This dissertation focuses on Chinese contemporary artists conceptualization of spectatorship in the 2000s, the decade when the state started to regulate art production within the parameters of cultural industry. I argue that these artistsCai Guoqiang (b. 1957), Xu Bing (b. 1955), and Yang Shaobin (b. 1962)adopted the visual language and ideals of socialist realism to make their artworks legible to national viewers, who were mostly unfamiliar with contemporary art in the 2000s. Their conceptualizations of spectatorship took the form of Caiâ negotiation between the local and international art worlds, which held opposing opinions of socialist realism at a state museum; Yangs figurative tactics that called into question the efficacy of representing coalminers in a conventional gallery space; and Xuas effort to make contemporary art approachable for the public at a private museum. I consider these artworks to be afterimages, a term that refers to the image that persists on a viewers retina after he or she is no longer exposed to the original object of perception. I suggest that these afterimages of socialism, though detached from direct engagement with historical conditions, provided opportunities for people to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the socialist past and the limitation of retracing this past in the present.

Last modified

• 11/20/2019

Creator

• Xinran Guo

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-9zw2-6y19

Subject

• Art History

Keyword

• Art history

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright