This thesis examines the questionable avant-garde-ness of contemporary Chinese art, based on a systematically archived primary source. It includes year-by-year databases of artworks, exhibitions, diaries, notebooks, articles, reading lists and music records collated by the author specifically for this research with the help and involvement of the artists and historians concerned. The carefully selected material is not only derived from direct conversation with historical witnesses, but also reflects the author's cautious cross-examination of the available evidence, as history is recorded by human beings, to some extent, it can be poorly documented and biased. In spite of many existing publications on the origin of contemporary Chinese art, this thesis provides a much closer scrutiny of particular aspects with a first hand and meticulously chosen material, which offers a macro-microscopic (collective/individual) dualist view on the history. In the filed, the term “contemporary Chinese art” has been used to describe certain trends of art developed in China since 1978. The '85 New Wave movement – within which emerged dozens of new art groups – has been commonly recognised as the birth of contemporary Chinese art. The New Concrete Image was the leading art group of the Life-Stream, one major faction of the New Wave. The development of this group explains the uniqueness of the trajectory of avant-garde art in China: from autonomous organisations to semi-governmental powers; from a modernist movement to a post-modernist one.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:714806 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Gong, Joshua |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/68271/ |
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