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.     

From Bohemia to Britart – art students over 50 years

In the mid-1980s, Frith and Horne (1987) were describing the experience of British arts schools as, “an anachronism, with students desperately clinging on to attitudes to work and play, which had otherwise vanished” (p. 12). Among these attitudes were the importance of freedom and experimentation in one's work, the status of the artist as an outsider, and the superiority of art over other forms of activity, such as design. Despite huge social changes and contemporary concerns about the “instrumentalization” of arts policy and education (Singerman, 1999; Wilson, 2007), the article argues that the Romantic ideology of the artist is remarkably persistent, and continues to shape graduates' attitudes to their working lives. This in turn feeds into contemporary debates about the nature of cultural labour (Ross, 2003) and the role of the “artistic critique” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), and, crucially, provides an empirically based view of these debates from the perspective of cultural workers themselves.     

Sameness and diversification: A global quantitative survey on cultural innovation in the visual arts

Cultural policies and cultural policy-making are closely associated with creativity and cultural innovation. While the festivals, large-scale art exhibitions and literary conferences supported by such policies play a vital part in the cultural landscape, in recent years they have been increasingly criticised as actually preventing creativity and innovativeness. The claim is that they foster a limited number of creative individuals while rejecting others, and that they are dominated by Western cultural norms that erase cultural diversity. A lack of wide-ranging empirical data with which to substantiate such claims, particularly from an historical perspective, has led to the creation of a 15,000-entry database with the names, nationalities and other details of the artists participating in perennial exhibitions, such as documenta, the Havana Biennial, Istanbul Biennial and Gwangju Biennale. These biennials and perennial exhibitions are widely regarded as vital to the definition of artistic standards and innovations in the visual arts, as exerting an important influence both in their home countries and abroad, and as encouraging the participation of artists from around the world. The first part of this paper considers which artists have appeared in regularly occurring exhibitions, determining whether the majority of them are, indeed, the same and whether there is any bias towards a particular cultural region. The second part inquires whether biennials and other regularly occurring exhibitions in the Western hemisphere “ignore” artists from other regions, or whether they, in fact, represent a global perspective. In short, this paper explores the cultural diversity of these perennial exhibitions and determines whether they favour artists from particular regions, while excluding others. The findings reveal that the data do not support these assumptions and that international exhibitions do, in fact, contribute to creativity, diversity and multiculturalism.     

A Complaint with the Cadi,ca. 1896: an East/West Cultural Encounter

This article presents a case study of A Complaint with the Cadi (Algeria), ca. 1896 – a painting by the French Orientalist artist Marie Lucas-Robiquet (1858–1959). Using cultural and social history as prisms, it explores what Lucas-Robiquet’s visual record communicates to the cultural ‘outsider’ about Muslim social life in French colonial Algeria. Attention is given to this artwork because it depicts the Islamic judiciary system as practised in late nineteenth-century Algeria. This article argues that this painting and its subject matter are rare in the Orientalist canon; that the artist was female, is, I posit, crucial to the ways in which this work can be read. Lucas-Robiquet, a decorated Orientalist, used a Naturalist style of painting which was both nuanced and sensitive to Islamic cultural traditions. I contend that A Complaint with the Cadi (or qā?ī meaning judge) is an important work because it represents a locus of historicised forms of Otherness: the French female artist and the Algerian cultural attribute.     

Creative labor as moral and ethical subjects and its limitation: Creative City Yokohama,Japan

This study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Yokohama, Japan. To shed light on this workforce’s everyday experiences and labor subjectivity, this investigation draws ideas from recent research trends of “creative labor” from the field of media and cultural studies, sociology of work, and political economy of communication. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations, this research focuses on how the ethical and moral dimensions of labor subjectivity in creative work are prominently important in explaining Yokohama workers’ everyday living and working experiences as creative labor. Unexpectedly, this study found that these moral and ethical sentiments and actions, which take on the role of retaining their labor motivation, actually limit the development of political subjects who can resist given precarious working conditions and thereby hinder them from building a collective solidarity as “workers.” Thus this investigation concludes that the creative worker’s subjectivity retreats to solely a moral dimension rather than to a political one. Through this finding, this study explores whether the articulation of moral-political and social values in the course of cultural work can evolve from creative workers’ moral and ethical sensitivities and actions.     

