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ARTH361
Contemporary Chinese Art-From Modern to the Chinese Version of Post-Modernism
Hsingyuan Tsao
Email address: htsao@interchange.ubc.ca
Office: LASL 411
Office Ext.: 22410
Course Description:
This course examines 20th Century Chinese art and how some of the Chinese artists transcended from the
position that was dominated by the Russian cultural policy to the position that is recognized by the
international art world. The course is a legacy of the ascendancy of Chinese art in the late 20th century and
early 21st century. This course will also discuss how the Chinese artists negotiate their identity and ethnicity
with the post-modern world.
Requirements: No prerequisites. Reading assignments are heavier in some weeks than others. Two paper
projects (each 5-7 pages), and a longer final paper based on your research. The length of maximum 5-7
pages is suggested for the long paper, double-spaced, and typed.
Read the works that will be discussed each week before you come to class.
Texts for Purchase:
Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, ed. Postmodernism and China: A Special Issue, Boundary 2 : an
international journal of literature and culture, vol. 24, number 3, fall 1997, Duke University Press.
Maria Galikowski, “The Stormy Years of the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976,” Art and Politics in China,
pp. 137-174.
Selected Bibliography:
Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979, Berkeley: U.C. Press,
1994.
Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-garde, translation from the German by Michael Shaw, University of
Minnesota Press, 1984.
Matei Calinscu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism,
Duke University Press Durham 1987.
Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press,
1983.
Hal Foster, The Return to the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass. MIT
Press, 1996.
Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, ed. Postmodernism and China: A Special Issue, Boundary 2 : an
international journal of literature and culture, vol. 24, number 3, fall 1997, Duke University Press.
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indiana: 1986.
Patrick Williams et. al. ed., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader New York: Columbia
University, 1994.
Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China, Urbana & Chicago, 1998.
John Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture.
Richard M. Barnhart James Cahill Wu Hung Yang Xin Nie Chongzheng Lang Shaojun Three Thousand
Years of Chinese Painting, Yale University Press, 1997 (ISBN: 0300070136).
Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1998.
Week one
Lecture One: Orientation and introduction to Chinese Art up to 1960.
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Readings:
Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979. pp. 34-109,
176-200.
Barnhart, Cahill, Ni, Lang, Yang, and Wu Three thousand Years of Chinese Paintings (skim)
Lecture Two
Introduction to Chinese art from 60s to mid-70s.
Reading:
Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979. pp. 314-376.
Week Two:
Lecture One
Introduction to art before and around 1979. Presentation by Wang Gongyi who participated during this
time.
Reading:
Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979, pp. 377-405.
Gao Minglu “Toward a Transnational Modernity: An Overview of Inside Out: New Chinese Art”
in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, pp. 15-40.
Lecture Two
The “Stars” movement, and art movements up to 1985.
Consider and work on these questions for your first paper project:
What is the nature of art during this period?
What was the political function of art in this period?
Can we find any parallel situation in countries outside China?
What is the difference between the terms “avant-garde art” and “contemporary art?” Political reasons for
the opening up of artistic practice, and the relationship between the avant-garde and the democracy
movement in China.
Your project may take the form of a short written report.
Readings:
Hanart Gallery, The Stars: Ten Years. Hanart Gallery: Hong Kong, 1989.
Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-garde, pp. 15-34.
Maria Galikowski, “The Discovery of ‘the Self’: A New Era for Chinese Art, 1976-1984,” Art and
Politics in China, pp. 175-246.
Week Three: Where are we?
Lecture One
Readings:
Hanart Gallery, The Stars: Ten Years. Hanart Gallery: Hong Kong, 1989.
Skim: Calinescu Five Faces, pp. 13-94.
Peter Burger, pp. 35-54.
Lecture Two
Culture of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1978): drama, film, pictorial art, and literiture.
Vedios on reserve in IMC.
Reading:
Maria Galikowski, “The Stormy Years of the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976,” Art and Politics in
China, pp. 137-174.
Week Four:
Lecture One
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1985: The Year of Cultural Turmoil
Note:
1985 art movements and events: (a) An article in Jiangsu huakan (Jiangsu Art Magazine) by Li Xiaoshan
announced that Chinese traditional painting had reached a dead-end. (b) A new magazine, Contemporary
Art Thoughts, published its first issue; it continued until 1989, when it was ordered to stop publishing. (c)
The first art newspaper to be devoted mainly to contemporary art both inside and outside China, Zhongguo
meishu bao, appeared; but after this newspaper published a whole page of photos taken in Tiananmen
Square during the June Fourth Student Movement, it was banned by the government.
