HCRT-330: Contemporary Chinese Art

This course traces the emergence of China as a contemporary society through its visual culture. After World War II the country was dominated by a Socialist Realist aesthetic in art, film, and design for publications and posters. During the era of "reform and openness" in the 1980s, artists and students were finally allowed to see what the rest of the world was doing, and launched their own experiments in art-making--even inventing a movement called Political Pop, which caught the attention of curators and collectors in the West. Topics to be covered include the dominance and subversion of the written language, the re-use of folk imagery, and the tradition of disguised protest in art.