by Jon Lackman | 4 April 2007 | Asia, Contemporary
In the Dec. 2006 issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Paul Gladston writes: “The publication of Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, by Karen Smith, a British-born art critic and a longtime resident of China with extensive firsthand knowledge of the contemporary Chinese art world, is … an extremely welcome addition to the existing literature … Nine Lives is a highly ambitious account … narrated through detailed biographical studies of nine of its most notable figures … [A] notable aspect of Nine Lives is Smith’s conspicuous eschewal of contemporary Western academic theory in favour of a largely unembellished narrative emphasizing the pressing actuality of everyday experience in contemporary China … One of the points that Smith makes consistently is that while Chinese avant-garde visual art is no less open to (deconstructive) re-contextualization and re-interpretation than its Western counterpart, it can also be understood to have an abiding significance in relation [to] Chinese culture and society often overlooked or effaced by Western(ized) approaches to its presentation and reception … Smith is clearly at pains to … capture something of the ‘Chineseness’ of Chinese contemporary art — a move which, it has to be said, runs the risk of an unjustifiable appeal to some form of essentialism.” Gladston also notes that “The format of Nine Lives – that of the Vasarian, biographical history of art — is a conspicuously Western one whose traditional association with humanist assumptions about the heroic agency of the artist is notably at odds with the lack of inevitability that Smith otherwise imputes to the lives of her chosen subjects.”
