| It is noticeable that Western art is in many cases the catalyst for new developments in Chinese contemporary art, so there is always an attempt to define China in terms of modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity as per the Western tradition. However, such an attempt to delineate Chinese contemporary art in a Western art historical perspective has been critiqued and dismissed for its inability to capture the full complexity of the Chinese condition. By providing an historical overview of the emergence of contemporary Chinese art during the twentieth century and exposing the unbreakable bind between the development of its contemporary art and its social and cultural revolutions, this paper tries to argue for cultural specificity through a focus on the process of interaction between modernity and local culture. |
