Cityscapes and the urban environment in contemporary art from China

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/42308

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Asian Studies (60 EC) (MA)

Liere, Sil van (2016)

Cityscapes and the urban environment in contemporary art from China

Master thesis | Asian Studies (60 EC) (MA)

Today, art from China is very different from that of the 1980s and 1990s. Contemporary Chinese urban art is critical of the modernization China has been experiencing the past decades. It is mostly done in the media of photography, sculpture and installation art. Most obviously this criticism can be seen in the cityscape. This cityscape is most times a pastiche of construction, combining into a vast city. Many installation artists construct such a city by using real cities as model, and they often use consumer items as material. But also many photographers create cityscape montages; they use digital software to combine photographs of the urban space into one big collage. There are five themes that prominently express the artists’ concerns over China’s urbanization: futurism, globalization, negativity, sinification, and disconnection. Artists apply (often several of) these themes onto the urban space they depict.