Traditions of the Avant-Garde: Radicals and Experimentalists in Early Chinese Art
The 2023 Sonia Lightfoot Memorial Lecture on Paintings will be given by Professor J P Park of Oxford University.
Various kinds of genre-breaking performance art such as John Cage’s 4’33 (1952), Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning (1953), and Jackson Pollock’s action paintings (1950s) have been recognized as the epitome of artistic originality in the postmodern era. However, it is less well known that the celebrated creations and performances of recent times have much earlier predecessors in the history of Chinese arts. Those artists and events are rarely addressed, if not completely forgotten or erased from the modern study of art history. This ellipsis in the discipline effectively cloaks and cancels truly provocative artistic expression in East Asia that may predate its Western counterparts by centuries and even millennia.
This paper illuminates how and why art history has remained institutionally unchanged in its grand narratives despite claims of being progressive and inclusive, and will further propose that modernities are not the exclusive invention of the West, but creative and analytical constructs that have been envisioned and practiced elsewhere across history.
This lecture is kindly sponsored by John Lightfoot and by Woolley and Wallis
Speaker
-
J P ParkJune and Simon Li Professorship in the History of Chinese ArtProfessor Park is a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford University.
Although his primary research focuses on early modern Chinese and Korean art, he has extensively researched and published on a much wider spectrum of art historical topics, including print culture, cartography, literary criticism, and post-globalism in contemporary East Asian art. He is the author of 1) A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700–1850) (University of Washington Press, 2018), 2) Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (University of Washington Press, 2012), and 3) Keeping It Real!:Korean Artists in the Age of Multi-Media Representation (Workroom, 2012) as well as numerous articles on East Asian art and literature featured in major field journals such as Art Bulletin, Artibus Asiae, Archives of Asian Art, Orientations, and Third Text. He is currently completing a new book project, Reinventing Art History: Forgery and Counterforgery in Early Modern Chinese Art.
