Minglu Gao: Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (2011)

“To the extent that Chinese contemporary art has become a global phenomenon, it is largely through the groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Gao Minglu: ‘China/Avant-Garde’ (Beijing, 1989), ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’ (Asia Society, New York, 1998), and ‘The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art’ (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005) among them. As the first Chinese writer to articulate a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and modernity—one not defined by Western chronology or formalism—Gao Minglu is largely responsible for the visibility of Chinese art in the global art scene today.

Contemporary Chinese artists tend to navigate between extremes, either embracing or rejecting a rich classical tradition. Indeed, for Chinese artists, the term “modernity” refers not to a new epoch or aesthetic but to a new nation—modernity inextricably connects politics to art. It is this notion of “total modernity” that forms the foundation of the Chinese avant-garde aesthetic, and of this book.

Gao examines the many ways Chinese artists engaged with this intrinsic total modernity, including the ’85 Movement, political pop, cynical realism, apartment art, maximalism, and the museum age, encompassing the emergence of local art museums and organizations as well as such major events as the Shanghai Biennial. He describes the inner logic of the Chinese context while locating the art within the framework of a worldwide avant-garde. He vividly describes the Chinese avant-garde’s embrace of a modernity that unifies politics, aesthetics, and social life, blurring the boundaries between abstraction, conception, and representation. Lavishly illustrated with color images throughout, this book will be a touchstone for all considerations of Chinese contemporary art.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 0262014947, 9780262014946
409 pages

Reviews: Craig Clunas (Artforum, 2011), David Carrier (artCritical, 2011).

Publisher

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Mary Bittner Wiseman, Liu Yuedi (eds.): Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (2011)

What is art and what is its role in a China that is changing at a dizzying speed? These questions lie at the heart of Chinese contemporary art. Subversive Strategies paves the way for the rebirth of a Chinese aesthetics adequate to the art whose sheer energy and imaginative power is subverting the ideas through which western and Chinese critics think about art. The first collection of essays by American and Chinese philosophers and art historians, Subversive Strategies begins by showing how the art reflects current crises and is working them out through bodies gendered and political. The essays raise the question of Chinese identity in a global world and note a blurring of the boundary between art and everyday life.

Publisher Brill Academic Pub, 2011
Volume 31 of Philosophy of History and Culture
ISBN 9004187952, 9789004187955
417 pages

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The Machinery of Stability Preservation (2011) [Chinese/English]

“There is widespread agreement in China, from high officials to ordinary people, about the importance of maintaining social stability. There is rather less consensus, though, about how best to ensure and promote stability. Considering the costs, both fiscal and human, of continued pursuit of the policy of “stability above all else,” some have begun to question whether, perhaps, the effort might actually be counterproductive.

In a recent article (translated below) posted on the website of Caijing magazine, two reporters who have been covering China’s social stability problem offer an excellent introduction to the organizational structure behind China’s stability management effort. Their detailed portrait of this structure as it exists at both the central and local levels leads into a trenchant analysis of China’s paradoxical pursuit of stability and a look at how that structure actually undermines that effort. Their conclusion—that the only escape from this paradox is to accelerate the pace of political and judicial reform—is a clear articulation of an aspiration that is gathering momentum in China but that will still have to overcome much resistance if it is to be realized.”

by Caijing magazine reporters Xu Kai & Li Weiao, 6 June 2011
Translated by Dui Hua Human Rights Journal, 8 June 2011

View online [Chinese]
View online [English]

related:
Stability Preservation in China (English extracts from three pieces written by Leung Man Tao, a recognized media professional and public intellectual from Hong Kong, Du Guang, a veteran Central Party School scholar, and Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University; 2010)
Riot erupts in southwest China town: reports (Reuters; 12 Aug 2011)