Playing cards with Cézanne : how the contemporary artists of China copy and recreate

textMy dissertation investigates the concepts and techniques of “copying” and appropriation in contemporary Chinese art, which, despite its phenomenal growth, has seldom been credited as original. Critics either condemn the Chinese artists’ willingness to appropriate from others as a lack of individuality, or declare it as a peculiarly “Chinese” quality. This paper, instead, argues that the Chinese artists deliberately adopt such “copying” as a visual strategy, in order to reexamine the traditions they “borrowed”, to reflect on their own cultural status in the modern world, and to challenge the conventional concept of originality--namely, to show that originality is not created by irreducible individuality or mystified inspiration, but by the author’s choice as well as manipulation of contexts. This strategy, I argue, is essential to the proper evaluation and interpretation of contemporary Chinese artworks. The first two chapters of my dissertation focus on laying out the context from which this art grows. I review how the ideas, styles and institutional structures of western modern art were imitated, questioned and redefined by the Chinese artists, from 1978 to the present; I then examine the conceptual complexity of originality and “copying” in the theories of modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and in traditional Chinese art. The next two chapters focus on, respectively, calligraphy and photography in contemporary Chinese art, both of which contain the paradox between originality and “copying” in their very nature. The works of four artists, Xu Bing, Qiu Zhijie, Hong Hao and Zhao Bandi, are discussed in details. Xu's site-specific reproduction of “pseudo characters” manage to engage its targeted audiences, psychologically and physically; Qiu's obsessive yet futile copying of a canon of calligraphy returns the act of writing to its essence--a physical pursuit of one's spiritual state of being; Hong's photographic emulation of an ancient masterpiece suggests that painting may excel photography in its ability to portray a grand cityscape; Zhao’s simulacrum of pop culture paradigms enables him to evade political censorship, and to have an substantial yet ironic impact in a broader public sphere. Each of these works has made a unique contribution to the redefinition of artistic originality.Comparative Literatur

The adoption and impact of computer integrated prepress systems in the printing and publishing industries of Kuwait

This research is aimed at developing a comprehensive picture of the implications of digital technology in the graphic arts industries in Kuwait. The purpose of the study is twofold: (1) to explore the meaning of the outcomes of recent technological change processes for the traditional prepress occupations in Kuwait; and, (2) to examine the impact of technology on Arabic layout and design. The study is based on the assumption that technological change is a chain of interactions among the sociological, cultural, political and economic variables. The prepress area in Kuwait has its own cultural, social, economic, and political structure. When a new technology is introduced it is absorbed and shaped by the existing structure. Based on such a dialectical conceptualisation, four major levels of analysis can be distinguished in this study: (1) technological change in the graphic arts industries; (2) the typographic evolution of the Arabic script; (3) the workers themselves as individuals and occupational collectives; and, (4) technology's impact on Arabic publication design. The methodological approach selected for this study can be defined as a dialectical, interpretive exploration. Given the historical perspective and the multiple levels of analysis, this approach calls for a variety of data gathering methods. Both qualitative and quantitative data were sought. A combination of document analysis, participant observation and interviewing allow to link the historical and current events with individual and collective actions, perceptions and interpretations of reality. The findings presented in this study contradicts the belief that the widespread adoption of new production processes is coincidental with continuous advances in scientific knowledge which provide the basis for the development of new technologies. Instead, the changes have been hindered by the lack of untrained personnel, the Arabic software incompatibility, and the lack of informed decisions to successfully implement the technology. Without any doubt, the new technology has influenced Arabic calligraphy, but this does not mean the decay of Arabic calligraphy as an art. As this study shows, the challenge is not to the art, but to the artist

