Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Gl ...

Ulrich Beck (1992) argued that one of the key mechanisms that differentiates first modernity from second modernity (also referred to as late modernity; Giddens, 1991) is the redefinition of the nation state caused by the global economy. Beck (1992) has observed that ‘Nation states can no longer cut themselves off from one another; their army-patrolled frontiers are full of holes, at least as far as their insertion in the space of global communications is concerned’ (p. 17).

The tensions between national and globalising cultures in the early twenty-first century are fundamentally different from their twentieth-century manifestations. The idea of a state being completely independent, or even needing complete independence from other states, is being challenged. The new European Union is an example of this happening on a huge scale. Nations and states have not disappeared, but the need for them to negotiate their cultural and physical autonomy in a global environment is increasingly necessary for their continued existence. A willingness to negotiate in the twenty-first century is not a sign of weakness; it is a material reality in contemporary global life. However, the necessity of compromising does not stop it from being a painful experience for those educated to believe that individual identity is locked into the state’s identity.

How then can traditional culture be understood from outside the culture in which it originated? This is a new concern that has formed in the new conditions of the twenty-first century. In first modernity, individuals with progressive cultural ambitions aspired to a universalising process in which all traditions were shed and replaced with some sort of transnational practice. In painting, this practice was either abstraction or realism, depending upon one’s ideological position. Avant-garde attitudes towards traditional forms of cultural representation were ones of disruption and transgression. The original functions of the avant-garde in art were to stimulate change in cultural practices and to encourage innovation in the form and content of works. These goals were accomplished either through group manifestos or through individual struggles to find a personal voice, and it was hoped that new ways could be achieved of representing a material world that was increasingly distant from traditional