Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (Aesthetics and Contemporary Art)

"In recent decades the previously assumed dominance within the international art world of western(ized) conceptions of aesthetic modernity has been challenged by a critically becalming diversification of cultural outlooks widely referred to as 'contemporaneity'. Contributing to that diversification are assertions within mainland China of essential differences between Chinese and western art. In response to the critical impasse posed by contemporaneity, Paul Gladston charts a historical relay of mutually formative interactions between the artworlds of China and the West as part of a new transcultural theory of artistic criticality. Informed by deconstructivism as well as syncretic Confucianism, Gladston extends this theory to a reading of the work of the artist Zhang Peili and his involvement with the Hangzhou-based art group, the Pond Association (Chi she). Revealed is a critical aesthetic productively resistant to any single interpretative viewpoint, including those of Chinese exceptionalism and the supposed immanence of deconstructivist uncertainty. Addressing art in and from the People's Republic of China as a significant aspect of post-West contemporaneity, Gladston provides a new critical understanding of what it means to be 'contemporary' and the profound changes taking place in the art world today."--Bloomsbury Publishing. Towards a Critical Contemporaneity Cover 1 Half title 2 Series page 3 Title 4 Copyrights 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 9 Introduction 10 Prolegomenon 20 Post-Enlightenment aesthetic modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity 20 Contemporary Chinese art within and outside the PRC 26 Rethinking contemporary Chinese art as a locus of criticality 31 Notes on theory and methodology 45 1 Critical art and aesthetics within China and Euro-America before modernism 52 Literati art and aesthetics within imperial China 52 Euro-American romanticism and radical idealism 68 2 Modernisms within and outside China 84 Euro-American modernisms 84 Modernisms within late imperial and republican China 99 3 Postmodernisms and contemporaneity within and outside China 114 Euro-American postmodernisms and contemporaneity 114 Postmodernisms and contemporaneity within the PRC 128 4 Case study: The work of Zhang Peili and the Pond Association (Chi she) 146 Conclusion 180 Notes 190 Bibliography 219 Index 237