The Shiny Body of the Good Soldier: Identity and the Corporeal in Shen Jingdong’s Art

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15210%2F25%3A73630706" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15210/25:73630706 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.5507/ff.25.24465821.15" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.5507/ff.25.24465821.15</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.5507/ff.25.24465821.15" target="_blank" >10.5507/ff.25.24465821.15</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Shiny Body of the Good Soldier: Identity and the Corporeal in Shen Jingdong’s Art

Original language description

Like several other young Chinese artists between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, Shen Jingdong experimented with conceptual and performance art before achieving critical and commercial success with paintings and sculptures. In Shen’s paintings since the early 2000s, the bodies of people and animals turn into shiny, smooth, and bright-colored “characters” inhabiting empty spaces. In recent portraits by Shen, the smooth surface of these bodies and faces is often damaged by wounds and violence—both represented in painting and physically enacted on the canvas. This chapter examines Shen Jingdong’s early conceptual and performance works in relation to the origins and transformations of his portrait paintings. Drawing also on Sinophone art criticism, intellectual history, and interviews with the artist in his studio, this chapter argues that Shen’s early conceptual and performance art not only prefigured the language and iconography of his portraits, but also introduced two key themes that underpin them, i.e., the transmutation of the body and the issue of personal identity. As a result, the fragile and increasingly tortured bodies of Shen’s characters come to represent extensions and evocations of the artist’s avantgardist experimentation. This study contributes in this way to our understanding of Shen’s art while shedding light on the legacy of post-Mao avant-gardist trends in contemporary Chinese art.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60401 - Arts, Art history

Project

<a href="/en/project/EH22_010%2F0002593" target="_blank" >EH22_010/0002593: MSCA Fellowships at Palacky University in Olomouc I.</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Embodied Entanglements: Gender, Identity, and the Corporeal in Asia

ISBN

978-80-244-6582-1

Number of pages of the result

27

Pages from-to

351-377

Number of pages of the book

466

Publisher name

Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci

Place of publication

Olomouc

UT code for WoS chapter

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