Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCCA) is an associate journal of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts. As a professional peer-reviewed academic journal, JCCA provides a scholarly forum for the presentation of new research and critical debates concerned with the subject of contemporary Chinese art. The journal is published by Intellect three issues per year.
Call for papers
10.1 Bodies in Action: Performance Art in China
Abstracts due 31 March 2022 (300 words); full manuscripts due 1 December 2022 (7,000-8,000 words).
9.2/3 Transcultural Curation and the Post-Covid World
Abstracts due September 301 2021; full manuscripts due April 1 2022.
9.1 The New Generation: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Diaspora
Abstracts due March 31 2021; full manuscripts due December 1 2021.
Latest issues
8.2/3 The World, Two Metres Away
At the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020, when the coronavirus first emerged, Wuhan became the first city worldwide affected by this deadly disease. It then rapidly spread to the entire country, and further on to Europe, America and the rest of the world. China, a country with a population of almost 1.5 billion, has to implement the strictest measures to rapidly and efficiently control the situation in its own way. We envisage, however, a tension between the Chinese government’s official narrative and public discussions emanating from social media; and we have seen light shows in Wuhan as a display of collectivism in overcoming the crisis, Chinese visual propaganda relating to the pandemic, dancing patients in the coronavirus hospitals, and mask-wearing in conformity.
This special issue invites researchers and scholars at all stages of their careers to revisit their experiences and perceptions in this pandemic, to discuss and speculate its impacts, and to make a contribution to our understanding of the COVID-19 in the context of contemporary China, arts and culture in China and beyond.
8.1 Bordering Hong-Kong: Aesthetics and Politics
The increasing importance of the problematic bordering in the questions posed to the social production of knowledge has given rise to what some scholars believe may be called a bordering turn. To be distinguished from the old question of the border and its associated problems of classification and identity, the new bordering turn is focused on the processes of drawing a border and the practices that constitute the ‘things’ between which the social institution of the border appears to be naturalized or given. Although the essentially political aspect of the act of bordering cannot be denied, it is above all an aesthetic phenomenon. The term aesthetic serves here as a marker of a disjunction between, variously: sensation and signification, the sensuous and the discursive, poetics and politics, fiction and the real.
7.23 Urban Transformations and Contemporary Art in China
In the recent decades, China has experienced a revolutionary urban development. The incessant changes have shaped a moving reality, almost illusive, beyond the normal and tangible environment of daily life. The rapidity of today’s urbanisation is a global issue, and yet the example of contemporary cities in China is singular, filled with excitement and anxiety. Histories have been destroyed, and heritage and memories are being reinvented for the future. How do we re-examine the triumph of the economic achievement and the urban development, or the loss, through sociological, anthropological, cultural and artistic perspectives? For those insiders – artists who are living through the accelerated development and its disturbance, how to capture and interpret the transient, to respond critically to such an urban existence, and to imagine a unique or almost surreal experience in China?
7.1 Biennials, Triennials in China
Today, biennials and triennials have become one of the most significant phenomena in globalised art world. In 1996, the Shanghai Biennale appeared as the very first art biennial in Mainland China and it was only opened up to welcome international artists and work from its third edition, Shanghai Spirit, curated by Hou Hanru in 2000. Soon after, the Guangzhou Triennial was initiated by Wang Huangsheng at the Guangdong Museum of Art in 2002, and its inaugural exhibition curated by Wu Hung et al., Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, aimed to review historically the experimental art in China in the 1990s. Simultaneously, we see many more established in various cities in China – the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (est. 1998), the Chengdu Biennale (est. 2001) and the Nanjing Triennial (est. 2002) for instance, as well as in Taiwan, such as the Taipei Biennial (est. 1992) and the Kuandu Biennale (est. 2008). And more recently, ‘biennial’ events parachuted in smaller cities and villages including Yinchuan (est. 2016), Wuzhen (est. 2016), and An’ren (est. 2017), as part of the biennial institution, whilst in addition, international art fairs, e.g., Art Basel Hong Kong (est. 2013) and West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai (est. 2014), migrated from the world or emerged spontaneously as part of the urban culture.
6.2 & 6.3 Everyday Legend: Reinventing tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art
2019 Fall
Since the founding of People’s Republic of China, a series of social transformations have rendered traditional design and hand-making skills marginal in contemporary China. Craftsmanship in numerous production, such as textiles, porcelain, wood- and stone- carving, lack the avenues of future inheritance and transmission; they have been substituted by the cursory processes of batch production for tourists. Now, much of what is described as ‘traditional# is no longer part of an everyday reality, but is instead an item of material culture ranging from discrete displays of museum cases to monumental structures of national and historical significance. Such popular reactions to ‘traditions broadly present the state of anxiety, an anxiety of seeking the cultural root.
