Aesthetics & Politics in China

Aesthetics and Politics in China.
Open to BFA-4 students only.

'I thought it would be terrible to live in this
world and not know what another part of the world
was like.' Robert Rauschenberg.

In modern China, politics have been conducted not
simply by means of party and mass movement, but
also by way of aesthetic experience. In this
course we will focus on the appreciation and
creation of art, and how it has intermeshed with
politics. How the need to forge a modern
subjectivity, to foster national and class
consciousness has been addressed
aesthetically---in ways that intimately involve
the bodily, sensuous, and emotional dimensions of
the individual's lived experience and the way
that politics themselves have been turned into
aesthetic experience. We will begin with an
analysis of "literati Art" which established the
importance of harmony between nature and culture,
feeling and reason, society and individuals,
making the tone of Confucian aesthetics deeply
emotional. Its overturn by Mao Zedong, the
adoption of Lu Xun's thinking as the foundation
of communist Chinese aesthetics till 1979. The
rise of Scar painting and Star group as important
art movements and Rustic Realism depicting the
revolution's impact on ordinary rural people. We
will then move to the Pro-democracy student
movement, the rise of the China/avant-garde and
the Political Pop of the 1990s. Finally we will
contemplate the resurgence of contemporary art
movement in China with Beijing once again
becoming the artistic center especially with the
creation of 798 art zone and the art of the
Olympics in 2008. Students will research and
present a contemporary political issue and write
a report on role of the artist in a heavily
censored society. The class will also visit China
Town and The Chinese Art collection at LACMA.