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

values. Experimenting with materials and their use, transforming the subject matter for painting, and transcending the boundaries of normative practices were important experiences in this process. The legacy of this attempt to transcend traditional culture is an international practice of intensely subjective work that has a devoted specialised audience, but its constant reinvention of process has become institutionalised and formularised. Often, “avant-gardism” no longer transcends anything, but has become normative. As Andreas Huyssen (1986) pointed out, the innovations of the past are repeated pointlessly in the mass media, and what was once new has been appropriated to sell us things, not to empower the individual to think differently.

This is one of the reasons a book on Chinese visual culture is important, for it has received minimal attention in contrast to Chinese avant-garde practices. The Chinese avant-garde art movement (qianwei yishu) has had an enormous impact on the Western art world in the last two decades. Work from artists like Yue Minjun and Fang Lijun have been shown in New York and London to critical approbation, and individual pieces command high prices at auction. Contemporary Chinese artists and photographers have become part of the global art market, and their works are successfully bought, traded, and discussed in Western academic texts. But where else can the avant-garde go? Rupturing and dislocating are important strategies in cultural renewal, but they imply a dialogue with a fixed structure that can be disrupted. Philosophers in line with views that were supported by Jurgen Habermas (1992) would argue that the fixed institutions of first modernity, like the nation state, are increasingly (though reluctantly and painfully) able to absorb differences of opinion (Cao, 2006), and sociologists like Beck and Lau (2005) have suggested that the either/or attitude of first modernity (either industrialise or atrophy) is being slowly replaced by both/and (industrialise and try to preserve traditions) in second modernity. Thus, the original intention of the avant-garde to transform monolithic cultural structures through oppositional practices, though whilst valuable in preglobalised societies, is increasingly redundant in globalised ones.