Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2014)
‘To enter art history – reading and writing art history in China during the Reform Era’
Abstract
This paper critically analyses how Western art history was imported, translated and negotiated in China during the Reform Era. Using Lydia Liu’s theory of “meaning-value,” the author considers how Chinese artists and art critics made sense of these texts within the context of Chinese art production in the early 1980s and 1990s. The author argues that Lin Jiahua’s artwork, To Enter Art History – Slideshow Activity (1988) anticipates a change in the relationship between Western art history and contemporary Chinese art practice from the translation and appropriation of Western modern art in the 1980s to the participation of Chinese within the emergent international art world of 1990s. By combing Chinese art within the canon of Western art history, these artists and critics proposed a spatial re- mapping of art history, decentering it from its Western-centric genealogies.
