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

Once a society has made the material step into a world economy as China did in 2001, its culture becomes embedded in a complex network of demands that enforce flexibility because cultural structures must adapt to change, just as trees in a storm must bend with the wind—otherwise, they will not stand the test of time. It is not simply the case that one way of art making is better than another. Both avant-gardism and traditional practices have great importance in different circumstances, but both suffer the danger of becoming self referential and self replicating if they are unconnected to issues that are valued by communities. Traditional Chinese brush and ink painting (guohua), if taught as a set of skills rather than as a way of thinking, can be locked into a set of routines that preserve the act, treating it like a corpse that needs embalming rather than a body that needs feeding. Designers who adopt traditional forms that are unrelated to their original conception can become parodic (see figure 3). Avant-gardism can degenerate into sets of practices that become narcissistic if they cease to engage with social issues. There is room for all these practices, and the chapters of this book convey the understanding that hybrid practices are a way of looking into the future.

Materially, traditional practices are a link to preindustrial sensibilities and intelligence. They provide a perspective that is different from the increasingly dominant vision of the mass media that assimilates and neutralises avant-gardism by using its forms but ignoring its content. For example, guohua (brush and ink painting) frames the world through sets of practices that are about contemplation; it is an examination of the physical world made directly through our senses and its relationship to our emotional autonomy, which are values that are entirely absent from the dynamism of the mass media. For this reason alone, one might be happy to argue for its preservation.

The chapters that follow have been organised into four sections. The first, Understanding Chinese Visual Tradition, examines the way in which visual tradition can be understood, its underlying philosophies and visual ideologies, and their applicability in a globalised present. The section that follows, Education in the Arts,reports and comments speculatively on the condition and role of art education under the circumstances of