China on Display

Past and Present Practices of Selecting, Exhibiting and Viewing Chinese Visual and Material Culture

An International Symposium

Time: December 6th to 8th, 2007
Venue: Leiden University School of Management Gravensteen, Pieterskerkhof 6, Room, The Netherlands

As displays in museums and galleries become increasingly globalized, it is essential to turn critical attention towards the historical and cultural variations that exist in display practice. This symposium focuses on China as a case study to examine how the visual production of non-European cultures has been represented in exhibitions and museum displays, both historically and in the contemporary period. The period covered spans from late Imperial China to the contemporary, and the papers focus on the presentation of Chinese material culture to both a Chinese and a non-Chinese public.

The symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary group of art historians, anthropologists and practitioners (critics, artists and curators) who both study and create the dynamics for displaying Chinese art and material culture. The goal of the symposium is to develop new theoretical frameworks for research and identify patterns of intervention that could modify how contemporary representations and interpretations of ‘China’ are conceptualized through exhibition and display.

Abstracts

Stan Abe (Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University, Durham)
Figuring China: Sculpture, Authenticity, and the Native

Sculpture, primarily figures in stone or bronze, is held in great esteem in the European tradition of Fine Arts. In China, sculpture was not collected or appreciated as a prized aesthetic object. The “discovery” of Chinese sculpture as Fine Art and its display in Western museums brings the contrast between two systems of aesthetic value—one so-called traditional and the other modern—into sharp relief. This paper will first explore the liminal moment around 1900 when objects we now call sculpture moved from the category of non-art to that of Fine Art.

I will then look back at the display and exhibition of sculpture-like objects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How were figures, models, and effigies from or about China used to represent the authentic Native in ethnographic settings? And how, after Chinese sculpture became art, did the figural form continue to carry the burden of representing the “authentic” in the Fine Art museum. All of the above will draw on James Clifford’s seminal articulation of The Art-Culture System: A Machine for Making Authenticity.

Stanley Abe received a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of California, Berkley and has published works on Chinese Buddhist art, contemporary Chinese art, Asian American art, Abstract Expressionism, and the construction of art historical knowledge. His book Ordinary Images was the recipient of the 2004 Shimada Prize for distinguished scholarship in the history of East Asian art. He is writing a critical study of how Chinese sculpture became a category of fine art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study pays special attention to the collecting, sale, and movement of objects; museum practices, aesthetic theory, and forms of knowledge organized by the disciplines of art history, ethnography, and religious studies in the context of colonialism, modernism, and the international art market.

Ting Chang (College of Fine Arts and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh)
Fantasies, Images and Objects: Two Nineteenth-Century European Displays of ‘China’

I wish to discuss Edmond de Goncourt’s collection of Chinese porcelain in Paris and Albert Smith’s display of ‘China’ in London. The former, an important writer and cultural authority, took part with other French collectors in the identification and classification of Chinese porcelain. Although Goncourt’s private collection was restricted to only friends and acquaintances, he shared his philosophy and system of display in his book, La Maison d’un artiste of 1881. On the other side of the English Channel, Smith disseminated a series of images of China and Hong Kong after a brief visit in 1858. He presented “China” in public performances at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London that could be subsequently replicated in private through the purchase of an optical device. Smith had a different, expanded sense of China, one that was less literal and material than Goncourt’s collection. I wish to examine these two displays in terms of their diverse media, format and space. Both the static presentation of aesthetic objects in glass cabinets and the dynamic transformation of images through a stereoscopic device, were underpinned, I suggest, by fantasies of ‘China’.

Ting Chang holds a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex, England. She currently teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. She is completing a book manuscript under the title Collecting Asia: Desire, Travel and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century France, that examines the poetics of collecting and European reconstruction of East Asia through travel narratives and artifacts. The Musée Guimet and Musée Cernuschi in Paris, the first public museums of Asian art and artifacts in France, in particular, were pivotal in this history. By investigating the travel accounts and holdings of Emile Guimet, Thédore Duret, Enrico Cernuschi and Edmond de Goncourt, she demonstrates how collections shaped personal and national identities, fantasies and knowledges in the modern era.

