Browsing by Author "Chao, Jenifer"

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    China's ancient past in its contemporary art: On the politics of time and nation branding at the Venice Biennale
    (Intellect Ltd, 2019-09-01) Chao, Jenifer
    This article examines the China Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale through an exploration of temporality. It argues that the pavilion’s deployment of a politics of time – by mobilizing China’s dynastic past and its traditional arts to enhance the present – constructs a mode of cultural timelessness that sustains a stultifying visual and discursive regime. Touting the theme of ‘Continuum – Generation by Generation’, the pavilion paid a lofty tribute to folk-art practices like embroidery and shadow play, elevating two paintings from the Song Dynasty as the fount of contemporary artistic imagination. This recourse to the past mirrors a predictable and safe representational strategy often mobilized by the country to shape its own public and media image on the global stage. In view of this, the pavilion can be more constructively investigated as an exercise in image and perception management, or nation branding, which reveals the self-narratives that the country embraces. Nation branding serves as a complementary analytical lens that probes the instrumentalization of Chinese traditions, history and past, while crystallizing some parallel visual logics and aims of contemporary art. Aesthetics and nation branding are, therefore, conjoined to question the shared visuality that perpetuates, to borrow a term from Rey Chow (2013), the ‘affect of pastness’ which obscures a more timely and inventive imaginary of the country.
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    China’s cautious ‘facetuning’: The art of cultural diplomacy and nation branding
    (Intellect, 2023-12-08) Chao, Jenifer; Browning, Christopher S.
    This introduction for the Special Issue establishes and substantiates China as a timely case study for the understanding of cultural diplomacy and nation branding. It traces the country’s mobilization of creative expressions, including contemporary art, to recalibrate its international image in line with its expanding power, but also more often, to offset what it perceives as hostile representations and critique of its authoritarian rule. We first disentangle the overlapping objectives and strategies between cultural diplomacy and national branding, then how they are rendered through artistic expressions to both redeem and – sometimes unintentionally – undermine China’s reputation. Finally, we mark the relationship between the assembled papers which explore a variety of cultural diplomacy and nation branding activities that have emerged out of different artistic traditions, geopolitical contexts and economic motivations. These papers pursue diverse themes, for instance, the misalignment of nationalist branding messages and actual cultural relations on the ground, or the shifting of China’s external image as dictated by the evolving agenda of the Chinese Communist Party. The particularities of these approaches and discoveries, nevertheless, coalesce to underscore that knotted relationship between politics and aesthetics which China must manage and manipulate continually to sway global perception.
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    Cultural Resistance, 9/11 and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions
    (Routledge, 2017-09-01) Chao, Jenifer
    Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions offers a fresh account of the enduring cultural legacies of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the global war on terror through the critical lens of cultural resistance. It assesses the intersecting ways that popular culture has been deployed as oppositional practice in the post-9/11 context by documenting a collection of media texts, including a political hip hop album, a TV sitcom, a best-selling novel and studio photographs. Deviating from the conventional discursive and representative axis of mourning, nationalism and commemoration, this multimedia assemblage contests and rearticulates the political meanings, affects and visualizations of the war on terror and its global consequences
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    Curating climate change: The Taipei Biennial as an environmental problem solver
    (Intellect, 2020) Chao, Jenifer; Kompatsiaris, Panos
    This article analyses the curatorial practices behind the 2018 Taipei Biennial by considering its ethos of public engagement that fostered a merging of artistic means and civic aims. Entitled ‘Post-Nature: A Museum as an Ecosystem’, the biennial confronted the timely theme of environmental precarity and positioned itself as a substantive stakeholder in the public debate on climate change. It mobilised the biennial platform to marshal artists, community groups, conservationists and others, to spur on new thinking, and perhaps more importantly, to create solutions. By adopting this new role as an environmental problem solver, the biennial expanded itself from the ensconced space of aesthetic inquiry and sought to generate new forms of institutional relations and to nurture in its audience an ecological consciousness. These exhibition strategies underscore many international biennials’ self-assigned mandates to claim a socially relevant role and to adopt an interventionist posture. But while the biennial showcased multifaceted ecological visions of the present, it also delimited its range of critique and the possible modes of collective action. In this way, the exhibition becomes a valuable searchlight into the social and political relevance of global biennials, as well as their contention for legitimacy and significance as agents of social transformation.
