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Distributed for Intellect Ltd

The Otherness of the Everyday

Twelve Conversations from the Chinese Art World during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Distributed for Intellect Ltd

The Otherness of the Everyday

Twelve Conversations from the Chinese Art World during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Jiang Jiehong seeks to understand the Covid-19 pandemic through interviews with leading figures of the Chinese art world during the summer of 2020. 

In late 2019, as a deadly pandemic began to take hold, China’s Wuhan province was the first to feel the effects. As the virus spread, the streets and squares of the world emptied, and the structures of our social world were redefined. 

In response to the pandemic, Jiang Jiehong convened in-conversation talks with twelve figures—such as Chen Danqing, Pi Li, Xiang Biao, and Zhang Peili, among others—from different disciplines in the Chinese-speaking world, including anthropology, architecture, art, curation, fashion, film, literature, media, museum, music, and photography. Presented here, the conversations foster new understandings of the ongoing crisis. The discussions explore the threat of the invisible; notions of distance and spatialization, separation and isolation, communication and mobility, discipline and surveillance, and community and collectiveness; and China’s changing relationship with the rest of the world. These illuminating reflections on the global crisis allow us to re-examine past norms and begin to form visions of a post-Covid world.

198 pages | 30 halftones | 6.69 x 9.61 | © 2021


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Reviews

"[The book's] strength lies in the fact that the voices we read are not – again – discussing China or Chinese art as the “other” in longstanding, now globalized academic discourses of (cultural) alterity and artistic practices that are informed by post-colonial, transnational or transcultural negotiations of difference. Rather, all participants share the experience of an unexpected “othering” of their daily lives and the amazement of being brought together more closely through a global crisis, while at the same time being forced apart – “two metres” – and mostly stranded in their homes. [...] Jiang allows us to travel back in time, compare and witness how the beginning of the global pandemic not only fueled anxieties of cultural difference and national control, but also showed the need to overcome our screens and epistemic borders, to sustain mutual dialogue, while affirming just how related we really are."
 

Franziska Koch, The China Quarterly

Table of Contents

List of Figures 


Acknowledgement


Introduction: the Otherness of the Everyday


1. The State of Suspension

Conversation with Xiang Biao, 6 June 2020


2. The Art of Quarantine

Conversation with Zhang Peili, 13 June 2020


3. The End of the Museums

Conversation with Pi Li, 20 June 2020


4. An Exhibition in the Palm of Your Hand

Conversation with Zhang Zikang, 27 June 2020 


5. Expressions of the Pandemic

Conversation with Gu Zheng, 4 July 2020


6. In Fashion at Home

Conversation with Li Lin, 11 July 2020 


7. Filming the Lockdown

Conversation with Zhang Zhen, 18 July 2020


8. Experience and Knowledge

Conversation with Shu Kewen, 15 August 2020


9. In Control

Conversation with Jiang Jun, 22 August 2020


10. Virus-affected Design

Conversation with Wang Shouzhi, 29 August 2020


11. Infected or Transmitted

Conversation with Chen Danqing, 5 September 2020


12. The Un-isolatable

Conversation with Zhu Zheqin, 12 September 2020


Glossary 

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