Murakami, Takashi. 98–149. New York and New Haven: The Japan Society and Yale University Press. Linda Hoaglund (trans.) [Google Scholar]. As Murakami wrote in his introduction to the catalogue, demilitarized Japan after the Second World War underwent a collective sense of helplessness, and the metaphor of a little boy is intended to describe Japan's supposedly unavoidable reliance on its big brother, America. The name ‘Little Boy,’ in fact, originates from the code name used by the American military for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The proliferation of ‘cuteness’ in Japanese contemporary art, which draws upon youth culture, especially otaku culture, evinces a common urge among the postwar generation in Japan to escape from their horrible memories and sense of powerlessness. Murakami's rhetorical analysis of Japan's self‐image seems, however, contradictory, given his extremely aggressive business tactics, which can find no counterpart in the Western art world – not even in the efforts of Murakami's predecessor, Andy Warhol. Like My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), whose hyper sexuality defies its pubescent and immature appearance, his art, theory, and art marketing indicate the paradoxical nature of his theory of impotence. By focusing on his manifesto and writings published on the occasion of his 2005 Murakami, Takashi. 2005. “‘Earth in my window’”. In Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, Edited by: Murakami, Takashi. 98–149. New York and New Haven: The Japan Society and Yale University Press. Linda Hoaglund (trans.) [Google Scholar] exhibition and his style of managing Kaikai Kiki Ltd., this paper delves into the dual nature of Murakami's interpretation of postwar Japanese art and culture, particularly in relation to those of America.     

‘Envisioning the Past: Art,Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract

This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.     

The spiritual and ethical predicaments in contemporary China: an investigation of thought

Accompanying the fast development of China’s economy in the last three decades is the worsening of its spiritual and ethical conditions. This article aims to analyze and discuss the contexts in which such spiritual and ethical predicaments emerged so as to offer historical and conceptual backgrounds that are necessary for understanding this contemporary reality in China.     

Facing history with a sense of awe: an interview with Professor Mizoguchi Yūzō

In this wide-ranging interview and discussion with Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sun Ge, Mizoguchi Yūzō describes the origins of his interest in China studies and the process through which he developed his perspective on China, Japan, and the world. Mizoguchi details his break with both old-style Japanese Sinology and Western-influenced scholarship, which assumes Japanese superiority over China and takes Euro-American society and concepts as its standard. Mizoguchi suggests that historians can and should cultivate a new subjectivity for themselves and understanding of the history of the world as a whole through an approach to China that attempts to understand China’s own internal historical processes rather than assuming the universality of Western processes. He discusses his efforts to help reform the institutional structure of China studies in Japan, and further touches on the part played by Japan in China’s modern history as well as its historical relations with Taiwan and Korea.     

The construction of national identity in South Korea and the tradition of masculinity in Korean Abstract Painting

ABSTRACT

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the ‘evolution’ of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and ‘ending’ with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea’s ultimate ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ art form, a ‘Korean’ painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of ‘Scholarly Painting’ (muninhwa). Japanese‐influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910–45) are rejected as ‘non‐authentic.’ The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre‐modern Korea, and thus its revival as an ‘ultimate modern’ and ‘Korean’ form has the consequence of locating traditionally‐gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South’s modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign ‘Koreaness’ in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an ‘ultimate Korean sign’ and how its use of anti‐Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War.     

The temporal pocket: 1990s Beijing artist colonies

In recent years, a small but growing body of scholarship has emerged on the category of the Chinese art district, particularly its institutionalisation amidst twenty-first century creative industries polices. Such research presents important stories of Chinese artists’ negotiations with urban and political authority, thus nuancing paradigms for the comprehension of political work within contemporary China. This current article contributes to this growing research area by considering the spatial conditions for these socio-spatial categories’ emergence, namely, the urban structures in which they first took shape in 1990s Beijing. First occupying traditional villages (cunzi) and later ex-socialist work units (danwei), these arts colonies appropriated existing communal architecture, and turned their designs and physical buildings to their own communal ends. Importantly, these sites were made available by the dramatic reconstruction of the city, and in this sense these occupations were limited to the temporal realm. To describe the nature of occupations, and their eventual impact upon the shape of the city, this paper proposes the category of “the temporal pocket”: a cellular and temporary inhabitance, defined by the shared investments of its participants, and one that is both discrete (in the sense of its spaces) and discreet (in the sense that this can be understood as a non-oppositional politics). The article is informed by spatial and cultural theory, literature on Chinese urban planning and art history, as well as primary documents (such as documentaries, art works and archival material) and interviews conducted by the researcher in Beijing.     

