Modern China Studies Vol 23, Issue 1, 2016

CONTEMPORARY CHINESE VISUAL CULTURE AND

CULTURAL TRANSLATION

EDITORIAL

PAUL GLADSTON
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

Abstract: This editorial discusses structuralist and poststructuralist semiotic

theorizations that problematize conventional notions of cultural-linguistic
translation. It also discusses how this problematization of cultural-linguistic
translation impacts on performative and essentialist conceptions of identity related
to visual cultures within contemporary Chinese contexts.

Keywords: translation, structuralism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism,

contemporaneity, Chinese visual cultures

About the Author: Paul Gladston is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures

and Critical theory at the University of Nottingham. He is principal editor of the
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His recent publications include
Contemporary Chinese Art: a Critical History (2014) and ‘Avant-garde’ Art
Groups in China, 1979-1989 (2013). Contemporary Chinese Art: a Critical
History was awarded ‘best publication’ at the 9th Award of Art China (AAC),
2015. Email: paul.gladston@nottingham.ac.uk

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《當代中國研究》 Vol 23, Issue 1, 2016

当代中国视觉文化与文化翻译

编者按

葛思谛
诺丁汉大学

摘要:本文探讨结构主义和后结构主义符号学理论对传统文化-语言翻译提出
的质疑。此外，本文还讨论了这些关于文化-语言翻译的质疑如何影响了当
代中国视觉文化的表演和身份认知。

关键词: 翻译、结构主义、后结构主义、后殖民主义、当代性、中国视觉文
化

作者: 葛思谛（Paul Gladston）是诺丁汉大学当代视觉文化和批判理论的

教授。他是《中国当代艺术》期刊的主编。其最近出版的新书包括《中国当
代艺术：批判史》(2014)和《“前卫”艺术团体在中国，1979-1989》
(2013)。《中国当代艺术：批判史》 被 2015 第九届 AAC 艺术中国评为“年
度出版物”。邮箱：paul.gladston@nottingham.ac.uk

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Modern China Studies Vol 23, Issue 1, 2016

This special edition of Modern China Studies brings together articles that in
various ways reflect on the relationship between contemporary visual culture
within and outside the People’s Republic of China and the question of cultural
translation. In recent years cultural translation (both in terms of the notion of
translation of meaning from one cultural-linguistic set to another or others, and the
effects on meaning of the shifting of cultural objects, texts and actions from one
cultural context to another) has become a significant focus for transnational
research, promoted institutionally as a key theme by research funding bodies and
conference planning committees. The privileging of cultural translation as a
research theme responds in large part to the increasingly conspicuous impact of
globalization on contemporary societies and cultures, not least the shifting of
economic and cultural power relations away from Western imperialist domination
since the nominal ending of the Cold War during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Conventional reflective conceptions of signification have always viewed
linguistic translation between cultures in problematic terms. While reflective
conceptions of signification uphold the possibility of a more or less truthful
correspondence between the noumenal and the linguistic, there is an
accompanying acceptance of the non-equivalence of terms belonging to differing
language sets as well as idiomatic combinations of those terms, and therefore the
necessity for active translation to ensure accurate transference of meaning.
Translation is consequently envisaged as requiring in-depth knowledge not only of
the signified meanings attached to particular signifiers (denotative and
connotative) as well as those relating to the syntactical/grammatical organization
of signs, but in addition culturally specific values underpinning the structuring of
language.
Since the critical-linguistic turn towards structuralist and poststructuralist
conceptions of language during the twentieth century, thinking on the subject of
translation has been problematized still further. Saussurian structuralism’s framing
of language as both arbitrary and synchronic significantly complicates reflective
conceptions of signification by asserting the constructed, culturally-specific and
historically contingent nature of linguistic meaning. Seen in this light, direct
translation between differing language sets is always subject to the refractive
effects of the cultural-linguistic position from which the translation is made, which
invariably skew the perceived meanings of the target language towards the
translator’s values and prejudices. In short, there is as part of the process of
translation an unresolvable struggle to see adequately beyond the limits of and
blind-spots within one’s own cultural horizons. Crucially, such effects can be
understood to involve asymmetrical power relations that render the values of
subaltern cultures marginal if not invisible to their dominant others.
Derridean poststructuralism’s opening up of an interaction between deferral as
well as difference between signs (différance) as the very possibility of linguistic
signification presents yet more difficulties for translation between cultures. As
well as resistance between differing language sets, there is as part of
poststructuralism’s purview of language an additional sense that linguistic
meaning is open to continual deconstructive re-motivation in the face of unfolding
instances of signification (de/re-contextualization). Here, linguistic meaning is
viewed as being susceptible to constant refraction not just between language sets
but also within them. Although this problematizes categorical limitations on

