The idea of beauty in the West has often been connected with the idea of woman, whose beauty has been celebrated in sculptures of the nude since classical Greece and in paintings since the sixteenth century. the nude is not a genre in either traditional or contemporary Chinese art, however, and although there has been nakedness in the representations of the body in the contemporary art of China, its presence is marked by two characteristics that distance the Chinese naked body (...) from the Western nude. (shrink)

Material matters in new Chinese art, which presents its subjects through the directness and immediacy of its material. This book applies theories by Osborne and Danto to new Chinese art to show how artists are working below the level of language to make each work of art prove that it is art.

This is a book about the journey of a man, Jizi, whose goal was to make contemporary what is authentically Chinese and to do it in a way that speaks to an increasingly global audience. The first ha...

Through the work of Julia Kristeva, this paper challenges Freud's laws that everyone is always already gendered, that the mother is feminine and every infant masculine, and that one cannot love the same (gender). The figure of the Madonna, seen through the paintings of Giovanni Bellini, is used to theorize the time in the life of a child before Oedipus and to undo the conceptual knot with which Freud has bound the feminine to the maternal.