Revisiting the Kuen Cheng High School dispute: contestation between gender equality and ethnic nationalism discourses

Abstract

By contextualizing the birth of modern Chinese women’s education as well as Kuen Cheng Girls’ High School (KCGHS) in the ethno nationalistic movement in pre‐independence years, and revisiting the dispute over changing KCGHS into a co‐education establishment in the Chinese education movement background in the post‐independence era, this paper illustrates the paradox of Chinese ethno nationalism, that took expression in modernization since its inception. The dispute over converting Kuen Cheng also shows how women’s education, a product of Chinese ethno nationalism as expressed in modernization and an appeal for equal treatment, has unexpectedly become a drive for democratization, equal treatment and pluralization from within the Chinese education movement in the post‐independence era, and thus makes the idea of gender equality not incompatible with ethno nationalism and Chinese education.     

Measuring the cultural value of the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries Exhibition as a platform for emerging artists

In our analysis of the cultural value of the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries Exhibition, we assessed the institution's role in shaping emerging artists’ careers, as well as wider cultural value. Supported by our conceptual framework of value creation, issues assessed included the expected versus experienced value of the exhibition and the individual artworks, price setting, the market mechanism surrounding the exhibition, and its enhancement. The created cultural value is facilitated by high-visibility media exposure and through development of career-enhancing networks. We have generated new insight into cultural value more generally by moving beyond dominant instrumental valuation approaches. We have addressed many of the gaps in understanding the mechanisms behind engagement with contemporary art. We have progressed theory with the assistance of our conceptual framework and supporting qualitative data. Cultural value is expressed in contemporary art through artistic production systems and its cultural messages. Artists’ cultural value is often constructed via the intrinsic worth of their work, rather than from market influences. Cultural value is often personal to the viewer, shared with others and remembered over time. It is also co-created among the other stakeholders involved.     

Yin Xiaofeng： Wonder of Behavior

Behavior art is an artistic genre of post-modernism flourishing in the 1960s and 70s in the West, and it has been imitated, explored and developed by avant-garde Chinese contemporary artists ever since the late 1980s. Some of them devote themselves so wholeheartedly to pursue and experiment it tnat graoually they have out their unique style and attracted attention home and abroad. Yin Xiaofeng, a gifted young artist from Chengdu, dramatically demonstrates the wonder and power of behavior art by harmoniously contrasting the ancient and the contemporary, the traditional and the modern, the Chinese and the Western, with his wit, his thought, his body and those rubbles buried in ruins for thousands of years...[第一段]     

Fear and Rumour in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The article explores the nature of popular fears during the early years of the People's Republic of China by examining two types of rumour: those of a ‘secular’ type that told of China's defeat in the Korean War, a third world war or an imminent nuclear attack; and those of a ‘supernatural’ type that told of demons out to snatch vital organs or the end of the world. These rumours testified both to the resilience of ancient cosmological beliefs and values and to their capacity to fuse with elements of ‘modern’ politics. The article asks what they tell us about the relationship of the party-state to the populace.     