Francesca Dal Lago (Center for Non-Western Studies, Leiden University):
Papercuts, Colorful Pictures and Mountains of Shit: ‘China’ at the Venice Biennale, 1980-2007

This paper discusses the presence and presentation of art from the People’s Republic of China at the foremost contemporary art bi-annual event , the mother of all Biennales. A prestigious and elaborate occasion organized through formal collaboration with nationally nominated commissions from around the world (until but a few years ago, prevalently based in Euro-America), the Venice Biennale was founded in 1893 by a group of Venetian artists and intellectuals to revive the stagnant cultural atmosphere of what had once been one of the centers of European culture. Today it attracts thousands of visitors (and millions of euros) to the economy of the quintessential Italian tourist destination.

Borrowing a definition by artist Zhang Peili, this is very much like the Olympics Games of the visual arts, with nationally nominated commissions, an international jury and a series of awards. But until 2005 the People’s Republic of China, which has been one of the major protagonists of the sports Olympics for at least two decades, never officially sponsored a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Chinese artists were regularly invited to Venice since 1993, but the first official involvement of the PRC dates back to the early 1980s, when the Ministry of Culture entered a selection of embroidered pillow covers and paper-cuts in the exhibition. By analyzing the very different conditions of China’s participation to the quintessential Biennale I will discuss how the agency of such selections has been defined by, and contributed to an ongoing cycle of miscommunication among Chinese artists, audiences and the cultural managers of contemporary art.

Francesca Dal Lago holds a BA degree in Chinese Studies from the University of Venice, Italy and a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She lived in China for more than nine years. During part of this time she worked as a Cultural Officer of the Italian Embassy, Beijing. In 1993 she helped to select and curate the first participation of contemporary Chinese artists to the Venice Biennale. She has been associate professor of Chinese Modern and Contemporary Art at McGill University, Montreal. In Leiden she is part of the project lead by Oliver Moore and sponsored by the Hulsewè Foundation “A Social History of Visual Images in Late Imperial and Modern China”. Her research topic deals with the transfer of artistic education and practices from France to China during the first part of the 20th century.

John Finlay (Independent Scholar, Paris)
Displaying Art at the Qing Court: The Qianlong Emperor on Display

Before the Palace Museum, Beijing, was a museum, it was an imperial palace—the Forbidden City, the ritual heart of the empire and primary residence of the rulers of Ming and Qing China. Along with the National Palace Museum, Taipei, the former imperial palace holds what is essentially the collection of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795), the largest group of Chinese works of art ever assembled. What the emperor selected as ‘works of art’ and the circumstances under which they were viewed in an 18th-century court context have, in many ways, set the stage for the modern display of Chinese visual culture. Placing himself directly in line with a long tradition of Chinese connoisseurship, the Qianlong emperor demonstrated his knowledge and appreciation in numerous inscriptions written either directly on works of art or recorded in his collected prose and poetry. Greatly expanding earlier imperial practice, the Qianlong emperor commissioned extensive catalogues of the imperial collections, compilations that remain an important source for scholars and museum professionals.

What museums classify as works of art filled imperial palace buildings, where they were put to use in ways that generated meanings that were frequently radically different from those implied by museum display. But contemporary curatorial and scholarly practice necessarily engage directly with Qing imperial connoisseurship, choosing to accept or firmly reject its criteria for collecting, evaluating and exhibiting treasured works of art. A brief examination of the strategies of display of works of art in the Qing imperial court—most especially in the reign of the Qianlong emperor—will help highlight those differences.

John Finlay, formerly an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1994-1998) and the first curator of Chinese art at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (1998-2005), is an independent researcher based in Paris. He is currently completing a PhD thesis on the Qianlong imperial album Forty Views of the Yuanming yuan for the Department of the History of Art at Yale University.

Anik Fournier (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis/Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art)
Representing Self and Nation Through the Other: the 1933 Exposition de la Peinture Chinoise at the Paris Jeu de Paume

This is a case study of the Exposition de la peinture chinoise held at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in 1933. The exhibition was co-planned by the French institution and Xu Beihong, a Chinese artist who had studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1920s. In this paper, I investigates the political implications of the cross-cultural encounter embodied in the exhibition’s co-organization and the inscription of Chinese paintings into Western Exhibition practices for a French audience. Through a close analysis of the exhibition narratives, the works, and their reception, I explore the complex web of identity and meaning production, in which representing Self and Other are simultaneously at play.