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    The Ignorant Hip-Hop Artist? Political Rap Encounters Jacques Rancière
    (Taylor and Francis, 2016-09-12) Chao, Jenifer
    This paper stages an unexpected encounter between the theoretical thoughts of Jacques Rancière and the soundscape of the American political rapper Paris. It examines the artist’s unapologetically militant rap music against the backdrop of Rancière’s labyrinthine thinking on politics and aesthetics which scrutinizes various traditions of politicized artistic expressions and the causal logic that undergirds them. To articulate this wider resonance for Rancière’s critical theory, three major themes that have permeated his extensive work – emancipatory pedagogy, spectatorship and political art – are joined and made trenchant to probe the revolutionary fervour behind Paris’s bellicose rap-star image and lyrics in his emblematic album Sonic Jihad. This analysis, covering multiple media texts, demonstrates how the artist instrumentalizes music for politics through the tropes of truthtelling and enlightenment. Such a strategy, seen through Rancière’s sceptical lens, inadvertently diminishes the listeners and accentuates their presumed conditions of ignorance and inequality. But while Rancière’s overall critique of political art’s efficacy can pinpoint the blind spot in Paris’s cultural resistance, the rapper’s sonic protests can, in return, highlight the deviation of Rancière’s approach to art-inspired mobilization and suggest the limits of the theorist’s reflections on artistic oppositional practices.
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    Oppositional Banality: Watching Ordinary Muslims in Little Mosque on the Prairie
    (Amsterdam University Press, 2015-03-01) Chao, Jenifer
    This paper interrogates how the globally-syndicated series Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012) mobilises one of the most beloved television formats – the situation comedy – to insert a banal and normalised gaze towards Muslims and contest hostile representations of Islam in Western media. Through what I have termed ‘oppositional banality’, the show relocates Muslim identities to the realm of everyday life and out of the confines of global terrorism. Rather than being under the scrutiny of news cameras and viewed through cataclysmic international events, Little Mosque’s Muslims are made comical and timeless, subjected to the emotional entanglements of ordinary life.
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    Portraits of the enemy: Visualizing the Taliban in a photography studio
    (Sage, 2017-06-23) Chao, Jenifer
    This article examines studio photographs of Taliban fighters that deviate from popular media images which often confine them within the visual coordinates of terrorism, insurgency and violence. Gathered in a photographic book known simply as Taliban, these 49 photographs represent the militants in Afghanistan through a studio photography aesthetic, transplanting them from the battlefields of the global war on terror to intimate scenes of pretense and posing. Besides troubling the Taliban’s expected militant identity, these images invite an opaque and oppositional form of viewing and initiate enigmatic visual and imaginative encounters. This article argues that these alternative visualizations consist of a compassionate way of seeing informed by Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and grievability, as well as a viewing inspired by Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus that obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. Consequently, these photographs counter a delimited post-9/11 process of enemy identification and introduce forms of seeing that reflect terrorism’s complexity.
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    The Visual Politics of Brand China: Exceptional History and Speculative Future
    (Springer Nature, 2022-08-30) Chao, Jenifer
    As a global power, China is a provocative case study for nation branding practitioners and scholars. It is mired in a contested process of global image-making animated by Western media headlines, often negative ones, which draw the ire of the country’s Foreign Ministry and its ripostes. Into the fray are also self-representations, or nation branding moments, that disseminate idealized visions of the country. This paper dissects two such promotional events: an art exhibit and a science fiction blockbuster through visual and narrative analysis. It considers how cultural diplomacy, political ideology and visuality coalesce to engender images of the nation, punctuated by the country’s prized cultural values and global political yearnings. Rather than examining official branding campaigns, this study is grounded in the liminal space of popular culture where there is state oversight, and yet, also some creative freedom. The findings point to two time-related themes and visual strategies that showcase the country through its distinct dynastic past and through anticipatory spectacles of its hoped-for future. These serve as a harbinger of nationalistic visions to come. An understanding of this time-sensibility and visuality of Brand China yields a keener sense of how the country reinforces itself as a global leader.