Art and Museum Lecture Series featuring Dr. Vivian LI

Vivian Li is Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Worcester Art Museum. In her curatorial practice she endeavors to present Asian art in a global context. Li received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan specializing in modern and contemporary art in China. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship which allowed her to conduct research in Beijing and Sichuan from 2012 to 2013. Li has lectured widely on modern and contemporary art in China as well as global post-1945 art, and has published articles in the journal Art History, the Oxford Art Journal and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Fitting Asia into a White Cube
Date: 22 March 2018 (Thu)
Time: 5:30-7:00 pm
Venue: RmG04 Y.C. Liang Hall, CUHK

For museum curators, reinstallations of permanent galleries are opportunities not only to give the walls a fresh coat of paint, but also to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the stories the collection’s objects are (or are not) telling to better connect the object with the viewers. The regular task of reinstalling the galleries of Asian art in the U.S. is especially challenging when considering the drastically changed public perceptions about Asia over the last couple of decades. Asia has become a rising, multifaceted player in the contemporary world in contrast to the early 20th century, when Asia was viewed as a faraway and timeless monolith and also when American museums started collecting Asian art. This talk will investigate the question, “What does it mean to exhibit Asian art in the art museum today?” and survey the latest thinking in representing Asian art through a selection of recent groundbreaking museum reinstallations.

Technology’s Challenge to Art Appreciation
Date: 26 March 2018 (Mon)
Time: 9:30-11:00 am
Venue: Rm405 Yasumoto International Academic Park, CUHK
*Guest Lecture for CUMT1000, all CUMT students and public attendance are welcome

Technologies developed just a few decades ago for science and government institutions, such as computers, the Internet, and virtual reality, have since the turn of the millennium become more accessible to the mainstream. With the unprecedented access to new technologies through their rapid commercialization over the past thirty years, artists’ experimentations with the latest technologies have grown exponentially as well. The turn of the millennium also witnessed an art institutional pivot toward new media and digital art, with such notable exhibitions as BitStreams at the Whitney Museum in 2001 and more recently Virtual Frontiers: Artists Experimenting With Tilt Brush at Art Basel Hong Kong last year. With the increased institutional acceptance and exhibitions of new media art, this talk explores how these works are questioning and changing traditional ways of looking and appreciating art.

When Everyone Was An Artist: Art and Propaganda During the Cultural Revolution
Date: 28 March 2018 (Wed)
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm
Venue: Rm703 William M.W. Mong Engineering Building, CUHK
*Guest Lecture for CUMT4005, all CUMT students and public attendance are welcome

Rent Collection Courtyard is a 96-meter long sculptural installation in rural Sichuan comprised of 114 life-sized clay figures that depict in six continuous tableaux downtrodden peasants submitting their harvest as rent. Collectively created in 1965, by February 1966 the government extolled the sculptural group as a model in art. This talk considers through Rent Collection Courtyard how after the Communist Revolution in 1949 the official line in China for art to serve ‘the people’, or 人民, sought to institutionalize a new value system for the arts. How did the act of copying models and collective artmaking mobilize the masses around the new concept of ‘the people’? This talk about Rent Collection Courtyard as the national model for art and propaganda during the Cultural Revolution reveals the actual uneven development of cultural production on the ground in contrast to the state’s desired vision.