Anik Fournier holds a BA and a Master in Art History from the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montreal. After a period of archival research in Paris, she wrote her MA thesis titled: “Building Nation and Self through the Other: Two Exhibitions of Chinese Painting in Paris, 1933/1977”. She has worked as curatorial assistant at the National Gallery of Canada and as curatorial intern at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She presently works in the Education and Conservation Department at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art and she is co-curator for Upgrade Montreal, a monthly event on art and technology at the Montreal Society for Arts and Technology. She is currently enrolled in a PhD program at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis under the supervision of Dr. Patricia Pisters.

Maris Gillette (Department of Anthropology, Haverford College)
China on display and china not on display: the politics of copying in Jingdezhen

Copying has been a mainstream practice in Jingdezhen’s porcelain industry for centuries. Art historians differ over how they represent ceramic copies. Some describe ceramic copies as a material tribute to the art produced by previous generations and other kilns, while others regard them as deception produced for commercial gain. In museums and personal collections, whether or not a ceramic is a copy, and how the practice of copying is understood, affects how such wares are displayed. Copies understood to be fakes are removed from public view, deaccessioned or removed to study collections, and occasionally shown in special exhibitions focusing on fakes and fakery. Those seen as tribute to past ceramists and/or to other kilns are more available for public viewing and can be prized as mastery artistry. To date, information about ceramic production has had virtually no influence on scholarly discussions of ceramic copying or the practices of display adopted by connoisseurs and institutions.

In this paper, I examine how copying looks to contemporary porcelain industry workers in Jingdezhen. I explore when and why Jingdezhen ceramists copy, and present their views on the practice. Where porcelain workers believe a piece of porcelain will be sold, how they envision its ultimate site of display, and what price they want for their work influences the time and effort that ceramic copyists devote to replication and they extent to which they modify the copies they produce. For Jingdezhen producers, the ethics of copying is determined by a politics of personal relations with other producers and consumers and their understandings of the logic of commercial enterprise.

Maris Gillette is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. She works in the socio-cultural field, with an area specialization on China. Her first field work project was a study of material culture and consumer behavior in the Chinese Muslim (Hui) district of Xi’an, Shaanxi. Currently she is studying porcelain industry workers in Jingdezhen, site of China’s imperial kilns during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and a substantial porcelain producer today. Gillette has worked actively as a curator at several institutions, and has a strong interest in visual culture and ethnographic film.

Guo Hui (Center of Non-Western Studies, Leiden University)
New Categories, New History: A Case Study of the Preliminary Exhibition of Chinese Art in Shanghai, 1935

This paper investigates how the emerging display of traditional Chinese artworks influenced the historiography of Chinese art in Republican China. It looks at how Chinese scholars negotiated a path between Western exhibition practices and older Chinese engagements with art to rewrite a new art history. I use the Preliminary Exhibition藝術國際展覽會預展 held in Shanghai, 1935 as a preparation for the London International Exhibition at Burlington House of xxx, as a case study to argue that exhibitions played an important role in generating an innovative discourse of Chinese art history.

Through a comparison with the Exhibition of Famous Paintings from Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties (唐宋元明名畫展) held in Beijing in 1927 and its particular choice of Chinese painting masterpieces, I investigate the modern taxonomy of the Preliminary Exhibition. This framework solidified an emerging notion of ‘Chinese fine arts’ borrowed largely from a Western canonical framework. The process of adaptation of a Western format to display Chinese paintings will also be discussed. These practices deeply affected the way in which Chinese scholars constructed anew the history of art in China.

Guo Hui is a PhD student from Leiden University. She holds a MA in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Languages, London. In Leiden she works as part of the research project headed by Oliver Moore and sponsored by the Hulsewé Foundation: “A Social History of Visual Images in Late Imperial and Modern China”. Her Ph.D. dissertation Writing Chinese Art History in Republican China: A Process of De-canonization and Canonization of Chinese Visual Arts focuses on the historiography of early twentieth century Chinese art.

