Franziska Koch

Sexual Healing (1998), a pioneering video by Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), provides shock therapy rather than a teasing cure. It presents an ambivalently framed view of her disabled husband Nam June Paik (1932–2006) in physical therapy. Fluxus humour and the groundbreaking video work of both artists notwithstanding, the video puts pressure on the epistemological boundaries of Art History. It pointedly engages the nexus between love, sex, and care in old age with a feminist worlding, thus opening our eyes to questions of affect, authorial power, and gender in artistic collaboration.

ISBN 978-3-96558-061-9 (open access)

The split film installation ‘Hanging Garden’ by South-Korean multimedia
artist Jung Yeondoo (b. 1969) presents a creative, metainstitutional
reflection on how (art) history is, and should be told, in
Korea today. It consists of two HD color film sequences, which Jung
realized in 2009 for the exhibition Platform in KIMUSA in the
section ‘Void of Memory.’ Crucial for the two films is a sequential
spatial display that allows viewers to see only one film after the
other, since the second sequence reveals the making of the first and
is intended to work as a kind of punch line in response. The article
explores the ironic ‘framings’ that Jung uses to expose the multilayered
ways heritage is constituted in South Korea given the
colonial and authoritarian roots of the art museum. The analysis
here follows and contextualizes the esthetic revealing of the art
museum’s most contemporary instantiation built on the former site
of the Defense Security Command (DSC) in Sogyeok-dong Seoul as a
‘hanging garden’ that is ambivalently suspended between official
efforts to establish national ‘heritage’ and citizens’ memories about
conflicted pasts, in which the site saw the torture of civilians.

Keywords:
Jung Yeondoo; framing heritage; institutional critique;
transcultural perspective; National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art (Seoul)

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik and Guggenheim’s Japanese survey show, Scream against the sky, to which he contributed an essay but declined to participate with his work. This paper articulates the transcultural (counter-) potential of artists who work(ed) across borders, especially at moments when Western canonization was a double-edged sword.

The book review discusses and partially compares the two following books:
Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions, by Jane Chin Davidson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, 224 pp., 54 illus., hardback, £80

Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, by Hentyle Yapp, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021, 288 pp., 38 illus., paperback,
$26.95

The article inquires how Nam June Paik negotiated his (trans-)cultural position in the globalizing art world of the 1990s by focusing on an exemplary conflict with the Guggenheim Museum New York. While the pioneering and influential Fluxus participant Paik aesthetically and theoretically subscribed to a border-crossing and collaborative practice with mail art projects such as "The Monthly Revue of Avant-garde Hinduism" created in the 1960s, he remained very sensitive to institutional and curatorial demarcations and refused to be included with such a work into the survey show "Scream against the Sky: Japanes Art After 1945". The article examines the complex balance of political, cultural, and aesthetic implications of transculturally constituted authorship.

Seit den 1990ern ist die Rezeption chinesischer Gegenwartskunst im Medium der Ausstellung stark gestiegen. Ausstellungen prägten das Etikett »chinesische Avantgarde« und ermöglichten eine neue, globale Dimension von Wechselwirkungen mit der Kunstproduktion in China. In transkultureller Perspektive beantwortet Franziska Koch die Frage nach der Verfasstheit dieser Kunst mit Blick auf das mediale Dispositiv der Ausstellung, in dem sich sowohl Chinas Kunstbilder wie auch verbundene Chinabilder zeigen bzw. gezeigt werden. Sie untersucht kritisch und diachron 20 Großausstellungen im Westen, ihr Verhältnis zur Entwicklung in China und synchron die damit verbundenen kanonisierenden Agenten, Institutionen und Diskurse.

Contemporary Chinese art is still a young field now being opened up to critical academic research. Negotiating Difference is a pioneering collection of articles which engage with contemporary Chinese art in a global context. The contributions collectively address the urgent methodological question of how to describe, contextualize and theorize artworks and artistic processes in and beyond the People's Republic of China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. The studies break new ground as they chalk out the transcultural entanglements of which art and its practices partake and which they in turn reconfigure.
The book features 20 essays written by a select group of international junior and senior scholars engaged in ambitious and methodologically innovative research on contemporary Chinese art. Their multi-faceted, in part interdisciplinary approaches are complemented by four contributions by distinguished practitioners in the field, who - as art curators and critics - are located in China and explore key developments within Chinese art and the changing art scene of the last three decades.


1st edition, July 2012, 374 pages, 139 illustrations in b/w., 29 colour illustrations, soft cover.

ISBN: 978-3-89739-717-0
Prize: 59,00 Euro

The 7 volume of the open access, peer reviewed journal Miradas - a multi-lingual academic journal fostering art historical research across the Iberian peninsula and Latin-American area - addresses decolonial theory, transculturation and entangeled art histories. With 7 articles and a range of catalogue entries and exhibiiton reviews authored also by emergent scholars, the issue presents the selected, revised and additionally enriched outcome of an eponomyous workshop-cum-seminar held at Heidelberg University during the pandemic.