Readings:
Cohen, The New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986, pp. 50-89.
Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World." in Art in Theory, 635-638.
David Smith "Tradition and Identity" in Art in Theory, pp. 748-750.
Gao Minglu, "The 1985 New Wave Art Movement" (Xerox on reserve)
Lecture Two
Narcissism or Nation Allegory-making
Reading:
Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, Columbia University Press, 1995, (ISBN 0-231-07683-5) pp.5378.
Week Five:
Lecture One
Around the mid-80s, the economy of China took a big turn.
Readings:
Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China, Urbana & Chicago, 1998, Ch. 6:
“Newspapers for the Market,” pp. 127-150.
Rereading Gao Minglu’s “Toward a Transnatioal Modernity” (Xerox)
Lecture Two
Readings:
Fredric Jameson interviewed by Paik Nak-chung, “South Korea as Social Space,” in Rob Wilson
and Wim Dissanayake, Global/ Local: Cultral Production and the Transnational Imaginary,
Durham, 1996, pp. 348-371.
Week Six
Lecture One
Readings:
High culture of high 80s
Liu Kang, “Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism,” in Positions 3:2 1995, Duke University, pp. 595629. (Xerox on reserve)
Lecture Two
No U-Turn: The Exhibition of 1989.
The political background of the late 80s; student movements of 1986 and 1989.
Discussion of the social changes brought about by the student movement of 1989.
Readings:
Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, ch. 6
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Hal Foster, ed., Anti-aesthetics,
Seattle, 1983, pp. 111-126.
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Li Xianting, "Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art," in China's New
Art, Post-1989, pp. x-xviii. On reserve.
4.Tsao Hsingyuan, "A Beijing Chronicle," in The Statue of Liberty Revisited, ed. by Wilton S.
Dillon & Neil G. Kotler, Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994, pp. 102110.
Yuzhi Zhao, Ch. 9 “Media Reform Beyond Commercialization.”
Week Seven
Lecture One
Tiananmen students’ movement and its cultural impact (video clips, on reserve)
Move into the 90s
Reading:
Han Minzhu, Hua Sheng, ed. Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speech from the 1989
Democracy Movement, Princeton University Press, 1990. ##
Lecture Two
Readings:
“The Art of Cynical Reason,” in Hal Foster, The Return to the Real, ch. 4.
Andrew Solomon, "Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China." (Xerox on Reserve.)
Geremie Barmé, "Exploit, Export, Expropriate: Artful Marketing from China, 1989-93," China's
New Art, Post-1989, exhibition catalog, pp. xlvii-li.
Video (on reserve).
Week Eight
Catching on!
Lecture One
Readings:
Hal Foster “(Post)-Modern Polemics,” in Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Culture Politics,
pp. 121-136.
Charles Stone, “Xu Bing and the Printed Word”; Wu Hung “A ‘Ghost Rebellion’: Notes on Xu
Bing’s ‘Nonsense Writing’ and Other Works,” and Tamara Hamlish, “Prestidigitations: A Reply
to Charles Stone,” in Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies, 1994, 6: 407423. (Xerox)
Wu Hung, “Counter-Monument” in Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the
Twentieth Century, an exhibition catalogue, Chicago University, pp. 31-34.
Lecture Two
Britta Erickson, "Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing" (Xerox)
Sheldon Lu, “Global POSTmodernIZATION: The Intellectual, the Artist, and China’s Condition,”
Boundary 2, pp. 65-97.
Calinescu “On Postmodernism” in Five Faces of Modernity.
Week Nine:
Postmodern?
Lecture One
Readings:
Jonathan Arac, Chinese Posetmodernism: Toward a Global Context” in Boundary 2, pp. 262-275.
Norman Bryson, “The Post-Ideological Avant-Garde” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, pp. 51-58.
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Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in his After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
Culture, Postmodernism, pp. 179-221.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Across Trans-Chinese Landscapes: Reflections on Contemporary Chinese
Culture” Inside Out, pp. 41-49.
Lecture Two
Reading:
Wang Ning, “The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity” in Boundary 2, pp. 19-40.
Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon ed. A
Poatmodern Reader, Albany, 1993, pp. 105-156.
