Home Issues Past Issues MCS 2016 Issue 1 ‘BESIEGE WEI TO RESCUE ZHAO’: CULTURAL TRANSLATION AND THE SPECTRAL CONDITION(S) OF ARTISTIC CRITICALITY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA
‘BESIEGE WEI TO RESCUE ZHAO’: CULTURAL TRANSLATION AND THE SPECTRAL CONDITION(S) OF ARTISTIC CRITICALITY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA
Abstract: In recent years, there has been an increasingly conspicuous international return to dialectical thinking as part of a revival of interest in Marxist-inflected cultural analysis, associated conceptions of radical democracy and emerging debates related to the term ‘contemporaneity’. In this article I shall examine this return to dialectical thinking critically as part of a wider genealogy of changing attitudes towards the supposed criticality of western(ised) post-Enlightenment art. I shall argue that western(ised) dialectical framings of artistic criticality involve an ineluctably inconclusive shuttling between differing conceptions of art’s optimum critical distancing from or proximity to society. I shall then go on to examine the historically oblique critical positioning of art in China. I conclude that contemporary Chinese art holds out critical possibilities that do not translate easily into western(ised) post-Enlightenment contexts but nevertheless resonate tellingly with the problematic consensual politics of neo-liberalism internationally as well as localised political authority in China.
About the Author: Paul Gladston is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical theory at the University of Nottingham. He is principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: a Critical History (2014) and ‘Avant-gardeArt Groups in China, 1979-1989 (2013). Contemporary Chinese Art: a Critical History was awarded ‘best publication’ at the 9th Award of Art China (AAC), 2015. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.