Description
Book SynopsisExamining the cultural and gender politics of Chinese contemporary art at the turn of the twenty-first century, Sasha Su-Ling Welland shows how artists, curators, officials, and urban planners negotiated the meanings of the avant-garde, built new cultural institutions, wrote new histories of Chinese art, and imagined new, more gender-inclusive worlds.
Trade Review"Drawing on her own ethnographic fieldwork, Welland investigates the power dynamics (traditional versus modern, male versus female) that played out in China as the role of experimental art was negotiated and new cultural institutions were erected." * Art in America *
"For all readers, including non-specialists, Welland should succeed in making lost lives and camouflaged histories visible and palpable. The limpid prose, theoretically informed structure and expanded multimedia materials available on the book’s accompanying website would make it a captivating textbook for an advanced undergraduate course or a stimulating methodological text for graduate seminars. Marking a major contribution to the field, this is a masterful, thought-provoking and luminous text." -- Ros Holmes * Journal of Gender Studies *
"A much welcome addition not only to the expanding scholarship on contemporary Chinese art, but also to Chinese feminist art, and gender studies." -- Meiqin Wang * The China Quarterly *
"
Experimental Beijing is a complex book that demands close reading not only by scholars interested in gender issues in art, but also those who wish for a multi-dimensional picture of the worlds of Chinese contemporary art." -- Doris Sung * China Perspectives *
“Through interviews and communications on other occasions with a broad range of people, including artists, curators, officials, and urban planners, Welland shows convincingly the particular world of those almost forgotten artists and their creative strivings. … In so doing she creates a space for dialogue and cultural encounter in the text, averts the reader from the trap of translation and situates them in this admirably detailed account of the Chinese contemporary art world.” -- Siying Duan & Jun Zeng * Visual Anthropology *
“
Experimental Beijing is excellent at revealing the complex complicity between Chinese contemporary art and the new Chinese market economy and the heavy price that is paid by Chinese women artists for it.” -- Chris Berry * Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *
"Situated at the intersection of art history, anthropology, and gender studies,
Experimental Beijing enacts incisive interventions in histories of Chinese contemporary art, global contemporary art, and feminist art.… Engagingly written with fluid and lyrical prose." -- Peggy Wang * The Art Bulletin *
Table of ContentsNote on the Digital Companion ix
Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xv
Prologue. Worldly Fables 1
Introduction. Chinese Contemporary Art in the Expanded Field 7
Part I. Art Worldings
1.
Xianfeng Beijing 43
2. Showcase Beijing 79
Part II. Zones of Encounter
3. The Besieged City 111
4. The Hinterlands of Feminist Art 135
Part III. Feminist Sight Lines
5. Red Detachment 179
6. Opening the Great Wall 206
7. Camoflaged Histories 236
Epilogue. Recursive Worldly Fables 265
Notes 275
Bibliography 305
Index 323
