Staging art and Chineseness

The Conditions and Limits of ‘Chineseness’ in Contemporary Performance and Video Art

“…The authors also demonstrate how Chinese artists and their works have been rapidly included in the 'global contemporary', 4 which does not, however, mean the 'end of (art) history' 5 nor of orientalization. When revisiting works such as Ai Weiwei's 'Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn' (1995), 6 Zhang Huan's '12qm' (1994) 7 and 'To raise the water level in a fish pond' (1997), 8 Cai Guoqiang's 'Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard' (1999), 9 or Cao Fei's 'Cosplayers' (2004) 10 and 'Whose Utopia' (2006), 11 both authors are dealing with already critically acclaimed and institutionally canonized positions. However, Yapp and Chin Davidson both offer fresh interpretations and use their insights to prepare a broader and theoretically very engaging discussion that also includes lesser-known and younger works such as Yan Xing's 'Kill (the) TV -Set' (2012) (plate 1) or Samson Young's 'We Are the World' (2017, part of the 'Muted Situation' series).…”

“…The view toward creating a new planetary model while maintaining cultural differences can be conceived through ecofeminist works, such as by Cao, Chang, Wu, and Tan, attributed to a Chineseness that breaks from nationalist conventions. 21 Yapp echoes Chin Davidson's Althusserian strategy to 'look with' (women) artists that undermine the powerful workings of nationalism and modern subjectivity governed by capitalist biopolitics, when programmatically calling for 'minor subjects [to] offer a lens for reformulating our approaches to and understandings of the social structuration of the world'. 22 But he is quick to caution against the recuperation of aesthetic practices of minor subjects through the cultural industry and globalized art world, in which 'such subjects cannot be understood in their proper and major forms; their minor and indeterminate forms are what provide ways to refrain from repeating the normative operations of everyday life and established sense'.…”