Contemporary Art in the Sinophonecene: Artistic Criticality, Defamiliarization, Being-in-the-World and the Persistence of Syncretic Confucianism

Recent debates related to contemporary art in Sinophone Asian contexts (considered to be inclusive of Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) have sought to uphold the idea of the Sinophonecene—excessive extraction of resources, environmental degradation and climate change across Sinophone Asia—as the focus for a culture-specific artistic investigation of/critical intervention with the ecologically damaging impact of the Anthropocene and its relationship to European/American colonialism-imperialism. Absent from those debates is any searching discussion of culturally specific conceptions of artistic criticality in present-day and historical Sinophone Asia. Contemporary art in Sinophone Asian contexts typically makes use of techniques, media and modes of presentation characteristic of European/American avant-garde modernism, neo avant-garde postmodernism and post avant-garde contemporary culture. That use is widely supposed to involve a necessary oppositional and/or disjunctive distancing between art and its objects of criticism. In Sinophone Asian contexts artists who have adopted European/American avant-garde techniques, media and modes of presentation also continue to exercise—consciously or unconsciously—an obliquely critical non−/rationalist (“being-in-the-world”) resistance to overweening authority associated historically with dynastic-imperial China’s Confucian-literati administrative class and its aspirations toward a harmonizing reciprocity between human society, heaven and Nature. It will be argued that oblique Nature-facing non−/rationalist criticality of this sort has relevance beyond Sinophone Asian boundaries given contemporary art’s subjection to a pervasively institutionalized political orthodoxy in Western/ized liberal-democratic contexts as well as the pressing need to interrupt rationalizing colonialist-imperialist attitudes toward the world and its resources.