School of Art - Theses
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ItemLOU IN BATH: an art practice 2000 – 2019( 2019)LOU IN BATH is a taxonomy of materials, themes and processes—tartan, teeth, eyeballs, horses—that amplify the pattern and the emergence of a studio syntax. LOU IN BATH identifies how systems of knowledge such as mathematics and physics can carry sentiment and slapstick; a language of readymade objects, sometimes operated upon with surgical like procedures and recorded in performance, can register powerful affect.
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ItemThe impact of the Biennale of Sydney on the collecting habits of the Art Gallery of New South Wales( 2019)The aim of this research is to examine the impact of the Biennale of Sydney on the collecting habits of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. While there is research within the area of Biennales and their impact on local economies, there is little research into their impact on how local (in this context, Australian) art is collected by public (State or Federal) institutions, whose role it is to keep safe the culture of the locality they are meant to represent. Biennales are often researched in the context of the Global internationalisation of art, with the ‘type’ of art shown being known as ‘biennale art’ - often spectacular, internationalising, and heeding little attention to the context in which the art is being shown. It can be argued that eventually, artists in the areas where Biennales have become either a source of civic pride or a tourist destination for global visitors, tend to adapt their artistic styles to mimic the work of those artists shown in such arenas. In Australia, this raises questions on how Australian artists see themselves in an international context and how this impacts on national narratives. With this in mind, I am examining, as a case study, the collection of contemporary art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in correlation with art exhibited in the Biennale, from six years prior to the Biennale’s inception through to Australia’s Bicentennial year of 1988.
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ItemReframing the representation of women in contemporary China with feminism( 2019)Reframe the Representation of Women in Contemporary Chinese Art with Feminism investigates the representations of women from the Cultural Revolution to today. Through a practice-led thesis, the research shows how women are formed through social, cultural, and political ideologies of “ideal female beauty,” and reframes the representation of women in contemporary Chinese art from a feminist perspective through my practice of making and writing about female representations in art. The representation of “ideal female beauty” that are investigated in this research include the propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese neo-classical paintings in the contemporary Chinese market, as well as the social media, selfie culture, and advertising in Chinese popular culture. The different representations of women developed over time reflect the patriarchal aesthetics of women in traditional Chinese Confucianism, the influence of traditional European nude genre painting on representations of woman, Chinese Communist Party’s political ideologies on gender, and consumerism under globalization. As one of the feminist debates around the diversities of nations, culture, and society, I found Chinese conception of feminism as “feminine-ism” has affected theorizing feminist art in Chinese art criticism. This research re-theorizes Chinese feminist art through case studies of contemporary Chinese feminist artists. To reframe the representation of women in contemporary Chinese art, this research includes a feminist criticism of the patriarchal aesthetics of female representation in the contemporary Chinese art market. It also includes a feminist analysis of some Chinese women artists who represent different female forms by using their bodies in their art and the first generation of Chinese feminist artists rather than “feminine-ism artists” that include me to reframe the representation of women by feminism. The study of the representation of women complements my own paintings, photographs, videos, and a short film in which I present the effects of the “invisible ideologies” that shape the dominant idea of “ideal female beauty” through representations of non-therapeutic cosmetic surgery showing how the invisible ideology becomes visible in women’s bodies through cosmetic surgery. I use the female images in my art to challenge patriarchal aesthetics of female beauty, to resist the cycle of producing the representation of women as beautiful objects, and to refuse the stereotypes of women’s art as feminine essence reinforced by Chinese feminine-ism and certain contemporary Chinese art criticism.
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ItemSculpture as activating object( 2019)The practice-led project Sculpture as Activating Object, which has developed over three years, 2015-2018, investigates how a sculptural object activates a process of transformation through play. Sculpture activating describes how the process itself becomes the artwork. Through the investigation of three artwork case studies produced for this project, this thesis examines the different outcomes generated by the art objects and speculates that sculpture as activating object is a new category within the field of contemporary action-sculpture.