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《當代中國研究》 Vol 23, Issue 1, 2016

meaning and by extension the possibility of direct linguistic translation, it also

suspends any outright closure between cultural linguistic outlooks. Also
emphasized are the productive as well as negative possibilities of the refractive
effects of the translation of meaning from one context to another. Cultural
translation is thus rendered a fundamentally deconstructive action which rather
than transferring meaning between language sets, performatively (re-)constructs it
in potentially positive as well as negative ways.
The combination of this suspension of absolute difference and emphasis on
the productive as well as negative (that is to say deconstructive) effects of
linguistic recontextualization is central to poststructuralist-postcolonialist
conceptions of ‘Third Space’. From a poststructuralist-postcolonialist perspective
linguistic translation through the mediations of linguistic Third Space is a locus of
potential resistance to asymmetrical relations of dominance by dint of its capacity
to multiply the significances and therefore undermine the singular authority of
dominant linguistic forms.
Recently, poststructuralist-postcolonialist conceptions of language have ceded
ground to critical attitudes associated with the term ‘contemporaneity’. Key to
contemporaneity is the notion that postructuralist-postcolonialism involves a self-
contradictory assertion of the universal uncertainty of linguistic signification; one
that has to boot signally failed to go in any meaningful way beyond the structural
asymmetries it seeks to deconstruct. As a critical response to poststructuralist-
postcolonialism contemporaneity, therefore, seeks to uphold a multi-dimensional
conception of modernity embracing geographically-specific as well as de-
territorialized perspectives on culture and language. For some this multi-
dimensional vision is a critically necessary extension of visions of difference
sustained by poststructuralism. For others, however, it has provided grounds for
the upholding of more or less openly essentialist conceptions of culture in
opposition to the latent imperialism(s) of poststructuralist uncertainty. In respect of
which a contested contemporaneity may be viewed in part as a locus for an
assertive hyper-structuralism emphasizing spatial difference and a granular
attention to cultural and historical detail over a deconstructive interaction between
difference and diachronic deferral. Such thinking is part of a wider demurral from
a once dominant institutionalized poststructuralism that includes a return to
materialist discourses in the wake of the global financial crisis.
In spite of calls for a critical contemporaneity by amongst others the present
author, the contestation between spatially grounded and deconstructive
conceptions of culture remains one without any clear or simple means of
resolution. As an integral aspect of the conditions of contemporaneity, translation
between cultures is inescapably challenging to essentialist as well as
universalizing conceptions of cultural-linguistic significance. As deconstructive
analysis demonstrates, plurality of meaning persists in relation to the textual
minutiae and marginalia of such translations. Rather than providing grounded
certainties of meaning, focused analytical attention to cultural and historical detail
(a useful rejoinder to the formalisms and abstractions of institutionalized
poststructuralism) remains a durable source of interpretative polysemy. This
edition of Modern China Studies does not set out, either as a whole or in its parts,
to resolve the current dichotomy between essentialist and counter-essentialist
readings of culture, which is evidenced strongly by current debates surrounding

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the significance of contemporary Chinese visual culture. Instead that dichotomy,

such as it is, emerges here as a complex and tectonically shifting field of
intersecting discourses. Wherein perhaps resides the possibility of an active
polylogical criticality beyond the discursively limited (and limiting) assurances of
both a resurgent essentialism and an institutionalized counter-essentialism.
This special edition of MCS begins with Vera Tollmann’s ‘Screens as Faces
and Façades: old order and new media - screens on Tiananmen Square in Beijing’,
which seeks to analyse the significance of digital display screens in Tiananmen
Square as a remediation of Chinese traditional screens and as 'furniture' for nation
building. Beccy Kennedy’s ‘Outside Chinatown: the evolution of Manchester’s
Chinese Arts Centre as a cultural translator for contemporary Chinese art’ traces
the ontological trajectory of Chinese Arts Centre from its origins in Manchester’s
Chinatown to its current location, considering how its purpose and focus have
changed in relation to how it identifies and translates Chinese Art to local and/or
global audiences. Kennedy’s article is followed by Huang Jian’s ‘Photography and
Ideology in Revolutionary China’: a critical review’. Huang’s article addresses the
discursive-ideological disciplining of photography and film production and
reception in China during the revolutionary era after 1949 by critically comparing
works produced by local Chinese photographers and Antonioni’s documentary
film Chung-Kuo. The next article is Linda Pittwood’s ‘Parallel Realities: the
relationship between translation studies and curating contemporary Chinese art’,
which explores how recent trends in translation studies align the discipline closer
to the practise of curating contemporary Chinese art in the UK. Following on from
Pittwood’s article is Paul Gladston’s ‘“Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao”: Cultural
Translation and the Spectral Condition(s) of Artistic Criticality in Contemporary
China’, which argues that contemporary Chinese art holds out critical possibilities
that do not translate easily into western(ised) post-Enlightenment contexts but
nevertheless resonate tellingly with the problematic consensual politics of neo-
liberalism internationally as well as localised political authority in China. The
penultimate article is Cai Shenshen’s ‘The Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Jiabiangou
jishi): an analysis of contemporary Chinese reportage literature using the theory of
totalitarianism and power’. Cai’s article critically analyses literary depiction of the
Chinese-style totalitarianism of the Mao era, using Hannah Arendt’s theory on
totalitarianism and Michael Foucault’s concept of the micro-physics of power to
address how totalitarianism and political and social upheavals such as the Anti-
Rightist Movement and the Great Famine severely affected many individuals by
isolating, disciplining, punishing, and starving them via the system of laojiao (re-
education through labor). The final article in this special edition is Thomas
 J.

Berghuis’s ‘The World according to Beijing in 2008’. In this article Berghuis
approaches cultural translation through the events surrounding the opening of the
2008 Beijing Olympics, comparing the ‘spectacle’ of the 2008 Beijing Olympics
ceremony to the 1964 production of the revolutionary song-and-dance epic The
East is Red (Dongfang hong).

Paul Gladston – April 2015

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permission.