The Chinese Seal in the Making, 1904-1937

Seals are hand-held printing blocks inscribed with some pattern, generally text. They were objects of immense power and prestige in imperial China. This dissertation examines the modern afterlife of inscribed seals against the backdrop of the decline and collapse of an imperial era order of knowledge and social status, the rise of modern consumer markets and mass culture, and the local accommodation of modern disciplines that promoted new ways of classifying and engaging the material world. In late imperial China (ca. 1600s-1800s), seals legitimized the rule of the emperor and his civil servants and marked the taste and erudition of the literati elite. As hand-held printing blocks that replicated in ink small textual signs, they produced authorizing marks of personhood and office and attracted elite collectors as calligraphic compositions of antiquarian interest. In modern China, seals proliferated within the cosmopolitan material culture of cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai. As the seal was transformed following the disintegration the imperial system, its multifaceted meanings and functions were increasingly subsumed under a monolithic category of "Chinese seal" as art object. The making of the "Chinese seal" as a representative fine art and marker of a distinctive Chinese culture evolved out of the diverse ways in which the carvers, consumers, scholars, and users of seals defined the object's significance in a modern world. This dissertation is thus structured around the new social venues in which the seal emerged in the first four decades of the twentieth century, from the final years of imperial rule through the period of the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). The seal in premodern China was not an unchanging part of a traditional material culture. Its uses and significance had already undergone dramatic, historically contingent, transformations before the twentieth century. Chapter one broadly examines the multifaceted functions of the seal through Chinese history, and explains the emergence of the seal as an object of literati fascination in the late imperial period. The relationship between seal carving and the literati way of life would have to be at least partially displaced for seal carving to survive China's transition to a more mass-oriented society. Chapter two demonstrates how members of the Xiling Seal Society (founded 1904), the first-ever specialized institution devoted to seal carving and inscriptions celebrated literati values of amateurism and exclusivity while simultaneously contributing to the commodification, public visibility, and transformation of literati seal carving. The Xiling Seal Society, as a modern heritage institution based in Hangzhou, had a commercial counterpart in Shanghai with a national and international consumer base. Chapter three uses catalogues of this business and its offshoots as evidence of the crucial role of the market in transmitting and modifying seal carving and related aspects of elite material culture after the collapse of the imperial order. While the Shanghai Xiling Seal Society positioned itself against a vulgarization of seal carving in contemporary society, it incrementally detached the seal from a broader framework of imperial era knowledge production and ultimately marketed it as a customizable commodity suitable to the needs of the modern consumer. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the emerging categorization of the seal as a fine art object. Through an examination of how-to manuals published during the Republican period, chapter 4 focuses on the ways in which practitioners characterized their expertise and how their practical instruction aimed at a general reader marked a transformation of the concept of amateurism. Chapter 5 looks at the seal's incorporation into state-sponsored national exhibitions of fine art held in 1929 and 1937 and the tensions produced by the collision of connoisseurship culture with the mass pedagogy of "aesthetic education." The categorization of seal carving as fine art can be understood as the grafting of an exogenous classification system onto a local practice. But this new categorization did not only transform the seal, it also transformed the very category of "fine arts" as it was understood in China. The final chapter examines the seal as an object of scholarly inquiry and the relationship between seals, seal carving, and an indigenous field of metal and stone inscription study (jinshi). The second director of the Xiling Seal Society, a scholar named Ma Heng, incorporated seals into his vision of metal and stone inscription study as a sub-discipline of modern historical scholarship. Ma Heng judged seal carving not by the aesthetics of the seal composition, but by the integrity of the archaic text as an accurately rendered play upon epigraphic models. His insistence that seal carving be understood as an expression of scholarship serves as a reminder of how awkwardly imperial era practices of connoisseurship and knowledge production mapped onto a modern field of disciplines, with their hardened boundaries between the arts and the sciences. Today, the Chinese government promotes seal carving as a representative part of an ancient and enduring Chinese culture. As examined in the dissertation's epilogue, the People's Republic of China has succeeded in having "the art of Chinese seal engraving" inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The seal has now come into the purview of the contemporary state's heritage politics. This has only been possible because the seal proved useful, significant, and accessible to people in the early twentieth century even after the imperial system that had accounted for the object's former prestige was torn asunder

Enchanting borders: the art & psychology of Chinese hanging scroll mounting.

