14 - Revolutions in vision: Chinese art and the experience of modernity

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.