Shifting the Ground: Rethinking Chinese Art

This special open-call issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (ANZJA) presents papers that examine issues relating to art of the Greater China region encompassing mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Chinese diasporas. Here, Greater China is understood as an active cultural space defined by historical, multi-directional flows of people and ideas rather than territorial boundaries, with Chinese diaspora connecting China to all parts of the world. The aim in encouraging writers to think about the Greater China cultural space is to recover forgotten or marginalised histories and suggest alternatives to monolithic national narratives in order to reconfigure the field of Chinese art history in more complex and connected ways. The writers here are rethinking the frameworks that inform art history, notably the way both art and history are conceptualised, its periodisation, its pedagogical assumptions, and notions of linear progress informed by political events emanating from dominant sources of power. As editors we posed the following questions: What are the limitations of and gaps in the current art historical record? What are the discrepancies and interventions that are generally not acknowledged? How do extant histories of Chinese art intersect with world art history? What is the contribution of art produced in Greater China and its diasporas to modern and contemporary international art? To what extent can new or reconsidered case studies of art produced in this cultural space point to alternative ways to think about the mobility of artists, ideas, and artworks and the writing of art history today? These questions and the ideas that they raise originated from issue editor Claire Roberts’ Australian Research Council Future Fellowship ‘Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now’ (FT140100743) based in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. This fellowship was conceived in 2013 to consider the international context of modern and contemporary Chinese art. Over the past eight years the idea of ‘Reconfiguring the world’ through the agency of artists and art works has become more urgent and relevant, and in ways that were difficult to anticipate back in 2013. Today, the world community faces serious challenges arising from geo-political power shifts, the ongoing scourge of