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Copyright of Public Art is the property of Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher Ltd. co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Public Art is the property of Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher Ltd. co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"Community Art Museum" is a new theory and attempt in China. With the initial development of the innovative system of public cultural services and the community art museum, it is very necessary to look into the relevant practices of the community art museum and social aesthetic education, which not only involves the professional requirements of art museums, but also involves the interdisciplinary practices in the fields of museology and sociology. This paper analyzes the community practices of "Su Shanghai Community Art Museum" and "Community Interchange Station", and theoretically discusses the issues of community art museum, social aesthetic education and public cultural innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper offers a re-evaluation of the significance of porcelain during the Yuan dynasty by analyzing a type of ceramics known as luanbai or shufu wares. These matt white porcelains, sometimes inscribed with the characters shu and fu, have generally been seen as official wares, manufactured on the orders of the highest echelons of the Yuan central government and classified as high-quality luxury wares associated with the imperial court. This paper proposes that this conventional interpretation is misleading. Instead of understanding luanbai wares as part of the narrative of ceramics manufacture and the history of porcelain, I explore their relevance by situating them in the context of Yuan-dynasty material culture more broadly, court-sponsored craft manufactures, and the practice of inscribing objects. This approach reveals a different story, highlighting the absence of court control over ceramic production, the ensuing freedom to experiment locally with new ceramic production methods, and the significance of the demands of consumers in territories outside Yuan China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the reification of ethnic categories, this paper sets out to examine the genealogy of Chineseness in Siam before the early twentieth century by focusing on the pigtail as an alleged sign of Chineseness. A critical scrutiny of G. William Skinner's arguments in his Chinese Society in Thailand and the political and cultural history of the pigtail in both the Middle Kingdom and the Kingdom of Siam reveal the variable, situational, and pluralistic meanings of the pigtail. With the pigtail as signifier being thus deconstructed, Chineseness turns out to be a recent invention in Thai racist discourse that had little to do with the pigtail as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a comparison of the status of the “traditional” medium of oil painting or acrylic in Hong Kong SAR and in Mainland China. This issue concerns the well-known discourse about the hand as medium; a typical example of what Pierre Bourdieu would callhabitus. The representation of art as something produced by the hand has been the only habitus in Euro-America for a number of centuries, and it remains so among many participants of the social field of art. The development of this habitus followed very different paths in Mainland China and in Hong Kong, thanks to very different institutions in those places. Those responsible for their establishment in the 20th century, especially educational institutions, are analyzed and provide the backdrop for the analysis of the field of art in present-day Hong Kong. New institutions and new ways for these institutions to deal with art education are now changing the field of art in Hong Kong, creating new concepts to deal with the issue of forms of art seen as respectively “traditional” and “contemporary.” In ways very different than what happens in Europe, for instance, where even media that can be seen as “traditional” like oil painting tend to belong to a single “contemporary art” habitus, Hong Kong has seen the establishment of a state of competition between two habitus seen as unrelated. This article concludes with a brief portrait of the state of struggle between these two habitus within the Hong Kong art field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the early involvement of Chinese artist Wenda Gu with calligraphy. It says that calligraphy is the cornerstone of Chinese culture as well as the highest form of visual art in China in which it is the fundamental mode of personal expression for the wenren, also known as literati. The dedication of Gu to art was encouraged by his cultured family including his paternal grandfather, Gu Jianchen, a prominent artist. Gu's arts feature large Chinese characters in distinctive writing style being outlined in glowing neon which is a transformation of commercial medium to a cultural one. His works include Neon Calligraphy Series, Forest of Stone Steles — Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, and The Misty Mountains in a Silent Night.

At the start of the twenty-first century artists and art works are increasingly mobile and dispersed within global networks and cultural flows. This essay considers the career of an artist (Gonkar Gyatso) who has travelled from his homeland (in Tibet) via a key centre for Tibetan exiles (in India) to his current location in London (where he successfully sought asylum). In each of these physical domains he and his work have been reconfigured, inspiring new ways of depicting the land he vacated: Tibet. A new type of analysis is required in order to chart such transnational dimensions in contemporary art, one which acknowledges that artists are subject to influences well beyond the places they physically inhabit and which gives due prominence to imaginative territories. However, this case study also notes the persistence of ‘location’ as a determining factor in interpretation and reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the continuous controversy over the proper distribution of social and economic resources in China during Han empire. Oftentimes opinions were expressed in public debate, sometimes in memorials about the conspicuous products of material wealth such as architecture, sculpture which cited in debates as emblems of extravagant consumption. The fact should be given attention that the mingling of social responsibility and artistic taste is by no means a practice peculiar to early China.

Analyzes the social circumstances under which Chinese painter Chen Hongshou negotiated his career, especially the civil service examination system and the mobility of Jiangnan society. Biographical sketch of Chen Hongshou; Paintings that depict Chen's participation in the presentation of the birthday picture; Definition of the educated painter as neither elegant nor common.

When European peepboxes and their associated perspectival views arrived in China in the seventeenth century, the elite who first encountered them treated these rarities as foreign curiosities. This essay shows that by the mid-nineteenth century, however, not only had both the optical device and the art been sinicized into common local products, but the peepbox had also become a form of street entertainment specifically directed toward children and the lower classes. Unexpectedly, the translation of the peepbox and its perspectival views in early modern China, it is argued, therefore speaks as much to internal differences in class and sophistication as to perceived differences between China and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]