Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, Huang Yong Ping: Cosmologists of Chinese Contemporary Art

This dissertation traces the transnational praxes of contemporary Chinese artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, and Huang Yong Ping. Initially trained in painting, these three artists reinvent Chinese metaphysics in France, Japan, and the United States through site-specific practice to transgress cultural and linguistic limitations brought on by identity politics characteristic of 1990s art. Rooted in a mid-1980s fascination with metaphysics, the three artists materialized ephemeral, idiosyncratic cosmologies in their respective sites of "spiritual exile" to contest reified identity. While contemporary Chinese art has been well studied in surveys that create taxonomies to map out artist groups and movements, I suggest that closer analyses of these individual cosmologies, projected through particular biographies and iconographies, are necessary to nuance studies of Chinese contemporary artists, who are too often portrayed as politically driven to play the Chinese card and inflate their success in the global art market./nDeparting from narratives of activism highlighted in previous scholarship, I take up issues of metaphysics historians of Chinese art tend to underplay for fear of reinforcing orientalist attitudes that plagued the initial reception of Chinese contemporary art. I argue that placing their cosmologies in focused historiographies of contemporary art and science reveals the artistic agency exercised by Chinese artists to achieve parity as individual artists on a global scale. Cai, Chen, and Huang aimed to rewrite the teleology of canonical art histories through praxes that embrace energetic languages and non-linear time./nMy study sheds light on a cultural trend that attempted to scientize paranormal phenomena as a means to reconcile art, science, and spirituality toward the end of the Cold War. Doing so remedies the imprecise connections previous scholars drew between Chinese contemporary art and pre-modern Chinese art, histories, and metaphysics that falsely privilege a sinological entry into this body of work. Instead, I suggest that these cosmologies are constructs of contemporaneity, practical strategies devised to spark creativity in contemporary situations rather than wholesale, uncritical deployments of ancient metaphysics./nPart I of the dissertation, Earth, introduces a synchronic analysis of the intellectual milieu of the mid-1980s in China and Europe. It situates Chinese contemporary art in an intersection of primitivist "root-seeking" cultural movements and a popular somatic therapeutic qigong fever marking 1980s China to trace the sources of metaphysics informing these artistic systems. This revival of metaphysics in China coincides with utopian efforts in Europe to mitigate the failures of capitalism through artistic and spiritual practice that culminated in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris, setting stage for a global reception of metaphysical themes deployed by Chinese contemporary artists. Part II, Water, traces Huang Yong Ping's deployment of anti-metaphysical, anti-utopian stances through paradoxical implementations of Chinese metaphysics in France in order to construct a formal language of time and teleology as intervention. Part III, Fire, examines the way technology and art in Japan shaped Cai Guo-Qiang's position as an "artist of the East" who shifts the discourse of art from the global to the cosmological through volatile, time-based sculptures. Part IV, Air, unravels the microcosms and macrocosms of the human body and social metabolism Chen Zhen generated from the therapeutic efficacies of Eastern and Western medicine./nAlthough each part of the dissertation forms its own autonomous cosmology, together, they cohere into a larger narrative of how contemporary expatriate artists negotiate their praxes in a globalized art system to dispel rather than reinforce orientalist readings under the aegis of the Beuysian "artist-as-shaman" thesis.

Advisor: Berger, Patricia A