The Darker Side of Contemporary Art in China: Market, Politics, Gender

Abstract

Between the opening-up policy and the Belt and Road Initiative of Chinese Dream, the development of Chinese contemporary art crystallises the robust growth of the country from an agriculture-based society into the world’s factory and a global powerhouse. During this period, the institutional voids and changing social paradigms from a planned economy to state capitalism has yielded opportunities for the ‘darker side (of modernity)’ and/or the ‘dark (deep) world of fine art)’ to take shape in China’s emerging culture economics. From the global perspective of the entangled history in the Sinosphere, this research takes a postcolonialist approach based on the cultural criticism of Mignolo and the media theory of McLuhan to investigate the three key dimensions of art history – market, politics and gender (social relevance) – with five independent but mutually related sub-studies, focusing on (1) the actor-agent network of foreign (in)direct investments in the Chinese contemporary ‘art game’, (2) the process of valorisation – value proposition, value added and value chain – in the ecosystem of the art industry, (3) the relationship between systems of political economy and the use of (contemporary) art, (4) the colonial way of seeing the arts and culture of the Other, and (5) gender equality in the art history of modern China. The findings and results support the thesis that ‘Chinese contemporary art is the medium is the message of coloniality’, an argument that is also valid in regard to other non-Western traditions in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, facing the globalised market-oriented neoliberalism and neo-colonisation. Keywords: Art Game, Chinese Contemporary Art, Art Economy, Cultural Policy, Modernity, Globalisation, Neoliberalism, Political Economy, Museum Phenomenology, (De)Coloniality, Foreign Investment, Value, Chinese Feminism