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Abstract
As Another Voice: Hidden Political Expression in Contemporary Chinese Allegorical Painting
Cultural censorship has been the main means to reign in the criticism of the Chinese government’s political systems, policies, and leaders throughout Chinese history. In response, ancient Chinese literati painters started to use implicit speech – an allegorical method originated from ancient Chinese literature and philosophy – to communicate political expressions in their practice as a form of passive resistance. Since the increase of particularly severe cultural censorship dating from 2013, more recent allegorical paintings aim to compose their political dimension in an even more implicit, or implied manner, which produces difficulties and challenges for interpretation. Meanwhile, when contemporary Chinese artists make or present political allegorical paintings, especially in the West, they face a problem: a colonised concept of allegory and self-imposed Orientalism may serve to strip the cultural identity and subjectivity present in such works.
Although political expression in contemporary Chinese art has been widely discussed in the fields of art history and cultural criticism, to date very little critical attention has been paid to painting, especially allegorical painting produced after 2013. In this case, this research identifies and examines art and literature that puts forward theoretical generalisations about Chinese allegorical paintings in the contemporary era in order to reformulate a more comprehensive account of political expression in Chinese allegorical paintings under censorship.
The central question of this project is: To what extent could allegorical painting become political practice under the self-censorship and cultural censorship in China? The follow-on questions are: How did the allegorical nature arise as a cultural tradition in Chinese painting? What may be a standard to define the function of allegory in contemporary Chinese allegorical painting? What strategies might artists employ in order to render their political expressions through allegory at once more legible to viewers while still not getting themselves or their painting into trouble with the authorities? Furthermore, how could Chinese artists avoid ideologically repeating the first-world countries’ dominant discourses and conceptions of an allegorical function within art production and maintain a Chinese subjectivity in their allegorical works?
In order to answer these questions, this research will work through practice, research and writing. In my practice, I will combine the spirit of traditional Chinese painting and the Western form of oil painting to explore political allegory in an effort to ‘decolonise’ Western allegory in and through a Chinese context. On a theoretical and methodological level, I will read paintings as literature, using a combined strategy that sits between close and distant readings, as well as applying critical theory (Benjamin and Jameson), ideological critique (Jameson and Moretti) and colonial discourse analysis (Said and Spivak) to examine the current position of Chinese political allegorical painting in the post-modern era, defending its complexity in representations which might be denigrated in the Western art world.