Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there is an incipient market in China strong enough to replace the global market for Chinese contemporary art. The (informal) market I have identified supports traditional methods of transaction and practice. It charts a course twixt slavish emulation of the past and unqualified acceptance of the present. To demonstrate the contemporary application of this trend, I introduce three case studies, which examine the attitude and behaviour of three Chinese artists active between 2005 and 2015. This period marks the transformation of China from an aspirant economic power to a self-confident advocate of Chinese values. The premise of this paper is that the China market today is moving towards a harmonious ideal rooted in Chinese thought. In the nineteenth-century art movement known as the Shanghai School, I have found a precedent for the evolutionary transformation of Chinese art from the traditional to the modern. This study will reveal how the Shanghai School market might be an exemplar for today’s Chinese contemporary art market. I will refer to this historical model to show how conventional methods of creation, distribution and consumption can effectively be modernised. Another effort to culturally transform China was attempted a generation later in the southern city of Guangzhou. The movement, known as the Lingnan School, attempted to fuse Western-style realism with Chinese techniques and media. I argue that these two early attempts to amalgamate the traditional with the modern failed to metamorphose into a consolidated Chinese contemporary art market model. They have, instead, resulted in the co-existence of two corrupted models; the one, a diffident fusion of the past and the modern world, and the other a concerted alliance of nationalism and globalism.
Highlights
The Chinese market for contemporary art is temporally bound to the period of economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping1 in 1977 until the present (Wang 2013)
I argue that these two early attempts to amalgamate the traditional with the modern failed to metamorphose into a consolidated Chinese contemporary art market model
Arts 2020, 9, 121 and Western commentators commonly refer is that which most closely corresponds to the international market for contemporary art
Summary
The Chinese market for contemporary art is temporally bound to the period of economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1977 until the present (Wang 2013). Arts 2020, 9, 121 and Western commentators commonly refer is that which most closely corresponds to the international market for contemporary art. The artist society has a long history in China, and is close in flavour to European artists’ guilds These institutions were transformed into organs of state under the Communist government, manufacturing an art commonly referred to, since the early twentieth century, as national painting.. For traditional-style art, the genesis of which, I believe, lies in the Shanghai and Lingnan Schools These two markets represent, in a sense, the ideological battlefield of contemporary art in China today
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