The University of Westminster Contemporary China Centre presents 
 
 
Towards a Polylogue of Western and Chinese Contemporary Art Criticism
 
A talk by
Dr Paul Gladston

Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture
The University of Nottingham 
 
 
Wednesday 15 December 2010 
4 - 6pm 
 
Room 350 
University of Westminster 
309 Regent Street 
London W1B 2UW 
 

During the last decade, cultural theory and practice have become increasingly enmeshed with critical discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity. These discourses, which have emerged as part of a continuing internationalized critique of Western modernism, persist in upholding the now well-established postmodernist view that there is no single objective experience or representation of modernity, but, instead, differing non-synchronous experiences and representations (some “central” and some “peripheral”), each with their own socio-culturally and economically inflected perspective on the trajectory and significance of historical events. 

However, unlike other critical discourses associated with postmodernism—such as postcolonialism, with its pervasively deconstructive invocations of third space and cultural hybridity—discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity have not sought to represent the current experience of (post)modernity as a universally uncertain one. Rather, by rigorously pursuing the notion that modernity has been experienced and represented differently in relation to differing, social, economic, and cultural circumstances, discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity have looked to extend critical legitimacy to experiences and representations of modernity that not only diverge from those associated with Western modernism, but that also problematize the assumed hegemony of postmodernist thought. 

Such thinking is, of course, highly problematic. By insisting on the simultaneous legitimacy of mutually resistant points of view, it presents us with an insurmountable double-bind whose circularity would appear to negate the possibility of meaningful critique.

Taking Western and Chinese contemporary art criticism as a case in point, I shall argue that we should neither succumb to this apparent negation, nor seek to overcome it by simply choosing one point of view over others, but instead embark upon the rather more complex task of developing a discursive polylogue exploring in close analytical detail potential areas of dynamic interpretative interaction as well as resistance between differing experiences and representations of modernity.



Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. Between 2005 and 2010, he was seconded to the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China as the inaugural head of the Department of International Communications and director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies. He has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and contemporary Chinese art criticism for numerous magazines and journals including Yishu, Art Review, Artworld, Contemporary Art and Investment and Eyeline. His recent book length publications include the monograph Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005) and an edited collection of essays, China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009). He is currently preparing a monograph on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for Reaktion and, in collaboration with Katie Hill, a guest edited edition of the journal Contemporary Art Practice for Intellect with the theme ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’. 



For further details please contact 
Dr Derek Hird  [log in to unmask]   
 
Contemporary China Centre 
Department of Modern and Applied Languages 
University of Westminster 
309 Regent Street. London, W1B 2UW 
www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/asian-studies