Longing for Distance rather than Proximity

This paper revisits the notion of cross-cultural curatorial practice as “translation,” examining the exhibition Art Chinois, Chine demain pour hier (1990) held in a village in southern France. Co-curated by the Chinese art critic Fei DaweiFootnote1 and the then president of Les Domaines de l’Art, Michèle Cohen, this collaborative curatorial work stood as the first exhibition in West Europe that focused exclusively on Chinese contemporary art. Based on my multi-sited research that involved interviews and archive visits, as well as visual and textual analysis and multilingual translations of first and secondary sources, I track the development of this project from its initiation to the mixed receptions of the exhibition, and the after effects of this Sino-French cultural initiative at a particular historical juncture. Anchored on this case study, my goal is to draw on a broader question about the model of “cross-cultural translation”—which continues to be mobilized as a way of creating an art-historical connection between Euro-American artistic productions and their counterparts “elsewhere.”

Archaeology · Art · Art history · China · Geography · Visual arts · Cultural Industries and Urban Development