This article is dedicated to Dorothea and Peter Buttinger. The author would like to thank Wang Keping, Huang Rui, and Qu Leilei for spontaneously and generously sharing their memories with her. She feels greatly indepted to Wu Wen-Ting, Lo Yin-Yueh, Sun Yi, and Zhu Xianwei for their patient support as translators during and after the interviews and Bindu Bhadana for serving as English copy-editor. She would like to thank Wenny Teo for her careful and patient editorial support, Julia F. Andrews, who very quickly and comprehensively provided missing historical information, and Zheng Bo for his helpful comments as peer reviewer as well as the Asia Art Archive Hong Kong which assured easy access to some of the quoted sources. Last, but not least, heartfelt thanks go to Kippy Yeh for triggering this research by providing his set of photographs, to Rudolf G. Wagner for forwarding the material to the Cluster of Excellence 'Asia and Europe in a Global Context' and to Madeleine-Chris...

An introduction to the section, “Re-thinking Artistic Knowledge Production: Global Media Cultures—Distributed Creativity,” which features two contributions chosen from a symposium with the same title that took place May 23‒24, 2013 based on a collaboration between members of the DFG research network “Medien der kollektiven Intelligenz” (2011–2014, University of Konstanz) and hosted by the chair of global art history at Heidelberg University.

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik a...

Introduction to the themed issue "How we work together: histories, ethics, and epistemology of artistic collaboration" of the Journal of Transcultural Studies (Vol. 11, No. 2, March 2020). The introduction explores the resonances and differences of the five case studies that cover contemporary artistic collaboration across Japan, China, Mexico, and Canada and analyze various levels, limits, and challenges of "working together" in a transcultural perspective. The themed issue took of with an eponympous panel in the context of the 1st TrACE Academy "Worlding the Global: The Arts in an Age of Decolonization" at Carleton University Ottawa in November 2019 and features revised and additional contributions that pay attention to histories, ethics, and epistemological aspects of artistic collaboration from an art historical point of view. The introduction outlines the risen discourse on collaboration in the field of "socially engaged art", which chiefly addresses contemporary collaborations without including longue durée perspectives, when querying cultural differences, resonances, as well as entanglements.

This editorial contextualizes the theme of 'Chineseness' in contemporary art discourse and practice and explains how the eight (peer reviewed) scholarly articles, two artist contributions and one exhibition review respond to various constructions of ‘Chineseness’ explored in connection with competing, conflicting or supplementing agencies, localities and vocalities in the field of art. Methodologically, the pluralist approaches are motivated in light of the global turn in art history and related disciplines that have fostered a critical, epistemologically conscious transcultural approach in recent years. The issue’s insightful contributions present the result of selected and revised proceedings of the international symposium (In) direct speech. ‘Chineseness’ in contemporary art discourse and practice. Art market, curatorial practices and creative processes that took place at Lisbon University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2015 and discussed transculturality in connection with contemporary Chinese art. Taking together, the case studies address three overlapping aspects of ‘Chineseness’ as a) constituted in curatorial practices and institutional politics of display, b) created by individual artists and their invention or negotiation of Chinese (premodern) ‘traditions’, and c) a methodological challenge for art history given underlying, often invisible epistemological conditions and confinements.

The section “Re-thinking Artistic Knowledge Production: Global Media Cultures—Distributed Creativity” of the e-journal transculturalstudies.org features two contributions chosen from a symposium with the same title  that took place May 23‒24, 2013 based on a collaboration between members of the DFG research network “Medien der kollektiven Intelligenz” (2011–2014, University of Konstanz)  and hosted by the chair of global art history at Heidelberg University. The introduction contextualized both contributions and explains how they relate to recent interdisciplinary discussions in the overlapping, but under-studied research fields of global media cultures and distributed creativity.

The paper discusses Yeondoo Jung's double channel video installation called "Hanging Garden" (2009) in context with South-Korea's recent boom of museums for modern and contemporary art. It analyzes how the artist by means of irony and a self-reflexive approach to the history of film making and authoritative history narrations deconstructs single authorship and shows collective forces at work when official and national stories are told. His tongue-in-cheek revelation of a "hanging garden" in Seoul based on a fantastic and transculturally framed love story at least indirectly refers to contemporary political conflicts surrounding the recently opened museum for modern and contemporary art at Seoul's central district Kimusa.

This paper is a review of the Gwangju Biennale 2012 framed as personal revisit of the exhibition by the author who compares her previous experiences as scholarship student of art when visiting the Biennale for the first time a decade ago. The edited volume consists of more or less personal recollections by academics who have researched or worked in Korea based on a scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) celebrating the 60th anniversary of its Korea exchange program by means of this reader.
 
