Full Description
This edited collection brings together essays that share in a critical attention to visual culture as a means of representing, contributing to and/or intervening with discursive struggles and territorial conflicts currently taking place at and across the outward-facing and internal borders of the People's Republic of China. Elucidated by the essays collected here for the first time is a constellation of what might be described as visual culture wars comprising resistances on numerous fronts not only to the growing power and expansiveness of the Chinese state but also the residues of a once pervasively suppressive Western colonialism/imperialism. The present volume addresses visual culture related to struggles and conflicts at the borders of Hong Kong, the South China Sea and Taiwan as well within the PRC with regard the so-called "Great Firewall of China" and differences in discursive outlook between China and the West on the significances of art, technology, gender and sexuality. In doing so, it provides a vital index of twenty-first century China's diversely conflicted status as a contemporary nation-state and arguably nascent empire.
Contents
Introduction.- Hong Kong and the South China Sea.- Some Tangible, Some Forgotten: art about borders in the Hong Kong SAR.- Reclaiming the Autonomy of Living in Truth: protest-making and design in Hong Kong's Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement.- Imagined Mappings of Geopolitical Power: liquid borders, military infrastructures and ecological destruction in the South China Sea.- Art and Technology.- Rendering Frontiers: from China's historical dynastic-imperial to modern republican borders and the changing significances of Chinese art.- Confucianism and Technology: critical reflections on the borders between Chinese and Euro-American modernity.- Remediating China's Virtual Borders: the ambient myth of Moha (toad worship).- Gender and Sexuality.- Taming China's Southern Frontiers through Song and Dance: chauvinisms (Han and male) in The Red Detachment of Women.- Biopolitical Borders, FemaleBodies and Knowledge about 'Women' in the Work of the Beijing-based Artists Ma Qiusha and Hu Xiaoyuan.- Technological Art and the Borders of Sexuality and Gender in Taiwan: a case study of Pey-Chwen Lin.
