Thinking of Space Relationally

Thinking of Space Relationally PDF Author: Xiaoxue Gao
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839455871
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Since the relational turn, scholars have combated methodological universalism, nationalism, and individualism in researching social-spatial transformations. Yet, when leaving the gaps between the traveling and local epistemic assumptions unattended, engaging relational spatial theories in empirical research may still reproduce established theoretical claims. Following the sociology of knowledge tradition and taking Critical Realism as a meta-theoretical framework, Xiaoxue Gao takes relational spatial theories as traveling conceptual knowledge and develops meaningful and context-sensitive ways of engaging them in studying the complex urban phenomenon in China. She offers conceptual elucidations and methodological roadmaps, which leap productively from employing plural causal hypotheses to generating effect-based explanations for locally observable events. They are exemplified by manifold interrogations of Beijing's Artworld as a conjuncture of particular events.

Thinking of Space Relationally

Thinking of Space Relationally PDF Author: Xiaoxue Gao
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839455871
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book

Book Description
Since the relational turn, scholars have combated methodological universalism, nationalism, and individualism in researching social-spatial transformations. Yet, when leaving the gaps between the traveling and local epistemic assumptions unattended, engaging relational spatial theories in empirical research may still reproduce established theoretical claims. Following the sociology of knowledge tradition and taking Critical Realism as a meta-theoretical framework, Xiaoxue Gao takes relational spatial theories as traveling conceptual knowledge and develops meaningful and context-sensitive ways of engaging them in studying the complex urban phenomenon in China. She offers conceptual elucidations and methodological roadmaps, which leap productively from employing plural causal hypotheses to generating effect-based explanations for locally observable events. They are exemplified by manifold interrogations of Beijing's Artworld as a conjuncture of particular events.

China's New Creative Clusters

China's New Creative Clusters PDF Author: Michael Keane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113634585X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Recognising that creativity is a major driving force in the post-industrial economy, the Chinese government has recently established a range of "creative clusters" – industrial parks devoted to media industries, and arts districts – in order to promote the development of the creative industries. This book examines these new creative clusters, outlining their nature and purpose, and assessing their effectiveness. Drawing on case studies of a range of cluster models, and comparing them with international examples, the book demonstrates that creativity, both in China and internationally, is in fact a process of fitting new ideas to existing patterns, models and formats. It shows how large and exceptionally impressive creative clusters have been successfully established, but raises the important questions of whether profit or culture is the driving force, and of whether the bringing together of independent-minded, creative people, entrepreneurial businessmen, preferential policies and foreign investment may in time lead to unintended changes in social and political attitudes in China, including a weakening of state bureaucratic power. An important contribution to the existing literature on the subject, this book will be of great interest to scholars of urban studies, cultural geography, cultural economics and Asian studies.

Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art

Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art PDF Author: Meiqin Wang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317481690
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between the ongoing urbanization in China and the production of contemporary Chinese art since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wang provides a detailed analysis of artworks and methodologies of art-making from eight contemporary artists who employ a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. She also sheds light on the relationship between these artists and their sociocultural origins, investigating their provocative responses to various processes and problems brought about by Chinese urbanization. With this urbanization comes a fundamental shift of the philosophical and aesthetic foundations in the practice of Chinese art: from a strong affiliation with nature and countryside to one that is complexly associated with the city and the urban world.

