Sydney Asian Art Series
Land Lords: Art, Property and Law in Post-Nineties China
Joan Kee
2.30pm-4pm, Saturday 20 May 2017
Domain Theatre, Art Gallery of New South Wales
The University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, The Power Institute and VisAsia, with support from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Sydney Ideas, are proud to present the second of our Sydney Asian Art Series talks, with a lecture by Associate Professor Joan Kee.
The years between 1988 and 2007 saw numerous, unprecedented changes take place in China on multiple cultural, social and economic registers. Among the most dramatic were those affecting the legal system and its understanding of property. Although Communist economic systems sought to end private property by collectivizing the means of production, the liberalization of property ownership in the 1990s and 2000s encouraged an altogether different approach to artistic production, one that required considering how social relations were shaped by new forms of legal discourse. This lecture addresses the intersection of various conceptions of property with several important artworks produced in 1990s and new millennium China, including those by Wang Jin, Ai Weiwei, Lin Yilin, Zhu Fadong, Li Jinghu, and Zhang Liaoyuan.
Joan Kee is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Kee was a former attorney based in Hong Kong whose practice included cross-border transactions with Chinese and Korean clients. The author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekwha and the Urgency of Method (2014), From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction (2015) and co-editor of To Scale (2016), Kee is a contributing editor to Artforum, and has recently completed a book on contemporary art’s engagement with the law.
For enquiries, contact: powerinstitute.events@sydney.edu.au
Free and open to all with online registrations required.
The Sydney Asian Art Series is presented by the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, The Power Institute and VisAsia, with support from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Sydney Ideas.