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ID:
122932
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper analyses the motives, processes, and effects of urbanisation in Korla, a small but rapidly expanding city in northwest China, where the author conducted over two years of fieldwork. The paper aims to show that the historical monuments of the urban environment are physical manifestations of a stirring, and often violent, program of ideational and socio-economic change that is directed at the periphery and all of its residents - even as some of those residents are also posed as agents of the ongoing transformation.
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| 2 |
ID:
144371
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines a work of contemporary art by the artist duo Sun Yuan (b. 1972) and Peng Yu (b. 1974). Entitled Wenming zhu (Civilization Pillar), in form the work resembles a classical stone column, but it is in fact entirely composed of layers of congealed, gleaming human fat. While the work has previously been read in relation to the emergence of zhenhan yishu or “Shock Art” in the late 1990s, I argue that it provides an important mirror on the corporeal aesthetics of the wenming discourse. In Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Civilization Pillar, flesh is fetishized as a site for the accumulation of wenming as a by-product of the hedonism and decadence of the 21st century. Wenming is thus defined as the corporeal surplus of burgeoning consumerism, a means by which both to figure and to counter the destabilizing forces of sociopolitical transformation.
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