Inside out: rethinking contemporary Chinese art and global creative economy

This thesis is to destabilize the Western dominant understanding of contemporary Chinese art when it circulates on the global art market, such as the all-to-common narratives only celebrating Chinese artists who are politically criticizing or resist the Chinese authority. Meanwhile, I also question the authority control inside of China, especially the mainstream criteria of aesthetics and art. Cultural anthropologist Aihwa Ong observes that some Western scholars believe contemporary Chinese art to be “crass opportunism with reduced aesthetic value.”Chinese American artist and art critic Chen Danqing criticizes contemporary Chinese art from the last ten years as too utilitarian: “During the Cultural Revolution, all [Chinese] artists worried about their artworks not being ‘revolutionary’; today, I see they only worry about their ‘tricks’ are not ‘contemporary’ enough.” He critically argued that Chinese art today is a consequence of learning Western art due to a lack of cultural confidence. I argue that contemporary Chinese art is not market-driven or simply copy Western arts. It has been shaped by the context of its particular socio-political and economic condition since the middle of the twentieth century. I also emphasize the specialness of “contemporaneity” in contemporary Chinese art

Uneven and combined development: modernity, modernism, revolution

Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development was born out of his experience of the Russian Revolution. To mark the centenary of the revolution, we are publishing a series of five pieces by Neil Davidson that explore the theory’s wider contribution to how we understand capitalist modernity. These articles show how ideas that began life in the revolution continue to inspire new ways of grasping the world, and that we are very much engaging in a living 21st century world when reflecting on the previous century. The series published here are extracts of his forthcoming book Violating all the Laws of History that will be published in the Haymarket Historical Materialism series in 2018

Chinese Glass Paintings in Bangkok Monasteries

Reverse glass paintings, a form of Chinese export art, were extensively traded in the nineteenth century. Several examples are on display in prominent Thai Buddhist monasteries in Bangkok. King Nangklao of Siam, Rama III, encouraged Sino-Siamese trade that brought Chinese objects and images to nineteenth-century Siam. The ideals of accretion and abundance characteristic of Thai Buddhism and the sinophilia of Rama III facilitated the construction of “Chinese-style” Thai temples. Glass paintings with scenes of the Pearl River Delta, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, auspicious objects, and bird-and-flower compositions were installed in temples and inspired new directions in Thai mural painting

Bauhausian Rhapsody 4.0: Mein Erbe, (My Heritage and Legacy) Design Thinking and Creativity in the Spirit of the Bauhaus

This honors thesis is a continued exploration of my Adrian Tinsley Program Summer Grant titled “Bauhausian Rhapsody, Uncle Chester went to Cambridge: An Adventure with Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative”. The Bauhaus was a school in Germany created in 1919, which for the first-time combined art education with applied arts and new technology. Today’s maker movement, and makerspaces, follow through with that idea and encourage creative problem solving, design thinking, craftsmanship, and technology. My ATP summer research focused on my great-uncle Chester Nagel, an architect who studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard from 1939-1940, and later became a professor of architecture from 1946-1984. Nagel spoke often and wrote essays and memoirs about the teaching style and philosophies of Walter Gropius regarding creativity, collaboration, and design. It is interesting to compare Gropius’s views as I research contemporary trends of design education, materials, and practice

The Architect-Teacher’s Role in Formulating Architectural Pedagogy in China before 1952: The Examples of Huang Zuoshen and Liang Sicheng

This thesis examines China’s early modern architectural pedagogy before the 1952 restructuring of higher education under the Communist regime. In this context, it reflects on two key figures—Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) and Huang Zuoshen (1915–1975)—in their respective departments of architectural engineering at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and St. John’s University (SJU, Shanghai). I explore three themes—architect-teacher, makeshift modernity, and contested discourse—which encapsulate Huang’s and Liang’s teaching methodology and reflect their foreign-study experiences. Part 1 is dedicated to Huang: his studies at the Architectural Association (1933–1938) in Britain during its curricular revolution inspired by the Modern Architectural Research Group; his learning at the Graduate School of Design (1939–1941), not only from Gropius (the focus of previous scholarship) but also other modernists; and the SJU architecture programme Huang established in 1942, where he gathered an international faculty and promoted progressive approaches beyond Bauhaus principles. Part 2 features Liang’s environmental design pedagogy at Tsinghua: his concept of building (ying jian, culminating in his proposal for a College of Building); his methods of teaching city planning (which he added to his curriculum after the Second World War); and his influences from midwestern US institutions (i.e., the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the University of Michigan, and Taliesin) and Harvard’s Fogg Museum of Art. Finally, the thesis investigates Huang’s and Liang’s beliefs about the social position of the architect. It aligns Liang’s views on architecture’s relationship to society, engineering, and art with Huang’s commitment to architecture’s popular, scientific, and national aspects in post-1949 China. This thesis demonstrates that, despite the differences between inward-looking Beijing and outward-looking Shanghai, and between Liang’s and Huang’s respective backgrounds in the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus modernism, these two figures embody the pedagogic plurality that characterised the establishment of architectural education in the first half of twentieth-century China

