Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Asian Arts'

This dissertation presents an analysis of the reconstruction of urban folk arts as cultural heritage in China. Focusing on material culture and folk performances revived in two Beijing folklore markets, the dissertation discusses the neoliberal marketization that coincides with urban commercial zoning in China since the 1980s. The dissertation examines the intertwined cultural and economic dimensions of collective nostalgia, urban marketization and heritage developmentalism. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Beijing from 2010 to 2015, the dissertation addresses China’s collaboration with UNESCO in world cultural heritage program. It looks closely at the process of cultural heritage marketization, which is geared toward a developmental agenda. Such a heritage construction appears in conjuncture with the rise of the new Chinese cultural industry and cultural entrepreneurship, reconfiguring the sociopolitical role of folk arts and folk artists in China.

Through the ethnographic lens, the dissertation focuses on depicting the everyday life in contemporary Beijing surrounding folklore marketplaces. In particular, it describes material engagements established by connoisseurs and collectors in two major folklore markets, the Shilihe and the Panjiayuan market, demonstrating a new Chinese folklore connoisseurship that ascends and reconfigured in contemporary Beijing. This dissertation argues that the desire, and the collective effort, to overcome the post-Mao social and cultural transformation have materialized in the revival of folk traditions as marketized cultural heritage. It contends that the ascending cultural market propels the hope of national rejuvenation while bringing about a new form of possessive individualism alongside the process of privatization.

My dissertation explores a cultural history of the body as reflected in meditative and therapeutic forms of the Chinese martial arts in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Precursors of the more familiar present-day taijiquan [special characters omitted] and qigong [special characters omitted], these forms of martial arts techniques focus on the inward cultivation of qi [special characters omitted] and other apparently ineffable energies of the body. They revolve around the harnessing of “internal strength” or neigong [special characters omitted]. These notions of a strength derived from an invisible, intangible, yet embodied qi came to represent a significant counterweight to sports, exercise science, the Physical Culture movement, physiology, and other Western ideas of muscularity and the body that were being imported into China at the time.

What role would such competing discourses of the body play in shaping contemporary ideas of embodiment? How would it raise the stakes in an era already ideologically charged with the intertwined issues of nationalism and imperialism, and so-called scientific modernity and indigenous tradition? This study is an inquiry into the epistemological and ontological ramifications of the idea of neigong internal strength, tracing the popular spread of the idea and its impact in late Qing and Republican China vernacular discourse. I pay particular attention to how the notion of “internal strength” might shed light on thinking about the body in the period. Using the notion of neigong as a lens, this project examines the claims of the internal forms of Chinese martial arts, and the cultural work that these claims perform in the context of late Qing and Republican China. I locate the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the key formative period when the idea first found popular conceptual purchase, and explore how the notion of neigong internal strength became increasingly steeped in the cultural politics of the time.

Considering the Chinese internal martial arts not only as a form of bodily practice but also as a mode of cultural production, in which a particular way of regarding 'the body' came to be established in Chinese vernacular culture, may additionally yield rich theoretical fodder. How might such claims about a different kind of “internal strength” revisit or disrupt modernist assumptions about the body? The project highlights the neglected significance of the internal martial arts as a narrative of the Chinese body. More broadly, it suggests fresh avenues for scholarship on the body, in showing how these other-bodily "ways of knowing" took on meaning in the period and beyond.

This is a case study that focuses on the socio-cultural and historical contexts that influenced the studio art practice of three Post-80s Generation student artists attending the Chinese Art School in Beijing. This study is grounded on the idea that the creation of art is determined by an interplay between multiple factors within the milieu (of what makes it understood to be “art” by the majority) and their influence on the artistic creation, which is non-assertive and invariably established in relation to others that happen to share and coexist within this processual context of doing and learning art making. On the other hand, the notion of a context in this study refers to a notion of “genealogies” where contexts are distanced from descriptions based on a horizontal platform or a lineal chain of events. Rather, in line with the methods that emerge from arts research and practice, this project operates on a “messy” yet sensible horizon of interconnections that transcend fixed notions of time and space.

