Department of Art History, University of Birmingham
Abstract
During the 1990s, curators and critics embraced conceptual art as a category for legitimizing Chinese art’s global and contemporary status. Conceptual art’s ambiguous parameters, critical cachet, and penchant for destabilization offered unprecedented opportunities for demonstrating Chinese art as globally relevant without being imitative, historical without being traditional, and resistant without being reduced to ‘dissident’. In order to apply the label, however, authors necessarily contended with post-colonial anxieties about imported terms and frameworks. This paper examines how curators and critics of contemporary Chinese art turned to writing and rewriting history—through constructed strategic lineages and cross-cultural comparisons—in order to accommodate the category of conceptual art in their claims for global parity
