Humanities Events Video

China Transformed: Artscape / Cityscape China is the epicenter of rapid urbanization, provoking responses from artists, photographers, and filmmakers whose focus ranges from optimistic expansiveness to radical dislocation. In this two-day international symposium, leading curators, critics and scholars will look at artists working in different mediums as they react to the new Chinese megacity. The keynote speaker will be the international authority on classical and contemporary Chinese art Wu Hung. Other participants include Julia Andrews, Hou Hanru, Wendy Larson, William Schaefer, Kuiyi Shen, Jerome Silbergeld, Pauline J. Yao, Deng Kunyan, Bérénice Reynaud, and Zheng Shengtian. Organized by Department of History of Art, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Division of the Arts and the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Keynote speaker: Wu Hung Contemporary Chinese Art and China's Urban Transformation The past twenty five years have witness two parallel changes in Chinese art and living environment, each unprecedented in the country's history. Whereas all the major urban centers have undergone a process of radical and at times traumatic transformation, contemporary art has also developed from scattered "un-official" expressions to a broad field encompassing divergent stylistic and ideological trends. This lecture explores the connections between these two developments through identifying various modes of architectural representations and relating these visual modes to the changing experience of the artists in the material landscape of metamorphoses like Beijing and Shanghai.