Word: westernness
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...only heard of the big artists. Zhou Tiehai with his computer-generated superimpositions of Joe Camel’s face onto famous Western paintings, or Wang Guangyi and his retooling of propaganda posters to incorporate an excessive amount of corporate logos. Yue Minjun’s trademark is fashioning representations of his face while smiling (in every medium imaginable), and then, of course, there is the work of Zhang Xiaogang whose black-and-white paintings of 1950s era Chinese families have sold for upwards of US$2 million at auction. While these men are undoubtably the blue chip artists...
...have chosen to use their national identity, more than anything, as a selling point. To them, Yue Minjun’s smiling faces appear more Chinese-looking than is accurate; similarly, Wang Guangyi’s political pop paintings are seen as insincere and overly topical. Many Western critics, along with other Chinese artists, are bothered by the success of those who make intentional and overtly Chinese art. Some have gone so far as to characterize much of this work as a sort of soft minstrel...
...overlapping subgroups (state-supporting art, commercial art, or overtly subversive art, to give a few examples) that are united by a universal challenge facing all artists of the Middle Kingdom: how do Chinese artists today reconcile their personal artistic convictions to the prospective financial boon of both appealing to Western art tastes and asserting (or exaggerating) one’s Chineseness...
...complex of galleries and studios on Moganshan Road, I saw works by all of those big names—Yue’s smiling faces, Zhang’s monochromatic canvases. None of these paintings however were made by the hands, or with the permission, of the artists. The Western art world has historically been one of trends (remember when feces paintings were in?) but never has such conceptual larceny, such outright theft of not only theme but style, been seen this side of the Yangtze. Perhaps I didn’t fully realize the situation at that instant...
...dealing so directly with issues of language in his work, what Xu quite ironically does is address the issue of cultural translation as well. He gives power to the belief that issues of relatability to Western audiences are not insurmountable, and in fact have cultural precedent within China. Standard Chinese is a Chinese that is at once familiar and foreign to many—there are likely hundreds of millions of Chinese who speak Chinese dialects at home or even exclusively and deal with issues of cross-cultural translation everyday...