Research and Innovation

Born in 1940, in Jiangxi province in eastern China, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Gao's interest in theater, writing, and all-things-creative was instilled at an early age by his mother, an amateur actress. He began painting at age ten after his uncle gave him a notebook for his birthday. Mr. Gao describes it as: “just white pages, no grid and no lines,” and that it was in this book where he first began writing and drawing simultaneously. Throughout the course of Gao Xingjian's prolific career, he has had nearly thirty international exhibitions of his ink paintings and, also, illustrates all of the covers of his books.

This essay addresses the problematic notion of the “avant-garde” in the context of Japanese modern art. It looks at the formation in 1907 of the national salon, the Bunten, to elucidate the relational dynamics of art organizations in early twentieth-century Japan, especially during the Taisho period (1912 – 27) when the Fusain Society (Fyûzankai) and the Nika Society (Nikakai) came into being as alternatives to the Bunten. The essay elucidates one of the fundamental paradoxes of Taisho-period art — the simultaneous proliferation of art organizations and artistic individualism — and the dialectic between authority and autonomy that prevailed in art under the conditions of Japanese modernity.

The monograph is a study of the paintings by Gao Xingjian who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 and was the first Chinese writer to receive the prize. He is a naturalized French citizen and lives in Paris. His style of ink painting belongs to the great Chinese literati tradition of xieyi (literally “writing the idea”); this style allows him to create subtle, intuitive settings and characters that move in the limits between figurative and abstract art, in a way that has been done by many of the great masters in Chinese art history. His paintings explore the expressive possibilities of ink and washes; the nuanced light and dark shadings, subtle washes, textures, and volumes in his paintings are both dramatic and refreshing.

In the past two decades, contemporary Chinese art and film have attracted a great deal of media and academic attention in the West, and scholars have adopted a variety of approaches in Chinese film and visual studies. The present volume focuses on the uses and status of theory originating in non-Chinese places in the creation, curating, narration, and criticism of contemporary Chinese visual culture (broadly defined to include traditional media in the visual arts as well as cinema, installation, video, etc.). Contributors reflect on the written and, even more interestingly, the unwritten assumptions on the part of artists, critics, historians, and curators in applying or resisting Western theories.The essays in the present volume demonstrate clearly that Western theory can be useful in explicating Chinese text, as long as it is applied judiciously; the essays, taken as a whole, also suggest that cultural exchange is never a matter of one-way street. Historically, ideas from traditional Chinese aesthetics have also traveled to the West, and it is a challenge to examine what travels and what does not, as well as what makes such travel possible or impossible. The present volume thus provides us an opportunity to rethink travels of theories and texts across cultures, languages, disciplines, and media.

A short essay for the online education platform Khan Academy on the group of artists known as "The Pictures Generation." I introduce the main critical concerns of these artists, as well as their legacy for contemporary art. Artists discussed include Sherrie Levine and Carrie Mae Weems.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays investigates the processes by which Augustine of Hippo's writings were re-invented in other media, including the visual arts, drama and music. Thereby it highlights the crucial role of Augustine's readers in constructing his universal stature.

n 1981, NBC's Hill Street Blues combined the cop show and the soap opera to set the model for primetime serial storytelling, which is evident in The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. In 1963, ABC's The Fugitive showed how an anthology series could tell a continuing tale, influencing The X-Files, House, and Fringe. In 1987, NBC's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd changed the situation comedy into attitudinal comedy, leading to Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Entourage. The DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the Television We Watch not only examines how American television shows changed, but also what television artists have been able to create. The book provides an alternate history of American television that compares it to British television, and explains the influence of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective on the development of long-form television and the evolution of drama shows and sitcoms. The work considers a wide range of network and cable television shows, paying special attention to the work of Steven Bochco, David Milch, and David Simon, and spotlighting the influence of graphic novels and literary novels in changing television

This book illuminates the primacy of Buddhist icons in disseminating the worship of the Medicine Master Buddha (J. Yakushi) in Japan. Suzuki’s study explicates how the devotional worship of Yakushi, one of the earliest Buddhist cults imported to Japan from China and Korea, developed its own distinctive Japanese imprint after centuries of blending with local beliefs, dispositions and ritual practices. Worship of the Medicine Master Buddha became most influential during the Heian period (794-1185) and its sculptural forms were enshrined in temples across Japan and widely disseminated to people in various levels of society. The book also focuses on Saichō (767-822), the founder of the Tendai school of Buddhism, and his personal reverence for the deity. Suzuki proposes that after Saichō’s death, the Tendai school played a critical role in further popularizing the cult to memorialize their founding master. The study reconsiders the devotional cult of the Medicine Master Buddha and its icons as paradigmatic of Heian religious and artistic culture.

The contributors to this volume (historians of art, of literature, of linguistics, and of architecture, as well as a practicing artist), acknowledging the tectonic shifts in academic practice and historical self-awareness prompted by post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav events, rethink the nature, subjects, and objectives of the avant-garde, both the historical ones of the early twentieth century and their more recent iterations. The present selection affords a rich introduction to some of the most imaginative thinking currently being focused on Eastern European modernism.

In 1992, during the first retrospective of Basquiat's work, Richard Marshall lamented: "Jean-Michel Basquiat first became famous for his art, then he became famous for being famous, then he became famous for being infamous—a succession of reputations that often overshadowed the seriousness and significance of the art he produced." The artist's place is even now much more secure in pop culture than in academe, so the Basquiat retrospective that opened at the Fondation Beyeler in 2010 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was not just a museum show to celebrate the artist's fiftieth birthday but also an argument for Basquiat's place in art history. Following precedent, this latest exhibition focused on the artist's larger, midcareer canvases, but this essay reads several of Basquiat's small-scale, early works as marked by often-overlooked inquiries into modernism, epistemology, and the potential of appropriation.