in Postmodernism and China
postmodern art in post-new China have gone through two phases:
1) "political pop" a combination of American pop art and Chinese politics
juxtaposition of "ontologically different worlds" on a depthless surface(e.g., commercial billboards next to or on top of images of revolutionary workers, etc)
this genre international recognization first major exhibition Hongkong 1993
by Hanart T Z Gallery
pop masters have become China's new millionaires
2) proclaim that they will not "play the political card"
Create an international postmodern art that is independent of nationality and ethnicity
Installation art uncollectible noncommercial and not very lucrative many avant-guard artists have no institutinal affiliation and they constitute one of the most marginal, displaced classes in Chinese society
(how do they make a living? I can understand the uncollectible installation art is a gesture against the commodification of art yet as it has been established as a genre i am wondering whether it has established a system of subsidizing )
Irving Sandler, Art of Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (New York, Harpercollins, 1996)
"postminimalism dematerialized the object(process art); spread it out into its surroundings (process art and earth art); formulated an idea and presented that as a work of art(conceptual art); and employed their own bodies in performance (body art). Ephemeral 'situations' in actual space and real time struck the art world as radical because they dispensed with art-as-precious object."
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Mysterious Other: Postpolitifcs in Chinese film (Chen Xiaoming)
in Postmodernism and China
"The multifarious functions of political codes constitute a peculiar narratological ambience in which chinese film is produced, circulated, watched, and interpreted. Such a manipulation of political codes can be labeled 'postpolitics' in Chinese film, where everything is political and nothing is political at one and the same time. Politics is everywhere, and yet it subverts itself at any moment."
Chen starts with the fifth generation, which emerged at a moment when revolutionary discourse still policed all cultural activities with its institutional power but lacked an effective system of ideology and representation. The Fifth generation with revolutionary myth as subject matter but employs a plethora of unconventional techniques such as fragmented narration, abrupt long shots that intersect close-ups and long scenes with muffled off-camera sound effects. Grand images, objects frozen by tedious long shots. The aesthetic form compresses the revolutionary myth to the most abstract level and rewrites it through the formalist language of the camera.Concomitant with root searching literature,and discussions about the global issue of cultural identity,culture was construed as a counterculture phenomenon of the "way of life," repressed libido. Politics, intertwined with this "culture" that is regarded as part of essential identity, serves as the very identity of China.
The fifth generation when came to international market severed politics from China's social and historical practices and turned politics into the cultural fountain to quench the western thirst for a mystified China. Creative appropriation of political symbols.
The tension between existing institutional power and the dysfunctional representational framework within the revolutionary discourse has created a great deal of contradiction in the cultural arena. Displacement of and discrepancy between signifier and signified, purpose and effect, imagination and real. The much inflated political discourse in film constructs only an illusory politics that sustains itself by reproducing, over and over,its imagined reality as a hyperreality. The always already reproduced political reality.
displacement idealism, heroism ----- comedy parody-travesty irony, black humor
"The multifarious functions of political codes constitute a peculiar narratological ambience in which chinese film is produced, circulated, watched, and interpreted. Such a manipulation of political codes can be labeled 'postpolitics' in Chinese film, where everything is political and nothing is political at one and the same time. Politics is everywhere, and yet it subverts itself at any moment."
Chen starts with the fifth generation, which emerged at a moment when revolutionary discourse still policed all cultural activities with its institutional power but lacked an effective system of ideology and representation. The Fifth generation with revolutionary myth as subject matter but employs a plethora of unconventional techniques such as fragmented narration, abrupt long shots that intersect close-ups and long scenes with muffled off-camera sound effects. Grand images, objects frozen by tedious long shots. The aesthetic form compresses the revolutionary myth to the most abstract level and rewrites it through the formalist language of the camera.Concomitant with root searching literature,and discussions about the global issue of cultural identity,culture was construed as a counterculture phenomenon of the "way of life," repressed libido. Politics, intertwined with this "culture" that is regarded as part of essential identity, serves as the very identity of China.
The fifth generation when came to international market severed politics from China's social and historical practices and turned politics into the cultural fountain to quench the western thirst for a mystified China. Creative appropriation of political symbols.
