Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Defining modern Chinese culture
- 2 Social and political developments: the making of the twentieth-century Chinese state
- 3 Historical consciousness and national identity
- 4 Gender in modern Chinese culture
- 5 Ethnicity and Chinese identity: ethnographic insight and political positioning
- 6 Flag, flame and embers: diaspora cultures
- 7 Modernizing Confucianism and ‘new Confucianism’
- 8 Socialism in China: a historical overview
- 9 Chinese religious traditions from 1900-2005: an overview
- 10 Languages in a modernizing China
- 11 The revolutionary tradition in modern Chinese literature
- 12 The involutionary tradition in modern Chinese literature
- 13 Music and performing arts: tradition, reform and political and social relevance
- 14 Revolutions in vision: Chinese art and the experience of modernity
- 15 Cinema: from foreign import to global brand
- 16 Media boom and cyber culture: television and the Internet in China
- 17 Physical culture, sports and the Olympics
- Appendix
- Index
14 - Revolutions in vision: Chinese art and the experience of modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2009
- Frontmatter
- 1 Defining modern Chinese culture
- 2 Social and political developments: the making of the twentieth-century Chinese state
- 3 Historical consciousness and national identity
- 4 Gender in modern Chinese culture
- 5 Ethnicity and Chinese identity: ethnographic insight and political positioning
- 6 Flag, flame and embers: diaspora cultures
- 7 Modernizing Confucianism and ‘new Confucianism’
- 8 Socialism in China: a historical overview
- 9 Chinese religious traditions from 1900-2005: an overview
- 10 Languages in a modernizing China
- 11 The revolutionary tradition in modern Chinese literature
- 12 The involutionary tradition in modern Chinese literature
- 13 Music and performing arts: tradition, reform and political and social relevance
- 14 Revolutions in vision: Chinese art and the experience of modernity
- 15 Cinema: from foreign import to global brand
- 16 Media boom and cyber culture: television and the Internet in China
- 17 Physical culture, sports and the Olympics
- Appendix
- Index
Summary
Since the mid-1990s, contemporary Chinese art has been increasingly visible in European, North American and Australian venues. While the same period has also seen an equally unprecedented interest in the art of many other non-Western countries, indicating a more general waning of Western-centred conceptions of artistic contemporaneity, the sheer abundance of recent Chinese art is particularly striking. While it has long been acknowledged in the West that China has its own highly distinctive visual culture, this has often been presented as a largely monolithic and timeless tradition, distinct from the concerns of Western art. European art has generally been seen as having developed over time, whether the focus has been on the emergence of coherent perspectival space during the Italian Renaissance or on the apparent movement towards abstraction and formal purity in the modern era. Chinese art, at least from the point of view of the non-specialist Western observer, has by contrast seemed relatively static in terms of both its subject matter and its technique. With the irruption of recent Chinese art into Western exhibition venues, both the sense of Chinese art as occurring in some other cultural space and the sense of it as somehow not really having a historical development are no longer tenable. Chinese art now clearly exists in the present tense, rather than offering some unchanging timeless tradition that provides an exotic backdrop against which the historical evolution of Western art can be viewed, and it is perceived as taking place within the same globalized arena for art as that occupied by its Western counterpart.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture , pp. 272 - 296Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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