Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-sh8wx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T02:09:29.545Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction - Toward a short history of visual culture in contemporary China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2015

Xiaobing Tang
Xiaobing Tang
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Get access

Summary

In this interdisciplinary study, I present and discuss artistic expressions and experiments that are pivotal to our understanding of the logic and complexity of contemporary Chinese visual culture. The six chapters take us from the mid-twentieth century to the present, covering the entire history of the People’s Republic. An array of artwork in various media and genres is examined in detail, and more is referred to. Most of these visual objects may be, and some have been, studied in academic disciplines such as art history and film studies, but I believe the notion of visual culture allows us to appreciate their significance in more interactive and more explanatory contexts. More than embodying a specific artistic imagination or conceptual innovation, these works of art take up different positions – from high to low, academic to popular, public to personal – in an evolving structure of visibility, and they contribute instrumentally, as I seek to demonstrate, to the production of a complex visual order and experience that is recognizably Chinese and contemporary. They illustrate a succession of changing practices and paradigms. What this study reveals, I hope, is the deep resonance of continuing efforts to create a distinct Chinese culture and identity in the modern era.

Type
Chapter
Information
Visual Culture in Contemporary China
Paradigms and Shifts
 , pp. 1 - 17
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, “Introduction: What Is Visual Culture?,” in Mirzoeff, , An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 26Google Scholar
Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Periodical Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 29–103Google Scholar
Dikovitskaya, Margaret, “The Study of Visual Culture: A Bibliographic Essay,” in Dikovitskaya, The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 6–7Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T., “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 7, no. 4 (1995), 542Google Scholar
Efland, Arthur, “Problems Confronting Visual Culture,” Art Education, vol. 58, no. 6 (2005), 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolff, Janet, “After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy,” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 11, no. 1 (2012), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holloway, David and Beck, John, “General Introduction: Towards a Social Theory of American Visual Cultures,” in Holloway, and Beck, , eds., American Visual Cultures (London: Continuum, 2005), 2–4.Google Scholar
Rawlinson, Mark, American Visual Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 1–6.Google Scholar
Levenson, Joseph, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages, with a foreword by Wakeman, Jr Frederick E.. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1.Google Scholar
Vukovich, Daniel F., China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (London: Routledge, 2012), 26–9Google Scholar
Clark, Timothy et al., The Revolution of Modern Art and the Art of Modern Revolution, first composed in 1967 (Norfolk, UK: Chronos Publications, 1994)Google Scholar
“On the Concept of the Avant-Garde in Chinese Art,” Journal of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art History, vol. 20 (2010), 202–14
Clark, Paul, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 202Google Scholar
Meng, Wang, “Voices of Spring,” in The Butterfly and Other Stories (Beijing: Panda Books, 1983), 139.Google Scholar
Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), 120–4.Google Scholar
Sihe, Chen, “Gongming yu wuming” (Shared Naming and Absence of Naming), first published in 1996, in Chen Sihe zixuan ji (Selected Essays of Chen Sihe) (Nanning: Guangxi sifan daxue, 1997), 139–52.Google Scholar
China Contemporary: Architecture, Art, Visual Culture, exhibition catalogue (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006)
Zakaria, Fareed, The Post-American World, release 2.0, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2011)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×