Week Ten
Installations, young women artists
Lecture One
Readings:
Chris Driessen et. al., ed., Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual and
Installation Art in the Nineties, Breda, the Netherlands, 1997.
Craig Owens “The Discourse of Other: Feminists and Postmodernism” in The Anti-Aesthetic, pp.
57-81.
Lecture Two
Wu Hung, “Sealed Memory” in Transience, pp. 120-126.
Huang Zhuan, ed., The First Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art 96-97,
Beijing, 1997, pp. 11-49.
Hong Kong &
Week Eleven
Installation: City, Ruins, and beyond.
Lecture One
Reading:
Wu Hung, “Ruins, Fragmentation, and the Chinese Modern/Postmodern” in Inside Out, pp. 59-66.
Dai Jinhua, “Imagined Nostalgia” in Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and
Culture, vol. 24, number 3, fall 1997, Duke University, pp. 143-161.
Lecture Two
Reading:
Wu Hung, “Demolition Project” in Transience, pp. 109-119.
Wang Mingxian “Notes on Architecture and Postmodernism in China” in Boundary 2, pp. 164175.
Week Twelve
Lecture One
Readings:
Wendy Larson, “Women and the Discourse of Desire in Postrevolutionary China: The Awkward
Postmodernism of Chen Ran” in Boundary 2, pp. 201-224.
Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, pp. 93-117.
Lecture Two
Readings:
Geremie R. Barme, “Artful Marketing,” In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1999, pp. 201-234.
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Week Thirteen
Final Exam Week
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Works of Art From Post-Cultural-Revolution
Last Song of the Grand Historian Shao Fei (b. 1954, female)
People at Ease
Feng Guodong (b. 1948)
Jean-Paul Sartre
Zhong Ming (b. 1949)
Awakening of Tarim
Zhao Yoxiong (b. 1934)
Blind and Silent
Wang Keping (b. 1949)
Long Live Chairman Mao
Wang Keping
New Life in the Yuanming Yuan Huang Rui (b. 1952)
Double Happiness
Mao Lizi
A Wise Old Man who Knows How to Choose Horses
Wang Huaqing (b. 1944)
Tibetan
Sun Jingbo (b. 1947)
Self-portrait
Yuan Yunsheng (b. 1937)
Old Man in the Mountains
Sun Weiming (b. 1946)
Shining After the Rain
Wang Datong (b. 1937)
My Father
Luo Zhongli (b. 1950)
Worship
Pan Chuyang (b. 1953)
"Why?"
Gao Xiaohua (b. 1955)
X day of X month in 1968
Cheng Congling (b. 1955)
The Death of an Expert in Agricultural Engineering
Shao Zenghu (date unknown)
Going to Town
Chen Danqing (b. 1950)
Retrieving the Lost Time
Zeng Zhengming (b. 1952)
Re-visiting Home Village
Lie Tan (b. 1935)
Star Lights of May
Zhu Naizheng (b. 1935)
Efforts
Gu Yue and Ma Yiping
Spring Wind is Awakening
Ai Xuan (b. 1956)
My Land
Ai Xuan
“Avant-garde” Artists and works
Fang Lijun (b. 1963)
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Series II, No. 7, 1991-92.
Series II, No. 4, 1991-92.
Landscape, No.1, 1990.
Family, 1989.
Series I, No. 1, 1991.
Series I, No. 3, 1990.
Series I, No. 4, 1991.
Landscape, No. 2, 1990.
Landscape, No. 3, 1990.
Gen Jianyi (b. 1961)
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Second Condition, 1987.
Gu Wenda (b. 1954)
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Ink on Paper, 1982.
Number II, 1982.
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3.
Backward, 1985.
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Audience as Pawns in A Game, 1987.
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Do You Want Us to Read and Amend on the Word "Tranquility" Written by Three Men and Three
Women?, 1989.
Li Shan (b. 1944)
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The Rouge Series, No. 22, 1992.
The Rouge Series, No. 34, 1992.
The Rouge Series, No. 24, 1992.
The Rouge Series, No. 33, 1992.
Rouge A, 1991.
Rouge B. 1991.
Liu Wei (b. 1965)
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Mao Zedong, 1990.
The New Generation, 1992.
The Revolutionary Family: Dad & Mum, 1990.
Comrades, 1990.
Dad & Mum, 1990.
