chinese visual culture website

[niubi]

hi all,

i am starting a new website: chinese visual culture - primarily focused on the modern and contemporary period, but will also include the pre-modern. please check it out and let me know what you think. thanks!

william

[liuzhou]

Your site seems to be blocked in China. I can only reach it through a proxy.

[niubi]

really? what about some of my other domains hosted by the same webhosting company, such as:

www.niubi.com

www.herchina.com

www.shabi.com

www.linglei.com

www.yunnantcm.com ?

[Xiao Kui]

None of your sites can be accessed without a proxy. I have to use Gladder, otherwise they're blocked. (location:KM)

[niubi]

hmmm, i have never had access problems with niubi.com which is the only site for which i had hosting until the past couple of months when i changed to a new webhost and plan with which i could host all of my many, many domains. i wonder if its a problem on the chinese side with the great firewall or whether my host is blocking ips from china. i welcome other members who are currently in china to please try my domains. i appreciate your help.

xiao kui, how is kunming...its been a few months since i left...damn i am missing kunming like crazy.

[Xiao Kui]

KM is great except for the traffic which seems to worsen by the day. Looks like we have some new Indian and Thai places opening up in Wenhua Xiang - anxious to try them. Other than that it's the same place you left - I'm sure the niubi laowais would have more newz for you, but I'm just a Chinese language geek. Oh and taxis aren't collecting the gas tax since it dropped to 5 mao in 2007 - tai mafan. Hop over to Flushing every now and then - it will cure your homesickness for KM, (or worsen it. )

[gato]

i have never had access problems with niubi.com ... until the past couple of months when i changed to a new webhost

All of your sites are blocked in Shanghai, as well. If it's not your sites specifically that's being targeted by the great firewall, it might be some other site that you are sharing a server with. Try sending a note to your hosting company asking them to move one of your sites to another server and see if that helps.

[imron]

I have no troubles accessing any of those sites here in Beijing. My ISP is Bluewave, which goes through China Netcom.

[gato]

Niubi,

Why is it that modern Chinese art that's popular in the West so kitschy?

They are usually along the lines of

http://www.goedhuiscontemporary.com/artists/shen_liang/shen_liang.htm

And not

http://www.westpower.com.cn/exphs/teacher/fandexi/fandexi.htm

It seems that there's a preference for the former over the latter. Is it because the former is considered more exotic?

[imron]

I much prefer the latter, however I don't think you can just lump all westerners into one group, especially when it comes to what kind of art they like. I'm Australian, and my former flatmate was an American, and we had vastly different tastes regarding modern Chinese art. It was almost like everything he liked I didn't really think was so great, and vice-versa.

[gato]

I much prefer the latter, however I don't think you can just lump all westerners into one group

I prefer that latter, too. But based on the several exhibits I've been to in the US, it seems that Westerners in the "art business" (curators, I suppose) overwhelmingly selects art works that are more like the former. I suspect that it's because it's easier to pitch them for an exhibition as they more conspicuously "cutting-edge" and "Chinese" (many of them are just parodies of old Communist propaganda art).

I like the second picture, but maybe it's too traditional-looking in some people's mind to be considered worthy of modern art. I think it's a great combination of Western and traditional Chinese techniques and themes. The artist Fan Dexi (樊德喜) is not known outside of China at all. http://www.westpower.com.cn/exphs/teacher/fandexi/fandexi.htm

I've looked on google.

I actually found this website showing Fan's work after being very disappointed by a contemporary Chinese art show at Stanford University two years ago. Everything there was kitsch. I think the technical term is Conceptual Art defined as "art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns," i.e. idea over traditional notion of beauty. It might have worked for geniuses like Marcel Duchamp who founded the movement, but when your average Joe or Zhang conceptual artist gets into the act, the ideas are often so commonplace (i.e. gimmicky) that the lack of beauty becomes glaringly obvious.

p.s. If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then idea is even more in the eyes of the beholder. An idea that seems original to Joe Schmoe is often not so.

[imron]

Out of all the artists on that page, I'd have to say I like Fan Dexi's (樊德喜) work the best, followed by Liu Rui (刘锐). I also like the fact that the paintings combine Western and Chinese techniques and themes. None of the other artists there particularly grab me.