[심야통신] 어느 조선족 예술가의 초상 : 문화일반 : 문화 : 뉴스 : 한겨레 (hani.co.kr)
Globalism and Transnationalism | Art History Teaching Resources
Michelle Yee (author) is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.
Kaegan Sparks (editor) is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Publication Associate in Critical Anthologies at the New Museum, New York.
the local versus the global.
Globalization and transnationalism are often perceived as phenomena that have had their most apparent impact on art in the contemporary era. Several scholars such as Andreas Huyssen, however, have accurately and persuasively discussed globalization and transnationalism as historically relevant and pervasive topics that contest the belief that cultures can be or were ever actually “pure.”
Instead, cultures/nations/ethnicities/groups have always inevitably interacted, collided, and blended throughout time. In conjunction with this lecture, you might consider today’s digital advancements and increasingly post-neoliberal world from the historical perspective of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent World Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
fantasy on “pure” something: pure means authentic
pure art, pure Korean
William Marlow is a wonderful example of an early world traveler who was interested in other cultures, and more specifically, interested in bringing aesthetics from “exotic” places back to Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website offers this description of Marlow’s watercolor View of the Wilderness at Kew: “The magnificent Chinese Pagoda of Kew Gardens, designed in 1757 by William Chambers, has always attracted much attention. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pagoda fueled a rage for such buildings throughout Europe, and even today remains one of London’s main tourist attractions.
The painting that launched Edward Said’s highly regarded analysis of postcolonialism and Orientalism, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer is a well-known example of European perspectives of an exotic and unknown land. Painted in almost photorealistic detail, the painting suggests absolute authenticity in its depiction of a Middle Eastern scene of slumped men watching a nude snake charmer.
Negro in an African Setting, one of four panels in Aaron Douglas’s mural series Aspects of Negro Life is an example of what the artist called “Egyptian form,” which featured figures in profile with front-facing eyes like those seen in ancient Egyptian painting. The entire series is highly cinematic and features the same aesthetic style, which is primarily monochromatic with translucent colors and geometric edges.
Born in 1943, Zhang Hongtu is one of many diasporic Asian artists based in New York City. He was born in China and came to the United States in 1980. His Long Live Chairman Mao series is considered one of Zhang’s first political Pop works where, with just a few simple brushstrokes, he converted the iconic Western face of the Quaker Oats man into the iconic Chinese face of Mao Zedong. As a child of the Communist Revolution in China, Zhang understood the political power of images that could be used to propagandize for political movements and ideas. The cross-pollination of American and Chinese iconography highlighted by Hongtu speaks to the capitalistic agenda that China holds despite its Communist proclamations and can be read as a statement critical of Chinese hypocrisy. However, in Long Live Chairman Mao, Hongtu replaced a benevolent figure of American consumerism with the face of a seemingly benevolent Chinese leader, potentially also revealing the artist’s homesickness for his homeland. Conflicting interpretations are at the heart of this artist’s work, which negotiates the constantly shifting experiences and emotions of transnational (and transplanted) individuals.
For a simple-looking object, Ai Wei Wei’s Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Label is a highly complicated site of contestation. One of China’s most famous artists, Ai Wei Wei is primarily known for his political dissent toward the Chinese government. Here, he has taken an urn (one of many) that he claims is from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and emblazoned it with an iconic Western commercial logo. At face value, the work is a palimpsest of eras and cultures mashed together. However, the work also evokes multiple questions and issues. First, is it problematic that an artist has taken a unique antique object and essentially defaced it? On the other hand, Ai Wei Wei’s commentary on the destruction of Chinese culture by the means of commercialism and capitalism can be read as a meta-critique of Chinese authorities, whose banishment of free expression has already destroyed centuries of a Chinese culture once renowned for its poetry, aesthetics, and literature.
Horrified, the press stated that an artist had destroyed a one-million-dollar object, but what was actually being destroyed? The original Han Dynasty vase, or the work of a famous international artist? How might we respond to either act? Ai Wei Wei himself destroyed Han Dynasty vases in a series of photographs (Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995/2009), which was mimicked in 2012 by Swiss artist Manuel Salvisberg’s Fragments of History, which documented prominent collector Uli Sigg dropping a similar Ai Wei Wei work that he owned. The layers of this work are ripe for discussion and present multiple points for potential essays or response papers. For an in-depth consideration, one could read Chin-Chin Yap’s essay “Devastating History” in ArtAsiaPacific.
