Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art

Explores how Xu Bing and other contemporary Chinese artists use Western ideas within a Chinese cultural discourse.How Chinese is contemporary Chinese art? Treasured by collectors, critics, and art world cognoscenti, this art developed within an avant-garde that looked West to find a language to strike out against government control. Traditionally, Chinese artistic expression has been related to the structure and function of the Chinese language and the assumptions of Chinese natural cosmology. Is contemporary Chinese art rooted in these traditions or is it an example of cultural self-colonization? Contributors to this volume address this question, going beyond the more obvious political and social commentaries on contemporary Chinese art to find resonances between contemporary artistic ideas and the indigenous sources of Chinese cultural self-understanding.>Hsingyuan Tsao is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. Roger T. Ames is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and editor of Philosophy East and West. His many books include Confucian Cultures of Authority (coedited with Peter D. Hershock) and the translation (with D. C. Lau) of the classic Chinese work Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare, both also published by SUNY Press.