Good Old Dad, 1991.
Spring Dream in a Garden: Dad in Front of T. V., 1992.
Dad & Mum, 1991.
Shunzhi Emperor, 1988.
Empress Dowager, 1988.
Family, 1990.
Long Live Our Great Leader Chairman Mao, 1991.
A Noble Lady, 1988.
Women in Woods, 1989.
Uncles, 1992.
Bird & Flower, 1989.
Lu Shengzhong (b. 1955)
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Pacing, 1989.
Little Red Babies, 1989.
Wang Guangyi (b. 1957)
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Worker-Peasant-Soldier and Coca-Cola, 1992.
Great Criticism, 1990.
Red Ration--Revision of Idol, 1987.
Solidified Northern Polar Region, 1985.
Mao Zedong. Red Check No. 2, 1988.
Wang Jingsong (b. 1963)
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Taking a Picture in Front of Tiananmen Square, 1992.
Chorus Line, 1990.
Group Picture, 1991.
Stage Show, 1990.
Mass "Qigong", 1991.
Sports, 1990.
"I Have Been to the Great Wall!" 1992.
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Xu Bing (b. 1954)
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A Mirror to Analyse the World (Synthetic Material), 1988.
Ghost Pounding the Wall (Rubbing), 1990.
A Mirror to Observe the World (Synthetic Material), 1988.
Classroom Calligraphy, 1995
Ye Yongqing (b. 1958)
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Big-character Poster, 1990.
Yu Youhan (b. 1944)
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Mao Zedong and Revolution, 1990.
Round-shape, 1990.
Red Image of Mao Waving, 1992.
Mao Out of Focus, 1992.
Mao Zedong in His Home Village, 1991.
Zhang Peili (b. 1957)
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Three Minutes of Washing Chicken,
Anchors, 1992.
Jazz, 1985.
Untitled, 1992.
Chinese Culturism, 1989.
No Jazz for Tonight, 1987.
X?, 1987.
Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, female)
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River-weighing, 1995
River-washing, 1995
Dress Box, 1995
Ruined City, 1996
Dinning Table, 1997
Unknitting, 1997
Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961, female)
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Bound, Unbound, 1995-97
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Bound, Unbound, 1995-97
3.
The Temptation of Santa Teresa, 1995
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The Proliferation of Thread Winding, 1995
5.
Tree, 1997
Zhang Lei (b. 1965, female)
1.
Li Qingzhao, 1995
2.
Washing, Sun-dring, Lasa, Tibet, 1996
Cai Jing (b. 1965, female)
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Shoes and Pigments, 1998
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2.
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Bicycle sits and Pigments, 1998
Banana Groves, 1994-7
Shi Hui (b. 1957, female)
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Net, 1997
Net, 1997
Net, 1998
Net 1998
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1989 Exhibition: NO U-TURN
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Xu Bing: A Mirror to Analyse the World (Synthetic Material)
Gu Wenda: "Inspiration Comes From Tranqillity" (Soft-sculpture)
Huang Yongping: A History of Chinese Painting (by Li Yu) and A Concise History of Modern
Painting (by Herbert Read, installation).
Wu Shanzhuan: Cabbage (Synthetic Material)
Ding Yi + Shows, III, (Oil on Canvas)
Xiao Lu and Tang Song: Dialogue (installation).
Wei Guangqing: Suicide, No. I.
Hou Hanru and Yang Jiechang: Action, Dialogue and Human.
Wang Guangyi: Series of Post-Classic.
Wang Luyan: Art of Tactile Sensation.
Yu Jiyong: Composition 8510.
Feng Guodong: Alarm Clock Series.
Sun Baoguo: Vessal.
Chen Wenji: Pink Paper.
Huang Yali: Red Earth Series.
Wang Chuan: Ink on Paper.
Jian Jun: Existence.
Wang Gongyi: Untitled.
Song Gang: Diary.
Shi Benming: Dream.
Jiang Hai: Face.
Xiao Xiaolan: Christmas.
Wang Jiang: Untitled.
Wu Shaoxiang: Shoe.
Ding Defu: Libido Phantasies.
Ye Yongqing: Escaping.
Liang Yue: Urban Series.
Lin Chun: Action II.
Zuo Zhengyao and Luo Ying: Returning.
Liu Yan: Altar.
Dong Chao: Confusing Series.
Zhu Yan: 3 x 3 = 9