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]     

Trans-Singapore: some notes towards queer Asia as method

From the transsexual sex workers of Bugis Street to the self-fashioning butches of the current creative economy, trans-visibility has always been an iconic feature of Singapore’s public culture. Using three case studies that examine colonial transsexual subculture, postcolonial transgender biomedical modernity and the contemporary inter-Asian performances of tomboy boybands, this paper examines these practices of trans-embodiment to reveal their centrality to Singapore’s modernity. While the recent transgender turn in the West has resulted in trans-visibility and acceptance, this paper will critically show how the experience of trans-visibility in Singapore provides a different model to consider the narrative of progressive modernity. It concludes by gesturing to this new model – one that does not replicate Eurocentric ontology – through further demonstrating these practices as strategies for the critical paradigm of “queer Asia as method.”     

Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam

This article uses the wide dispersal of ostrich eggs and peacock feathers among the different cultural contexts of the Mediterranean – and beyond into the Indian Ocean world – to explore the nature and limits of cultural inheritance and exchange between Christianity and Islam. These avian materials previously possessed symbolic meaning and material value as early as the pre-dynastic period in Egypt, as well as amid the early cultures of Mesopotamia and Crete. The main early cultural associations of the eggs and feathers were with death/resurrection and kingship respectively, a symbolism that was passed on into early Christian and Muslim usage. Mercantile, religious and political links across the premodern Mediterranean meant that these items found parallel employment all around the Mediterranean littoral, and beyond it, in Arabia, South Asia and Africa. As an essay in the uses of material culture in mapping cultural exchange and charting the eclectic qualities of popular religiosity, the article provides a wide-ranging survey of the presence of these objects, from their visual appearance in Renaissance paintings to their hanging in the shrines of Indo-Muslim saints. A final section draws conclusions on the relationship between shared objects, cultural boundaries and the writing of history.     

Political failure and the necessity for global democracy

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the changes in creative activities of young people – especially in the alternative media – in Indonesia before and after Reformasi. It begins with the story of the dynamics of a student press, from my personal experience – which I believe is a typical form of student/youth movement in Indonesia – and how the student’s life obviously depends on the political situation, the university policy, and the dynamics of the student’s life at that particular time. Reformasi caused political change and freedom but simultaneously, and ironically, placed the student press in a state of meaninglessness, such that it was painfully forced for search for new meanings to keep it contextually relevant in the new era. I end the paper describing the latest form of the alternative media scene of Indonesian youth, whose focus is dramatically shifting from ‘big’ political issues to issues of the celebration of communities and self‐existence.     

Re-envisioning media literacy education as feminist arts-activism

ABSTRACT

This project interrogates the premises of media literacy education – the predominant approach to equipping K-12 students to navigate the contemporary media environment – by moving it beyond teaching students to critique commercial media toward undermining ideological messages about health, violence, race, and gender embedded in media discourses. This participatory programme evaluation uses mixed-methods to assess the effectiveness of an alternative, performing arts education-based approach to media literacy called The Girl Project (TGP), a feminist artist-activist programme based at a non-profit community theatre in Versailles, Kentucky. The 12–18 high school-aged girls who participate in TGP every year are engaged in workshops by guest artists from around the nation to express what they think is important for their audiences to understand about their lived experiences as girls in a conservative sociopolitical environment.

The project employed “youth-adult partnership model” to programme evaluation that involved working with programme alumni as co-researchers to evaluate TGP 2017. In June 2017, a team of eight co-researchers comprising alumni from the 2014, 2015, and 2016 classes met to develop evaluation questions and make data collection decisions. Data collection included surveys and interviews conducted pre- and post-programme with participants, field notes of the co-researchers’ observations of workshops and rehearsals, and feedback from guest artists and audience members. The team met again in January 2018 to collaboratively analyse how the data answered their evaluation questions. The survey data allowed us to see that girls’ statistical scores on mental health and body confidence measurements significantly improved after their participation in TGP, meaning that girls are less vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. In talking with participants and audience members, we learned that TGP participation increases girls’ self-confidence and ability to set boundaries in friendships, family relationships, and romantic relationships.     

