The Performing Arts in Contemporary China PDF Download

Author: Colin Mackerras
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000583082
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The overthrow of the ‘gang of four’ in 1976 had profound effects in all areas of Chinese society, and probably nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the performing arts. Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s widow, was strongly interested in the performing arts and exercised great influence over them. Professor Mackerras describes this influence and the effects its removal had on the arts in the years after Mao’s death, as well as in the years following the Cultural Revolution. This book, first published in 1981, deals not only with opera, the spoken play, music and dance but also with cinema, describing how in all these cases the Chinese have adapted traditional art forms for political, social and propagandist purposes, both domestic and international. It charts the transformations that have taken place in all the multiple aspects of the performing arts and sets them against the development of Chinese society as a whole. It also looks at the role of the actor and performer in society, including their training, social status and livelihood.

Author: Thomas J. Berghuis
Publisher: Timezone 8 Limited
ISBN: 9789889926595
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Performance Art in China takes as its subject one of the most dynamic and controversial areas of experimental art practice in China. In his comprehensive study, Sydney-based theorist and art historian Thomas J. Berghuis introduces and investigates the idea of the "role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art," a notion grounded in the realization that the body is always present in art practice, as well as its subsequent, secondary representations. Through a series of in-depth case studies, Berghuis reveals how, during the past 25 years, Chinese performance artists have "acted out" their art, often in opposition to the principles governing correct behavior in the public domain. In addition to a 25-year chronology of events, a systematic index of places, names and key terms, as well as a bibliography and a glossary in English and Chinese, this study also offers the reader numerous previously unpublished photos and documents.

Author: Silvia Fok
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 9781841506265
Category : Art, Chinese
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For all their ubiquity, life and death have not been fully explored as integral themes in many forms of contemporary Chinese art. Life and Death addresses that lacuna. Exploring the strategies employed by a variety of Chinese artists who engage with these timeless concerns, Silvia Fok opens a new line of inquiry about contemporary art in a rapidly changing environment. Fok focuses, in particular, on the ways in which these artists use their own bodies, animals' bodies, and other corporeal substances to represent life and death in performance art, installations, and photography. Over the course of her investigations, corporeality emerges as a common means of highlighting the social and cultural issues that surround these themes. By assessing its effectiveness in the expression of life, death, and related ideas, Fok ultimately illuminates the extent to which we can see corporeality as a significant trend in the history of contemporary art in China. Her conclusions will fascinate scholars of performance and installation art, photography, and contemporary Chinese art.

Author: Meiqin Wang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429853637
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China’s top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

Author: Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 9781527541023
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book presents in eight chapters the work of over 75 Chinese female artists, both pictorial and poetic. Their art is viewed within a framework of eight themes. The broad topics explored include the body; life; the representation of the experience of being a woman; home and the world; a view of children and other women; clothes; social conscience; fantasy; and abstractionâ "nonfigurative work and its viability as a medium to express the spiritual. These themes provide several lenses through which to enjoy and compare these artistsâ (TM) approaches and outputs. The volume is unique in its inclusion of poetry by contemporary women whose voices articulate so many of the same concerns as the visual artists. In China, poetry has always been the prime form of artistic expression, and it remains so today. Looking at this poetry affords us a different means of appreciating the art of women in contemporary society.

Author: Jiang Jiehong
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500776288
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
A redefinition of contemporary Chinese art from the last forty years in the context of unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation, written by an authority on the subject. Contemporary Chinese art is a subject of sustained and growing significance in present-day culture across the globe. This new volume in the World of Art series reframes Chinese art since the end of China’s Cultural Revolution more than four decades ago, placing it in the context of the nation’s unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation. Based on original research by writer, curator, and leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang Jiehong, this volume explores the area through firsthand materials and in-depth interviews with more than thirty artists. Providing the most up-to-date understanding of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang includes a variety of media, ranging from painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, performance, and participatory art. Featuring over 150 color images of artworks by more than fifty internationally renowned Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Peili, as well as emerging artists, such as Zhao Zhao, The Art of Contemporary China presents a wide variety of practices through curatorial discussions and images of original installation views and historical art events. What emerges are revelations on art, and new insights into contemporary China. Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers a concise but far-reaching survey of the movement.

Author: Qingsheng Zhu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781003221821
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"The book is a collection of fifteen introductory essays excerpted from the Annual of Contemporary Art in China, covering the years from 2005 to 2019, showcasing the development and changing landscapes of contemporary art in China. The Annual documents exhibitions, events, creative practices, and critical literature concerning contemporary art in China since 2005. Based on archival documentation and statistics data from these annuals, notable phenomena, events, and discourses from a given year, as well as key works and artists are reviewed in each introduction, with no ideological or market-driven undertone. The author unravels industrial and institutional factors, while also broaching important issues of abstract art, new media art and so on, and probing the historical and socio-cultural context as well. In this regard, the book offers a panorama of contemporary Chinese art and critically engages with the art scene in China, including Hongkong, Taiwan, and among the Chinese diaspora. The title will appeal to scholars, students and general readers interested in contemporary art history, art criticism, contemporary Chinese art, iconography, and contemporary art theory"--

Author: Jörg Huber
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839423090
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This publication enquires into the role and treatment of the body in the visual culture of contemporary China. What meanings are assigned to the body in artistic practice, what does it represent and what (hi)stories does it refer to? Considerable importance is ascribed to the body as a means of orientation and placement; as an arena and medium of social experience. 19 Chinese artists, theatre practitioners and theorists describe their personal experiences, put their thoughts and views up for discussion and explore how art can shed light on the individual and collective experiences that emerge in the wake of historical change and the anticipation of a newly won freedom.

Author: Xiaomei Chen
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861361
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Acting the Right Part is a cultural history of huaju (modern Chinese drama) from 1966 to 1996. Xiaomei Chen situates her study both in the context of Chinese literary and cultural history and in the context of comparative drama and theater, cultural studies, and critical issues relevant to national theater worldwide. Following a discussion of the marginality of modern Chinese drama in relation to other genres, periods, and cultures, early chapters focus on the dynamic relationship between theater and revolution. Chosen during the Cultural Revolution as the exclusive artistic vehicle to promote proletariat art, "model theater" raises important questions about the complex relationships between women, memory, nation/state, revolution, and visual culture. Throughout this study, Chen argues that dramatic norms inform both theatrical performance and everyday political behavior in contemporary China.

Author: Rossella Ferrari
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China's major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China's most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui--the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia's foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct--the pop avant-garde--and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.