This book addresses the politics of borders in the era of global art by exploring the identification of Chinese artists by location and exhibition. Focusing on performative, body-oriented video works by the post-1989 generation, it tests the premise of genealogical inscription and the ways in which cultural objects are attributed to the artist’s residency, homeland or citizenship rather than cultural tradition, style or practice. Acknowledging historical definitions of Chineseness, including the orientalist assumptions of the past and the cultural-mixing of the present, the book’s case studies address the paradoxes and contradictions of representation. An analysis of the historical matrix of global expositions reveals the structural connections among art, culture, capital and nation.

Chin Davidson’s Staging Art and Chineseness offers an opportunity to challenge the universalizing
claims of Western theories and to queer popular scholarly stereotypes about ‘Chineseness’ as a theoretical problem and the fetishization of contemporary China as an ‘empire’.
JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE

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Jane Chin Davidson is Associate Professor of Art History and Contemporary Global Art at California State University, San Bernardino