'Everyday Life and Imaginaries of the Modern' discusses the work of a handful of artists from both Guangzhou and Shanghai of the 1990s as emergent discourses in which the challenge should be seen as not only as one of definition in relation to an aesthetics of a globalising commodity culture but also constitutes a re-imagining of the self within everyday urban life. This paper was first presented at Our Modernities : Positioning Asia Art Now, held in Singapore in February 2004.

About the speaker

Charles Merewether is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research, Australian National University in Canberra. An art historian he was Collections Curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles between 1994-2004. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney and has taught at the University of Sydney, Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona, the Ibero-Americana in Mexico City and University of Southern California. He was a Research Fellow at Yale University and in 2003 Fellow at the Humanities Research Center, Australian National University and Japan Foundation Fellow. His extensive writing has been appeared in Europe, the Americas, Australia and China. He is Advisory Editor of the journal Grand Street as well as on the editorial board of Art AsiaPacific and Yishu. He is currently preparing an exhibition on the post-war Japanese avant-garde, and writing on recent art in China and a book on looting. His essays have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.