Modern and Contemporary in China

In the last two decades, a contemporary visual art has arisen in Mainland China on an unprecedented scale and on a peculiar calendar, arising after the death of Mao, later encouraged by new economic policies, auction houses and market forces, biennials and fairs. In this seminar, we explore this on-going episode and its implications within the emerging field of global art history and theory and for the very idea of ‘the contemporary’. We first look at the question of documents and methods available for its study in the context of new translations and intellectual debates and the frameworks and calendars through which it unfolds, its relations with New York and Paris.  We then focus on the work of several key artists whose work refracts these questions and take up a number of specific current issues within the field: how the rise of contemporary ink painting draws on Asian visual tradition in new ways; how new museum expansions in Asia pose questions for the old nineteenth European ‘museum without walls’; how  the Market figures in the field and in the story about it; how a practice of the ‘moving image’ arose and developed, how questions of realism and abstraction are posed in it. With the participation of a number of noted artists, critics and curators, and geared to related events in New York City, the seminar is thus conceived as a laboratory for a critical investigation of the field, and is open to qualified students in all relevant disciplines and departments.