The Social Imperative

The Social Imperative PDF Author: H. Koon Wee
Publisher: Actar D, Inc.
ISBN: 1638409757
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This book contains multiple short critiques, reflections and manifestos, affording each contributing architect and intellectual the time and space to imagine new social paradigms in China. Emerging from a tumultuous history of high culture and complex territorial conditions, there is nothing straightforward about the social development of China. The complexity of the social practices developed by architects and shapers of the built environment can be explained in part by the last three decades of an intensified adoption of the market economy by the Communist Party of China, after an equally short three decades of closed-door communist control. There is no political meltdown like the democratization of the former Communist Bloc, but there is a constant managing of discontent and resistance across China. At the apex of the many creative and intellectual forces in China, architects harbor and give form to many tactics of resistance. Unfortunately, architects are also the instruments and minds complicit with profit-mongering developers and governments, pursuing unchecked urbanization, degradation of the environment, exploitation of the marginalized, and the creation of a very inequitable China. This book begins with an introduction that defines the forms and tendencies of China’s society as it stands today, and it positions the work of a small number of architects and intellectuals who are at the forefront of reforming, rethinking and even revolutionizing the Chinese society. Beneath the veneer of a very successful China that the world readily acknowledges, a quiet revolution is taking place within the realms of architecture and the city. The social, architectural and urban theories documented in this book are organized around the established canons of social actions – from mobilizing, laboring, resisting and mediating, to networking, controlling, rationalizing and aestheticizing. This book aims to put the social agenda squarely back in the rapid development of the built environment in China. This publication is the culmination of a three-year study of social issues in the architecture and cities of China. It involved visits to sites undergoing massive change, discussions and debates among architects and critics, reflections by practitioners about their own work, and activists lobbying for social change. Supported by the non-profit AA Asia, the edition of the contents relied heavily on original input and exchanges between architects and theorists committed to China, from Asia and beyond. Since the 1990s, AA Asia remains one of a few unique think tanks committed to the study of architecture and cities in Asia. As an advocacy with strong academic roots, it seeks to establish the differences across various postcolonial and Asian contexts, and recalibrate the role of architecture in a technocratic era dominated by the global economy. With Contributions of Robert Adams, Lee Ambrozy, Yung Ho Chang, Chen Ling, Jeremy Chia, Cui Kai, Dong Gong, Dong Yugan, Mario Gandelsonas, Han Tao, Andrei Harwell, He Jianxiang, Hu Yan, Hua Li, Huang Weiwen, Huang Wenjing, Jiang Jun, Jeffrey Johnson, Michael Kokora, Kengo Kuma, Andrew Lee, Joan Leung Lye, Li Han, Li Hu, Li Shiqiao, Nartano Lim, William S.W. Lim, Liu Jiakun, Liu Kecheng, Liu Yichun, Long Ying, Ma Qingyun, Robert Mangurian, Meng Yan, Ou Ning, Alan Plattus, Mary-Ann Ray, Daan Roggeveen, Ruan Hao, Eunice Seng, Shi Jian, Victor Su, Sun Yimin, Wang Fei, Wang Shu, Wang Yan, H. Koon Wee, Shirley Woo, Wu Gang, Wu Liangyong, Xu Tiantian, Rocco Yim, Yu Kongjian, Zhang Ke, Zhao Liang, Zhou Yi, Zhu Tao, Zhu

Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters

Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters PDF Author: Ai Weiwei
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262525747
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
A richly illustrated exploration of Ai Weiwei's installation and architecture projects, focusing on the artist's use of space. Outspoken, provocative, and prolific, the artist Ai Weiwei is an international phenomenon. In recent years, he has produced an astonishingly varied body of work while continuing his role as activist, provocateur, and conscience of a nation. Ai Weiwei is under “city arrest” in Beijing after an 81-day imprisonment; he is accused of tax evasion, but many suspect he is being punished for his political activism, including his exposure of shoddy school building practices that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2009, he was badly beaten by the police during his earthquake investigations. Ai Weiwei's work reflects his multiple artistic identities as conceptual artist, architect, filmmaker, designer, curator, writer, and publisher. This monumental volume, developed in association with the artist, draws on the full breadth of Ai Weiwei's architectural, installation, and activist work, with a focus on his use of space. It documents a huge range of international projects with drawings, plans, and photographs of finished work. It also includes excerpts from Ai Weiwei's famous blog (shut down by Chinese authorities in 2009), in which he offers pithy and scathing commentary on the world around him. Essays by leading critics and art historians and interviews with the artist, drawing out his central concerns, accompany the 450 beautifully reproduced color illustrations of his work.

