Download or read book The Avant Garde and the Popular in Modern China written by Liang Luo and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a new perspective on the Chinese avant-garde through the figure of artist and activist Tian Han
Download or read book The Avant Garde and the Popular in Modern China written by Liang Luo and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China explores how an important group of Chinese performing artists invested in politics and the pursuit of the avant-garde came to terms with different ways of being “popular” in modern times. In particular, playwright and activist Tian Han (1898-1968) exemplified the instability of conventional delineations between the avant-garde, popular culture, and political propaganda. Liang Luo traces Tian’s trajectory through key moments in the evolution of twentieth-century Chinese national culture, from the Christian socialist cosmopolitanism of post–WWI Tokyo to the urban modernism of Shanghai in 1920s and 30s, then into the Chinese hinterland during the late 1930s and 40s, and finally to the Communist Beijing of the 1950s, revealing the dynamic interplay of art and politics throughout this period. Understanding Tian in his time sheds light upon a new generation of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists (Ai Wei Wei being the best known), who, half a century later, are similarly engaging national politics and popular culture.
Download or read book Origins of the Chinese Avant garde written by Xiaobing Tang and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xiaobing Tang's "Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde "is much more than its title implies, for it is both a vivid account of the conflict between Chinese artistic conservatism, freedom of expression, and political commitment in the 1920s and 1930s and a deeply researched study of the origins and development of the woodcut movement. The author ranges widely over the controversial writings of this hectic period, showing how intimately art, literature, criticism, and politics were intertwined, but gives due prominence to such key figures as Cai Yuanpei and Lu Xun. This book will attract many readers for the vigor and lucidity of Tang's style and will become an essential source for anyone concerned with the cultural history of this turbulent era.--Michael Sullivan, author of "Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary" "Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde" is a genuine masterpiece of scholarship, an impressively documented cultural history of the Republican period. In five substantial chapters written in highly lucid and eloquent prose, Xiaobing Tang reconstructs, in detail, the art world of the Republican era, with all its different styles, organisations, institutions, and individuals, and provides cross-references to contemporaneous events in other fields, especially literature. Presenting the emergence of the woodblock printing movement in the context of other art movements, traditionalist and modernist, this book offers an art history of the period more comprehensive than any other, in Chinese or in English.--Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London "This is one of the first books in English to connect the literature and the fine arts of the early twentieth century. The author follows Lu Xun, one of the leading proponents of the revival of woodblock printmaking in early republican China, as the central thread in a narrative examining the intersections of art education, visual art, literature, and the cinema. Drawing on a wide variety of published materials, Tang successfully puts avant-garde work of the 1930s into a much broader cultural perspective."--Kuiyi Shen, author of "A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China"
Download or read book Total Modernity and the Avant Garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art written by Minglu Gao and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking book that describes a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and a modernity that unifies art, politics, and social life. To the extent that Chinese contemporary art has become a global phenomenon, it is largely through the groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Gao Minglu: "China/Avant-Garde" (Beijing, 1989), "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" (Asia Society, New York, 1998), and "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art" (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005) among them. As the first Chinese writer to articulate a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and modernity—one not defined by Western chronology or formalism—Gao Minglu is largely responsible for the visibility of Chinese art in the global art scene today. Contemporary Chinese artists tend to navigate between extremes, either embracing or rejecting a rich classical tradition. Indeed, for Chinese artists, the term "modernity" refers not to a new epoch or aesthetic but to a new nation—modernityinextricably connects politics to art. It is this notion of "total modernity" that forms the foundation of the Chinese avant-garde aesthetic, and of this book. Gao examines the many ways Chinese artists engaged with this intrinsic total modernity, including the '85 Movement, political pop, cynical realism, apartment art, maximalism, and the museum age, encompassing the emergenceof local art museums and organizations as well as such major events as the Shanghai Biennial. He describes the inner logic of the Chinese context while locating the art within the framework of a worldwide avant-garde. He vividly describes the Chinese avant-garde's embrace of a modernity that unifies politics, aesthetics, and social life, blurring the boundaries between abstraction, conception, and representation. Lavishly illustrated with color images throughout, this book will be a touchstone for all considerations of Chinese contemporary art.
Download or read book A New Literary History of Modern China written by David Der-wei Wang and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 1033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature, from the Chinese perspective, makes manifest the cosmic patterns that shape and complete the world—a process of “worlding” that is much more than mere representation. In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official narratives to reveal China as it has seldom been seen before, through a rich spectrum of writings covering Chinese literature from the late-seventeenth century to the present. Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors from throughout the world, this landmark volume explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres—pop song lyrics and presidential speeches, political treatises and prison-house jottings, to name just a few. Major figures such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and Mo Yan appear in a new light, while lesser-known works illuminate turning points in recent history with unexpected clarity and force. Many essays emphasize Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences. Contemporary works that engage with ethnic minorities and environmental issues take their place in the critical discussion, alongside writers who embraced Chinese traditions and others who resisted. Writers’ assessments of the popularity of translated foreign-language classics and avant-garde subjects refute the notion of China as an insular and inward-looking culture. A vibrant collection of contrasting voices and points of view, A New Literary History of Modern China is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of China’s literary and cultural legacy.
