| DATE: | Friday-Saturday, October 17-18, 2008 |
|---|---|
| PLACE: | Museum Theater, Berkeley Art Museum, 2621 Durant Avenue |
| SPONSORS: | Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Division of the Arts and the Humanities, Department of History of Art, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive |
China is the epicenter of rapid urbanization, provoking responses from artists, photographers, and filmmakers whose focus ranges from optimistic expansiveness to radical dislocation. In this two-day international symposium, leading curators, critics and scholars will look at artists working in different mediums as they react to the new Chinese megacity.
The keynote speaker will be the international authority on classical and contemporary Chinese art Wu Hung. Other participants include Julia Andrews, Hou Hanru, Wendy Larson, William Schaefer, Kuiyi Shen, Jerome Silbergeld, Pauline J. Yao, Deng Kunyan, Bérénice Reynaud, and Zheng Shengtian.
Organized by Department of History of Art, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. For information, please contact the Institute of East Asian Studies at 510-643-6492 or email ieas@berkeley.edu.
Exhibition viewing and reception follows the Friday 4:00 pm keynote address.
Bérénice Reynaud
Urban displacement and subterranean ruins in recent Chinese independent films
While the constitutional reform of 1982 guarantees "a citizen's lawful private property" as "inviolable," three series of interrelated events have caused massive destruction of urban areas and population displacement — thus reducing these dreams of ownership to rubble.
Films discussed:
Wang Bing: West of the Tracks (Tiexi Qu, 2002)
Jia Zhangke: Still Life (Sanxia Haoren, 2006)
Jia Zhangke: Dong (2006)
Jia Zhangke: 24 City (Er Shi Si Cheng Ji, 2008)
Ou Ning and Cao Fei: Meishi Street (2006)
Cui Zi'en: We are the... of Communism (2007)
Peng Xiaolian: Shanghai Kids (2007)
Ying Liang: Good Cats (Hao Mao, 2008)
Olivier Meys and Zhang Yaxuan: A Disappearance Foretold (2008)
Wang Quan'an: Weaving Girl (2008)
Kuiyi Shen
The Practice of Ink and Its Dilemma in the Contemporary Art World
In recent years, Chinese contemporary art has become the object of widespread international interest. A significant segment of the Chinese art scene — art that takes ink as its medium, however, has largely escaped notice. Although it is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese art in terms of form, theme, and materials, and although its practice enjoys unflagging popularity, it has not received the attention it deserves as an aspect of the study of contemporary art. No matter whether in expression of concept, selection of theme, application of skill, or use of materials, the artists today practicing in ink show enormous tolerance and adaptability. Art in ink, like all other contemporary art, faces issues around the individual’s relationships to the spiritual world, nature, and society. It engages in constant dialogue and communication with the environment and the people around it and is directly linked to changes in contemporary society, politics, economics, and culture. At the same time, it retains a certain inherent relationship to the traditional culture and stands as a symbol of Chinese cultural identity, but is not to be simply confined within the bounds of traditional culture. Rather, it is clearly affected both in concept and attitude by contemporary society. Some recent exhibitions of ink art have attempted to present the multifaceted process of the development of Chinese contemporary art, to redefine the contemporaneity of this segment of the arts, and to explore the potential inherent in breaking boundaries, so as to encourage dialogue between the art and culture of China and that elsewhere.
Jerome Silbergeld
The New Beijing, The Real Beijing, and Jia Zhangke's The World: A Celluloid Ecology
Jia Zhangke's 2004 film "The World" is set in Beijing's largest theme park, replete with replicas of the world's most famous architectural monuments, and it explores the "New Beijing" from the perspective of its facades. Told from the point of view not of the World Park's patrons but of the staff who work there, Jia's cinematic study subtly raises questions about China's workplace and natural ecologies and the entire issue of China's newly-borrowed Western culture. The filmmaker's attitude toward this ersatz culture is sharply critical, but is it accurate? This paper not only questions whether the future might bring a different perspective to these questions but puts them in the context of China's long history of cultural appropriation, replication, and its own distinctive understanding of facades.
Wu Hung
Contemporary Chinese Art and China's Urban Transformation
The past twenty five years have witness two parallel changes in Chinese art and living environment, each unprecedented in the country's history. Whereas all the major urban centers have undergone a process of radical and at times traumatic transformation, contemporary art has also developed from scattered "un-official" expressions to a broad field encompassing divergent stylistic and ideological trends. This lecture explores the connections between these two developments through identifying various modes of architectural representations and relating these visual modes to the changing experience of the artists in the material landscape of metamorphoses like Beijing and Shanghai.
Zheng Shengtian
'The Great Economic Retreat,' New Images of Urban China
The paper will discuss Shanghai/Beijing based artist Jiangbao's recent photography series 'The Great Economic Retreat.' The modern landscape he has captured provides a new page of the astonishing and sometimes catastrophic transformation of China's urban life. The political significance of these images may help us to re-examine the fundamental role of contemporary art today in China.
