Global Dialogue, Local Insight: Avant-Garde Meets Neo-Confucian Thought

Professor Paul Gladston, the inaugural Judith Neilson Chair of Chinese Contemporary Art at UNSW Sydney, has been invited to deliver a keynote speech at the international symposium “Intercultural Dialogue and Contemporaneity of Aesthetics,” hosted by Shenzhen University on 22–23 November 2025.

In his keynote paper, Professor Gladston introduces a timely framework for thinking about contemporary art in the PRC that brings the story back to its origins in the late 1970s–80s and looks forward to today’s global debates. He argues that Chinese contemporary art has long staged a conversation between European/American avant-garde strategies of defamiliarization, including collage, montage, assemblage, appropriation, looping, as well as distinctly local images, ideas and practices; the result is not simple imitation but a re-situating of meaning within Chinese cultural contexts. Zhang Peili’s looped video works, for example, press fragments of 1960s–70s cinema toward productive uncertainty, a move that clarifies how “making strange” can open new readings when placed within different traditions. 

What makes this intervention distinctive, Gladston suggests, is the lens through which that “strangeness” is received. Rather than presuming a Western post-Enlightenment ideal of critical distance, he situates PRC practices within the country’s syncretic neo-Confucian inheritance – an evolving weave of Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist thought in which rational and non-rational modes sit side by side. From this vantage, criticism need not announce itself in stark opposition; it can operate obliquely, inflecting and qualifying authority from within, much as Zhuangzi’s notion of wu-wei historically offered the literati a repertoire of subtle dissent. 

The keynote therefore reframes familiar binaries. It reads the PRC’s use of defamiliarization not only through postmodern deconstruction but also alongside meditation-like attention to open-ended meaning, and it places artistic agency in a “both/and” dynamic – supporting social harmony while enabling critique in forms that may be less spectacular yet no less consequential. In doing so, it questions the Western narrative that true critique must stand at a distance, noting how avant-garde oppositionality has itself been repeatedly absorbed by mainstream culture since the mid-twentieth century. 

Set against today’s condition of global contemporaneity – marked by intensified interconnection, renewed geopolitical tensions and vigorous debates around identity and decoloniality – the framework offers a pragmatic way of reading Chinese contemporary art on its own terms while remaining legible to international discourse. 

It proposes that the most productive critical energy often lies in a neo-syncretic “shuttling” between positions: between representation and deconstruction, between endorsement and resistance, and between local traditions and global art languages. In that movement, critique becomes a practice of calibration rather than rupture – closer to construction than denunciation – yet still capable of unsettling established meanings.  

Following the symposium in Shenzhen, Professor Gladston will present a related version of the paper at Beijing Language and Culture University on 27 November.