234 THE CHINA JOURNAL, No.

66

fact, does Jullien attempt to elucidate or support one of his sweeping claims about
the nature of Chinese painting with reference to an actual painting. Without
convincingly establishing this connection between theory and practice, the
marvelous literary edifice that he concocts here ultimately collapses under its own
weight: despite the fact that paintings are, indeed, quite tangible, physical objects,
Jullien treats them as “nonobjects” in a literal sense.
Finally, Jullien’s inclination to reify “the Chinese painter” and “Chinese
painting” as uniform, monolithic entities causes him to marshal evidence in
support of his claims in a way that treats all source materials as equally applicable
and relevant: the Daodejing, an essay by an 11th-century court painter and a
treatise by a Qing dynasty monastic recluse are all grist for the mill, as if the
contextual and historical differences between these sources were negligible and/or
irrelevant. Contrary to what I presume was his intent, this rhetorical strategy
creates the impression that Jullien began with his conclusions firmly in hand and
is now casting about to find justification for them wherever he can.
Previous works by Jullien have been criticized (most notably by Jean-
François Billeter in his well-known treatise Against François Jullien, 2006) for
being a-historical and for perpetuating the myth of China as some absolute Other
to the West, and it is unlikely that this book will do much, if anything, to prevent
similar charges from being leveled at him once again.
Charles Lachman
University of Oregon

Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, edited by Wu Hung, with the

assistance of Peggy Wang. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
2010. xvi + 455 pp. US$40.00 (paperback).
Western understandings of the trajectory of Chinese art following Mao’s death in
1976 have been hampered by several factors. A persistent element, of course, is
the propensity of Western art historians and critics to impose Western historical
patterns, esthetic standards and critical methods to the analysis of Chinese art, its
production and expression. This tendency was exacerbated by China’s closing to
the West after 1949, which discouraged scholarship and Chinese language study,
resulting in a 30-year hiatus in scholarly communications and firsthand
knowledge—a situation that invited imagination and speculation skewed by an
obsessive preference in the West for art that could be satisfyingly interpreted as
politically subversive. When China opened in the 1980s, scholars of
contemporary Chinese art faced the further problem of trying to make sense of
an anarchic disarray of theories and practices rushing in to fill the vacuum
afforded by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong ideology. The
prolific but scattered writings and publications by Chinese artists, critics and
theorists were accessible only to those few who already possessed a high level of
 REVIEWS 235

Chinese language facility, including the specially nuanced vocabulary of the art
world, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced network of personal contacts.
Addressing the need for wider access to Chinese sources by readers of
English, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, edited by Wu Hung
(University of Chicago) and published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art,
presents a meaty and comprehensive chronologically arranged potpourri of
English translations of writings published between 1979 and 2008 by Chinese
artists, curators, critics, theorists and art historians. The selections are divided
overall between “Contemporary Art as Domestic Movement, 1976–89” and
“Globalization and a Domestic Turn, 1990–2000”, with a final nod to the New
Millennium (2000–09). Within these divisions, texts are further subdivided by
time and dominant theme, accompanied by brief introductory commentaries and
occasionally including even official government declarations. The selections
range from brief to lengthy, from well-known to obscure authors, from direct and
analytical discourse to convoluted and nuanced ruminations—but nearly all were
written and published in China by Chinese authors for Chinese intellectuals. One
of the delights, then, of exploring this collection is that of becoming privy to just
how divergent were the views, how passionate the motives and how discerning the
analyses by Chinese artists processing events in their world as they were happening.
Wu Hung thus invites the reader to view the continuing search for new paradigms,
for new language, through a window not yet beclouded by retrospection or
devolution into simple explanations—we need no longer be hostage to a jumble
of critical commentaries strewn across art journals or selectively sheltered in
exhibition catalogs, but instead are empowered to construct more complex and
holistic understandings.
The well-known landmarks and battlegrounds are all here: unofficial art
groups, the Stars Exhibition (Xingxing meizhan, 1979); “scar art“ (shanghen
meishu); “contemplative” responses to the images of Andrew Wyeth (sisuo hua);
photorealist “root seeking” (xungen) and “native soil” imagery exemplified by
“Father” (Fuqin, 1981); the metamorphosis from 1985 to 1989 of the New Wave
Movement (Xinchao yundong) into Avant Garde (Xianfeng); consequences of
economic reform and an increasingly multinational artistic arena; Cynical
Realism (Wanshi xianshi zhuyi) and Political Pop (Zhengzhi bopu) of the
early ’90s; the emerging importance of photography, video art and multimedia
(mid- to late 1990s); Conceptual and performance art that triggered impassioned
debates about social transformation and the use of the human body and animals
(late 1990s); feminist art and esthetics; the artistic construction of personal self-
identities, coalescing residential art communities (huajia cun); inventing new art
infrastructures in the wake of the first Biennial Art Fair (1992) and the 2000
Shanghai Biennale; defining new relations to history, to the art market and to
international identity in a global context; the copyright controversy over The Rent
Collection Courtyard (Venice Biennale, 2001); and finally an internationalist
vision of Chinese intellectual and artistic independence from North American
hegemony and Eurocentrism.
236 THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 66

While not profusely illustrated, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary

Documents contains numerous black and white photographs scattered throughout,
and two 16-page sections of full-color illustrations. A 30-page detailed month-by-
month chronology enumerates significant publications and exhibitions from
1976–2006, making it possible to locate particular exhibitions and commentaries
accurately within a dynamic field of socio–political events (designated by bold
type). The book is attractively designed, and its various sections are visually
demarcated by black title pages with vertical white text that make the sections
easy to navigate—a welcome feature in a 500-page volume that one is more likely
to use as a reference than to sit down and read from beginning to end. Chinese
characters for personal names and some exhibitions and schools of thought are
tucked away in the index—but not accompanied by pinyin transliteration. My
principal dissatisfaction is a recurring one, not peculiar to this publication: that is,
the frequent absence of pinyin and the complete absence of Chinese characters
throughout the text to distinguish and clarify the names of styles and homophonic
phrases whose English translations (such as “art for fun’s sake”, “spirit
consonance”, “modern wildness”) are sometimes variable and not always
informative to those outside the Chinese modern art field. As familiarity with
Chinese language and art becomes more prevalent, such precision is increasingly
needed for high-definition discourse. All things considered, though, this volume is
only a whisper away from perfection.
Carolyn M. Bloomer
Ringling College of Art and Design

Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in

China, by Julie Y. Chu. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv + 343 pp.
US$89.95 (hardcover), US$24.95 (paperback).
Julie Chu’s ambitious ethnography provides a captivating description of
contemporary Chinese people’s desire for mobility. Unlike much recent
scholarship which has focused on migrants’ adaptations and dreams after arrival,
Chu focuses on the desires and strategies that fuel this movement from a single
region in Fuzhou, Longyan. She offers a critical example of how “home” sites are
a crucial antidote to the overemphasis on displacement and detached nostalgia
found in contemporary diaspora studies. Her exploration starts with a beautifully
written vignette: a young Fuzhounese woman waits for the last-minute call from
the snakehead/smuggler (shetou) whom she has employed to get her to the United
States. Bags packed and feeling anxious, the young woman talks to Chu about her
difficulties in her multiple attempts to leave, and the frustrations associated with
their failure. This scene encapsulates the major theme in Chu’s book: that
immobility, as much as mobility, is a source of distress and displacement for
Chinese subjects.