Download or read book China Avant garde written by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reinventing Licentiousness written by Y. Yvon Wang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic—a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives—ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures—to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed "proper" sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.
Download or read book Parallel Modernism written by Chinghsin Wu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.
Download or read book Nine Lives written by Karen Smith and published by Timezone 8 Limited. This book was released on 2008 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lenni wants to find someone to understand her and the new girl could just be that person Lenni can't please anyone lately. At school, her friends want her to kiss someone for a stupid competition. At home, her grandmother wants her to be more ladylike. And on the playing field, her friend Adam has started acting like a big weirdo around her. Then Lenni meets Jo, the new girl at school, and everything feels so normal. Jo is cool, fun, and unlike anyone Lenni's ever known—finally, someone's on Lenni's wavelength!
Download or read book The Chinese Postmodern written by Xiaobin Yang and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful look into contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction and the problem of Chinese postmodernity
Download or read book China s New Cultural Scene written by Marie Claire Huot and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays the ongoing revolution in cultural production that has transformed contemporary life in the People's Republic of China.
Download or read book Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics written by Sheldon H. Lu and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book China s Avant Garde Fiction written by Jing Wang and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn anthology of translated short stories from Chinese writers of the 1980s. Authors considered “avant-garde” because work reflects the seriousness of revolutionary concerns, the disinterest in the progress of the Chinese nation and celebra/div
Download or read book Chinese Avant garde Fiction written by Zhansui Yu and published by Cambria Sinophone World. This book was released on 2017 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the works of three leading writers-Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei-and their significant contributions to the genre of Chinese avant-garde fiction.
Download or read book The Phoenix Years written by Madeleine O'Dea and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By following the stories of nine contemporary Chinese artists, The Phoenix Years shows how China's rise unleashed creativity, thwarted hopes, and sparked tensions between the individual and the state that continue to this day. It relates the heady years of hope and creativity in the 1980s, which ended in the disaster of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Following that tragedy comes China's meteoric economic rise, and the opportunities that emerged alongside the difficult compromises artists and others have to make to be citizens in modern China.Foreign correspondent Madeleine O'Dea has been an eyewitness for over thirty years to the rise of China, the explosion of its contemporary art and cultural scene, and the long, ongoing struggle for free expression. The stories of these artists and their art mirror the history of their country. The Phoenix Years is vital reading for anyone interested in China today.
Download or read book Contemporary Chinese Art Primary Documents written by Wu Hung and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2010 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese art, one of the most fascinating art scenes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Download or read book Mainstream Culture Refocused written by Xueping Zhong and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-07-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serialized television drama (dianshiju), perhaps the most popular and influential cultural form in China over the past three decades, offers a wide and penetrating look at the tensions and contradictions of the post-revolutionary and pro-market period. Zhong Xueping’s timely new work draws attention to the multiple cultural and historical legacies that coexist and challenge each other within this dominant form of story telling. Although scholars tend to focus their attention on elite cultural trends and avant garde movements in literature and film, Zhong argues for recognizing the complexity of dianshiju’s melodramatic mode and its various subgenres, in effect "refocusing" mainstream Chinese culture. Mainstream Culture Refocused opens with an examination of television as a narrative motif in three contemporary Chinese art-house films. Zhong then turns her attention to dianshiju’s most important subgenres. "Emperor dramas" highlight the link between popular culture’s obsession with emperors and modern Chinese intellectuals’ preoccupation with issues of history and tradition and how they relate to modernity. In her exploration of the "anti-corruption" subgenre, Zhong considers three representative dramas, exploring their diverse plots and emphases. "Youth dramas’" rich array of representations reveal the numerous social, economic, cultural, and ideological issues surrounding the notion of youth and its changing meanings. The chapter on the "family-marriage" subgenre analyzes the ways in which women’s emotions are represented in relation to their desire for "happiness." Song lyrics from music composed for television dramas are considered as "popular poetics." Their sentiments range between nostalgia and uncertainty, mirroring the social contradictions of the reform era. The Epilogue returns to the relationship between intellectuals and the production of mainstream cultural meaning in the context of China’s post-revolutionary social, economic, and cultural transformation. Provocative and insightful, Mainstream Culture Refocused will appeal to scholars and students in studies of modern China generally and of contemporary Chinese media and popular culture specifically.