Franziska Koch (Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste, Stuttgart)
Chinese Pictures on Display for Western Audiences: Three Early Group Shows of Chinese Contemporary Art in Berlin, Hong Kong and Venice, 1993

Only in the early 1990s did European and North-American art audiences became aware of ‘Chinese contemporary art’. Yet the production of so-called ‘modern’, ‘avant-garde’ or simply ‘experimental’ art in the People’s Republic of China had already been gaining momentum since 1979, after overcoming the iconoclasm marking the period of the Cultural Revolution.

Western interest was triggered in 1989 by the spectacular national China/Avant-garde exhibition emerging from the 85 Movement at the China art Gallery, Beijing. Some of the artists who created scandal at this event made their international debut just few months later at the exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

My talk will focus on the first three major group exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art held outside China in 1993 that set the standards for further developments: China Avant-garde (that toured Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain); New Chinese Art – Post 1989 in Hong Kong (which eventually toured Australia and the United States) and the exhibition of Chinese contemporary art at the Venice Biennale

By comparing them, I will elaborate on some of the iconic, ekphrastic, and exhibitionary aspects that mark respectively the Western reception of images of China and their reflection in China. Using a postcolonial approach, questions about the exhibition as medium, the role of the curator, and asymmetries of the involved notions of modern art will be addressed.

Franziska Koch holds a degree in Painting and Graphic from the National Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart. From 2001 to 2004 she studied Oriental Painting at the Seoul National University and Chinese Painting (guohua) at Shandong Normal University in Jinan, PRC. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the National Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart. The title of her dissertation is “China(s) images in the field of postcolonial discourse. Contemporary Chinese Art of the 1990s and its Western reception”.

Felicity Lufkin (Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University)
Bringing Folk In: The Folk Picture Exhibition, Hangzhou 1937

The Folk Picture Exhibition of 1937 was China’s first specialized exhibition of the popular woodcut prints now commonly known as nianhua or New Year Pictures. What did it mean, to the exhibition’s organizers, to bring these materials into the space of the modern exhibition hall? What did it mean to audiences to encounter them there? The discourse around the exhibition, its intentions, and its reception, reveals some of the intractable contradictions in the larger modern Chinese project of popularization.

One newspaper report heralded the exhibition as a breakthrough in cultural democratization: Unlike art exhibitions that attracted ‘only a few connoisseurs’, the report claimed, the Folk Picture Exhibition would draw a broad audience, because the pictures it displayed were already dear to the hearts of ordinary people. However, the organizers of the exhibition also saw the familiarity of the prints as a problem. They expected the exhibition to be criticized for seeming to celebrate material that was cheap, common, and full of harmful superstition. But, they argued, their display was not an endorsement: rather, by putting these images under ‘scientific’ scrutiny, the exhibition was to undermine their ‘old’ meanings and give them new ones. Set out for systematic study, these images were no longer icons or charms, but instead ethnographic documents or points of reference for the construction of new forms of popular art. In other words, while some critics of modern exhibitionary practices lament the way in which decontextualized display drains an object of its original power, the organizers of the Folk Picture Exhibition saw this as a virtue.

Felicity Lufkin is currently at work on a book about the construction of the concept of ‘folk art’ within the modern Chinese artistic canon. She has been an affiliate of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, and also a lecturer in Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard. She teaches courses on the history of popular prints or nianhua, on the development of popular genres in the 20th century, on gendered practices of creativity in the visual arts, and on the modern exhibition of Chinese art. She has a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, she has also studied at Peking University and the Central Academy of Art in Beijing.

Oliver Moore (Department of Chinese Studies, Leiden University)
Art staged for the camera in Qing and Republican China

This paper explores historical change in displaying material culture at the beginning of the 20th century in China. It employs the literary notion of ‘theatricality’ in order to highlight how audiences engaged with representations of classical art and ritual after the technology of photography had entered the field as an extra medium for framing the viewer’s gaze. Photography was usually inferior to the high achievements of ink rubbing and woodblock engraving; also, the medium disallowed numerous practices of authentication (e.g. inscription) that had been integral to the circulation of images for many centuries.

