Negotiating Autonomy in Contemporary Chinese Art

"Dr. Li's monograph is a pivotal contribution to the scholarly literature
on Sinophone contemporary art. It's careful attention to understudied primary and secondary sources significantly enriches our existing knowledge of 'conceptual' art in the People's Republic of China."

- Paul Gladston, the UNSW Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art

What does it mean for art to aspire toward autonomy in times of political transition, ideological pressure and accelerating globalisation?

For decades, the story of contemporary Chinese art has often been told through rupture: the opening-up of China in the 1980s, the rise of avant-garde practices, and the symbolic weight of 1989 as a turning point between local experimentation and global contemporary art. But what happens when that narrative is reconsidered – not through broad historical narratives, but through close attention to the writings, archives and lived negotiations of artists themselves?

These questions lie at the centre of Dr. Yu-Chieh Li’s new monograph, Approaching Autonomy: Post-socialist Conceptualism in Chinese Art (Brill, 2025).

Dr. Li was the inaugural Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art & Design (2018–2020), where her research developed within the broader commitment of the Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art (JNCCA) to critical inquiry, cross-cultural dialogue and contemporary art research. Her scholarship engages with performance art in Asia, postcolonial art historiography and media art histories, often examining how artistic practices emerge through moments of political and cultural transformation.

Rather than presenting post-Mao conceptual art as a straightforward story of liberation or globalisation, Approaching Autonomy traces a more complicated and ongoing struggle around artistic expression in post-socialist China.

Drawing on understudied archival materials, artists’ writings, documentary footage and interviews, the book revisits works by artists who shaped conceptualism in China from the 1980s onward. Across these chapters, Dr. Li explores how artists negotiated questions of appropriation, affect, dehumanisation and collective practice while attempting to define spaces of autonomy within rapidly changing ideological and institutional conditions. 

As she explains:

“A continuous development can be found in the politics and aesthetics of post-socialism, which has struggled to define its space for expression, from the 1980s until today.” 

One of the book’s central chapters revisits Robert Rauschenberg’s 1985 exhibition in Beijing, a moment frequently described as a landmark cultural exchange between China and the West. Yet rather than treating the exhibition simply as a symbol of artistic opening, Dr. Li reconstructs the encounter in greater detail through archival research conducted at the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Curators’ notes, inventory lists and documentary videos reveal a more layered story – one in which Chinese artists did not passively absorb Western contemporary art, but actively appropriated, challenged and reinterpreted Rauschenberg’s work within their own artistic and political contexts.

Another chapter turns to the New Measurement Group, whose collective practice became deeply entangled with tensions between rationality, affect and artistic autonomy. Through interviews and close readings of the group’s artists’ books, Dr. Li examines how collective artistic production could simultaneously create solidarity and expose internal contradictions around emotion, individuality and systematisation.

Rather than treating 1989 as a fixed historical rupture, Approaching Autonomy traces a longer and more continuous negotiation around artistic expression in post-socialist China – one shaped by shifting political realities, collective experimentation and the search for autonomy across different generations of artists.

These ongoing questions around artistic agency, historiography and cross-cultural interpretation were also part of the intellectual environment surrounding Dr. Li’s time as the inaugural Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art & Design (2018–2020). Through research exchanges, critical dialogue and the broader scholarly community fostered by JNCCA – including conversations with JNCCA Chair Professor Paul Gladston – her work developed within a space committed to rethinking contemporary art through international and interdisciplinary perspectives.