| 'China/Avant-Garde': Contemporary Chinese Art since the 1970s |
Art History, Theory, and Criticism |
3469 (001) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
What counts as ?avant-garde?? Can a work of art be radically new and traditional at the same time? Can it incorporate Western art forms and techniques and still be considered Chinese art? These were questions that Chinese artists coming out of the Cultural Revolution grappled with as they sought to reconcile Chinese artistic traditions and historical realities with Western modern and contemporary art practices. This course takes its name from the seminal 1989 exhibition China/Avant-Garde, which sought to survey the most advanced practices of the day and stake a claim for Chinese avant-garde art in relation to the shifting categories of ?modern,? ?postmodern,? ?contemporary,? ?Eastern,? and ?Western? art. Considering this exhibition and other developments from the late 1970s to the present, we will chronologically study roughly four decades of art and exhibition practices during a period of unprecedented socio-economic, political, and spatial change. We will look at a wide variety of art forms (painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, performance, conceptual art, socially engaged practices); key exhibitions; and diverse artists including Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lu Yang, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Zhang Dali, Zhang Huan, and Yin Xiuzhen, among others. Through weekly lectures, discussions, select readings, and museum visits, students will develop the vocabulary and visual reasoning necessary to analyze a wide variety of challenging artworks, situate them within a historic and theoretical context, and construct informed arguments about them.
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Class Number
2160
Credits
3
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| Mass Demonstration: Art, Politics, and Collective Action in Asia |
Art History, Theory, and Criticism |
4452 (001) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
After the death of Mao, protests practices that came to define China's 'Peking Spring' in the late 1970s served not only to articulate everyday citizens' collective demands for new polity, but also to forge their emergent expressions of selfhood and society through art. This course interrogates the ways in which such aesthetic formations--exhibitions of art, societies of painting and photography, poetic performance, documentary and film production--arise from the spontaneity of collective action in the midst of civil unrest and cold war (Hong Kong), or in the aftermaths of revolution and global conflict (Korea, PRC). Examining the simultaneity and mutual constitutions of art and politics that come to define East Asian modernity at key moments throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the course will consider the contradictory and conflicted functions of new art as a medium of social and cultural transformation.
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Class Number
2163
Credits
3
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| Critical Fabulations |
Art History, Theory, and Criticism |
5030 (001) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
Histories both untold and unsung continue to shape art historical inquiries through absence. This course asks: What are the means and methods of filling in the negative spaces where documentation falls short, and where archives yield indifference if not violence? At times speculative, always imaginative, the craft of piecing together the lives left off historical records and administrative ledgers demand responsible research, methodological rigor, as well as radical openness. This seminar invites students to explore existing approaches by Saidiya Hartman, Margaret Hillenbrand, Alexander Nemerov, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, among others, before crafting their own.
Readings will consist of approximately one book per week (specific sections) as case studies of diverging approaches to the work of critical fabulation, jumping off from the starting point of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives. Other works to be studied include Margaret Hillenbrand's recent publication on migrant artists in China as well as Alexander Nemerov's portrait of his aunt, Diane Arbus.
Course work will typically include weekly reading responses as well as a final writing project in which each student develops their own approach, based on their individual research interests, to critical fabulation.
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Class Number
2154
Credits
3
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| Aesthetics, Politics, and Revolution In and Beyond Modern China |
Art History, Theory, and Criticism |
5452 (001) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
Taking China as both a focal point and point of departure, this course is intended to familiarize students with core concepts of the philosophy of art in a comparative framework. We will examine the emergence of modern aesthetics as a topic of heated debate in 20th century China, the politicization of aesthetic theory that occurs during the high point of revolutionary movement, and the dispersal of aesthetic concerns amid global marketization and mass consumerism in the present day. Texts to be examined include writings of Immanuel Kant and Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi and John Dewey, Mao Zedong and Karl Marx, Slavoj Zizek and Xi Jinping.
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Class Number
2351
Credits
3
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| Perception |
Masters in Fine Arts Low Residency |
6530 (001) |
Summer 2025 |
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Description
Framed by the Low-Residency MFA theme of 'Poetics,' this course is an art historical investigation into perception in connection with aesthetics in four key areas: Black Arts Movement, Afro-Futurism, Ritual Art Performance in the African Diaspora, and African Art and Design. With an eye to the concept of ?sculpting space? and location in the liminal and the margins as defined by bell hooks, we will consider perceptions of Self and Other, identity expression as intentional resistance and creative expression, ?Africa? and notions of ?African art,? and performative modes of production. How does work become canonized and remembered? How do movements form a foundation for contemporary practices? This course understands the artist as a kind of divine sculptor, trickster-DJ-griot, considering methodologies such as oral history, indigenous systems, and community legacies to critique time as linear and interrogate perceptions of body, location, belonging, and what it means to center oneself via art.
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Class Number
1223
Credits
3
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| Thesis Tutorial II |
Art History, Theory, and Criticism |
6999 (006) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
This independent study program for Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism candidates is taken in the final term of coursework.
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Class Number
2430
Credits
3
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