Crafting the local: the lived experience of craft production in the Northern Isles of Scotland

ABSTRACT

National creative and cultural industries policy agendas tend to focus on the economic impact of the sector often favouring scalable digital activities based in global clusters, which underpin notions of growth. There has, however, been a re-emergence of craft, which may not be scalable in the same way, into public debate, with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic policy agendas. Accordingly, policymakers have begun to view craft as a stimulus to develop local and regional economies, skills and materials in relation to wider networks. Within this push towards craft-driven creative place making and economic growth, it has been argued that more sophisticated understandings of the “local” are needed that go beyond those which are inward and parochial. Based on AHRC-funded empirical research undertaken in the Northern Isles of Scotland with craft practitioners, this article attempts to provide evidence of the place-based nature of craft work highlighting both opportunities as well as constraints linked to contexts that are often referred to as remote and peripheral when contrasted with urban locations. We argue for future investigation into, what we term, fractal growth – growth and development that considers multiple dimensions – as being a valid and valuable outcome of creative practice, and which cannot be easily scaled.     

The Singing Postman: The Mobility of Traditional Culture in Nineteenth-Century France

Nineteenth-century French traditional culture was not immobile. Nor was it a conservative impediment to ‘modernization’. Focusing on the ethnographic work of two folklorists – Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921) in the Landes, and Victor Smith (1826-1882) – this article explores the ways that traditional culture circulated, and the people that carried it. Far from sedentary ‘peasants’, many of the singers and storytellers the folklorists collected from were actively involved in modern transport networks and worked in new occupations. These hybrid networks suggest a picture of nineteenth-century culture ‘from below’ that flows along informal, regional conduits, both within and beyond the borders of France.     

Xu Beihong and the New China: thoughts centered on the painting At the World Peace Congress

This essay analyses a politically tinged painting by Xu Beihong (1895–1953), a representative modern Chinese painter. He composed the work in 1949, just before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, or the New China. In this article’s discussion of the perplexing work, the author attempts to unveil Xu’s understanding of revolution and of the relationship between art and politics, in relation to his difficulties in exploring and practicing art in the early Republic period (1912–1949). Based on this, the author discusses the painter’s mindset in the social and political context of the New China. She also tries to reveal that Xu’s art practices were restrained by the realities he was in – a crucial point to understanding his achievements and predicaments. As an artist who resisted the western modernism in the course of modernization, and who idealistically pursued the highest good and beauty through “realist” approaches and historical expressions, Xu’s predicaments interestingly reflect the complicated relationship between art and revolution in China’s road to modernization, and provide a foundation for further explorations into the core issues and the particularity of modern Chinese paintings.     

‘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.     

Zhang Runzi＇s creation of painted clay figures LIFE DEDICATED TO ART

In a sunny, chilly winter morning, I was invited to the apartment of Zhang Runzi, an old woman artist who has dedicated herself to the creation of painted clay figures. I had admired this respectable artist for years but never had chances to meet her before.     

“Immigrant” in Russian and French Print Media (Linguistic and Visual Composition Analyses)

This study addresses the representation of the linguistic and cultural type “immigrant” in French and Russian media discourse. Linguistic analysis of selected sources shows, on the one hand, signs of tolerance towards immigrants and, on the other hand, evidence of rejecting immigrants, which demonstrates the ambiguity of the matter and indirectly provokes conflicts. Visual composition analysis complements these results by revealing the following: the purpose of immigration – employment – is often socially rejected; immigrants’ sense of community is a specific cultural code in a host culture; and the cultural transfer of an “immigrant” into a different space creates uncertainty or ambiguity.     

Constructing a Visual Rhetoric: Images of Craftsmen and Builders in the Umayyad Palace at Qusayr ‘Amra

