Salvaging Hybridity: Reimagining ‘Chineseness’ within the Global Art Arena
A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) 2023.
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Departing from fixed nationalist rhetoric and orientalist ethnography, I focus on ‘Chineseness’ as an embodied artistic subjectivity that strongly relates to China as a proposition rather than a fixed territory or political index. Salvaging Hybridity: Reimagining ‘Chineseness’ within the Global Art Arena proposes an alternative set of relations for approaching contemporary Chinese art by problematising the assumed ‘primordial’ fixity of Chineseness within the global context. This research attends to the impact of cultural globalisation and modern migration on the aesthetic modality and consciousness of contemporary Chinese artists who live or work in and out of China. Paying close attention to the patriarchal canonisation and the under-researched contributions of women artists within the broader study of contemporary Chinese art, I examine the works of Cao Fei, Chu YinHua, Lap-See Lam, Leung Mee Ping, and Shen Yuan. Until now, the application of hybridity and the Third Space theory in the redefinition of ‘Chineseness’ within the context of globalisation and modern migration has yet to be considered.
Supplementing the existing post-colonial discourse of hybridity and Third Space theory, I apply the concept as the major method to examine how ‘Chineseness’ unfolds as an open and unfixed code, an ever-shifting artistic subjectivity and ambivalent identity within the global art arena. Across three chapters, I examine how a hybrid consciousness manifests in the artists’ practices through their engagement with the local/global, cultural translation, and memory. My emphasis on hybridity and Third Space theory lies not in its capacity for emancipation and revolution but in the generative possibilities that emerge from ambivalence and in-betweenness. I salvage aspects of Bhabha’s hybridity and Third Space model as a conceptual and aesthetic modality to effectively enable meaningful engagements with Chinese art globally. Avoiding simplistic prescriptions like ‘hybrid’, I explore how the artists elicit a hybrid consciousness, negating any attempt at universalising the experience of ‘Chineseness’. This thesis posits how ‘Chineseness’ can be understood as an everchanging and paradoxical embodied subjectivity within the global context.
