The Art of Contemporary China (World of Art)

The Art of Contemporary China (World of Art) PDF

Author: Jiang Jiehong

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0500776288

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A redefinition of contemporary Chinese art from the last forty years in the context of unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation, written by an authority on the subject. Contemporary Chinese art is a subject of sustained and growing significance in present-day culture across the globe. This new volume in the World of Art series reframes Chinese art since the end of China’s Cultural Revolution more than four decades ago, placing it in the context of the nation’s unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation. Based on original research by writer, curator, and leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang Jiehong, this volume explores the area through firsthand materials and in-depth interviews with more than thirty artists. Providing the most up-to-date understanding of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang includes a variety of media, ranging from painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, performance, and participatory art. Featuring over 150 color images of artworks by more than fifty internationally renowned Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Peili, as well as emerging artists, such as Zhao Zhao, The Art of Contemporary China presents a wide variety of practices through curatorial discussions and images of original installation views and historical art events. What emerges are revelations on art, and new insights into contemporary China. Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers a concise but far-reaching survey of the movement.

Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting

Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting PDF

Author: Juliane Noth

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-11-20

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1684176603

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Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world. Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.

Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art

Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art PDF

Author: Meiqin Wang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781138899193

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This book explores the relationship between the ongoing urbanization in China and the production of contemporary Chinese art since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wang provides a detailed analysis of artworks and methodologies of art-making from eight contemporary artists who employ a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. She also sheds light on the relationship between these artists and their sociocultural origins, investigating their provocative responses to various processes and problems brought about by Chinese urbanization. With this urbanization comes a fundamental shift of the philosophical and aesthetic foundations in the practice of Chinese art: from a strong affiliation with nature and countryside to one that is complexly associated with the city and the urban world.

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting PDF

Author: Yi Gu

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1684176131

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"How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China? Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there."

Longing for Nature: Reading Landscapes in Chinese Art

Longing for Nature: Reading Landscapes in Chinese Art PDF

Author: Kim Karlsson

Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9783775746700

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The secret language of Chinese landscape painting A genre dating back more than 1,000 years, China's landscape painting tradition reflects all of its cultural and intellectual history, and its representational language famously follows its own rules. What at first glance seem to be idyllic ink-wash pictures actually depict far more than romantic landscapes. Through subtle allusions and references, Chinese landscape painters were able to convey a whole range of messages, from social positions to political opposition, all the way to philosophical observations and very personal feelings. This splendid illustrated volume unlocks these codes and juxtaposes important historical works with landscape paintings by internationally renowned modern and contemporary artists. The dialogue between past and present reveals surprising links, but also ruptures and conflicts.

Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History

Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History PDF

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9622090001

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This is a provocative essay of reflections on traditional mainstream scholarship on Chinese art as done by towering figures in the field such as James Cahill and Wen Fong. James Elkins offers an engaging and accessible survey of his personal journey encountering and interpreting Chinese art through Western scholars' writings. He argues that the search for optimal comparisons is itself a modern, Western interest, and that art history as a discipline is inherently Western in several identifiable senses. Although he concentrates on art history in this book, and on Chinese painting in particular, these issues bear implications for Sinology in general, and for wider questions about humanistic inquiry and historical writing. Jennifer Purtle's Foreword provides a useful counterpoint from the perspective of a Chinese art specialist, anticipating and responding to other specialists’ likely reactions to Elkins's hypotheses.