Above Sea/Underground: Spectacle and Art in Contemporary Shanghai

The Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University presents a talk with Jenny Lin on art in contemporary Shanghai.

Historically considered to be Mainland China's most cosmopolitan metropolis, Shanghai has recently been repositioned as a global center of contemporary culture, defined in both distinctly Chinese and consciously international terms. In 2010, the city hosted the World Expo, helping to export an image of Shanghai as a capital of cutting-edge art and design. In conjunction with the World Expo, art stars such as Zhang Huan produced large-scale installations that utilized Chiinese motifs and celebrated transnational cultural exchange. Simultaneously, others, such as Cai Guo-Qiang, staged artistic interventions that challenged the World Expo slogan, "Better City, Better Life," while brining to light the soci-economic stakes of Shanghai's fast-paced development. Still others, namely the photography collective, Birdhead, created an archive of images of World Expo-related demolition, crafting a localized narrative that stood in contrast to the global exemplum touted by the World Expo. This presentation investigates how spectacular events like the 2010 World Expo, and its attendant art, help fashion images of Shanghai as a global capital of culture that travels above sea, while introducing artistic practices that operate underground to complicate such images.

Jenny Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History, with a focus in contemporary Chinese art, from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed her B.A. in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies at Brown University. Jenny's general research interests lie in the relations between twentieth and twenty-first century art and design praxes and broader social phenomena, such as colonialism, urbanization, and globalization. Her current book project studies imaginations and constructions of cosmopolitan Shanghai vis-a-vis art, architecture, and film produced within and about the city's former French Concession, and addresses issues of Chinese modernity and cultural hybridity.