Pauline J. Yao - Artistic Transformations and Global Repositioning in East

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the entire course.

This lesson examines artistic production across Korea, China, and Japan from the 1980s through 2000s, focusing on the ways artists respond to political change, social transformation, and global cultural exchange. We begin in Korea with the Minjung Art Movement, or People’s Art, which featured painting, printmaking, and performance that venerated working-class laborers and popular collective memory; and its oppositional counterpart, the minimalist monochrome painting trend known as Dansaekhwa. In China, we will look at how artists of the ’85 New Wave Movement challenged the existing status quo by embracing conceptualist and anti-art strategies, and later in the post-1989 era, how styles like Political Pop and Cynical Realism used humor, appropriation, and large-scale interventions to critique ideology, history, and the pressures of globalization. The lesson also considers the Superflat movement in Japan, a merging of manga, consumer culture, and fine art that questioned boundaries between high and low culture, examining its influence upon later generations of artists as they navigated Japan’s postmodern urban experience and embraced new media-based practices. In each cultural context, new forms of art are introduced and situated within moments of vibrant social and political change, surfacing important questions about the nature of art and its role with a rapidly globalizing world.

Pauline J. Yao is a curator and writer specializing in contemporary Chinese and Asian art. She co-founded the Beijing-based artist-run space Arrow Factory and has held curatorial positions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and M+ in Hong Kong. Her work focuses on building cross-cultural museum collections and supporting critical artistic networks.