The tension between existing institutional power and the dysfunctional representational framework within the revolutionary discourse has created a great deal of contradiction in the cultural arena. Displacement of and discrepancy between signifier and signified, purpose and effect, imagination and real. The much inflated political discourse in film constructs only an illusory politics that sustains itself by reproducing, over and over,its imagined reality as a hyperreality. The always already reproduced political reality.
displacement idealism, heroism ----- comedy parody-travesty irony, black humor
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Melancholy against the grain: approaching postmodernity in Wang Anyi's tales of sorrow(Tang xiaobing)
in Postmodernism and China edited by Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong (Duke 2000)
Tang starts with Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia: Postmodern erects an "artifice of seeming" and offers the "heartrending distraction of parody," both of which promise to act as antidepressants for literary obsession with the illness of modernity. Tang wants to see the dialects between melancholy in Wang anyi's works and postmodern lightheartedness: Wang's "postmodern melancholy," "in which the longing for modern long causes the deepest sorrow and ambivalend, gathers its historical content and relevance only in an age that deems itself 'post' and beyond all ideologies of the modern."
Wang's "melancholy" stories always explore the dynamic between a young postmodern writer and his/her moderin(ist) predecessor(uncle, father). The young narrator feels a woeful sense of loss and inconsequentiality that filters her/him vision of the youthful enthusiasm of her/his fahter's generation. At the same time, there is an anxiety over the absence of comparable passion in her/his own life. The narrating subject indulges in intense nostalgia, which, by widening the gap between a vividly remembered past world and an increasingly standardized present life, serves to defamiliarize the present as having failed its own historical potential.
A deep historical ambivalence is expressed in the form of melancholy subjectivity- who simultaneously longs for and fears the passion of her father's generation. The melancholy occurs at a moment when the modern project of collectively determining human destiny seems to be universally disavowed and when capital claims a global hegemony. Amid the spreading postmodern euphoria, melancholy alone reveals negativity as indispensable to dialectical truth.
Tang reiterates Wong's inscription of moods that leads toward a modality of significance that precedes any meaningful articulation. In this sense, Tang's idea about melancholy is similar to Ray williams' "structure of feeling," which means that, literature and art might capture certain social forces even before they emerge.
To me, the most interesting part is the question: could lighthearted postmodern parody at the same time melancholy? when camp, kitsch render melancholy sentimental, how do we account for the spreading nostalgia and melancholy(even if it is in the form of kitsch melodrama)? kristeva's phrases "heartrending distraction of parody" implies a more complex spectrum of emotions in postmodernism.
Tang starts with Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia: Postmodern erects an "artifice of seeming" and offers the "heartrending distraction of parody," both of which promise to act as antidepressants for literary obsession with the illness of modernity. Tang wants to see the dialects between melancholy in Wang anyi's works and postmodern lightheartedness: Wang's "postmodern melancholy," "in which the longing for modern long causes the deepest sorrow and ambivalend, gathers its historical content and relevance only in an age that deems itself 'post' and beyond all ideologies of the modern."
Wang's "melancholy" stories always explore the dynamic between a young postmodern writer and his/her moderin(ist) predecessor(uncle, father). The young narrator feels a woeful sense of loss and inconsequentiality that filters her/him vision of the youthful enthusiasm of her/his fahter's generation. At the same time, there is an anxiety over the absence of comparable passion in her/his own life. The narrating subject indulges in intense nostalgia, which, by widening the gap between a vividly remembered past world and an increasingly standardized present life, serves to defamiliarize the present as having failed its own historical potential.
A deep historical ambivalence is expressed in the form of melancholy subjectivity- who simultaneously longs for and fears the passion of her father's generation. The melancholy occurs at a moment when the modern project of collectively determining human destiny seems to be universally disavowed and when capital claims a global hegemony. Amid the spreading postmodern euphoria, melancholy alone reveals negativity as indispensable to dialectical truth.
Tang reiterates Wong's inscription of moods that leads toward a modality of significance that precedes any meaningful articulation. In this sense, Tang's idea about melancholy is similar to Ray williams' "structure of feeling," which means that, literature and art might capture certain social forces even before they emerge.
To me, the most interesting part is the question: could lighthearted postmodern parody at the same time melancholy? when camp, kitsch render melancholy sentimental, how do we account for the spreading nostalgia and melancholy(even if it is in the form of kitsch melodrama)? kristeva's phrases "heartrending distraction of parody" implies a more complex spectrum of emotions in postmodernism.
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