This article treats a group of wall paintings depicting craftsmen and builders on the east vault of the large basilical hall in the Umayyad palace at Qusayr ‘Amra near Amman, Jordan.* *A series of craftsmen holding various tools of their trade – one with a frame saw, another with a chisel, a third with masonry hammer etc. – are depicted on a mosaic floor recently uncovered by Dr Uzi Leibner from the Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a Roman-era synagogue at Khirbet Wadi Hamam, in the Lower Galilee. The workers appear next to a very large building, which they seem to be constructing. More details are found on the Institute website: http://archaeology.huji.ac.il/depart/classical/uzil/Kh_Hamam.pdf View all notes The figures appear within 32 linked framed squares covering the whole ceiling. The significance of the paintings, their iconographical sources, style and the question of patronage are examined. Depictions of workers are a unique phenomenon in early Islamic art. However, they form part of the complex of themes present in Qusayr ‘Amra (as well as in other Umayyad palaces) under the heading of the “princely cycle”. I argue that the images of the builders, the act of building and the location of the paintings on the ceiling are all expressions of royal visual rhetoric which presents the Caliph as a great and glorious builder thus forging a self-glorifying image of the Umayyad dynasty in the eyes of their Muslim and Christian subjects alike. This visual rhetoric was adopted by the Umayyad patrons from the art traditions of Late Antiquity which offer both models for presenting rulers as builders as well as images of buildings and the act of building.     

The undulating contours of sōgō geijutsu (total work of art), or Hanada Kiyoteru's thoughts on transmedia in postwar Japan

This article provides an insight into the theorization of sōgō geijutsu or the work of total art during the postwar decades in Japan, primarily through the language of Hanada Kiyoteru, a notable communist critic during the 1950s, as a way to present a discursive precursor to what would be explored as intermedia in the 1960s. It is an attempt to trace the debates that were seen in journal Sōgō Bunka, which was established immediately after the war, and how the question of collectivity and collective production of art was discussed among the contributing critics, artists, and intellectuals. Totality as some may know already, is a problematic term that comes close to the wartime notion of ‘totality’, as it was employed for Japanese government's ideological deployment for its war efforts. Although the term has accrued a sinister ring, the critics mentioned in the article, especially Hanada, were determined to reclaim the term as a way of devising a postwar aesthetic-political platform. One important component of sōgō geijutsu was popular art and its relationship to the masses, as it was designed to relocate avant-garde art practices to the juncture of popular space and political praxis, while critiquing the modernist avant-garde art associated with high art. In addition to providing a fuller historiography of intermedia (or transmedia) in Japan, interrogating sōgō geijutsu also serves to shed some light on the complex and multivalent discourse of locating a ‘people’ and their communicative action. Through this history, the term totality gains a greater texture, no longer dismissible as a mere vestige of fascism in the minds of the Japanese artists and critics.     

Cultural politics of emotions in households: migrant domestic workers in Macau

This article discusses the emotions and cultural politics within domestic work contexts involving employers and migrant domestic workers in Macau. Since Macau was transferred back to China from Portugal in 1999, the Macau SAR government has pursued a neoliberal economic policy that emphasizes economic growth. With a revitalized economy boosted by casino revenues, thousands of migrant workers have moved to Macau to take advantage of new employment opportunities. Based on first-hand interviews with migrant domestic workers and employers in Macau, this paper examines how emotions are motivated and articulated within the affective interactions between employers and Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs). This includes how employers’ emotions of fear and disgust towards MDWs contribute to the creation of an MDW population as a feared and inferior “other,” and how such affective operations reinforces the existing hegemonic dominance of naming and legitimizing the exploitation of MDWs. Meanwhile, in the production of domesticity in the home, this paper explores how emotions such as emotional numbness and disgust experienced by the MDWs make affective negotiations and contestation possible, and generate disobedience and resistance to the disciplines and controls imposed upon them. This article also investigates how such emotions, acting as a kind of intervention, operate within the production of specific subjectivities and identities that MDWs want to claim for themselves.     

Performing the Resurrection: James Graham and the Multiplication of the Real

In contrast to recent work on the charlatan James Graham which locates him in relation to medical history, this paper focuses on his various performances, the theatrical spaces he constructed (or imagined) for them, and the ‘other’ realities that these spaces and performances were designed to conjure. It argues that in the unprecedented commercial and cosmopolitan milieu of late eighteenth-century London, the charlatan emerges as the uncanny double (rather than straight-forward antagonist) of the scientist and the artist, from which both must struggle to distinguish themselves. Both romantic poet and enlightenment scientist are concerned to manage the relation problematized in a culture of simulation, between first-order and second-order realities. The charlatan is the uncanny double of both of these projects because he raises the possibility that each attempt to mediate between these realms will be revealed as one more simulation, and that artist, scientist, and charlatan will be found to be the ‘guardian saints' of a culture shaped to a single identity by lawless difference.