Field Notes 3: Mapping Asia (2013) [English, Chinese]

The latest issue of e-journal Field Notes edited and published by the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive “examines multiple vantage points from which to consider Asia, looking beyond inherited boundaries, histories, and political and economic systems.”

“In our most field note-like issue to date, we interweave artist work, an email exchange, literary extracts, a film plot, exhibition reviews, newspaper clippings, comics, and archival photos. If we were to list some of the entry points for the selections they would include (in no particular order) Guangzhou as site, speculative geographies, Hong Kong, seaborne histories, territory and myth, island disputes, language, migration, and sites of knowledge production and distribution.” (from the editorial)

Edited by Claire Hsu and Chantal Wong
Publisher Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2013
138 pages

Publisher

PDF (38 MB), HTML, Issuu (English, updated on 2017-11-30)
PDF (32 MB), HTML, Issuu (Chinese, updated on 2017-11-30)

See also Mapping Asia, a 190-page book based on this issue, published circa July 2014 (Issuu, in English).

Nikolaus Gansterer (ed.): Drawing A Hypothesis: Figures of Thought (2011)

“Drawing a Hypothesis is a reader on the ontology of forms of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory. In a process of exchange with artists and scientists, Nikolaus Gansterer reveals drawing as a media of research enabling the emergence of new narratives and ideas by tracing the speculative potential of diagrams. Based on a discursive analysis of found figures with the artists’ own diagrammatic maps and models, the invited authors create unique correlations between thinking and drawing. Due to its ability to mediate between perception and reflection, drawing proves to be one of the most basic instruments of scientific and artistic practice, and plays an essential role in the production and communication of knowledge. The book is a rich compendium of figures of thought, which moves from scientific representation through artistic interpretation and vice versa.”

Translation: Veronica Buckley, Aileen Derieg
Publisher Springer, 2011
Edition Angewandte
ISBN 3709108020, 9783709108024
352 pages

Review: Mark Robert Doyle, Gert Hasenhuetl (in German).

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PDF (updated on 2021-12-17)

Winnie Won Yin Wong: After the Copy: Creativity, Originality and the Labor of Appropriation: Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China, 1989-2010 (2010)

“Since 1989, Dafen village in Shenzhen, China, has supplied millions of hand-painted oil-on-canvas paintings each year to global consumer markets. Accused of copying Western masterpieces, and spurred by the Chinese party-state’s creative industry policies, Dafen village’s eight thousand painters have been striving to become original artists. Simultaneously, conceptualist artists from outside Dafen village have engaged with the creative alienation of Dafen painters, by purchasing their labor in works of appropriation art. This study examines the discourses of creativity, originality, and appropriation that frame Dafen’s painting production, and sets them against an ethnography of flexible work in the South Chinese painting trade. It explores the myriad ways in which Dafen village lends itself to intellectual and aesthetic explorations of the separation of painting labor from conceptual labor, as enacted in both modernist and postmodernist framings of artistic authorship.

The study begins by charting the historical categorization of Chinese ‘export painting’ and the emergence of the ‘painting factory’ as a cultural imaginary of Sino-Western trade. It then examines the political stakes of ‘creativity’ as constructed in Dafen television propaganda made by the national and local party-state. Then, turning to a single Vincent van Gogh-specialty workshop and the transnational wholesale and retail of van Gogh trade paintings, it theorizes the relationship of ‘craft’ to modernist authorship and signature style. Finally, it scrutinizes cosmopolitan conceptual artists’ and designers’ collaborations with Dafen painters, exploring the ethical and aesthetic terms of universal creativity raised by the Dafen ‘readymade’. Establishing continuities between Dafen production and the making of ‘high’ art while challenging their putative antinomies, this study shows how the ideology of individual creativity undergirds the cultural industry policies of the local party-state, the consumer demand for authentic craft, and the appropriation of labor in contemporary art.” (Abstract)

Thesis, Ph. D. in History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture
Dept. of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010
Supervisor: Caroline A. Jones
410 pages

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