"Koreas Kunst revisited: ein Wiedersehen mit der Gwangju Biennale nach 10 Jahren", in: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (ed.), Wege nach Korea. DAAD-Alumni erinnern sich. Ein Lesebuch, Bonn: DAAD, 2014, pp. 166-185.

This article focuses on a set of thirty-two photographs of artworks which were created by the Chinese artists group the ‘Stars’ (Xingxing) and distributed in Beijing in 1979/80. It explores the role these photographs played at a time when Chinese artists searched for innovative ways to address an expanding local public as well as an increasingly international audience. This piece also considers how the historiographical status of these prints has changed from 1979/80 until today.

Ausstellungen sind ein zentrales Medium der modernen Kunst. Sie zeigen zeitgenössische künstlerische Entwicklungen nicht nur, sondern formen sie gleichzeitig entscheidend mit. Der Beitrag untersucht am Beispiel der ersten Gruppenausstellungen zeitgenössischer Werke aus der Volksrepublik China in Deutschland, wie dieses Medium die mittlerweile globale diskursive Kategorie „zeitgenössische chinesische Kunst“ konstituieren half. Untersucht werden verschiedene (trans-)kulturelle Übersetzungsstrategien der beteiligten Kuratoren, die ausgehend von der kulturwissenschaftlich argumentierenden Pionierschau China Avantgarde (1993) über die eher marktorientierte Malereiausstellung China! (1996) und die feministische Replik Die Hälfte des Himmels (1998) bis zur ersten offiziell mit der chinesischen Regierung co-organisierten Ausstellung Living in time (2001) reichen.

"At the turn of the millennium, the boom in group exhibitions displaying and thereby configuring what European audiences came to know as "Contemporary Chinese art" was fueled by a new exhibition format: bi-national panorama exhibitions that were jointly organized on an official level between European states and the People's Republic of China.

These exhibitions mark a significant political change in the ambivalent history of the communist state's patronage of art since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the rise of manifold artistic activities during the 1980-1990s in the wake of the Open Door Policy (Gao, 1990; Gao et al., 1991 ; Lü and Yi, 1992; Gao, 1993; Chang et al., 1993; Pohlmann and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 1993; Dal Lago, 1993; Andrews and Gao, 1995; Gao, 1998; Lü, 2000; Köppel-Yang, 2003; Gao, 2005), Chinese officials largely managed to exclude avant-garde and experimental artworks from public museum displays. (Clark, 1992; Wu, 2001; Kraus, 2004) The state run media mostly ignored or even censored articles on unconventional, partly critical artistic positions and the party-controlled art academies prevented these positions from openly featuring in their curricula.

Around 2000 - with China becoming a member of the WTO - the government effectively changed its cultural policy to back-up its increased international economic and political power by promoting the arts as cultural "soft-skills" in international relations. The Chinese government began to recognize and use the great commercial and diplomatic potential of experimental artistic positions, which had already been successfully mediated through a whole genealogy of "non-official" group exhibitions taking place abroad since the early 1980s. (Erickson, 2002; Koch, 2010; Koch, 2011a; Koch, 2011b; Koch, 2013) Germany and France were the first to join the transnational enterprise of negotiating the markedly changed Euro-Chinese relationship through bi-national group exhibitions of contemporary art.

My paper compares and illuminates how the exhibition "Living in Time" at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof 2001 and the Centre Pompidou's show "Alors, la Chine?" in Paris 2003 respectively performed a diplomatic task. It questions the narratives of the main exhibition agents: the European and Chinese curators, the political patrons, and critics writing in the catalogs. The paper also examines how the discourse of these writers runs along or against aspects of the artworks that were on display. It asks how the actual spatial arrangement in these two different institutions fostered certain kinds of reception and suppressed other possible readings of the works by the visitors.

Methodologically, the paper aims to challenge and complicate prevalent assumptions about the global marketing and canonizing mechanisms of large scale and officially supported exhibitions, viewing them as mere spectacles and/or political endeavors. Focusing on crucial intersections between powerful exhibition agents, the mission and display of the respective museum institutions and the local foreign policies, the paper shows to what extent the exhibitionary complex (Bennett, 1988) is not only the result of (limited) knowledge, but literally (in-)forms new knowledge on art in transcultural negotiations. In this case, a problematic notion of contemporary "Chinese" art was coined, one that was paradoxically framed as national and global."

