Contemporary Chinese Art Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili

In recent decades the previously assumed dominance within the international art world of western(ized) conceptions of aesthetic modernity has been challenged by a critically becalming diversification of cultural outlooks widely referred to as 'contemporaneity'. Contributing to that diversification are assertions within mainland China of essential differences between Chinese and western art.<br/> <br/>In response to the critical impasse posed by contemporaneity Paul Gladston charts a historical relay of mutually formative interactions between the artworlds of China and the West as part of a new transcultural theory of artistic criticality. Informed by deconstructivism as well as syncretic Confucianism Gladston extends this theory to a reading of the work of the artist Zhang Peili and his involvement with the Hangzhou-based art group the Pond Association (<i>Chi she</i>). Revealed is a critical aesthetic productively resistant to any single interpretative viewpoint including those of Chinese exceptionalism and the supposed immanence of deconstructivist uncertainty. <br/> <br/>Addressing art in and from the People's Republic of China as a significant aspect of post-West contemporaneity Gladston provides a new critical understanding of what it means to be 'contemporary' and the profound changes taking place in the art world today.<b></b>