Peggy Wang. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, . xiv, pp. Hardcover $, ISBN ----. Paperback $, ISBN ----. The dissident in post-Tiananmen Chinese art history has been fetishized by the West. Peggy Wang highlights in The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art that this misplaced attention shoehorns artwork, neglects artistic agency, and ignores how artists in the s responded to a wide swathe of cultural and intellectual dialogues. Addressing this dissident trope, chapter , titled “Spaces of Self-Recognition,” probes art criticism and major debates in the s and uncovers new lines of inquiry that indigenize the understanding of postTiananmen Chinese art history. One debate was the how and why of bridging the distance and differences between contemporary Chinese art and established centers of the art world. Art critics contended that Chinese artists must develop their own standard and objectives. Rather than emulating Western styles and modes of making art, Chinese artists, critics held, should embrace the history and culture of minzu or Chinese ethnicity. “New Realism,” exemplified by the oil paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b. ) and Yu Hong (b. ), gained appeal among critics who found that realist ideology embraces minzu and orients the future of contemporary Chinese art. By focusing on China’s social reality and local environments, Chinese artists, as critics hypothesized, could bring lived experience to the center of their art, embrace contemporaneity without succumbing to Western art, and profess “Chineseness” (p. ) without being fettered to the past. Such direction could make China a new contemporary art center. Pivoting on this sentiment in the art circle in the s, Wang, in subsequent chapters, spotlights five artists whose works have largely suffered from well worn, limited interpretations derived from the dissident lens and explores how they used their works to claim agency in their own world. These five artists are Zhang Xiaogang (b. ), Wang Guangyi (b. ), Sui Jianguo (b. ), Zhang Peili (b. ), and Lin Tianmiao (b. ). Titled “Zhang Xiaogang: Bloodline and Belonging,” chapter focuses on how the early works in Zhang’s Bloodline series (begun in ) speaks to the artist’s shifting engagement with the world and artistic explorations, as well as an art historical lineage in representing “relationship.” During his study at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in , Zhang’s works were greatly inspired by Review© by University of Hawai‘i Press European masters, ranging from Michelangelo (–) to Vincent van Gogh (–). In the next fifteen years, Zhang continued to see European masters as “gods” who gave him “encouragement” (p. ). Nuancing the interpretation that Zhang’s early works were simply derivative of Western art, Wang regards the artist’s prolonged self-identification with the Western art tradition and the resulting artworks as illustrations to the artist’s worldly belonging and representations of an art historical relationship. In , Zhang spent three months in Germany, during which he also visited Paris and Amsterdam. Not only had seeing European masters’ works in person, Wang reveals, shattered Zhang’s past understanding of their styles, the artist’s visit to Amsterdam also allowed him to see how van Gogh’s works was tied to his indigeneity to the Dutch landscape, his place of existence. During Zhang’s visit to the exhibition of contemporary art Documenta (Kassel, Germany), he witnessed how the display of art was a de facto capitalist spectacle. These experiences in Europe, as Wang explains, made Zhang reorient the relationship of his art to Chinese history and culture, resulting in works like the Bloodline series. Far from being a protest of socialist suppression, the series, which was based on a set of old family photos, was rather the artist’s deep study of the representation of human relationship. Also, Zhang derived the handling of paint and the anonymity of figures in the series from the calendar posters from the early twentieth century, which, as Wang argues, situated his representation of relationship in an art historical lineage. Titled “Wang Guangyi: Pop and the People,” chapter challenges the persistent assumption that Wang Guangyi’s works were simply derivative of Western styles and presents the artist’s journey in developing his Mao Zedong AO () and The Great Criticism series from China’s own visual culture and the experiences that...
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Dec 30, 2022
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