Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema

Notes

237 Notes Introduction 1. For more information on this subject, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2. Since the historic 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition, Beijing has been center stage for contemporary Chinese art, and the newly developed 798 Art District is a free space where young Chinese artists are able to display their most recent work. New York, on the other hand, is also a top venue for new Chinese art and cinema. The first major exhibition was Gao Minglu’s “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” held at the Asia Society in 1998, followed by individual exhibits in local art galleries and prestigious museums such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum. As for cinema, the city is a unique place to see independent films made by Sixth Generation directors, such as Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000) and Wang Chao’s Anyang Orphan (2002) at Lincoln Center and the MoMA, respectively. Both films were banned in mainland China, as were many other films by Sixth Generation directors. In this respect, Beijing and New York both serve as a global cultural space that allows me to conduct this study. 3. On this subject, an impressive body of scholarly work has already been done, including Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Claire Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Liu Kang, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004); Gao Minglu, Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (Beijing: Millennium Art Museum; Buffalo, N.Y.: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005); Sheila Cornelius , New Chinese Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2002); Zhang Zhen, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Paul Pickowicz and Zhang Yingjin, eds., 238 From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). I frequently consulted these authors’ writings while researching this book. 4. Within the single year of 2001 China became a member country of the World Trade Organization and Beijing was chosen to host the 2008 Olympic Games. 5. Gao Minglu, The Wall, pp. 43–44. 6. Ibid., p. 45. 7. Ibid. 8. Andreas Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition: Avant-garde and Post-modernism in the 1970s,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty, p. 228 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 9. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 119. 10. Gao Minglu, The Wall, p. 68. 11. Ibid. 12. Calinescu, Five Faces, p. 122. 13. Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition,” p. 231. 14. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 49. 15. Ibid., p. 50. 16. Gao Minglu, The Wall, p. 68. 17. Anita Chang, “Police Block Events Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary,” February 5, 2009, Associated Press, available at http://www.google.com/hostednews. 18. Ibid. 19. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 61. 20. Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (New York: IconEditions, 1996), pp. 484–486. 21. It is still a most important national institution in China today. 22. Ye Ying, “Warhol in China (Wohuoer zai Zhongguo),” Time Out Beijing, issue 8, no. 143 (June 12–June 25, 2008): p. 29. 23. Ibid. 24. Jin Wei, “He Andi Wohuoer kan 1982 de Zhonghuo” (Looking at 1982’s China with Andy Warhol), Sheying zhi you (Photographer’s companion), issue 8 (August 2008): p. 73. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. See the Wikipedia entry for “Hongqi,” available at http://en.wikipedia.org. 28. Andi Wohuoer de zhexue: popu qishilu (The philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again), trans. Lu Ciying (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe , 2008). 29. Jin Wei, “Looking at 1982’s China with Andy Warhol,” p. 72. 30. Ellen Pearlman, “Xu Bing with Ellen Pearlman,” available at http://www .brooklynrail.org/2007/09/art...