The main targets of this enquiry are catalogues of imperial and private art collections, for example: Illustrated Catalogue of Ancestral Vessels in the Wuying Hall (Wuying Dian yiqi tulu), compiled by Rong Geng in 1934. The ‘theatre’ idea will be used to show how the medium of representing art was firmly integrated with content. And, discussion of photography can engage with the conference’s central question of what happens when a form of intellectual enquiry in one cultural system is used in another. Photography entered the visual field of cultural historians, arbiters of taste and promoters of Chinese patriotism (who published catalogues of art objects located in collections overseas), but it did not dominate the field. This forces a reappraisal of photography’s function in visualizing knowledge and its much vaunted power to report truth. Equally, it demands a definition of what constituted the theatre of art and history in early Republican China, and it suggests a modern visual medium’s limitations in contributing to cultural projects that accommodated but never completely relied upon the photograph.

Oliver Moore first studied Chinese at London University and Fudan University, Shanghai. He wrote his PhD thesis at Cambridge University on a Five Dynasties’ nostalgic recollection of Tang examination culture. After working for five years at the British Museum, he moved to Leiden to teach and research art history and material culture of China within the Department of Chinese Studies at Leiden University. He is the head of a research project sponsored by the Hulsewé Foundation: “A Social History of Visual Images in Late Imperial and Modern China” He is currently engaged in completing a history of early photography in China.

Morgan Perkins (Departments of Anthropology and Art, State University of New York, Potsdam)
‘What They Make doesn’t Interest Me’. Perceptions, Tastes and Social Practices of Displaying Chinese Art

The goal of this paper is to highlight frameworks in which social practices influence the display of contemporary Chinese art. Whether displays are considered traditional or contemporary, or take place inside or outside of China, an understanding of the different systems of knowledge that inform display practices is essential in a cross-cultural art world. The primary focus for this analysis will draw upon exhibitions and broader contexts for the display of experimental work by the New York artist Zhang Hongtu. Particular attention will be paid to material that documents audience responses and to different cultural conventions of display, such as the use of space, social behavior, the use of terminology, and the formulation of social networks. The social relationships between artists, curators and their audiences that influence practices of display are fundamentally influenced by these conventions of practice that are learned through different knowledge systems.

Morgan Perkins is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Art at the State University of New York – Potsdam where he is Director of the Weaver Museum of Anthropology and the Museum Studies Program. He has a doctorate in anthropology from Oxford University and his cross-cultural research in the anthropology of art explores the relationship between contemporary art and art education with a particular focus upon Native North American and Chinese art. He is the editor (with Howard Morphy) of The Anthropology of Art and has curated several contemporary art exhibitions including, “Icons and Innovations: The Cross-Cultural Art of Zhang Hongtu”. His current book projects include an ethnography entitled Art For The Masses? Anthropology, Art and Contemporary China and Museums and Native American Knowledge with Gwyneira Isaac.

Davide Quadrio (Director BizArt Shanghai)
No cleaning and no fees required: the contradictions of showing un-decoded art in Shanghai

Displaying contemporary art in an independent context during the late 90’s was, from the start, a process challenged by the total freedom associated with the undefined and uncertain space occupied by contemporary art in Shanghai. A great number of questions arose such as how to choose from the ocean of possible art forms? What technical issues would impact the production and display of art? Would it need a clean, unencumbered space (white box) and if so, how to find such a clean white box in the city? Who could offer this type of know-how and where could such spaces be found? Finally, who could be interested in art made ‘just’ as creation and not as propaganda or decoration?

Through my personal experience as the founder and director of one of China’s first independent spaces for the display of contemporary art, I will illustrate some of the outcomes emerging from these challenges and their uncertain context: an exciting laboratory of experimentation generated by the open possibilities of a booming new economy, new forms of expression, ‘entrepreneurial initiative,’ as well as political and social limitations.
Everything started with a wall in front of the entrance of the Bizart Art Warehouse, a kind of partition closing the exhibition space. Bizart at the time was based in an unused factory still partially inhabited by laid-off workers (xiagang gongren). When one of the janitors visited our first exhibition by the artist Zheng Guogu, he came to my office and asked: “With a wall at the entrance how could you have trucks unloading crates of toys? Are you a toy factory or not?”

