Chinese avant-garde art (installation, video, performance, multimedia, painting) has captured the attention of the art world in recent years. Yet, serious academic studies of the subject are few. Our panel intends to take a new step in examining some crucial aspects of this art.

Contemporary Chinese avant-garde artists consist of those working and residing in the West and those operating in China. They all participate mainly in international venues of exhibition, and create artworks for global audiences. Critical reception of this Chinese art in China and among Chinese critics may differ dramatically from its understanding by critics in the Western countries where it is exhibited. We look at the central tension and dilemma of their art, namely, the nexus between a postmodern, globalized art form and a putative "Chinese," Eastern, local, indigenous appeal. In other words, we analyze the construction and questioning of Chinese identity in terms of culture, nationhood, and gender on the one hand, and how such artworks are received and interpreted in the transnational circuits of production, exhibition, and consumption on the other.

Xiaoping Lin’s paper considers three prominent Chinese artists who participated in a major Chinese art exhibition in New York City in 1998. Their works have aroused heatedly critical debates, and he explores the relationship between nationalism and globalism in their art. Sheldon H. Lu outlines the strategies of self-representation in Chinese art, and takes up the questions of postmodernism and post-orientalism in the works of several artists. While Lin and Lu dwell on Chinese artists in the diaspora, Hsingyuan Tsao focuses on three women artists who are located in China. She studies how these artists address the issues of gender, domestic labor, private space, and social work.

Xiaoping Lin, Queen’s College

This paper deals with the installation art of Cai Guoqiang, Zhang Huan and Xu Bing, three Chinese avant-garde artists now living and working in New York. In September 1998, they all participated in "Inside Out: New Chinese Art," an exhibition organized by the Asia Society, and their works provoked different reactions among art critics. Cai Guoqiang’s "Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows" (Caochuan jiejian) was singled out by Holland Cotter of The New York Times for his criticism of a "distinctly nationalistic and implicitly anti-Western bent" that he discerned from contemporary Chinese art. However, the bruised wooden boat in Cai’s masterpiece merely predicts a "self-inflicted pain" suffered by nations and peoples in the bitter and armed conflicts that take place around the globe, especially in what Kissinger has defined as "new world disorder" after the war in Kosovo. In this 1998 work, Cai’s gloomy forecast about such a desperate human condition contrasts sharply with a more optimistic vision embraced by his 1995 "Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot." Sharing Cai’s guileless dream of a better world, Zhang Huan, a new arrival in New York, has nonetheless found himself "surrounded by the fear of violence, war, catastrophe, death..." as he states during his performance "Pilgrimage—Wind and Water [fengshui] in New York" for the Asia Society show. While Xu Bing seems to maintain his cool in the volatile and even dangerous global environment that has troubled Cai Guoqiang and Zhang Huan, he nevertheless attacks both the "venerated tradition" of the East and the "rationalism" of the West in his witty and sarcastic "A Book from the Sky" and "Introduction to New English Calligraphy." In a word, all the three Chinese artists based in New York have assumed a "postmodern, globalist identity" in the terms of Dan Cameron of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, an identity that is crucial to their artistic creation.

Sheldon H. Lu, University of Pittsburgh

This paper attempts to identify and analyze the conventions and strategies of representing China and cultural identity in the work of Chinese artists who now reside in the West. Contemporary diasporic Chinese art may be seen as part of a broad international postmodernism, and the artists fully take advantage of postmodernist techniques of representation—collage, pastiche, and parody. In appropriating postmodernism, the artists find a new way to actively engage the multi-faceted, fast-changing realities of postsocialist China. At the same time, they bring to the foreground the theme of cultural identity and alterity, or the problematic of the self and the other. For some artists, Chinese art must possess a local flavor, an indigenous appeal, an oriental aura. a certain "Chineseness." China and Chinese art are seen as the cultural other, an alternative to the art system and the life world of the West. More important, artists also begin to experiment with ways in which they question and unmask the "orientalist" habits of thinking about China and the East among both Chinese artists and the Western audience. Even as it fabricates semblances and images of Chineseness in the global contexts of exhibition and reception, "post-orientalist" art cross-examines, interrogates, and disengages from those conventional orientalist notions of the self, the other, China, and the West. In taking up these critical issues, the paper considers installation works such as Lotus in Wind and Spring in the Jade Hall by Qin Yufen (Germany), Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan by Cai Guoqiang (New York), Square Words: New English Calligraphy and Cultural Animal: Panda Pigs by Xu Bing (New York).

Hsingyuan Tsao, Reed College

Among the artists who participate in the making of "Contemporary Art of China," two groups can be discerned: those who live and work in China, and those who mainly reside in cities outside China, such as New York City or Paris. This paper will focus on three women artists who live in China, but participate in international art circles; they are Cai Jing, Lin Tianmiao, and Yin Xiuzhen.

Unlike Political Pop Art of the mid-1990s, charged with political implications, works of these women are free from obvious political labels. Using Chinese visual references, these works are full of nostalgic feelings and personal experiences. In their works, we do not see bound feet, queues, or opium pipes from old China; we witness used but carefully stored women’s clothes, unraveled sweaters, old furniture covered with broken roof tiles and cement powder, and dried, deformed, re-colored plants painted on canvas.