FAH262H1 Chap.12 Modern and Contemporary Art after 1976
Modern and Contemporary Art after 1976
The last week of the course
Week 12 covers about 1976 to 2001 under the heading of “modern” and “contemporary”, and all three listed readings are optional references. The course description names postwar Anti-Art and Non-Art, living artists and the biennale circuit, and the arrival of East Asian art on a worldwide market.
The exam aid sheet's contemporary names run from Nam June Paik (1932 to 2008) to Cao Fei (born 1978). Two names there are misspelled: read Takahashi Murakami as Takashi Murakami and Do Ho Su as Do Ho Suh.
Ai Weiwei appears in the Chinese reading as a co-editor, with Xu Bing and Zeng Xiaojun, of a privately published untitled book with a black cover (1994).
China: experiment after the Cultural Revolution
Wu Hung's introduction to the 1999 exhibition Transience describes Chinese art after 1976 as a negotiation among five realms: official art, academic art, urban popular culture, experimental art and an international commercial art aimed at foreign buyers.
He divides experimental art into four phases, from the unofficial art of 1979 to 1984 to a domestic turn after 1994. The first Stars show opened on 27 September 1979 in the street beside Beijing's National Art Gallery and was closed by police two days later.
Ten years on, the China/Avant-garde exhibition filled the same building with 297 works, its black carpets marked with a No U-Turn sign.
After June 1989, Wu Hung argues, idealism gave way to sarcasm in cynical realism and political pop.
He prefers the term experimental art because Chinese artists use it themselves and because it describes a position at society's border rather than a style.
Japan: the body as medium
Eric Shiner argues that Japanese artists commenting on society since the mid-1970s have worked through bodily transformation, role playing and the panel-by-panel vision of comics and animation.
Kimura Tsunehisa held a photomontage exhibition at the Parco gallery in Tokyo in 1977; his Cola of 1970, with bottles falling on the city like missiles, reads American consumer goods as a second bombardment. Sawada Tomoko photographed herself in four hundred guises in an ID photo booth for ID400 (1999).
Shiner is sceptical of the neo-pop of Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and Chiho Aoshima, which he finds pessimistic; Murakami's Superflat theory itself is a Week 2 reading.
Where the line between modern and contemporary falls
Each author draws the boundary differently, which makes a good comparison question.
Horlyck reports that many Korean critics took the minjung treatment of social reality as the marker separating modern from contemporary Korean art. Wu Hung's fourth phase, the domestic turn of the mid-1990s, is the first that has stopped answering the Cultural Revolution, so for him the contemporary begins when that memory stops setting the agenda.
In the previous week's reading, Jesty observed that Japanese critics of the 1950s and later tied contemporary art to international contemporaneity, while older standards of facture survived for modern painting.
Shiner, finally, finds the contemporary in hybrid artists who act at once as cultural critics and world citizens.
Korea: from protest to pluralism
Charlotte Horlyck treats the 1988 Seoul Olympics as the catalyst for international projects, followed by the 1993 Whitney Biennial in Seoul, which Nam June Paik supported with a personal donation of 150,000 US dollars.
In 1987 Lee Bul and Choi Jeong-hwa co-founded the group Museum, which answered politically charged minjung art by promoting “the meaning of being meaningless”. After the foreign exchange crisis of December 1997 closed galleries, younger curators and artists opened alternative spaces.
By the 2000s, Horlyck writes, Korean artworks could no longer be grouped by medium or by movement, a pluralism she traces back to the minjung generation.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Wu Hung's five realms of post-1976 Chinese art
- 02
Four phases of Chinese experimental art, 1979 to 1999
- 03
Cynical realism and political pop after 1989
- 04
Bodily transformation and performance in Japanese art
- 05
Neo-pop versus self-contained pop
- 06
Biennales, pavilions and alternative spaces in South Korea
- 07
Anti-Art, Non-Art and the global art market
Worked example · free
Explain how Morimura turns Western masterpieces into critique
- 2Describe the method: makeup, body paint and props turn the artist into the sitter, and the work is a photograph that passes at first for a painting.
- 2Name the target: Shiner links the series to bubble-era consumption, Japanese investors buying Western masterworks and imported ideals of beauty.
- 2Place it in Shiner's scheme: the work uses henshin and performance to leave viewers a story to complete, which he calls self-contained pop.
Key terms
- Experimental Art
- Wu Hung's preferred name for Chinese vanguard art from 1979 to 1999, defined by artists placing themselves at society's border rather than by style or politics.
- Political Pop
- A Chinese painting trend of the early 1990s that broke up Cultural Revolution imagery and mixed it with trademarks and other borrowed signs.
- Henshin
- Bodily transformation through costume, makeup or digital manipulation; Shiner treats it as one of three screens in Japanese art since the mid-1970s.
- Self-Contained Pop
- Shiner's label for optimistic Japanese pop, such as Morimura's or Yanagi Miwa's, that draws on popular imagery yet leaves viewers an open narrative.
Modern and Contemporary Art after 1976 FAQ
What were the Stars exhibitions in Beijing?
Wu Hung presents them as the start of unofficial art after the Cultural Revolution. Most members lacked formal training; the first show was closed by police, but the third, in 1980, was held inside the National Art Gallery itself.
Why did Dumb Type matter in 1990s Japan?
The Kyoto collective, founded in 1984, toured performances such as pH, S/N and OR, combining dance, video and lighting to confront AIDS and the invisibility of gay life. Its founder Furuhashi Teiji died of AIDS in 1995.
When did South Korea get its own Venice Biennale pavilion?
In 1995, the Biennale's centenary and the fiftieth anniversary of liberation. Horlyck notes Korea became only the second Asian country with its own pavilion, after Japan in 1956; Lee Bul won an Honourable Mention there in 1999.
Exam move
Redraw the three-lane timeline from memory with at least four dated events per country, then write one sentence per lane on where the line between modern and contemporary falls for that author.
