Graduation Spotlight: Rethinking Art Criticism and Map-Making Across Cultures

The UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art (JNCCA) proudly celebrates the recent graduation of two of the Chair’s doctoral students: Nan Li and Jianxiong Jing. Their work brings fresh trans-cultural perspectives to contemporary art criticism and cartography. Nan’s work examines how Chinese contemporary art is interpreted and evaluated in English-speaking contexts, while Jianxiong’s research delves into classical Chinese map-making traditions that challenge Western conceptions of space and cartography. Each of their projects challenges inherited narratives and expands the boundaries of critical inquiry.

Nan Li : Rethinking How East & West Talk About Art

Nan Li’s journey began with a simple observation that unfolded into a deeper, more complex story. By the 1990s, Chinese contemporary art was making waves on the international stage, sparking what many called “China fever.” But as Nan dug deeper into the English-language criticism surrounding this phenomenon, she noticed a significant gap: the conversations happening in Beijing galleries and those occurring in Manhattan art spaces weren't just different – they were operating on entirely different frequencies.

Supported by a China Scholarship Council award, Nan arrived at UNSW in September 2023 as an international Ph.D. exchange student from Beijing Language and Culture University. Her mission? To decode what she would eventually term the "asynchronicity" between Chinese and Western art criticism. This wasn't simply about language barriers or cultural differences – it was about fundamentally different ways of understanding what art means and how it should be discussed.

Working under Professor Paul Gladston's supervision at UNSW, Nan began constructing what she calls a "paradigm map" – not a geographical tool, but a way of visualizing how different critical frameworks collide, compete, and sometimes completely miss each other. Her doctoral dissertation, "Research on Chinese Contemporary Art Criticism in the English-Speaking World (1990–2020): Focusing on the US, the UK, and Australia," explores how Chinese contemporary art is interpreted in English-speaking countries, revealing how meaning is shaped and transformed across cultures.

What emerges is a deeper divide, as Nan discovers that this isn't just about delayed reactions or simple misunderstandings. Western critics in the 1990s often dismissed Chinese contemporary art as derivative or secondary, while Chinese critics were developing entirely different vocabularies for discussing contemporaneity itself. The two critical traditions weren't just out of sync – they were asking essentially different questions.

Nan's year at UNSW proved transformative, not just for the access to English-language resources difficult to obtain in China, but for the intellectual dialogue with Professor Gladston, whose deconstructive approach helped her see the productive tensions between theory and practice, tradition and modernity, East and West. Now, as she begins her new position as a lecturer at a university in Shanghai, Nan carries with her a toolkit for helping future scholars navigate these complex cross-cultural conversations.

Jianxiong Jing : Decolonizing Maps Through Ancient Wisdom

In 2018, Jianxiong Jing encountered something that would change the trajectory of his academic life: a classical Chinese map that he realised he couldn’t fully understand using modern cartographic concepts. Yet somehow, impossibly, it had guided countless travellers and shaped imperial decisions for centuries. Jianxiong could have simply shrugged and moved on, chalking up his confusion to the mysteries of ancient Chinese culture. Instead, he became fascinated. How could something so "wrong" have been so right?

This moment of bewilderment set Jianxiong on a long intellectual journey across centuries, one that challenged his assumptions about how humans conceptualise and represent space. Jianxiong received an International Postgraduate Award and was supervised by Professor Paul Gladston, Dr. Marnie Feneley, and Dr. Ian McArthur at UNSW as he undertook his Ph.D. dissertation: "Decolonizing Cartography: A Multi-modal Analysis of Classical Chinese Map-making and its Critical Relevance to Contemporary Representations of Space."

The mystery deepened as Jianxiong discovered that classical Chinese maps from the Ming and Qing periods weren't trying to be "accurate" in the Western scientific sense at all. They were doing something far more sophisticated: embedding Confucian literati cultural and aesthetic frameworks directly into spatial representation. These weren't failed attempts at scientific mapping – they were successful attempts at something entirely different.

Using social semiotics and discourse analysis, Jianxiong began to crack the code. These maps were simultaneously practical navigation tools, philosophical statements, and aesthetic objects. They represented space not as neutral territory to be measured and controlled, but as culturally meaningful landscape shaped by historical relationships, ethical considerations, and aesthetic values.

The breakthrough came when Jing realized these weren't just historical curiosities – they were blueprints for what he calls "post-West" cartography. In an era when China is developing independent knowledge systems across various fields, these traditional approaches offer alternatives to Western spatial epistemologies. They suggest ways of mapping that don't just show where things are, but what they mean and how they relate to human experience.

After successfully defending his thesis in June 2024, Jianxiong describes his doctoral work as only "preliminary explorations" of a vast research territory. His next steps involve deepening these findings and producing what promises to be a series of papers and monographs that could reshape how we think about maps, space, and cultural knowledge systems.