Davide Quadrio manages BizArt Art Centre in Shanghai, the first not for profit independent creative lab in China. With BizArt and its team, he organizes exhibitions, workshops and artistic activities: sourcing venues and sponsorships, designing spaces, media communication, and so on. During the last decade, he organized hundreds of exhibitions and events in China and abroad, developing relationships with local and foreign institutions in China, building up an energetic independent art space in Shanghai. Quadrio has been appointed Creative Director of the Bund18 creative space where he organized with his team Vivienne Westwood’s Exhibition together with V&A, the “Droog Design” exhibition tour China (Shanghai, Shenzhen and Taipei) and the solo exhibition by Olivo Barbieri, Site-specific during the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. On the cultural policy side, he is actively working in strengthening the relationship between Europe and Asia and he obtain The Prince Claus Award as network partner of Prince Claus Fund (the Netherlands) for South East Asia (2008-2010).

Ren Hai (Departments of East Asian Studies and Anthropology, University of Arizona)
Memories of the Future: Politics of Disappearance and Historical Representations in Hong Kong’s ‘Return’ to China

The paper examines the way in which museums in Hong Kong performed an important role in restoring and constructing historical memories that would last after Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997. It focuses on the Hong Kong Museum of History, especially the exhibition, The Story of Hong Kong, not merely the permanent exhibition at the museum but also one of the few official historical exhibitions in Hong Kong. I will examine the exhibition’s development, its content, and its uses of gallery space and multimedia. I will situate the discussion within the cultural politics of creating and preserving Hong Kong’s post-1997 cultural identity.

Dr. Hai Ren is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He has written on museums, theme parks, and popular culture in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places. He recently completed a book manuscript, a study of the intersections between China’s neo-liberalization and the development of “culture industries” during Hong Kong’s return to China. He is the editor of Neo-Liberal Governmentality: Technologies of the Self & Governmental Conduct (a special issue of the journal Rhizomes) (2005). His most recent publications include “The Merit of Time: A Genealogy of the Countdown” (in The End that Does: Art, Science, and Millennial Accomplishment. Eds., Cathy Gutierrez and Hillel Scwartz. Equinox, 2006) and “The Landscape of Power: Imagineering Consumer Behavior at China’s Theme Parks” (in The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self. Ed. Scott A. Lukas. Lexington Books, 2007).

Wang Nanming (Sichuan Art Academy, Chongqing)
Art and Local Politics: Practices of Display and Criticism

When French ‘New Wave’ art was shown at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2005, the curator of the Centre Pompidou who was responsible for the exhibition said there were works in the exhibition whose meaning would be very hard to understand if one was not acquainted with their political background. What he was saying was that the work of art is a text, and that the meaning of a text is created by its context.

Today, a transnational flow of art has inevitably brought about a misunderstanding of context(s). In front of a work of art it is very important that the public understands its temporal and local context, particularly after contemporary art has become actively involved in discussing, and sometimes even participating in specific social conditions. In such cases, the role of local politics is more and more clear.

As soon as transnational exhibitions take place, a dialogue with a transnational public is established, making it necessary for the public to have an understanding of different places. For Western audiences it is very hard to have an understanding of China, so it is very hard for them to be able to decode Chinese art. Yet it is largely by Westerners that contemporary Chinese art is persistently exhibited and interpreted. One way of interpreting contemporary Chinese art is through a system of ‘Chinese symbols.’ This is an easy solution often adopted by Western critics or curators, but using China’s symbols to interpret contemporary Chinese art is quite problematic: it looks Chinese, but not a China that is intricate, complex and evolving. Indeed without information on the condition of China’s social problems, it is impossible to understand true contemporary Chinese art.

