Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art

Abstract

In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? The article focuses on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China. It suggests that artworld art (encompassed by the artworld institutions of commerce, museums, and the academy) is far from the only art currently produced. Art beyond the artworld, whether commercial or religious, is important to many people worldwide. It describes four kinds of art currently made in China. Three are artworld art (Modernist, traditional, and avantHgarde), one is non-artworld (mass commercial). Connections exist among them. Further, it argues that practices in all four conform to expectations globally that Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed ‘staging Chineseness’. The article concludes with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it.