Lu Pan

Who is occupying wall and street: graffiti and urban spatial politics in contemporary China

This paper examines three cases of graffiti production characterized by showing the connections between three key ideas (aura, carnival, and publicity) in the context of contemporary China. This paper attempts to construct a paradigm for this particular cultural phenomenon by analysing three cases situated in three different social levels. First, graffiti as artwork, as exhibited by the contemporary artist Zhang Dali, is discussed. Second, sponsorship of graffiti culture by the local government is studied. The last and most controversial topic of discussion is how graffitis online circulation reflects civil society in China. This paper explores the complex intersection of street culture, public space, and media. In revolving around the questions of what defines graffiti producers and spectators, what can be said about graffiti-writing practices, and who has the ability to speak out, this discussion illustrates the extent to which graffiti can be understood as a means of public communication against the backdrop of, and amid the moments of crisis in, the construction of modern Chinese cities. This paper illustrates how the aesthetics and the politics of representational forms and their intermediality are mobilized in a variety of contested spaces, where producer and spectator change and exchange identities.

Marginality as centrality: South Korea's alternative creative cities

This paper tries to present the parallel existence of a more publicized narrative of the global creative city of South Korea and the ‘marginal’ stories of self-organized artists and cultural activists. The study will begin with the official presentation of Seoul as a creative city in its application to join the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Next, by discussing two case studies, ‘Seoul Urban Art Project’ and AGIT in Busan, the paper unfolds the different meanings of urban space created through languages, visual representations and events that happened outside the official narratives. I contend that there is an interesting relativity between the ‘centrality’ and ‘marginality’ of a particular space, city and a kind of market or community that is constantly changing not only with the shifts of subjectivities that tell the stories, but more importantly, with the ways where the spaces and visual tools are actually occupied, used and distributed. All these may prompt a re-contemplation of the concept of ‘creative city’ not just as a progressive modernist project obsessed with creating the new in the future, but also as a horizontally force field, where encounters of energies on various orders of magnitude may also constitute a powerful creative present.

Translating visual archives: on the making of the new through three cases of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This study attempts to provide an original perspective to deciphering the mechanism of cultural production, the change in value hierarchies and the making of public space through the lens of art and visual archives in contemporary Hong Kong. The three cases of visual archives in question, intentionally or not, have three different Chinese translations of the English term ‘archive’: Asia Art Archive (wenxian 文獻), ‘Archive of the People’ (dang’an 檔案), and Umbrella Movement Visual Archive (kucun 庫存). The use of each translation literally and symbolically indicates the difference, tension, and diversity of the archive discourses in their specific context. In this vein, this study rethinks the art archive in relation to the idea of ‘the new’.

Abandoned negatives, Themeless Parks : images of contemporary China in two photographic projects

Abstract This article juxtaposes two photographic projects to illustrate ways of perceiving everyday space in contemporary China: on the one hand, ‘Silvermine Project’ (2009–2013), by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, recycles a vast collection of abandoned film negatives from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and subsequently ‘curates’ these amateur images into the frame of a quasi-ethnographic approach. On the other hand, Hong Kong photographer Dustin Shum’s ‘Themeless Parks’ (2008) presents a series images of public parks in Chinese cities and towns. The two projects propose different readings of the ‘postsocialist’ condition in contemporary China. While the domestic shots curated by Sauvin actively mobilise individual and national identities in private and public spaces, Shum’s compositions of shape, colour and architectural density reveal a highly orchestrated ‘China’ that pre-empts the emergence of an individual identity. This paper analyses the textual articulations of individuality, space, and temporality in the two projects.

In-visible palimpsest: memory, space and modernity in Berlin and Shanghai

In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 S ...

Nostalgia as Resistance: Memory, Space and the Competing Modernities in Berlin and Shanghai

This paper compares the nostalgia culture of urban space in contemporary Berlin and Shanghai. In Berlin, the nostalgia for both pre-WWII Berlin space and East Berlin street culture prove attractive. In Shanghai, spaces that associate with the 1930s’ Shanghai bourgeois life win high popularity among the local. Rather than understanding nostalgia in local-global tension, this article argues that the spatial nostalgia in both cities is related to the local resistance to the predominant national narrative in exhibiting competing understandings of modernity.