Wang Nanming graduated from the Law Department of the Huadong Academy of Politics and Laws in Shanghai. He teaches courses on contemporary art and criticism at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing. Since the 1990s he has been working as an artist, critic and curator of contemporary art and calligraphy. His works have been exhibited in numerous national and international exhibitions and collected, among others, by the British Museum. He has written a large number of articles and books on contemporary art, law and the arts and contemporary calligraphy, such as “Art Must Die: from zhongguohua (Chinese painting) to modern shuimo hua (ink painting)” (2006); “After the Concept: Art and Criticism” (2006); “Post-colonial Privileges: the Chineseness of Art and the Chinese Identity of Artists”.

Watson Rubie (Department of Anthropology and Peabody Museum, Harvard University)
Old Hamlets and Old Houses: Memory, Ritual, and Heritage in Hong Kong’s Walled Villages

Hong Kong’s New Territories is home to hundreds of small hamlets, some dating to the twelfth century. Thirty years ago these old, tightly nucleated hamlets, many of them walled, were filled with houses, small shops, temples, local shrines, and people going about their everyday activities. During the 1980s and 1990s, development projects lead to the destruction of some hamlets, and many of those that survived are abandoned and or offer a mix of poorly maintained and derelict houses. Yet, many hamlets remain important ceremonial centers for the householders that once lived in them and heritage sites for Hong Kong urbanites in search of a ‘visible past.’ These hamlets and the old houses (the so-called jou nguk or ancestral houses) that line their interior lanes are the focus of my paper. They offer displays (in bricks and mortar) of the past both to “residents” and to visitors. In my paper the following issues will be discussed: architecture, place, and memory; history and heritage; preservation and local control.

Rubie Watson is Curator at the Peabody Museum and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Harvard University. She has conducted long term anthropology research in Hong Kong. Currently, she is writing a book tentatively entitled Private Lives Under Imperial Rule: Rural Hong Kong, 1898-1997.

Sasha Su-Ling Welland (Departments of Anthropology and Women’s Studies, University of Washington)
Showcase Beijing: Art, Real Estate, and Urban Planning in the Capital

This paper presents a socio-cultural history of Beijing’s East Modern Art Center, state-run factory converted into exhibition space by a real estate developer, juxtaposing this effort with the Beijing Urban Planning Museum and MOMA apartment complex in order to explore the relationship between art, real estate, and urban planning in contemporary displays of Beijing as China’s global capital.

Sasha Su-Ling Welland is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters. Her current research project “Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in China’s Capital” examines the social role of visual art and competing ideas of aesthetic, cultural, and market value.

Zhang Peili (Department of New Media, China Arts Academy, Hangzhou)
Chinese Artists in a Chinese Spectacle

The term Chinese spectacle refers to the construction of a special phenomenon evident in the field of Chinese art. Today this is not simply created by the West for the West, but it is also produced for the West with the help of Chinese artists: in effect it is jointly created by Westerners and by Chinese artists. In the Chinese spectacle, the typical identity of a Chinese artist is a collective identity. Unlike most Western artists, the national character attached to the figure of the Chinese artist is much more important than the artist’s individual character. Concurrently Chinese artists and their work are positioned within a collective and taxonomic framework. In the Chinese spectacle, the real question is: for which public is the art made? This question actually leads to another question: who are the judges for Chinese art? In whose hands rests the power over Chinese art’s discourse? In the Chinese spectacle, Chinese artists are made to enter a competitive space, or else, an imaginary Olympics. Just as sport is not just about sport anymore, art is not just about art anymore.

Zhang Peili, China’s first video artist, graduated in 1984 from the Department of Oil Painting of the China Art Academy, Hangzhou. One of the protagonists of the 1985 movement that reached its zenith with the seminal 1989 “Beijing Avant-Garde” exhibition, he has participated to all major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art since the early 1990s like “China Avant-garde”, in Berlin, “China’s New Art Post-89 in Hong Kong”, both in 1993; “Inside-Out”, in New York, 1999; “Living in Time” at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2001. He was invited to three editions of the Venice Biennale and his work has been exhibited world-wide at such prestigious venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Mori Museum, Tokyo; the Gwangju Biennale, the Moscow Biennale and the Serpentine Gallery, London. He is the founder and the director of the Department of New Media at the China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou.