Negotiating East and West: Hybridity and Transexperience in Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Art (2011)

Undergraduate: Faye Fang

Faculty Advisor: Wei-Cheng Lin
Department: Art

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The exodus of Chinese artists, curators, and critics to Western nations began in the 1980s as a result of liberalized emigration policies and the Four Modernization program. Naturally, Chinese diasporic artists pondered the nature and construction of cultural exchange through their own experiences as émigré artists. Although Chinese artists had similar concerns, Chinese émigré artists had the additional factor of foreign space, as well as the initial displacement and the inherent cultural tensions in that new space. This diaspora has produced a visual trend that has brought together conventional binaries—West/East, past/present, here/there, tradition/avant-garde—in an effort to conceptualize cultural difference. This presentation analyzes two series from the oeuvre of Chinese contemporary artist Zhang Hongtu (1943-). The hybridity of East and West in Zhang’s works reflects the perspective and understanding that globalization creates and fortifies multiple identities rather than polarizing them to reaffirm boundaries. Zhang addresses the contemporary theme of Chinese diaspora and transculturalism through the blending of historically familiar modes of visual representation from the East and West. Zhang’s appropriation of history and art history to construct a hybridity between East and West visually formulates the contemporary diaspora where identity is a process of movement and development. Furthermore, the adaptation or development of diasporic identity does not rely on a model of duality, but one in which identities are in constant negotiation with one another. Both series reflect this flux, but also recognize a specific interaction between East and West through an interdependent and non-hierarchical visual structuring.