Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China Art, Design, Film, New Media and the Prospects of “Post-West” Contemporaneity

This edited collection brings together essays that share in a critical attention to visual culture as a means of representing, contributing to and/or intervening with discursive struggles and territorial conflicts currently taking place at and across the outward-facing and internal borders of the People’s Republic of China. Elucidated by the essays collected here for the first time is a constellation of what might be described as visual culture wars comprising resistances on numerous fronts not only to the growing power and expansiveness of the Chinese state but also the residues of a once pervasively suppressive Western colonialism/imperialism. The present volume addresses visual culture related to struggles and conflicts at the borders of Hong Kong, the South China Sea and Taiwan as well within the PRC with regard the so-called “Great Firewall of China” and differences in discursive outlook between China and the West on the significances of art, technology, gender and sexuality. In doing so, it provides a vital index of twenty-first century China’s diversely conflicted status as a contemporary nation-state and arguably nascent empire.

Paul Gladston is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham (2015-2018) and, prior to that, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham (2010-2015) and inaugural Head of the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China (2005-2010). Paul has written extensively on contemporary art and culture with respect to the concerns of critical/cultural theory. His numerous book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), awarded ‘best publication’ at the Awards of Art China (2015), and Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019). He was an academic adviser to the internationally-acclaimed exhibition ‘Art of Change: New Directionsfrom China’, Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre, London (2012), and  co-curator—with Dr Lynne Howarth-Gladston—of the exhibitions, ‘Dis/Continuing Traditions; Contemporary Video Art from China’, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania (2021) and 'New China/New Art: Contemporary Video from Shanghai and Hangzhou', Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham (2015).

Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk is a Senior Lecturer in Art History & Curating at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, with a focus on Diaspora and Global Visual Culture. She is on the Editorial board for the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded research network - Culture, Capital and Communication: Visualising Chinese Borders in the 21^st Century (2014-16) and is currently working on her monograph - Imaging Migration in Post-war Britain: Artists of Chinese, Korean and Japanese Descent, Routledge (2021-22).

Ming Turner is Associate Professor in the Institute of Creative Industries Design, and Director of Visual Arts at the Art Center, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She was awarded her PhD in Art History and Theory from Loughborough University and lectured on critical and contextual studies at De Montfort University. She has published widely in both English and Chinese  and has curated a variety of projects and exhibitions internationally. Her recent book-length publications include The Art of Contemporary Curation and Its Realisation: Body, Gender and Technology (2018), and Crossing Borders: Transition and Nostalgia in Contemporary Art (2015).