Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Towards the end of the 20th century, and in the early decades of the 21st century, the study of visual art is no longer confined to the field of image study, and the subject matter of text in works of visual art has attracted the attention of artists and theorists alike. Contemporary scholars and artists have explored the communicative potential of text-art since the late 1960s, such as the works by Joseph Kosuth (1945-) and the pioneer art group Art&Language, regarding it as a new type of contemporary art. Compared with western text-art research, very little study has been devoted to the picto-ideographic textual language of Chinese text-art, which was developed out of Western conception of contemporary text-art but is also distinguished from it. Major Chinese avant-garde artists, including Gu Wenda(1955-), Liu Yonggang(1964-), and Xu Bing(1955-), embraced this new concept from the Western sphere of contemporary art and brought it to contemporary Chinese art since the 1980s. This paper explores the unique characteristics of contemporary Chinese text-art by analysing its writing system and linguistic features from a Western point of view. It compares the use of text-art in Western and Chinese cultures, examining the similarities and differences between the two and evaluating the specific characteristics of Chinese text-art. Ultimately, it demonstrates that Chinese picto-ideographic text raises fundamentally different questions about the use of text in art.