Chau, Cheuk Ying.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010.Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-275).Abstracts in English and Chinese; includes Chinese.List of Illustrations --- p.viAcknowledgements --- p.ixIntroduction： a Psychological Approach to the Art of Mounting --- p.1The Significance of Mounting --- p.3Classical Literature and Past Research on Chinese Mounting --- p.10a psychological approach --- p.18Dissertation Structure --- p.24Chapter Chapter One： --- Scrolling' through History --- p.33Desire to Display´ؤFrom the Warring States to the Tang Dynasty --- p.33Splendid Adornment - The Song Dynasty --- p.40Emergence of the Literati - The Ming Dynasty --- p.60Subtlest of Pastels - The Qing Dynasty --- p.74Virtual Invisibility - The Republican Period and After --- p.84A Thousand Years of Hanging Scroll Mounting --- p.92Chapter Chapter Two： --- Seeing through the Enchanting Borders --- p.97Palette and Induction --- p.99Depth and Window --- p.109Oversized Outfit and Illusionary Size --- p.120Stave Strips and Composition --- p.126psychology and chinese hanging scroll mounting --- p.133Chapter Chapter Three： --- Experiment on Aesthetic Quality of Mounting --- p.137Method --- p.141Results --- p.146Discussion --- p.149Limitations --- p.152Conclusion： Subordination of Mounting --- p.153Appendix A： Experiment Questions --- p.157Appendix b： List of Artworks Included in the Experiment --- p.159Appendix c: Artworks Presentation Sequence in Different Groups --- p.161Appendix d： Aesthetic Quality Rating Sections of Different Groups --- p.162Group k --- p.162Group L --- p.168Chapter 1.1 --- Group M --- p.174Group n --- p.180Appendix E： Means (Standard Deviations) for Aesthetic Quality Ratings --- p.186Plates --- p.187Bibliography --- p.26

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

Re-conceptualizing foreignness : the English translation of Chinese calligraphic culture

Foreignness is one primary concern of Translation Studies. Chinese calligraphy, with its unique aesthetic pursuits and cultural underpinnings, presents an unusual case of foreign otherness in relation to the English language. Thus, theories derived from the translation of Chinese calligraphic culture into English can contribute to our existing knowledge of the nature of translation. Despite sporadic endeavors, translation issues related to Chinese calligraphy remain largely under-researched. This thesis constructs a theoretical framework that offers new perspectives on translating foreignness by exploring how the culture of Chinese calligraphy, concretized in the discourses of classical treatises, has been translated into English since the early 20th century. The study of English discourses on Chinese calligraphy, which include linguistic translation, cultural translation, cultural domestication, and statements of facts, reveals a special translational mode that features an interactive and flexible re-contextualization of Chinese calligraphic culture. This study finds that while the traditional practice of translation does not guarantee cross-cultural comprehensibility, the English texts have accommodated the culture of Chinese calligraphy by reconstructing its basics and resorting to visual means of representation. This thesis divides textual manifestations of Chinese calligraphic culture into three parts –– terms, descriptions and metaphors. For terms, I hold that the study of their translations from etymological perspectives implies the possibility of an endless debate on what constitutes a good translation. My study demonstrates that the repeated use of some widely accepted translations is harmless to cultural genuineness and cross-cultural understanding. For descriptive expressions, translation effects diverge from bringing out literal meanings to revealing cultural meanings. Besides, cultural dilution of varying degrees is found in translation. Calligraphic metaphors, which exemplify traditional Chinese worldviews and correlative thinking patterns, are largely unfamiliar to English-speaking readers. My study reveals a re-contextualizing endeavor that revitalizes these metaphors in the Anglo-American context. On the basis of the case study of the English texts on Chinese calligraphy, this thesis proposes a new theoretical framework for re-conceptualizing foreignness. The three components of this framework are bicultural competency, intercultural competency, and cross-cultural attitudes, all gravitating towards the goal of understanding foreignness. In addition, I introduce three levels of foreign knowledge that cover one’s perception of foreignness at different stages of understanding and with different depths. I also propose to expand the meaning of intercultural integration that is a key manifestation of intercultural competency. One salient part of this framework is that I place anthropological and traditional Chinese zhihui approaches under the structure of cross- cultural attitudes. Such a theoretical advancement empowers the explanative mechanism of the framework. Finally, I argue that the representation of foreignness as it is can be accomplished by strategic re-contextualization, and thus meanings lost in one place can be regained somewhere else