Beyond the anti-American sentiment

Abstract

This paper juxtaposes the predicaments of two popular stars in Asia whose mobility in their respective cultural fields became challenged by political sentiments in 2004. Chang Hui‐Mei (A‐Mei), the aboriginal pop diva from Taiwan, became the target of a protest organized by Chinese ‘patriots’ before a performance in Hangzhou. The event set off a series of public debates involving high‐level Taiwanese politicians, fans, and members of the public that recalled a similar controversy in 2000 when A‐Mei was banned in China after singing at the inauguration of President Chen Shui‐Bian. Some months later, Korean Wave star Song Seung‐Heon became the subject of a draft‐dodging investigation while he was shooting a highly anticipated TV drama, Sad Love Story. Support from different configurations of overseas fans poured in and remained strong even after he gave up the project and began his mandatory military service. Using these two parallel cases to reveal how politics and entertainment interact in Asia independent of stars’ volition, this paper investigates the affective investment and communication strategies of A‐Mei’s cross‐strait fans and Song’s Chinese‐Asian fans during these emotion‐laden circumstances. The inter‐referential approach of this paper not only reveals the importance of considering patriotism as a latent (rather than exceptional) political and popular force in trans‐Asian popular culture, but also reconfigures the relationships between the public, popular, and political in inter‐Asia cultural traffic.     

Pi Village,with occasional music: notes on the New Workers Art Troupe

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on music practice of the New Workers Art Troupe (NWAT, xingongrenyishutuan) that is based in Pi Village (picun), Beijing. During last 3–4 years, the troupe has gradually attracted the attention of young scholars and college students due to their public advocacy for the rights and benefits of migrant workers in Mainland China. Given structural marginalization of workers and peasants that ironically contradicts with the officially claimed principles of socialism, the NWAT should not be ignored as far as cultural activism in nowadays Mainland China is concerned. Many researchers have investigated NWAT’s practices according to approaches of various discipline, however, the cultural meanings and social-historical condition of its core art form, music, have been largely neglected. Whereas this neglect acts both as cause and consequence, discourses about the NWAT have gradually been overwhelmed by moral commitment or sympathy to “disadvantaged groups,” which eventually proves nothing more than the coming-being of a moral order dominated by the new-born Chinese middle-class. In order to comprehend the affects the NWAT’s music articulated, what need to be illuminated are not only what they are singing, but also where and how they sing, as well as the cultural mechanism behind their practice.     

The way our generation imagined the world

Abstract

This paper tells the worldview of a generation that grew up in the Communist revolutionary ideology. For the people of this generation, the world was always divided into two worlds, the East and the West. Throughout China’s modern national history, the West, led by the United States, has been the imperialist aggressor and invader; on a global scale, it has been the hegemonic power that rejected and blockaded China; in social structure and ideology, it was capitalist, countering socialist China, and ever ready to subvert the New China. According to Mao Zedong’s three‐pronged theory of ‘enemy, friends and us,’ the West belonged to the ‘enemy’ side. The Bandung Conference in 1955, and prior to it, the Peace Conference for Asia and the Pacific Region held in Beijing, had a great impact on high‐school students in Mainland China. We viewed these conferences as promising signs that the New China would rid itself of isolation, and felt very close to those countries of ‘neighbors and friends.’     

Andres Bonifacio: proletarian hero of the Philippines and Indonesia

The concluding chapter of Tan Malaka’s (1897–1949) large philosophical work entitled Madilog: Materialisme, Dialektika, Logika contains interesting reflections on the extent and scope of the future liberated and sovereign Indonesian nation and on the concept of “Indonesian” heroism and nationality. However, most striking of all is the uppermost position he allots in his schema for Philippine national heroes such as Dr. Jose Rizal, the patriot and writer, and Andres Bonifacio, the leader and founder of the Katipunan, the most successful Philippine revolutionary anti-colonial organization.     

Globalizing Korean queers? Project L(esbian), the first exhibition of lesbian arts in South Korea

This paper deals with the influence of queer and visual culture in South Korea by concentrating on the example of Project L, the first exhibition organized by self-proclaimed lesbian artists and curators in South Korea in 2005, followed by the group's second exhibition, Gender Spectrum, in 2008. Conflicts between the dominant curatorial approach toward feminist arts and the identity politics of the Project L team are investigated in order to illustrate major theoretical predicaments in which lesbian activists and artists find themselves in feminist organizations and art exhibitions in Korea. As the title “Globalizing Korean Queer” suggests, this paper also examines contradictory circumstances related to the influence of queer theory in non-western countries. A close analysis of Gender Spectrum sheds light upon how a non-western lesbian group utilizes queer theory to understand the distinctive cultural conditions underlying homophobia, beyond merely importing “advanced” theories from the west.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.