In this Book
- Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
- Series: Critical Interventions
Xiaoping Lin provides illuminating close readings of a variety of visual texts and artistic practices, including installation, performance, painting, photography, video, and film. Throughout he sustains a theoretical discussion of representative artworks and films and succeeds in delineating a variegated postsocialist cultural landscape saturated by market forces, confused values, and lost faith. This refreshing approach is due to Lin’s ability to tackle both Chinese art and cinema rigorously within a shared discursive space. He, for example, aptly conceptualizes a central thematic concern in both genres as "postsocialist trauma" aggravated by capitalist globalization. By thus focusing exclusively on the two parallel and often intersecting movements or phenomena in the visual arts, his work brings about a fruitful dialogue between the narrow field of traditional art history and visual studies more generally.
Children of Marx and Coca-Cola will be a major contribution to China studies, art history, film studies, and cultural studies. Multiple audiences—specialists, teachers, and students in these disciplines, as well as general readers with an interest in contemporary Chinese society and culture—will find that this work fulfills an urgent need for sophisticated analysis of China’s cultural production as it assumes a key role in capitalist globalization.
30 illus.Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Part 1: Re-creating Urban Space in Avant-garde Art
- Part 2: China’s Lost Youth through the Lens of Independent Cinema
- Part 3: In Quest of Meaning in a Spiritual Void: Film and Video
- Chinese Glossary of Names, Titles, and Terms
- pp. 287-290
- Filmography
- pp. 291-292
- Bibliography
- pp. 293-306