Jane Chin Davidson is Professor of Art and Design at California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB). She is also a historian-curator. Her research focuses are on transnationalism, Chinese identity, eco-feminism, among other topics. Some of her books are: Global and World Art in the practice of the University Museum (Routledge, 2017), Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023), the monograph Staging art and Chineseness: politics and trans/nationalism and global expositions (University of Manchester Press, 2020). She has been awarded with the distinguished PhD Postgraduate at the University of Manchester, and a Getty Research Institute Postgraduate Fellowship.
Last Wednesday 05/08 she was presenting to students and professors her book Staging art and Chineseness: politics and trans/nationalism and global expositions at CSUSB. Her ideas, with no doubt, invite us to a reflective process. I will try to unfold some of them. First, what is the role of concepts as identity or national culture in a global world? What should we consider as local art in a globalized world? What is the use of talking about borders in a deeply interconnected world? Globalization is not just an economic or political issue. Globalization also addresses in different directions, aspects such as art, history, culture, culinary orientations, among others. Consequently, the old idea about borders, local identities, under the shadow of globalization, has new connotations, and of course new ways to understand and to explain our lives and our meanings in an extraordinarily complex world.
Professor Chin remarks her book’s primary inquiry: what does the term Chinese art mean in the aftermath of the globalized shift in art? What does it mean the word Chinesness? A word “that has come to be associated with those circulate transnationally among the Chinese states of China, Honk Kong, and Taiwan, and diasporic places elsewhere.” Chinesness is more than a definition, is a changing concept that confirms the problem of identification and an overly complicated issue: What should we treat as authentic in Chinese culture? One should be clear that identity is always a historic problem looking for a way to explain. In this book various theoretical references are relevant in this search: Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Mao Zedong, Jean-Luc Nancy.
Finally, Professor Chin underlined the eco-feminism perspective, a term attributed to 1970’s feminist advocates such as Francoise d’Eaubonne. The domination of the environment linked to patriarchal oppression, is the feminist claim. From this eco-feminism perspective, we can conclude as a kind of warning: “unless we sat to see ourselves once again as nature, we are all doomed to become zombies.”
