Papers > History > Children of Mao and Coca Cola avant garde art in China
|
Featured Papers from Direct Essays
|
|
|
|
|
|
This is a preview of a paper to view the full text you need to signup and login.
|
Children of Mao and Coca Cola avant garde art in China
|
|
|
Children of Mao and Coca-Cola.(avant-garde art in China)
The achievement of Chinas avant-garde since the mid-1980s, both at home and in exile, is the subject of a large-scale traveling exhibition.
When the work of the Chinese avant-garde started to appear in the West in the mid-1990s, many mistook it for an Asian version of the "unofficial" Russian art that had gained so much international attention a few years earlier. The confusion was, perhaps, understandable: like Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov and the collaborative team of Komar and Melamid, the newly visible Chinese artists crossed Pop art with Communist kitsch, creating wittily subversive paintings and sculptures which seemed to embody individual resistance against a totalitarian regime. Now comes a massive exhibition titled "Inside Out: New Chinese Art," which allows us to see how much more complicated is the full story of the Chinese avant-garde. Spanning the period from the mid-1980s to the present, "Inside Out," currently on view at San Franciscos Museum of Modern Art and Asian Art Museum, charts the complex relationship between Chinese artists and the Communist regime through cycles of openness and repression. The 62 artists or artist groups in the show represent not only mainland China but also Hong Kong and Taiwan, allowing the exhibition to addresses issues relating to Chinese identity and traditions. ...
The main curator of "Inside Out" is Gao Minglu, who organized the groundbreaking, and officially vilified, exhibition "China/Avant Garde" at the National Gallery in Beijing in 1989. (Gao left China in 1991 and is currently a doctoral candidate in art history at Harvard.) Thanks to his involvement in the tumultuous events of the Tiananmen period, Gao brings a tremendous inside knowledge to bear on the evolution of avant-garde art in mainland China. ... As part of this structure, the Taiwan and Hong Kong art scenes are dealt with in separate sections, while the lions share of the space is devoted, rightfully, to the dramatic twists and turns which accompanied the development of avant-garde art in the Peoples Republic. Offering a more or less chronological account of recent Chinese art, this part of the exhibition includes many artists unfamiliar to most U. ... " These sections chronicle the emergence of avant-garde art between 1985 and 1989--a time when the Chinese government, eager to cast off the shadows of the Cultural Revolution, began to officially welcome foreign ideas and cultural activity. ... Pre-Tiananmen paintings such as Wang Guangyis Mao Zedong No. ... 1-4 (1987) adopt a generalized representational style that owes something to both Surrealism and American Pop art. ... These tendencies received such expressive monikers as Political Pop and Cynical Realism, and are represented by works which range from Wang Guangyis Coca-Cola (1993) from the "Great Castigation" series, in which the stalwart worker heroes of Cultural Revolution propaganda find themselves promoting a classic American beverage, to Liu Weis New Generation (1992), which shows a pair of strangely misshapen toddlers lolling before a giant portrait of Mao. Given the anticapitalist bent of much of this work, there is a certain irony in the fact this was the faction of the Chinese avant-garde which had the biggest commercial success in the West.
One of the great virtues of this exhibition is that it reveals how much else was going on behind the scenes when the Wests image of Chinese art was being shaped by Political Pop and Cynical Realism. In a section titled "Conceptual Art and Dada," the focus is on the artists who bridge the pre- and post-Tiananmen years with works which combine the Zen renunciation of self and a Fluxus-style attack on the preciousness of art. ... In "Inside Out" Huang is represented with several works from the 80s which attack the marketing of art and art theory. ... In a 1987 work, seminal texts on Chinese and Western art were immersed in a washing machine and reduced to a pile of paper pulp. ... In the West, language-based works often seek to subvert surface meanings in order to undermine the absolutism of Western rationalism, while in China, language-based art seems both more overtly political and more embedded in a sense of Chinese cultural identity. ... Use of language is also affected by the complicated relationship to visual art of the pictographic forms of the written Chinese language. ... However, because the original was buried with an art-loving emperor, the Orchard Pavilion Preface only survives through copies. ... In the context of Chinese society, Book from the Sky can be seen as a comment on the subtle erosion of language effected by propaganda; it also suggests the difficulty of transmitting tradition in post-Cultural Revolution China.
|
|
|
To link to this page, copy the following code to your site:
|
|
Paper Information
|
|
|
Title: Children of Mao and Coca Cola avant garde art in China
Words: 3783
Rating: None
Pages: 15.1
submitted by: maressapk
If you think this paper shouldn't be here then
|
|
|
|
|
Signup & Login
|
|
|
If you don't currently have a login then Signup here
|
|
|
|
|
Pre-Written Papers
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Custom Papers
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
