Media Studies and Media Culture in Contemporary China

„China converts its converters.“ Norbert Wiener.

Just when the West thought that the synthesis of alphabets and numeric systems could solve any problem there is, another writing system and language entered the stage. Coinciding almost exactly with the introduction of symbolic algebra in In artem analyticam isagoge by François Viète in 1591, the first letters from Jesuit missionaries reporting of the Chinese language and writing system toppled the West’s concepts of how symbolic systems were supposed to behave.

Interdisciplinary transmission rather than religious mission, the Jesuit endeavors in China led to a significant, yet subcutaneous influence of Chinese concepts of knowledge on Western developments of ideas of computability and nature. Large parts of the complex universal system of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would not have been possible without his almost life-long occupation with Chinese ideas. Essentially, the West believed China to be in possession of some sort of artificial intelligence.

Tracing cultural historical developments from 1600 to 1900, the lecture explores the violence and tragedy of Western missionary and colonial politics, and takes a close look at Norbert Wiener’s work at Tsinghua University in the 1930s, his Chinese collaborators Yuk Wing Lee and Zhao Yuanren and their long-lasting involvement in the invention and evolution of Cybernetics. Zhao Yuanren’s linguistic and translation work, the Chinese language reform, invention of the Chinese typewriter and advent of the Cultural Revolution form a constellation which predicts the leading role of China in the 21st century.

My lecture will address the fraught issue of modern time and art historical timing, by revisiting three moments, in which different artists and a scholar have engaged with the pervasive idea of the avant-garde and its claiming of contemporaneity. While in 1988, comparative literature scholar Shigemi Inaga argued with a view to Japan that it is “logically impossible to find an authentically avant-gardist position within Third World culture”, the self-taught Chinese artist group “Xingxing” (“Stars”) in 1979/80 had insisted on calling themselves a political-cum-aesthetic avant-garde in lock-step with Deng Xiaoping’s policy of the Open Door. Peripherally situated to hegemonic modern European discourse, too, Canadian artist Kent Monkman – well informed by their Cree-Irish ancestry and settler colonial traumata – allows flamboyant alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle to pay a care-taking visit to “the modern wing” of art history disguised as a hospital in a telenovela staged as late as 2015.

Theoretically entangling the three moments, I will ask how art historians today can learn from them, in order to foster a transcultural methodology that allows “to world” the global. Rather than completely dismissing the concept of the avant-garde, its presence and presentness, its validity for non-Western contexts, or belittling artistic responses that did/do engage with the paradoxes of progress when longing for a radical break with the past in order to change the present for a better future, I argue that we need to microhistorically situate these practices and trace interrelated understandings as well as incommensurabilities by acknowledging the epistemological horizon of a shared modernity including its violent conditions and limits.