a topological mapping of the emergence of performance and installations in contemporary China

The phenomenological approach reflected in this academic research attempts to deepen our understandings of how performative acts enriches society, thus viewing the various methodologies and syntagmatic strategies as a significant contribution to the understanding of historical processes of culture formation and the cross cultural references that contributed to the emergence of performance and installation art discourses in contemporary China.

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For the past seven years, I have been living and executing my art practice in the Popular Republic of China. My practice consists of a body of works that analyzes through photo installations and performances, how individual and collective identities contest cultural policies by re-formulating themselves in their search for self-definition through artistic expression and queer politic strategies

The central point of this research is to analyze through the exploration of a phenomenology of the gaze focus on the body of performers and their installations, the modalities of being and presence in the crystallization of the artwork as an act of contestation and on such terms and conditions that affect individual transactions and displacements that are manifest in the works of art as cultural agent. A cross examination of the influence of Visuality, linguistics and rhetorical figures of speech in search of spaces that challenge the relationship between the phenomenological analysis of seeing and being present; the identity of desire and the desire for identity.

This re-mapping, spreading as a metaphorical/ metonymical net, allows artists to challenge their position when confronted with its own representations and the places they occupy in his/her imaginings. A strategy of representation that act upon the search for the existentiary site of the self within the artwork and supply the artist with multiple possible understandings of a given event or premise that the work deals with. This act of creation through strategies of representation can be perceived as a Psycho-geography presented between the spectacle and the represented object in relation to the phenomenological instance of seeing and being present and the notion of place as topos in its correlation with the Spaciality of the gaze. This space, kiasms, demarcation, pucture, can be analized, researched and perceived through a methodological cartographic inquiry by Mapping topologies on Chinese contemporary art

a)The phenomenology of the gaze and its inscription in a dialectic of gaze and desire and its correlation with Virtuality. Forbidden senses? Sensuality in contemporary Chinese art. Fen - Ma Liuming. PUEL Caroline

1. The redemption of vision as a cultural heritage practice. Chinese art theorists and critics: Gao Minglu, He Guiyan, Gao Xingjian, Li Xianting, David Clarke.

2. The gaze as Cultural memory. Scar art - Red and Grey: 8 Avant-Garde Chinese Artists by Li Xianting

b) The architectural space of the modalities of being that the work produces. A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. Wu Hung. 2012.

c)Which are the configurations that are best equipped for communicating the symbolic projections as they unfold through collected data. Ai Weiwei: Monumental Junkyard

introduction

Objectives

The aim of the research is to analyze through AAA’s extensive collection, artistic interactions between individuals and the symbolic network they have invented to conform a constellation

of texts, concepts and artworks influencing further their sense of collective and individual identities which will shape and question inter-subjective shared meanings in the geopolitical cultural context of contemporary China.

the emergence of performance and installations in

This examination is relevant to the understanding of the visual images that populates the imaginary within a cultural process as an insight towards the problem of identity and its virtual configurations within a process of cultural translation.

contemporary china

Methodology

The following points will be taken into consideration;

Imagination as process in

The phenomenology of the gaze and its inscription in a dialectic of gaze and desire and its correlation with Virtuality.

1. The redemption of vision as a cultural heritage practice.

China’s aesthetic tradition was never concerned with “truth” zhen . Instead, the Chinese tradition, in Gao’s terminology, demonstrates continued respect for yi , or “something that comes from your mind.” This is a conceptually powerful line of distinction, particularly as we look forward to developments in Chinese art. When the agent of art, the artist, is always in balance (or tension) with her context, be it external environmental, internal mental, combined physical/material or what not, the conglomeration of factors is never mistaken for re-presented reality, just one person’s yi.

How are body discourses related to different bodily expressions? In what ways do the Confucian ideas on the body shed light on recent discussions in the West on reclaiming the body? Are the problems with the dichotomies of mind and body solved in the Confucian tradition? Can active engagement through the process of reworking artworks create new possibilities of bodily expression?

the desire of the gaze and its embodiment

embodiment and presence

territoriality of the gaze and its entorno

the gaze as cultural memory

the gaze as trace

absence

scar

demarcation

cultural politics of representation

scarification

stain / tache

presence that is always already an absence,

the philosophical gaze in totalitarian politics