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From Both, and Inconclusively, from Neither

Critical Reflections on the Significances of Yu Youhan’s Paintings as a Locus of Aesthetic Modernity1

Paul Gladston
Eyeline 90
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The idea of aesthetic modernity—that is to say, art’s supposed use-value as a transformative means of criticising established socio-cultural conventions and political authority, as well as of paying related critical-philosophical attention to the limits of thought and practice—is usually understood to have originated in Europe and North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in relation to emerging post-Enlightenment discourses. Following Immanuel Kant’s instituting of an integrated critical-philosophical system at the end of the eighteenth century, aesthetic experience came to be seen by European and North American thinkers as a crucial means of mediating between reason and morality and therefore of supporting progressive social and/or cultural change. The critical role ascribed to aesthetic experience by post-Enlightenment discourses has persisted in the western(ised) imagination ever since, traversing significant shifts in the dominant cultural outlook first from modernism to postmodernism, and more recently from the latter to perceptions of a starkly perspectivist contemporaneity.

Dissemination of the idea of aesthetic modernity beyond Europe and North America took place initially during the nineteenth century through the impact of western colonialism-imperialism and associated impositions of modernist thinking and practice, in relation to spreading global-capitalist networks. In the longer run, however, it has been sustained by combinations of elements appropriated from western modernity with localised cultural traditions and identities as well as what are arguably manifestations of non-western modernities.2 Seen from a residual rationalist-modernist/colonialist-imperialist viewpoint, aesthetic modernity within non-western spaces therefore presents itself almost automatically as a monstrous, self-contradicting parody of progressive western values. By contrast, from a non-rationalist poststructuralist postmodernist viewpoint it is viewed not as a parody but as a pastiche, whose bringing together of differing cultural outlooks serves as an... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

A Pocket Western Art History about Mao—‘Foreign Mao’ (Robert Ryman), 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 116 x 116cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.

A Pocket Western Art History about Mao—‘Foreign Mao’ (Robert Ryman), 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 116 x 116cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.

The World is Yours, 2004. Silkscreen on canvas, 73 x 98cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.

The World is Yours, 2004. Silkscreen on canvas, 73 x 98cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.