2007-12-14T08:12:46-06:00 <p>My research addresses the work of contemporary Chinese artists based in Beijing, whose work is both formed in negotiation with a global audience and influenced by a historically and culturally specific form of urban development. The tide of economic progress in China has a direct impact on daily life and continues to fuel the art world, raising issues of authenticity, authority and ownership.</p> <p>My own engagement with China is as part of its diaspora and my approach is practice-based. My theoretical research has a specific concern with the interaction between modernity and the everyday, and I therefore discuss both Lefebvre’s understanding of everyday life, Bourriaud’s concept of the relational in the context of <em>guanxi</em> (social relationships). I also consider the specific importance of spectacle to the work of Chinese contemporary artists, examining pertinent parallels between the communist ideal of mass identification that is a part of Mao’s legacy, and the mass experience of Modernity as discussed by Guy Debord. My own research is also considered in relation to an emerging and increasingly self-aware field of new ‘sinologists’, or scholars of Chinese Contemporary Art.</p> Voon Pow 48 Bartlett 23 <em>The relational and quotidian in contemporary urban China</em> 2009-11-27T10:04:10-06:00