While sixteen participants took part in data collection, the main focus is reserved to three student-artists. Data collection was conducted in the month of June in 2010 and 2011. Interviews and studio visits were the two methods applied for data collection. Data or narratives collected from the three research participants pertaining to the development of their studio art practices provided three avenues of interpretation: first, through the students’ own idiosyncratic accounts of their work and their student experience; secondly, through the lens of art as a collective entity from both the perspective of the participants and the researcher; and last, through a summative analysis, offering a number of possible explanations.

Through an analysis of the students’ artistic production and their art educational experience, this study aims at offering art educators, both within as well as outside China, with a discussion that illustrates the history and the stories of the Post-80s Generation student artists in the Chinese Art School.

Wuhan Han Opera Theater (WHOT, formerly Han Opera) is a 400-year old regional opera based in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, in China. WHOT’s recent designation as a public institution under China’s neoliberal creative economy initiative to enter the global market has necessitated its transformation from a cultural institution ( wenhua jigou) into a creative industry ( wehua chanye). As such, WHOT must now create adaptive strategies, alter traditional conventions of performance, infrastructure, education and community presence, reconstitute traditional social functions at the national level, and most importantly, manage a relationship with the government that is entirely novel for both. In the summer of 2016, WHOT participated in two government-led projects: Opera into Campuses and the Chinese National Arts Fund. These programs were the focus of my ethnographic fieldwork, to identify possible effects of the creative economy initiative on a traditional musical institution. Specifically, inquiry was made as to whether and how creative musical and organizational adaptations were being decided, implemented and executed, and as to how the outcomes of these adaptations were being evaluated. Despite using an ethnographic approach, findings from the preliminary study were found to be much more broadly generalizable and applicable across disciplines than expected. As a result, this thesis makes the following arguments: for modernization of an institution of traditional music to be effective, a relationship must exist whereby the transitioning institution is given creative license to generate continued socio-cultural productivity through its creative class (“talent”) in joint cooperation with, rather than dependence on, government agencies. The goal must be to revitalize rather than simply preserve such an institution, and to avoid cultural attrition of unique musical qualities of the institution.

In Taiwan’s experimental theatre, the “Grotowski phenomenon” is too prominent to be ignored. The “Grotowski method,” as it is called in Taiwan, has nurtured a generation of experimental theatre workers ever since the mid-1980s. In this dissertation I will investigate the entire picture of how the Grotowski-to-Taiwan transmission began. This investigation begins with the American encounter between the Polish exile and two Taiwanese overseas students in the Objective Drama Program at U.C. Irvine in 1985 – and what subsequently developed from that encounter in the context of Taiwan’s Little Theatre Movement and New Age Movement. Their encounter is not simply a manifestation of Western cultural hegemony. Grotowski’s physical training fills a cultural need in Taiwan, a place in which the grand narrative of the Great China ideology was dissolving and liberation of both language and body was beginning in earnest. Taiwan’s liberal religious and spiritual environment gave Grotowski’s post-theatrical work, particularly the “inner aspect” of his work, a promised land full of fertile ground. And it was upon this fertile ground that the seeds of Grotowski’s ideas fell, with time took root, grew vigorously and finally bloomed in a way that Grotowski could never have imagined.

This dissertation explores English as a Foreign Language instruction within the context of the contemporary Chinese education system. Basic outlines chart the historical development of EFL studies in the United States and China framing the question of what each community values as important measures of success when assessing language learning. While traditional Chinese methods value strict memorization of vast word lists ([special characters omitted], BeiDanCi, BDC) the US educational community stresses essay writing—particularly on standardized tests such as the ACT, SAT, and TOEFL, which are required for university admissions. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and writing ability among Grade 10 Chinese high schoolers in a megalopolis in mainland China. Students’ vocabulary knowledge was measured with Nation’s Vocabulary Size Test, and students’ writing ability was assessed with an essay graded using the TOEFL iBT ^® Integrated Writing Rubrics. The results validate previous findings among different L2 populations by observing a moderate correlation between vocabulary knowledge and writing ability.