The differences among

American, European and Asian Contemporary Art

Globalization/ Dialogical Aesthetics

Asian artists’ idea of using the body as an artistic medium is different from that of many Western artists: here, the body is not to be stripped bare or to be displayed, it is not used to challenge taboos, either; instead, it is the vehicle through which the artist aims to train the artist’s will, it is the arena where spirit confronts material. Ex:Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba: “Breathing is Free: 12756.3”. The artist intends to run the physical distance of 12756.3 km, the diameter of the earth, in different parts of the world within a certain period of time, and have the whole process filmed by others.

Chinese artist He Yunchang picked up a rock in a small town called Boulmer on the Northumberland coast in northern England, and carried it all the way around the coast of Great Britain and finally went back to Boulmer to put the rock back in the same place. Besides using the body as a medium, the biggest characteristic of these works is to show meaning through meaningless behavior, showing typical Asian thinking.

The US-based Taiwan artist Teh-ching Hsieh carried out a series of one-year performances in New York in the seventies and the eighties, for instance, living in a cage for one year, punching a time clock every hour for one year, living outdoors for one year, etc.

Today’s Asia no longer an irrelevant other…

Year Performance 1978-1979 -- Hsieh lived in a locked cage without reading, writing, or talking to anyone, which is now fully documented at the Museum of Modern Art through May 18.

Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 -- Hsieh and artist Linda Montano were tied together by a length of rope. http://www.one-year-performance.com/

We will stay together for one year and never be alone. We will be in the same room at the same time, when we are inside. We will be tied together at the waist with an 8 foot rope. We will never touch each other during the year.

Globalization:

(from - “The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art” by Ou Ning)

In the late eighties and the early nineties of last century, along with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR, the ideological opposition between the two camps came to an end; after having won its final victory, capitalism went further in its advance across the world by speeding up its pace and increasing its intensity, thereby inaugurating the movement of globalization.

The political iron curtain having been torn open, not only could Western capital enter the once antagonistic third world countries, but the art of third world countries

could also be brought to the West.

(from - Tate and The Open University's complementary resources “Contemporary Art and Globalisation”)

One of the most important factors to affect contemporary art has been cultural and economic globalisation. Increasingly, international art exhibitions draw their contents from all over the world, and artists address a wide range of subjects relating to this developing situation. …biennials are one of the forces for homogenisation…Glocal: somewhere between the local and the global… what happens when local and global get mixed up…

Dialogical Aesthetics: (from “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art” by Grant Kester)("Littoral" = socially engaged art practices)

Three related components of a discursive or dialogical art practice.1. InterdisciplinarityIt operates "between" discourses (art and activism, for example) and between institutions (the gallery and the community center or the housing block)…. This interdisciplinarity, the ability to draw on analytic resources from other areas such as critical theory, social history or environmental science, and the ability to work through alternative institutional sites, allows Littoral art to develop a systematic critique that can be actualized through specific political or social struggles. 2. Multiple registers of meaning vs. formal immanenceIn Littoral art the "meaning" of a given work is not centered in the physical locus of the object, or in the imaginative capacity of the single viewer. Rather, it is dispersed through multiple registers. These include a spatial-temporal register, in which the work "means" differently in different locations and times, as opposed to the immanence that is characteristic of modernist formalism…. There is thus no single "work" to be judged in a Littoralist criticism. This is what differentiates Littoral criticism from conventional art criticism. The "work" is constituted as an ensemble of effects and forces, which operate in numerous registers of signification and discursive interaction.3. Dialogical indeterminance vs. formal indeterminanceThe principle of indeterminance that is registered in conventional art through formal innovation is expressed in Littoral art through the open-ended process of dialogical engagement, which produces new and unanticipated forms of collaborative knowledge.

San Francisco Exhibitions :

imPOSSIBLE! @ SFACG & M17

8 renowned Chinese artists engage absurdity and theatricality in video and photographic works that respond to recent

socio-political and economic circumstances in China.

Artists :Lu Chunsheng (Shanghai), Xing Danwen (Beijing), Ni Haifeng (Amsterdam), Zhu Jia (Beijing), Xu Zhen (Shanghai) and Michael Zheng (San Francisco & Beijing), Yang Zhenzhong (Shanghai), Shi Yong (Shanghai)

imPOSSIBLE! 8 Chinese Artists Engage Absurdity

•

Lu Chusheng

Ni Haifeng

Shi Yong

Xing Danwen

Cantocore: @ M17, SF

Explores the globalized conditions of contemporary culture, through an exchange specifically between artists from the San Francisco Bay Area and Guangzhou, China.The collaboration takes its inspiration and its name, "Cantocore," from the rapid economic, social, and cultural changes currently taking place in Canton province. Over the last 20 years, cities such as Guangzhou, the capital of Canton, have changed from having a uniquely Chinese culture into global cities.

Art and culture is no longer defined by merely national boundaries - if it ever was - and yet cultural differences persist, providing productive tensions, rich with critical and creative possibilities.

Participating Artists: JD Beltran, Deer Fang, Wang Ge, Misako Inaoka, David O. Johnson, Guy Overfelt, Jon Phillips, Lin Fang Suo, Zhou Tao, Katherine Worel, Huang Xiaopeng. Curated by Deer Fang, Justin Hoover, Jon Phillips

Trying To Cope With Things That Aren’t Human @ DCP, SF(David Cunningham Projects)

Artists: Paul Rooney, Heather and Ivan Morison, Richard T. Walker, Annika Ström, Ian Brown, Ryan Gander, Francis McKee and Alex Pearl

The show places us in a familiar position, one where we struggle to deal with the things around us, unable to completely understand how technology works but simultaneously unable to truly understand the beauty of nature.

Everything goes as if it is always away, Walker ‘what could have been’ pointing to the peak of the mountain. Along side the litho print Walker combines audio and a stack of letters addressed to ‘whom it may concern’ for viewers to take away, which address, in letter form, the anti-climatic tale revealing the reason for not triumphantly climbing the mountain: a headache.

- What is your impression about the differences among American, European and Asian Contemporary Art ?

- How similar the European and American art since they are bothbeing discussed/mentioned as Western art?