Contemporary Chinese Art as a Product and Reflection of Globalisation in Culture

Abstract

At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, China underwent an important social transformation, which was among others manifested by the renouncement of revolutionary aesthetics in both art and everyday life. As a result, one can observe the emergence of a new, pluralistic culture, which nowadays appears to combine the unfinished modernist project with postmodernity. The mutual defining of these two factors constitutes also an important aspect of the ongoing Chinese globalisation within the area of culture, where the global is modified by the local, and concurrently the latter invalidates the identity of the former. This article describes the relation between these two factors in the field of contemporary Chinese art. The analysis of selected artworks by Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, MadeIn, Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei and Wang Qingsong serves as a departure point of assessing whether the new cultural quality constitutes strong distortion of Chinese aesthetic order or is a new challenge it has to confront.