Confrontation and complicity: Rethinking official art in contemporary China

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese state has evidently changed its stance towards contemporary art within a society that is marked by rapid marketization and the resulting extensive social transformations. The government has put considerable effort, both human and financial resources, into supporting and promoting Chinese contemporary art, which historically was unofficial and underground. At the same time it has invested greatly into presenting contemporary Chinese official art by introducing new art institutions, widely practiced in the international art world, including the international biennial and individual curatorship. This dissertation endeavors to articulate the above mentioned changes in relation to changing unofficial art, changing Chinese society, and changing Chinese politics. I argue that the new direction that Chinese official art has taken since the beginning of the twenty-first century has, to a great extent, epitomized the Chinese government's newly conceived cultural policies and multiple administrative approaches towards art and its modified vision of the function of art in Chinese society as it actively responds to the ongoing transnational and external processes in the age of globalization.; In this study, I utilize a few important official art exhibitions as a framing mechanism through which I examine the shifting institutional context and representation of Chinese official art since the late 1990s. In particular, I investigate two important exhibitions in 2003: the first Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale (Chinese Pavilion) and the First Beijing International Art Biennale (Beijing Biennale) respectively authorized by the Ministry of Culture and the Chinese Artists Association. Both exhibitions endeavored to present "authentic" contemporary Chinese art and Chinese values, but did so in almost opposite ways, in terms of the curatorial methods, the theme, content, and the types of works exhibited. Through highlighting different roles played by governmental, institutional, and individual agencies in the staging of these exhibitions, the dissertation explores the recently emerged internal divisions within the scope of Chinese official art and the intricate collaborative relations between official and unofficial art.