CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

'High Archive Fever': The Internet and Art Historical Research in China
Adele Tan, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK

With the recent controversy over Google’s concession to the authorities in China, Chinese media, political censorship and access to information has once again been brought to the forefront, culminating in the absurd situation of artists being able to upload content on their weblogs but are unable to view their websites in China. In a globalised age where it has been said that ‘access rather than property has become the new form of capital and oppression’, the techniques and tactics of art and culture have correspondingly altered to either exploit its potential or mount critical interventions against other forces of control. As such, conventional art historical material that we read and touch is no longer benign and stable but rendered volatile and active again through new media technologies.

This paper aims to draw attention to the new uses of the Internet and how it circumvents the limits of traditional text/book-bound art-historical resources and methodologies, particularly for a country like China where the discipline of art history (I am here referring mostly to modern and contemporary art) is relatively immature, the physical archiving and collection of materials haphazard, and the path to publication fraught with difficulties. I shall be reflecting on my PhD research practice in documenting the history of performance art in China post-1979, using the Internet as a prime resource via important Chinese language portals such as <http://arts.tom.com> which has brought to the surface more first-hand material for this recent art practice in China than any exhaustive library search. That performance research should depend on this Internet archive produces a reflexive and symbiotic relationship as how we understand the workings of the Internet also pushes the parameters of performance. Similar theoretical considerations of dematerialisation in performance art also spill over into the superannuating of historical material into bytes and cyber optics over the shared coordinates of time and space.

With this new ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and techno-textual diaspora, the Internet archive is felt as alive, constantly updating itself, interactive but at times ephemeral, cheap to store and reproduce but lacking consistency of quality. With China as my locus, I would like to propose new questions about our resources at hand, (i.e. the veracity of material, authorship, audiences/addressees, copyright, etc) and the politically ‘sensitive’ nature of all critical research and thinking.

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