“Interim Meetings” is a project initiated by the Academic Department of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, including writing, lecturing and publishing. The original intention of launching this project is to consider the present time as an object of continuous dialogue and identification, and to repeatedly view the growing and changing trends inside and outside the art industry. With our attention to the complexity of our time and to the recurrent state of urgency and anxiety, we hope that, through this project, we can inspire actions and discussions in the art and culture industry to face up to the realities. “Interim Meetings” extends invitations to all the cultural practitioners who insist their sincere and multi-dimensional works in their respective fields; it focuses its attention on the work that has been carried out at the crossroads of the political discourse and the time frame; and it keeps an alert mind towards the wavering positions and the unexperienced and untested discussions. Discussions that are subject to thought and practice tests remain vigilant. This project will take place without a fixed schedule. We will invite active artists, young writers and researchers in the fields of art and culture to the Inside-Out Art Museum to share their work with us.
Interim Meetings·Lecture II | June 9, 2018
▲ 13:30 - 14:30
On Iconoclasm: An Introduction to Transcultural Art Historical Methodology
Speaker: Birgit Hopfener
Language: English
Interpreter: Xu Xiaofan
In my lecture I am going to examine “iconoclastic” works by contemporary Chinese artists from a transcultural perspective by adopting different (art-)historical and epistemological lenses. In order to shed light on “iconoclasm’s” multiple and entangled meanings I suggest reading their works in relation to a Zen-Buddhist concept of “iconoclasm” as well as to a Neo-Avant-garde concept of iconoclastic destruction and transgression – enacted for example by the ‘global nomad’ and Fluxus artist Nam June Paik, who in turn has been working through Zen-Buddhism, mediated through the American artist John Cage and his teacher, the Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki respectively.
Birgit Hopfener: Art historian and sinologist; associate professor in Art History Division at Carleton University.
▲ 14:40 - 15:40
Rethinking the No Name Group
Speaker: Sheng Wei
No Name Group, a civil art group in 1970s, is repetitively remarked in the new era for the reflection and rewriting the history of Chinese avant-garde art. This concerns not only the No Name Group or its own history, but also relates directly to how we understand the past and its cause now. With the rediscovery of the No Name Group, the commencement of Chinese avant-garde art dates back to even before The Stars in the 1960s. This redefines and reshapes avant-garde art itself. On the one hand, it stresses the fracture between avant-garde art in 1980s and modernist art in the Republican era, and on the other hand, it precedes a priori and legitimately The Stars and 85’ New Wave, becoming the starting point of Chinese avant-garde art. However, this conclusion needs more reflection, which makes it meaningful and important to recur to the No Name Group today.
Sheng Wei: Doctor of Philosophy in Art History; associate editor of Art.
▲ 15:50 – 16:50
Multiple Narratives of Art History
Speaker: Wu Wei
These years, art history is confronted with unprecedented criticism and crisis in terms of epistemology and methodology. This results from, on one hand, the increasing difficulty to define and interpret “art” in interdisciplinary conversations enabled by the continually opening boundaries, and on the other, the reflection and critique of Eurocentrism from post-colonialism and post-modernism. With the development of big data and the drastic transformation in cognition, people begin to think more deeply about history and tradition, and reflect on the enclosed academic environment of historical studies. Some scholars even attempt to redefine art history. “Image”, “semiotics”, “iconography” and “visual turn” have been core concepts in Western art historical research and writing. Formally and pan-culturally, the methodology of art historical research hovers between individual works and context of the time. The meaning of art historical research, similarly, hesitates between its value as an independent discipline and as a branch of cultural or intellectual history. How to reach a consensus out of the diversity, division and connection of art historical researches, to break through the limitation of its framework, and to make its theories, methods and question consciousness advance with the times have become pressing issues. This lecture, by briefly analyzing the historical views and methodologies of Heinrich Wölfflin, Otto Pächt and Hans Belting, hopes to rethink the historical foundations and intellectual discourse of art today, and advance the conversations about the impact of globalization on the language, system, environment, audience and writing of contemporary art practice.
Wu Wei: Art critic; associate editor of Public Art; former planning editor of Art China.
Free of admission!
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Please send your information to info@ioam.org.cn before June 8, 2018, including your name, number of participants, and contact details.
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010-62730230
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