Yinka Shonibare, who was born in London and grew up in the UK and Nigeria, has described himself as “a postcolonial hybrid.” The Swing (After Fragonard) is an installation based on Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s iconic Rococo painting The Swing (1767), depicting a young girl playing flirtatiously in a garden containing two men. Fragonard paints the young woman as her shoe flies off her foot in a moment of abandon, while a titillated suitor looks on and encourages her. Shonibare’s work preserves the girl, her shoe, and the swing but omits the two men. Her figure is headless, perhaps referencing the guillotine of the French Revolution, which was impending at the time of the original painting, though amputation is also a signature of Shonibare’s work. The artist often removes a limb or a body part from his figures, introducing a disturbing and jolting element to otherwise exquisitely and seamlessly constructed objects.
her skin is darker. He has eschewed the frills and lace of the original girl’s pink gown and instead dressed his figure in vibrant batik fabric, characteristic of his other sculptures and paintings. Batik fabric itself has highly postcolonial characteristics and signifies the Western imagination of African identity by its completely “fabricated” African origin. Indeed, these textiles are also known as Dutch wax textiles, having been appropriated and then mass-industrialized from African designs by the Dutch during the colonial period. Later, English manufacturers copied the Dutch fabrics, using a predominantly Asian workforce to reproduce designs that were originally derived from African textiles, further complicating their chain of production. The fabrics were finally exported to West Africa, where they became popular during several African independence movements. Their bright colors and bold patterns became iconic of a struggle for political and cultural independence. Today they continue to be sold in Africa, but also New York and London, and are often adapted by high-end fashion designers who themselves are highly globalized.
Her photographic series Daddy and I focuses on Chinese girls who have been adopted by American families, primarily during the period of China’s one-child policy, then after 1991 when it loosened its adoption rules. Since then, over 55,000 Chinese girls have been adopted by American parents, creating multiracial families that have changed the archetype of the traditional American nuclear family. Zhang’s project examines the bond between father and daughter despite or because of their different ethnicities and considers the unique interplay between skin color, ethnicity, and upbringing. She also considers gender issues, as the American concept of “Daddy’s girl” is a component of father/daughter relationships that does not necessarily play a significant role in Chinese society.
Samson Young, a young artist based in Hong Kong, is a classically trained musician and composer who creates multimedia projects using contemporary communication technologies. For Liquid Borders, the artist traces, in a sonic fashion, the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.
Laura Kina, a mixed-race artist based in Chicago, painted Okinawa — All American Food during a trip to Okinawa, a tiny island off the coast of Japan where her father’s family is based. Kina is acutely interested in matters of movement, migration, race, and identity. In this particular image, a local billboard in Okinawa juxtaposes an all-American image and icons of American commercialism with Japanese words. Like Kina herself, the ad is a mixture of multiple identities, histories, and agendas.
Diaspora: This term refers to the dispersal of a particular group of people from their homeland (see “Homeland”, below). Most specifically, it refers to the expelling of the Jews from their homeland, but has been co-opted by many other disciplines to refer to forced, or sometimes voluntary, migrations due to war, poverty, famine, or other traumatic circumstances.
Globalization: Globalization refers to increasing integration of different areas of the world and their respective worldviews, commercial products, ideas, money, and cultural productions. Inherent in this definition is the economic impact of changing borders and definitions of the nation-state (see “Nation-state”, below). In 2000, the International Monetary Fund defined four aspects that comprise globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and exchange of knowledge. These increasing exchanges are fueled by advancements in transportation and telecommunications. Globalization is sometimes defined as primarily the economic side of transnationalism.
Homeland: the original (usually ethnic and cultural) nation-state and geographic land of a particular group of people.
Nation: people with a common identity that ideally includes shared culture, language, and feelings of belonging.
Nation-State: The modern nation-state generally emerged from the World War II era. Characteristic of the modern world, the concept of nation-states refers to particular types of states in which governments have sovereign power within defined territorial areas (hint: boundaries play a big role!), with populations that are made up of “citizens” who know themselves to be members of their nation-state. Members of nation-states maintain some political sovereignty over the land that is claimed to belong to a nation-state.
Transnationalism: Transnationalism refers to the movement of people, cultures, and ideas across borders and groups. Stemming from the concept of the nation-state (see below), transnationalism also refers to phenomena evident in flows of people, products, and knowledge from one nation to another. These flows are often difficult to define, unstable, and fluid by their very nature.
For instructors, I recommend:
Andreas Huyssen, ed., Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalisation and Contemporary Art (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers (Boston: The MIT Press, 2008).
I also highly recommend downloading the Art21’s Season Six Educators’ Guide. It touches on some of the major relevant topics and themes of this lecture, including concepts of boundaries and change.
The guide here is also a simple overview of globalization and its impact on art by the Levin Institute of SUNY.
For students, I recommend:
Andreas Huyssen, ed., “Introduction,” Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–23.
“Scenes from a Globalized Artworld” is a strong Art21 blog post dealing with issues central to globalization and transnationalism.
The key ideas of this lecture can be explored in an hour and fifteen minutes through a variety of examples, including:
- William Marlow, View of the Wilderness at Kew, 1763
- Édouard Manet, Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868
- Jean-Léon Gerôme, The Snake Charmer, c. 1870
- Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, 1907
- Aaron Douglas, Negro in an African Setting from Aspects of Negro Life, 1934
- Zhang Hongtu, Long Live Chairman Mao Series, 1989
- Alighiero e Boetti, Mappa del Mondo, 1989
- Ai Wei Wei, Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Label, 1994
- Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (After Fragonard), 2001
- O Zhang, Daddy and I No. 18, 2006
- Shelly Jyoti, An Ode to Neel Darpan, 2009
- Samson Young, Liquid Borders, 2012
- Laura Kina, Okinawa — All American Food, 2013