The Politics of Memory: Cultural Interaction and Confrontation among the Haunting Ghosts of Russians, Japanese, and Chinese in Harbin

This dissertation focuses on a spatial analysis of the cultural memories of Harbin, a city in Northeast China, a former (semi)colony of Russia and Japan, and a habitat of more than forty nationalities from across the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Harbins history, determined in great part by a large foreign presence, is still a matter of contention in China and elsewhere. By adopting Pierre Noras concept of lieux de mmoire (places of memory), Henri Lefebvres notion of the social production of space, and concepts and theories of many others, this dissertation investigates the contested memories of Harbin through the lens of architecture, literature, film, and television drama. It conducts interdisciplinary and inter-medial examinations of Harbin as an encompassing lieu de mmoire, where various practices demonstrate, individually and collectively, differently yet consistently, the social signification of the citys pasts in the present, enriching the city with ambivalent and contradictory meanings, and contributing to the social production of the memorial space and spatial memory of the city. This dissertation examines Harbin as a contact zone amongst Russia, Japan, and China, and as a periphery of the cultural heartland of China. It attaches importance to memories as an arena for the contemporary Harbiners to negotiate the divergent ideologies, power contests, and economic and cultural concerns. The city itself is a palimpsest, a text which has experienced, and is experiencing, a process of being effaced and rewritten, translated, and resignified. The citys contested past overlaps with its present, persistently haunting and shaping the city, while experiencing metamorphosis and resurrection. Overshadowed by the real-and-imagined ghosts of the past, Harbin continues to function as a contested contact zone and frontier that de-territorializes Chinas homogeneous cultural identity from the periphery. In this way, Harbin describes a local particularism by evoking a future-oriented reinvigoration of its cosmopolitan past in the current context of globalization. In this process, contemporary Harbiners demonstrate ambivalence and paradox in promoting the citys exoticism as much as complying with the states construction of nationalism

Tomimoto Kenkichi and the discourse of modern Japanese ceramics

In Japan, ceramics has long been considered a medium associated with elevated aesthetic expression and high cultural capital. However, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw transformations of its epistemological underpinnings. The collapse of the feudal system gave rise to the multivalenced concept of "art craft" (bijutsu kôgei) that included "art ceramics." For individual artists like Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963), ceramics traversed a parallel path with other mediums of modern art that emphasized self-expression and hybridizations of multiple geo-historical sources. Ultimately, these ceramics became significant state-supported symbols of the nation. An analysis of the art, praxis, and theories of Tomimoto Kenkichi presents an ideal case study for illuminating the central mechanisms responsible for the emergence and development of modern Japanese art ceramics. With a wide angle yet critical perspective lacking in previous studies, this dissertation not only reveals Tomimoto's complex individual role in the history of modern ceramics, but also sheds light on the ontology of modern Japanese craft itself. By considering Tomimoto's entire oeuvre-- including calligraphy, ceramics, design goods, painting, and prints--we may track the development of his modernist embrace of the direct observation of nature, abstract form, and original expression. His praxis, synergistically modeled on William Morris and Ogata Kenzan, reveals a modernist stance towards Japanese literati culture in which ceramics became a medium negotiating between British Arts and Crafts design; modernist European sculpture; and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese historical ceramics. The dissertation's diachronic structure charts artistic concepts, ideologies, and creative works from the late Meiji to the mid-Shôwa eras, relying on formal analysis as well as organizational analysis of pedagogical systems, art organizations, and exhibition structures. Chapter One considers Tomimoto's lineal inheritances, university education, and self-study. Chapter Two explores Tomimoto's discourse of self-expression and the equivalency of artistic mediums. Chapter Three deconstructs the image of the ceramic vessel and Tomimoto's discourse of ceramic form according to respective engagements with Joseon porcelain and modernist sculpture. Chapter Four analyzes the sinophilic and modernist aspects of his overglaze enamel porcelain. Finally, Chapter Five surveys the role of exhibitions and preservation efforts in positioning ceramics as art and national tradition

Negotiating the Discourse of the Modern in Art: Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) and the Transnational Modern.

This dissertation offers a critical reassessment of Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) and her works. Although scholarship on Pan Yuliang has proliferated in past decades, it has focused on a review of her works, her status as a woman artist, and a revised assessment of her contribution to the legacy of modern art in China during the twentieth century. By situating her work within the international cultural politics of the mid-twentieth century, the dissertation recasts her works as media through which she negotiated both race and gender, and shows how the binary “East” and “West,” ubiquitous in the critical writings of the period, reveals the dynamics at play in Chinese modernism, not only in the past but right up to the present. The dissertation focuses on a range of historical moments, culling primary source material from Pan’s participation in the 1929 National Exhibition of Art and then on to her participation in French exhibitions after she left China in 1937. Several chapters examine her most representative subject matter, the female nude, situating her treatment of the subject in relation to the discourse of the New Woman in early twentieth-century China, as well as considering how she adapted to the discourse of the Chinese Other in a transnational context.PhDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99860/4/shalian_1.pd