New Urban Configurations

New Urban Configurations PDF Author: R. Cavallo
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 1614993661
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 1072

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Book Description
Urban areas have been caught up in a turbulent process of transformation over the past 50 years and changes have been rapid, with issues such as mobility, nature, water management, energy use and public space featuring prominently._x000D_ In each Olympic year since 1988, the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology has held an international conference focusing on the connection between research and design, exploring the field of tension between science, technology and art._x000D_ This book presents the proceedings of the latest in this series of conferences: New Urban Configurations, held in Delft, the Netherlands, in October 2012 in collaboration with the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) and the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF). This edition of the conference discussed the role and critical potential of the architectural project in the transformation process of cities and territories that leads to new urban configurations._x000D_ The publication contains all 140 accepted papers and a selection of the keynote lectures presented at the conference. The papers have been grouped into five main themes: innovation in building typology; infrastructure and the city; complex urban projects; green spaces, and delta urbanism. Four of these major topics are further divided into several subtopics._x000D_ This book will be of interest to everyone involved in designing, building, thinking about as well as managing the urban landscape and territory.

Caochangdi Beijing Inside Out

Caochangdi Beijing Inside Out PDF Author: Robert Mangurian
Publisher: Blue Kingfisher
ISBN: 9789881752246
Category : Beijing (China)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Caochangdi, one of more than 300 urban villages in the city of Beijing, tells a specific story about itself and its mostly illegal residents (including farmers, floaters, taxi drivers, and world class artists), but it also has embedded within it both the problems and the possibilities of a new urban space redefining the city of Beijing at this pivotal point in human history when cities make up half of the world's population. The authors, who live and work in Caochangdi, dissect the multiple phenomena that form this dynamic urban condition." --Book Jacket.

A Window Suddenly Opens

A Window Suddenly Opens PDF Author: Melissa Chiu
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300269889
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A lively tour through experimental Chinese photography from the early 1990s to today The past thirty years were dynamic, transformative decades in Chinese photography. Artists exposed to recent work from around the globe experimented with photography in newly conceptual and expressive ways, and their art from this period offers a portrait of a country at a moment of rapid urbanization, globalization, and cultural foment. A Window Suddenly Opens reveals the key role that photography has played in questioning and refashioning the aesthetic and social status quo of modern Chinese society for the past three decades. Alongside prescient works by Cao Fei, Lin Tianmiao, Rong Rong, Song Dong, Wang Qingsong, Zhang Huan, Zhang Peili, and many other artists, essays and interviews by scholars and curators explore the history of experimental photography in China and the artistic transformations of the digital age. The book also features texts written between 1994 and 2014 by Chinese artists, some published for the first time here in English, which offer essential insights into their ideas and experiences as they forged new creative paths. To explore further, readers can instantly access artist videos inside this book with Hirshhorn Eye, the Hirshhorn Museum's award-winning image-recognition technology. Published in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Exhibition Schedule: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (November 4, 2022-January 7, 2024)

Engaging Comparative Urbanism

Engaging Comparative Urbanism PDF Author: Ren, Julie
Publisher: Bristol University Press
ISBN: 1529207053
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Julie Ren investigates the motivations and practices of making art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research, beyond its significance as a critical intervention. Across vastly different contexts, where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, she innovatively explores the ways that art spaces employ creative capital to sustain themselves in a competitive urban landscape. She shows how these art spaces are embedded within a politics of aspiration and demonstrates that aspiration is an important lens through which to understand the nature of, and possibilities for, urban change.

China and the West

China and the West PDF Author: Lili Hernández
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443838640
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
The meeting point between China and the West is a striking subject in a wide range of disciplines. This collection scrutinises how China and the West interact in aspects of culture, arts, politics and everyday life. Within a complex web of actors, dimensions, technologies, spaces and social structures, cultural encounters are nevertheless problematic. China and the West come together within the stream of a global world. The essays in this anthology analyse new and emerging dynamics that challenge authoritative views imposed on the other, while deconstructing traditional responses to otherness too. Bringing these essays together responds to a commitment to a critical assessment of the various shapes that such convergence takes within globalisation. China and the West: Encounters with the Other in Culture, Arts, Politics and Everyday Life will appeal to scholars and practitioners in communications, the visual arts, cultural studies, sociology, media studies, anthropology, literature and politics. The non-academic reader interested in the vibrant and emerging interface between China and the West will find this enlightening too.