Introduction

This special edition of the Journal for Cultural Research originates in part from an academic conference held at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai in November 2014 on the theme of contemporary art, curating and social engagement in twenty-first century China. That conference, which was co-convened by myself as director of the Centre for East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham and Larys Frogier, director of RAM, included papers by an international group of speakers all of whom have growing or established profiles as scholars and/or critics of contemporary Chinese art and culture. The initial intention was to publish proceedings from that conference either as a special journal edition or edited collection.

Those plans were partly derailed by the inability of some participants to extend their papers in a timely way for publication due to weight of other work – an increasingly common problem within academia where neoliberal imperatives have in many places taken precedence over scholarly research and publication. Other participants unfamiliar with scholarly publication also sadly, but understandably, declined the invitation to publish. As a consequence, it seemed that the RAM conference would leave no published trace. I was therefore extremely pleased when Lu Dai, my co-editor here, proposed this special edition of JCR on contemporary art in/from China and social engagement. Included in this special edition are a number of articles that relate to papers given at the RAM conference. Supplementing those articles are others specially commissioned to extend an engagement with the edition’s theme.

In recent years, there has been a significant revival of academic/critical interest in the question of art and social engagement prompted in part by a so-called ‘social turn’ in the contemporary art world that has gained increasing traction since the global economic downturn of 2008. This revival has resulted in a number of high-profile exhibitions, conferences and publications including Weibel (2015) and Klanten, Hübner, Bieber, Alonzo, and Jansen (2011) signifying a return to oppositional discourses implicitly/explicitly critical of the complicity of institutionalised postmodernism with neoliberal capitalism. Largely absent in relation to the recent revival of academic/critical interest in the question of art and social engagement however, and in spite of persistent calls within the international art world for trans-cultural approaches to historical and theoretical interpretation, is any searching attention to conceptions of art’s critical relationship to society differing from those dominant in Western and heavily Westernised contexts. This edition aims to address that deficiency by presenting papers critically cognisant of particular conditions and concerns related to socially oriented artistic practices in the People’s Republic of China and related diasporic communities.

Within mainland China, artistic production and public dissemination of art take place in relation to what is still in many ways, in spite of nearly four decades of increasingly precipitous post-Maoist economic and social reform, a culturally conservative and politically authoritarian society wary of supposedly progressive Western(ised) cultural values. Art’s use as a public means of criticising established authority is therefore heavily embargoed in that context both by law and social expectation resulting in an understandable tendency on the part of artists and curators towards obliqueness/indeterminacy of expression and deniability of meaning. This contrasts with prevailing circumstances within Western(ised) liberal democracies where art’s use as a public means of criticising authority is now not only institutionalised, but, as such, often supported by public funding. Consider for example – among countless other possible instances – Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007), which comprised a meticulous restaging within Tate Britain of a public protest outside the Westminster Houses of Parliament against the second Iraq War provocatively straddling the boundary of a one-kilometre exclusion zone restricting public protests in the vicinity of parliament.

Moreover, there is within mainland China an equally understandable orientation towards localised artistic traditions different in many ways from those in Europe and North America, both as a target of progressive criticism and as a source of resistant anti-Western identity. This orientation is perhaps most evident in relation to art works, often referred to under the collective title of ‘new ink’, that uphold the continuing relevancy of traditional Chinese ink and brush painting and calligraphy techniques.¹ Consequently, art works that appear entirely conservative from a Western(ised) post-Enlightenment perspective may nevertheless be open to interpretation as critically resonant with respect to the particular socio-political and cultural horizons of contemporary China.

In addressing the significances of contemporary art in China as a locus of criticality, it therefore becomes necessary to relinquish an exclusive adherence to Western(ised) post-Enlightenment ways of thinking, characteristic of which, as (Habermas, 1981), makes clear is the abiding assumption of a necessary critical distance between art and mainstream society.

It is also important to note that uncertain delineation of the boundary between art and society is not only characteristic of contemporary art in China, but also as part of traditional neo-Confucian literati culture dominant in imperial China from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) to the Qing (1644–1912). As part of neo-Confucian literati culture the shi, China’s scholar-gentry administrative class, were morally obligated (in principle, at least) to challenge wayward governmental authority as a means of maintaining the continuity of the Chinese imperial-dynastic state. Given the absolute authority of imperial rule in China such criticism was signified more often in an oblique rather than directly oppositional way, including in the form of withdrawal into painting and the writing of poetry. With regard to which, post-Enlightenment assumptions of a critical distance between art and society – which persist as part of internationally dominant art world discourses in spite of the intervention of deconstructivist thinking an practice on the certainty of all such dialectical oppositions – can be understood to occlude a more complex, long-standing localised interrelationship between art and its objects of criticism inside China.

The special edition presented here begins with an article by Birgit Hopfener, ‘Tomorrow: Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art’, an examination of Qiu’s long-term project, A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (since 2008), which conceives of the Nanjing Bridge – a notorious suicide hot spot – as an embodiment of a historically constituted contemporary Chinese reality. Hopfener’s article is followed by Drew Hammond’s ‘Jia’s The Chinese Version’, a historically/linguistically informed account of a text-based series of artworks by the Berlin-based artist Jia registering critical outrage with regard to the enforced adoption of simplified Chinese script (Putonghua) within the PRC by the Chinese Communist Party during the 1950s. This is followed by Lu Pan’s ‘Abandoned Negatives, Themeless Parks: Images of Contemporary China in Two Photographic Projects’, a critical reflection on two photographic projects overlooked by current histories of photography in China, Beijing Silvermine (2009–2013) compiled by the Beijing-based French collector, curator, and editor Thomas Sauvin, and Themeless Parks (2008) by Hong Kong-based photographer Dustin Shum. Next is Yao Yung-Wen’s, ‘China’s Modern Image – Contemporary Chinese Art’, which investigates how the fluid construct of ‘Chineseness’ is promoted through the Chinese government’s support of contemporary Chinese art. The edition concludes with Zhou Yanhua’s ‘Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale: A Unique Social Engagement’, a critical discussion of how traditional Chinese philosophy can be understood to have shaped Ai’s strategy of social engagement, and Frank Vigneron’s ‘“Ink Art” as strategy for Hong Kong Institutions’, a critical account of a thwarted attempt by Hong Kong’s Ink Society to develop and manage a venue dedicated to the making and showing of a localised form of traditional Chinese ink and brush painting resistant to dominant governmentally supported cultural attitudes in mainland China. The articles by Hopfener, Zhou and Vigneron are based on papers given at the RAM conference.

Notes on contributor

Paul Gladston is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham and sometime visiting professor at Sotheby’s Institute in London and the Sichuan China Academy of Fine Arts. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: a Critical History (2014), which received ‘best publication’ at the Award of Art China 2015. He was founding principal editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art between 2014 and 2016 and an academic adviser to the internationally acclaimed exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China, staged at the Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre London in 2012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As showcased by the exhibition Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, staged at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 2013–2014.