Art Academies in China: Global Histories and Institutional Practices

Art academies played an essential role in shaping modern art in China.

They were the sites where European methods of art education were introduced; where the social role of the modern artist was defined; where the importance of traditional art forms and training methods was negotiated; where art history as a modern field was established; and where political and ideological changes in artistic practices were first implemented.

Today, art academies incorporate laboratories of innovation as well as academic curricula inherited from the socialist period.

Thus, they are emblematic of the dynamics within the Chinese cultural sphere and society at large, and of the tensions between a rapid globalization on the one hand and the preservation of cultural heritage and national identity discourses on the other.By studying art academies, their global histories and institutional practices, as the most significant actors in modern Chinese art, CHINACADEMY offers new understandings of the aesthetic, social, and political conditions of artistic creation in modern and contemporary China.

Tracing the transnational connections to Japan, France, the Soviet Union, and other regions, it shows how institutional structures and artistic practices were adapted to the requirements of Chinese society in acts of cultural translation.

It questions existing narratives of modernization, conservation, and political influence in art by highlighting personal affiliations, the agency of institutions, issues of conflict, and gendered experiences. These will be excavated through oral histories as well as archival records.

By stressing the importance of academic and traditionalist practices, CHINACADEMY also decentres the paradigm of modernism that is still prevalent in global histories of modern art.

It thereby proposes a new perspective for a global art history that pushes beyond Eurocentric as well as Sinocentric narratives.