This well-illustrated volume has an appealingly clear organization, but it is not exactly an easy read. In a narrative that follows a seamless chronological order, Gladston intends to provide a mapping of ideas and practices that have defined and propelled what is known as contemporary art in China. Yet, in addition to a historical account, he wishes to examine “ways in which discursive combinations of ideas and practices bind contemporary Chinese art … to the structures of power and state both within and outside” the PRC (p. 7). He is committed to a “theorized analysis,” the lack of which, in his view, marks a good number of existing studies (p. 38).

Central to Gladston's intervention is the argument that, in order to have a more intelligent understanding of contemporary Chinese art, we need to recognize and overcome two seemingly contradictory approaches: one is the essentialist or localized approach, and the other is an “established international postmodernist or poststructuralist point of view” (p. 34). While the former (dubbed as “counter-deconstructivist interpretation”) foregrounds identity and tradition, the latter (a “deconstructivist” position) valorizes difference, transgression and hybridity. For Gladston, the story of contemporary Chinese art is one of resistance against dominant discourses or various forms of authoritarianism prevalent in China on the one hand, and one of concrete historical events against “the latent universalism of dominant critical discourses outside China” on the other (p. 40).

This theoretical agenda is elaborated in the Introduction, which begins with a brief discussion of the term “contemporary Chinese art.” Gladston accepts it as a conventional reference to experimental or avant-garde art produced since the mid-1980s. He also signals an interest in art from outside China, so that his topic could “encompass a now globalized and increasingly spatially and historically indeterminate sense of cultural Chineseness” (p. 8). In glossing over “Chinese contemporary art,” a closer translation of the widely used Chinese term, Gladston misses an opportunity, in my view, to discuss “contemporary art” as not merely a style or a periodization, but an institution, an establishment that promotes a certain sensibility and art making. (A visit to a MoCA in New York or London should help bring this point home.) “Contemporary Chinese art” is a broader concept than “Chinese contemporary art,” and it is with the latter that Gladston is exclusively concerned. Some of the difficulties in this study arise from this substitution of a particular, albeit prominent, component for a much larger and more complex picture.

In chapter one, Gladston constructs a peculiar historical context to illustrate an “indeterminate sense of cultural Chineseness.” It is a story of interaction and exchange between Chinese and Western arts. Instead of outlining the formation of a Chinese tradition, this chapter begins with a reference to the Silk Road and the Roman Empire, moves swiftly from the late 16th century, when the Portuguese and the Dutch arrived, all the way through the revolutions and socialist realism of the 20th century, and ends with the death of Mao in 1976.

Chapter two turns to the beginnings of contemporary art in 1980s China and follows a familiar storyline of continual confrontation between artists and a restrictive political system, of unabashed appropriation of artistic forms and techniques associated with Western modernism and even postmodernism. (Compared to chapter one, illustrations for this chapter are much better chosen and more meaningful.) Mindful as Gladston is of necessary complications in assessing important art groups and individual artists, his narrative is driven and punctuated by political events, their climax being the Tiananmen protest movement in 1989. Invariably, the impact of such events appears to be a constraining and deplorable one.

This persistent “art vs. politics” storyline (or more crudely the saga of “contemporary art vs. the CCP”) becomes more strained in chapter three, in which Gladston tackles the explosive development of contemporary art in the 1990s. Compelled to decry the crackdown of 1989 as a turning point and certainly a turn for the worse, he cannot help recognizing continuities and irrepressible energy, remarking that “post-Tiananmen restrictions on the making and public showing of contemporary art in the PRC were by no means absolute” (p. 171). To his credit, Gladston registers many important exhibitions and art works from the period, even though their significance is largely confined to continued expressions of “localized political concerns.” Also to his credit, he observes that the conditions of cultural production from the mid-1980s onward did not evolve principally through the “agency of dissenting artists” (pp. 213–14), but was rather the result of systemic changes in the economy, society and government functions. In this context, his consideration of the reaction of a “culturally conservative Chinese public” to contemporary art is refreshing (p. 214). He begins to show the inadequacy of seeing the artist solely in terms of his or her opposition to the state.

Such suggestions of a more complex understanding however go no further in the final chapter on the 21st century. Several loosely connected, if mostly academic, topics are addressed, and the historian's own ambivalence becomes increasingly evident. He is quick to remind his more naïve Western readers of “the continuing strength of governmental restrictions on freedom of expression; and the persistence of a deeply ingrained anti-Westernism” in China (p. 245). “China is not the West,” he warns, and “there is little prospect of a shift any time soon (if indeed ever) towards the kinds of publicness and criticality now established in Western liberal-democratic contexts.” However, “for those with the patience to see, there are localized forms of resistance” (p. 283). Beyond that, there is little, Gladston seems to conclude, to contemporary art from China, least of all as a critique of “the structures of power and state” outside the PRC.

Informed readers may object, Gladston predicts, “to interpretative perspectives” in the book that differ from their own “particular cultural-discursive points of view” (p. 40). This may well be the case. Yet patient readers may wonder how the author understands his own position. To readers not familiar with the topic, the rich information on many events as well as the high-quality illustrations are certainly useful, but how to make sense of them will remain a challenge.