The Use of Aesthetics in a Comprehensive Art Curriculum

This study focuses on using aesthetics in the art education curriculum. It also suggests a variety of approaches through which art educators may implement aesthetics in the classroom. Discussions of aesthetics were found in writings of Plato and Aristotle and continue to this day. Philosophers have defined aesthetics as a theory of the beautiful. Educators took this idea a step further in developing curricula and methods of educating that include aesthetics. It has been said in art education literature that aesthetics gives those who practice it a more complete understanding of art. To show the extent of benefits that aesthetics can have in art education, examples of aesthetic experiences are reviewed and discussed. The aesthetics as a philosophy of art has developed into methods used in education. These methods will be discussed. Using the knowledge that aesthetics reveals will demonstrate the importance of art through comparative analysis and historical variation. Aesthetics provide important knowledge about art that can give a classroom teacher motivational dialogue and stimulating ideas in teaching art. Helping students to understand the connection between art and aesthetics allows students to know more about and better understand the importance of each

Site Specifics: Modernist Mediums in Modern Places

This dissertation argues that the modernist doctrine of medium specificity, the idea that the autonomy of the arts arises from artworks' investigation of the properties and limits of their materials, grounds artistic production in the place where it was produced. The identity of artistic mediums (writing, painting, sculpture, and land art) depends on their literal placement in physical, geographic environments. Medium specificity requires site specificity. In the aesthetic, art-historical discourses I consider -- Gertrude Stein's account of Cubism, Soviet avant-garde writings on Constructivism, Robert Smithson's texts on landscape, earth art, and Minimalism -- the mediums of art-making are located in places that serve simultaneously as construction sites, sources of raw materials, and models of aesthetic form. They are both the subject of representation and the representational means, the work's content, form, and substance. Art derives its physical properties, its subject matter, and its formal laws from the geography, topography, and geology of the sites at which it is made. Stein retroactively models Picasso's Cubism (and her own plays) on the spatial juxtaposition of houses and mountains in the Spanish landscape. Shklovsky discovers Constructivist principles (and those of his own formalist aesthetics) in the daily life of post-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Smithson finds a model for earth art and for the recovery of history from universal entropy in the "dialectical landscape" of Central Park. For all three of these aesthetic theorists and practitioners, natural processes are entangled with social history, reciprocally modifying each other at the intersections of the built and the found. The specific site is constituted by such intersections and models site-specific art as a legible composition of modern life. By literally taking place, the site-specific artworks these writers describe, theorize, and propose acquire historical specificity, an identity that both indexes the social order that gave rise to them and resists or revises it. This autonomy of the artwork is the stake of site-specificity. An artwork's capacity to resist its present, to be autonomous from or non-identical with the dominant mode of production of its time, is a function of its localization in a socially determined site. A site-specific work is made from materials that are arranged in real space and organized by the laws governing this space. By turning social materials and social laws into its own constructive principle, such a work makes them perceivable and reveals the historical processes at work in them. Manifesting history in its material composition and formal arrangement, the site-specific artwork both remembers and remakes it

Reworking the classics: revitalization of Guohua, traditional Chinese painting in search of contemporaneity

Since the early twentieth century a quest has been eagerly anticipated for Chinese painters to revive and rejuvenate the concept guohua, which literally means national painting. In Hong Kong which serves as a convergence of Chinese and Western cultural narratives, "hybridity" comes to be a primary concern for local artists to take into consideration in their art creation. As a Chinese painter I consider my artworks to related to the guohua concept, however I also aim to shape my art to reveal the identity of Hong Kong culture through hybridity, and to revive guohua through sustaining the great tradition of bimo (literally meaning the brush and ink), in Chinese painting, as well as appropriating Western modes of expression. Based on the concept of "reworking the classics", I decipher the codes embedded in traditional landscape painting and attempt to infuse my paintings with a new and contemporary look. With regard to spatial definition, I reinterpret the concept of the void and the solid and employ a multi-panelled setting for my works in order to further develop the "reworking" concept. Recently, I have been actively exploring other media, such as sound in order to create a contrast between ancient Chinese cultural heritage and contemporary city-life