To reflect critically upon this anxiety, we started the research project, Every Legend, funded by the Leverhulme Trust with a leading research question: will tradition reinvent the past for the future and translate from China to the world? Assembling twelve articles, this issue looks at the re-invention, re-construction and representation of traditions in contemporary Chinese art. The first article by Pi Li reviews the concept of ‘tradition’ in the Chinese intellectual history of the twentieth century. Ornella De Nigris and Jenifer Chao examine the Chinese Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, in relation to its cultural and political meanings respectively. In addition to focusing on individual artists such as Ai Weiwei, Liu Jianhua and Qu Leilei, articles included in this issue also examine Chinese female artists’ approaches to traditions as a group, and bring in interdisciplinary perspectives by relating traditions to urban planning and new media art. The two conversations pieces included in the end of this issue provide interpretations of traditions from artists’ perspectives.
6.1 Gender in Contemporary Chinese Art
2019 Spring
For decades studies in Chinese art have resisted gender (xingbie or nannv) as a theoretical framework and method of inquiry. This issue of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art testifies that the field is changing. The articles selected for this issue focus on mainland China with some brief exceptions, and include contributions by young scholars, academics, curators and one artist. The prevailing response from early career scholars in this issue indicates the desire to deepen the understanding of gender and its complexities within a growing field of research. The seven interdisciplinary articles contemplate the multiple meanings of gender and use it as a method of inquiry to interpret and understand the work of Chinese artists male and female, or above binary-distinction, feminist and non-, queer and non-, while including reflections on artistic, curatorial and art historical work.
The first two articles address gender in relation to intimate spaces, such as those of the house/home and family in a call for revaluating the micro versus the macro, and at the same time in rediscover the political and gendered dimension of familiar objects and the ordinary in contemporary artistic practices. While two other authors discuss gender and the complicacies of queerness, female artists are central to Pittword’s and Low’s articles. The last article in this issue is a series of conversations with the London-based Chinese performance artist Whisky Chow whose practice challenges the normative understanding of femininities and masculinities, the assumptions and cultural expectations attached to them and the limitations of their meanings within the binary gender framework. All the contributions converge on avoiding to reduce gender to one single concept, while pointing at the complexity and fluidity of a wide set of notions which intersect it.
5.2 & 5.3 Chinese Art outside the Art Space
2018 Fall
Historically, in China, ‘art outside the art space’ can be understood as both a cultural and a political proposition. From a cultural point of view, the notion of public ‘exhibition’ is entirely Western, whilst in the Chinese tradition of literati art for example, artworks were made, shared, and appreciated within the form of scholarly ‘elegant gathering’ (yaji), which was essentially a kind of private (rather than public) event within secluded (rather than institutional) spaces. From a political perspective, the ‘outside-ness’ immediately relates to the ‘unofficial’ status of contemporary Chinese art from its early development. For example, the first Star Group exhibition in September 1979 – generally acknowledged as the very first show that marked the beginning of contemporary art in China – was staged in a small public park just next to the China National Art Museum, outside the legitimated and official art space. Today, the situation of Chinese art taking place outside the museum and gallery spaces continues, but with a completely different momentum and agenda.
Art has been produced site-specifically for the spaces other than art institutions in China, including those of working venues, shown in a range of alternative spaces beyond galleries or museums, and has ‘happened’ in the public sphere and become political or social ‘events’, or artistic ‘incidents’, as a special form of ‘exhibition’. Creative curatorial and artistic strategies have been developed to respond to the constraints of art institutions, censorships and at the same time, to push the boundaries of art. Focusing on art made, displayed, performed or executed outside the conventional venues of art museums and galleries, this themed double issue not only hopes to offer a unique perspective to understand Chinese art in the contemporary context, but also, more importantly, it aims to critically reflect upon the understandings between art and art exhibition, between artistic productions and audience perceptions, and between art and our daily life.
5.1. Contemporary Chinese Artists in the Globalised Art World
2018 Spring
The end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution opened an entirely new chapter for modern Chinese history, and indeed, for Chinese art too. In 1993, as a section of the 45th Venice Biennale, Passaggio a Oriente (Passage to the Orient) was one of the first representations of Chinese contemporary art on the global art stage presenting fourteen Chinese artists. Externally, Chinese art started to attract the world’s attention by artists’ frequent participations in those long standing art events in cities like Venice, Kassel, Lyon, Istanbul, Sharjah and Sydney as well as important museum exhibitions and art fairs. Internally, contemporary art exhibition became international from the beginning of this millennium, precisely, marked by the third Shanghai Biennial (2000). The Chinese government’s awareness and anxiety about the internationalisation of cultural and creative industries through urban transformations, the institution of biennials and triennials invented and organised in various cities in China, and the rise of newly founded private art museums and galleries have all played a part in promoting Chinese artists and the development of contemporary art in the international context.
The term ‘Chinese’ in this journal is always cultural and signals a broad sense, to include artists not only from Mainland China, but also Hong Kong, Taiwan, as well as those global Chinese diasporas. The editors of this issue would like to invite article submissions from a variety of perspectives to produce a series of case studies of individual artists (or artist groups) and their work as representative examples of development in Chinese contemporary art within the last three decades. These individual case studies can be based on their artistic lives, conceptual strategies, speculative knowledge, political and social engagements, and methodological approaches to art production in response to the globalised art world today. As such, this issue is designed to stimulate original research, critical thinking and new understanding of Chinese contemporary art.