Exhibitions have always been at the heart of the modern art world. They are contested sites, where the joint forces of the art objects, their social agents, and institutional spaces temporarily intersect and provide a visual arrangement to specific audiences, whose interpretations feed back into the discourse on art. From this perspective, “contemporary Chinese art,” both as phenomenon and discursive category referring to specific dimensions of artistic production in China post-1979, was mediated through various exhibitions that took place in the People’s Republic of China. After 1989, exhibitions of artworks from the PRC in European and North American museums significantly contributed to the broadening of Western knowledge about this artistic production. Since then, the two strains of exhibition activities grew while becoming increasingly entangled and the discursive category of “contemporary Chinese art” has gone global.

This paper reviews the beginnings of this complex process by investigating the conditions that configured the first large group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art from the PRC in Europe after 1979: the travelling group show China Avantgarde, which opened in Berlin in early 1993.

The first part of the paper explores the wider historical conditions that impacted on the exhibition by contextualizing the event in relation to two important, if very different forerunners: the 1989 shows Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan. China/Avantgarde in Beijing and Magiciens de la terre in Paris.Yet the important entanglements between the respective curatorial concepts, affiliated art discourses, and the agents involved are also analysed. Constituting a specific network of mediators, mediating factors, and mediating institutions, these forerunners influenced the making of China Avantgarde in Berlin three years later.

The second part of the paper discusses the Berlin exhibition in detail. It argues that the title reflects the contested use of the discursive categories “avant-garde” and “modern art” in Beijing and Berlin at the time, which helped translate and thereby shape a certain image of contemporary Chinese art beyond the actual artworks on display. Of paricular interes are the concerns of the European curators, who had to overcome various political, logistic, as well as conceptual challenges when selecting artists and artworks. Examining the catalogue as an instance where diverging strategies of how to present artworks from thePRC become visible, the paper argues that China Avantgarde was not so much a clear-cut, singular, and–by now–canonical event, but formed as well as informed a complex canonizing process that is still relevant today.

This section of Transcultural Studies features the proceedings of a lecture series entitled “Multi-centred modernisms—reconfiguring Asian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” The programme of lectures, which was jointly organised by the Chairs of ...

Review of: Eva-Maria Troelenberg / Melania Savino (eds.): Images of the Art Museum. Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology, Berlin: de Gruyter 2017, in: sehepunkte 17 (2017), Nr. 12 [15.12.2017], URL: http://www.sehepunkte.de/2017/12/30088.html

The review discusses Barbara Lubich's book "Das Kreativsubjekt in der DDR. Performative Kunst im Kontext" (2014) as a recent contribution to the growing field of art historical and sociological studies of artistic/creative practices in the GDR. The review provides an overview of the structure of the discursive analysis and its main arguments and highlights the achievement of Lubich's book, which is the result of a detailed ph.d.-study based on many insightful case studies.

This is another English review of Birgit Hopfener's German book 'Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen' (Installation Art in China. Transcultural Spaces Reflecting a Genealogy of the Performative), which was published by Transcript in 2013.

This English review presents Birgit Hopfener's German book "Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen", which can be loosely translated as "Installation art in China. Transcultural spaces reflecting a genealogy of the performative" and was published by Transcript in 2013.

This is a CfP for a panel on artistic collaboration in transcultural and transnational perspectives related with the 1st TrACE Academy titled "Worlding the Global. The Arts in an Age of Decolonization" organized by the Centre for Transnational Analysis of Carleton University, 7-10 Nov. 2019, panel venue: Korean Cultural Centre Ottawa. While four panelists are called for, more submissions will be considered for the affiliated theme issue in the e-journal "Transcultural Studies" (Heidelberg University Press), a double blind peer reviewed and open access based international research journal. The extended submission deadline for abstracts of 500 words/short CVs is 15 September 2019. The panelists will receive (partial funding) for their travel/accomodation costs thanks to a generous grant of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung.

The “Forum for East Asian Art History” is an initiative by junior academics at German-speaking universities. In the first two years (2012 and 2013) the forum was held at the Berlin Free University (Freie Universität Berlin) and in the third year (2014) at Heidelberg University. The fourth forum will take place at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Location: University of Zurich, Institute of Art History, Section for East Asian Art History, Gablerstrasse 14, CH-
8002 Zurich, Switzerland

Deadline: 1st March, 2015

Organization team:
Natasha Fischer-Vaidya, Anna Grasskamp, Anna Hagdorn, Franziska Koch, Sabine Schenk, Wibke Schrape, Nora Usanov-Geißler

This is the comprehensive concept, programme, abstracts and biographical information of the 2nd International Gathering of the Research Network for Modern and Contemporary Art (ReNetMoCoCA). It takes the shape of a day-long online-Symposium on "Cohabitation" and worlded approaches to planetary aestehtics in contemporary art stemming from the Sinophone world. Taking the concept of the "Sinophonecene" as a starting point, 10 speakers and panel discussions, 1 keynote speaker and the organizers will explore creative responses located in the greater Chinese region to the global climate crisis, late capitalist extractivism, and environmental pollution.