Dr Wenny Teo

course description


This new MA Special Option sets out to examine the critical dimensions of artistic appropriation in recent Chinese art, and focuses on the conflicted processes of cross-cultural and trans-historical interchange that are (re)produced in the articulation of cultural identity and difference. It is designed to encourage students to develop a highly nuanced knowledge of the transformational logic at play in Chinese artistic practice in the years between China’s ‘open door’ economic reforms of 1978 and the watershed event of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The course will be structured around a series of comprehensive case studies that unfold chronologically, facilitating an in-depth understanding of the radical socio-political, economic and ideological developments in Mainland China over the thirty-year period it covers. Students will be introduced to key moments in Chinese artistic (re)presentation in which both Western as well as traditional Chinese aesthetic models were adopted and adapted to serve diverse critical, political and even commercial agendas. We shall also focus on how such art feeds into cultural projections of ‘Chineseness’ in the West and is also fed by them, in what might be considered reciprocal processes of ‘discursive cannibalisms’ that delineate and/or dissolve the fraught boundaries of identity politics in an age of globalization.

This MA is particularly suited to students who are keen to develop their interest in discourses of power, intertextuality, postmodernism, globalization, post-colonialism and psychoanalysis. One of our central aims will be to examine recent Chinese art through these theoretical paradigms, and also to challenge their utility when mapped onto different historio-cultural frameworks. In the process we shall expose to critical scrutiny what Benjamin Buchloh has referred to as ‘the delicate constructs of compromise’ and the ambivalence inherent to acts of artistic appropriation and re-contextualisation. A further task will be to look at the strategies of subversion, allegory and duplicity which have allowed Chinese artists to negotiate the shifting policies of the Chinese state towards artistic practice on home ground, as well as explore their own subjectivities within or even against the pressures of the international art market both locally and globally.


language or other requirements


Standard entry requirements. No previous knowledge of Chinese art and language is required.


Dr Wenny Teo


Wenny Teo’s research focuses on Chinese art from Deng Xiaoping’s “open door” reforms in 1978 to the present day, covering a period of radical transition from communism to market socialism, isolationism to globalisation, with a particular interest in how Chinese artists have resisted and circumvented dominant ideologies of power. Her PhD thesis, One World, One Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art and Spectacle, investigates the historically antagonistic relationship between Chinese artists and the state, citing the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a crucial moment in the nation’s self-representation and cultural significance on the world stage.

 

Having recently completed her doctorate at University College London, Dr Teo has also worked in a variety of curatorial roles, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, and at Tate Modern.