Jane Chin Davidson - Staging Art and Chineseness

Staging art and Chineseness

SERIES EDITORS

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

Rethinking Arts Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

Also available in the series

Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias Mia L. Bagneris

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 Amy Bryzgel

Art, museums and touch Fiona Candlin

Travelling images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture Anna Dahlgren

The do-it-yourself artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics Anna Dezeuze (ed.)

Empires of light: Vision, visibility and power in colonial India Niharika Dinkar

Fleshing out surfaces: Skin in French art and medicine, 16501850 Mechthild Fend

The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the painterly real, 19872004 Angela Harutyunyan

The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture Helen Hills

The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris Mary Hunter

Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture Dominic Johnson

Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds)

Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing Kimberly Lamm

Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai Jenny Lin

Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil Luciana Martins

After the event: New perspectives in art history Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds)

Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe (eds)

Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film Ara Osterweil

The ecological eye: Assembling an ecocritical art history Andrew Patrizio

After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum Griselda Pollock

Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-making in a globalised world Anne Ring Petersen

Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel Rose Marie San Juan

The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art Nizan Shaked

The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England Kimberley Skelton

The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz

Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art Tamara Trodd (ed.)

Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts Caroline Turner and Jen Webb

Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean Leon Wainwright

Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art Mechtild Widrich

Staging art and Chineseness

The politics of trans/nationalism and global expositions

Jane Chin Davidson

Manchester University Press

Copyright Jane Chin Davidson 2020

The right of Jane Chin Davidson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3978 8 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Yuk King Tan, Scavenger, still from video, 2008 (photograph courtesy of the artist)

Typeset by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

This book is dedicated to David, my one and my only

The plates can be found between pp. 122 and 123.

Plates

Figures

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material: the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

I have been thinking about the issues of identification examined in this book since I emigrated with my family to the United States from Hong Kong. This writing has been a long time coming, and I want to thank a diverse and often disparate group of colleagues and associates whose influence was essential to my process. Words could never convey my appreciation for Amelia Jones, since this book would never have been conceived without her brilliant insight and genuine care. The feminist consortium developed by Lisa Adkins and Nicole Vitellone at the Cultural Theory Institute, along with Laura Doan and the Institute for Gender and Sexuality at the University of Manchester was a point of inception. Since then, Emily Cuming has been a true support, along with Tony Crowley. Donald Preziosis important work has guided this book. I want to thank the British Economic and Social Research Council and also Tony Bennett, Nikos Papastergiadis, Lynne Pearce, Helen Rees Leahy and Nicholas Thoburn, and Cordelia Warr. The artists whose work constitutes the primary engagement of this study have been personally inspirational, and the earliest representatives in relation to this book were Zhang Huan (for whose generosity, along with Junjuns, I am deeply appreciative), Yin Xiuzhen, Song Dong, and Ai Weiwei in association with those at Reed College, Tsao Hsingyuan and especially Geraldine Ondrizek. I am indebted most of all to the important contributions from Patty Chang, who is amazing in the way she reframes the world of contemporary Chinese art. I am also grateful to artists Ho Siu Kee, Lin Shumin, and Cai Guo-Qiang; and also Wu Mali, Yuk King Tan, Cao Fei, and Wong Hoy Cheong. I am grateful for the support of Adriana Scalise at ASAC and Venice Biennale Archives, The Getty Research Institute, and The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. My colleagues at the Research Network for Modern and Contemporary Chinese and dear friends from the Chineseness symposium in Lisbon (2015) have played an important part in this book. I must also thank Shreerekha Subramanian, Marsha Meskimmon, Emma Brennan, and Alpesh Patel. The archivist Camille Sui Lin Davidson and photographer David Davidson have contributed so much. The research support of California State University, San Bernardino was essential to the completion of this work and I am thankful to my colleagues Olga Valdivia, Matthew Poole, Teodora Bozhilova, Tom McGovern, Sant Khalsa, Alison Ragguette, Kathy Gray, Ed Gomez, and Juan Delgado, as well as the amazing students at CSUSB who deserve mentioning. There are countless others who I have not named. But most importantly, this book is dedicated to David, Mei Leah, Camille, and Lucas.