Daria Berg
Title
Prof. Dr.
Last Name
Berg
First name
Daria
Email
daria.berg@unisg.ch
ORCID
Phone
+41 71 224 2216
166 results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 166
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Item type:Publication, Author, Artist, Actress: China's New Women Cultural EntrepreneursCutting across the boundaries of media, literature, visual arts, and cultural studies, this study examines the resurgence of cultural entrepreneurship in post-Mao China, focusing on how the new media have contributed to the rise of women cultural entrepreneurs as a new social phenomenon. It investigates the rise of China's women “cultural entrepreneurs” and their roles as tastemakers and cultural trendsetters, using three case studies from China's creative industries: author Anni Baobei, artist Cao Fei, and actress Xu Jinglei. The Chinese women cultural entrepreneurs are examined against the backdrop of the Reform-era history and growing importance of China's creative industries. Analysis explores how these entrepreneurs use the new media for content dissemination while spinning transmedia narratives about themselves. By examining female self-fashioning and the creation of the cultural entrepreneur as a new type of celebrity in China, the article aims to shed new light on the cultural and social negotiations in China's mediasphere.Type:journal articleJournal:Journal of Current Chinese AffairsVolume:53Issue:2Scopus© Citations 2 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, China's New Cultural Entrepreneurs and Creative Industries, 2000–2022: Guest Editors’ IntroductionThis Special Issue aims to open new windows on cultural entrepreneurship in China's new media and creative industries from circa 2000 to 2022. It presents four studies on Chinese cultural entrepreneurship in literary production, visual arts, social media, and cinema. These studies analyse from various angles the rise of cultural entrepreneurship – straddling commerce and culture – in China's official and vernacular cultures, including the role of gender and the rise of women cultural entrepreneurs in China's new mediasphere, within an adverse socio-political environment. Analysis of voices, themes, and a network of negotiations and exchanges in literary texts, visual artworks, movies, social media, and the socio-cultural and political discourses in China's mediasphere sheds new light on self-fashioning in transmedia narratives, the new cultural dynamics of the digital age, and the tensions between China's vernacular cultures – which thrive in digital spaces and non-official communities – and the officially ordained culture of the party-state.Type:journal articleJournal:Journal of Current Chinese AffairsVolume:53Issue:2Scopus© Citations 1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Body Art in China: Yang Zhichao’s Diary from a Psychiatric WardThis study aims to trace how artists in postsocialist China have adopted the discourse of body art and reshaped its import of sociopolitical criticality. In this article, “body art” implies the use of the human body as the primary material of artistic creation and the performance of actions of cruelty, modification, and endangerment on the artist's body. Through an engagement with theories of embodiment, biopolitics, and postsocialism, this article argues that body art represents one way in which the corporeal assumes a new centrality in China's post-1978 avant-garde and popular culture, as both a reappropriated territory of self-expression and an alienated object of consumption and surveillance. To do so, it discusses body art by Yang Zhichao 杨志超 (b. 1962), focusing in particular on a performance artwork titled Jiayuguan 嘉峪关 (Jiayu Pass, 1999 – 2000) and its documentation by the artist. As a result, this article shows how body art encapsulates the tension between dystopian negativity and regenerative potential at the heart of the postsocialist condition.Type:journal articleJournal:positionsVolume:31Issue:3Scopus© Citations 2 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Yang Zhichao’s performance art at the margins: Within the Fourth Ring Road (1999) and the Chinese contemporaryThis article explores the theme of marginality in the art of Yang Zhichao, a critically and socially engaged experimental artist who has been active in China since the mid-1980s. Yang’s oeuvre – which includes performance artworks, drawings and installations – revolves around the issue of sociocultural marginality in reform-era society, from the condition of migrant workers, beggars and psychiatric patients to the borderlands of Chinese civilization and the condition of the avant-garde artist. Drawing also on Chinese art criticism and two interviews with the artist, this study examines in particular the performance <jats:italic>Within the Fourth Ring Road</jats:italic> (1999) through its photographic and literary documentation. While writing on Yang Zhichao’s art has largely focused on his most extreme performances of ‘body art’ such as <jats:italic>Planting Grass</jats:italic> (2000), the artwork at the centre of this study highlights an anti-spectacular approach to performance art and reflects Yang’s stated belief in the importance of placing oneself in the circumstances of marginalized people in order to move beyond a voyeuristic gaze. Through a critical analysis of said approach the article reveals a quality that pervades Yang Zhichao’s multi-disciplinary artistic career – that is, its ‘contemporariness’, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense as a focus on the darkest, most emblematic aspects of one’s society and time.Type:journal articleJournal:Journal of Contemporary Chinese ArtVolume:10Issue:1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Alles unter dem Himmel und der Chinesische TraumType:journal articleJournal:Konfuzius Institut-Das Magazin für Chinesische SpracheIssue:5 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Ai Weiwei’s #Refugees: A Transcultural and Transmedia JourneyAfter spending years advocating for human and civil rights in China, Ai Weiwei is now employing his artistic abilities and his sizeable social media presence to sensitise the West to the plight of the refugees who attempt to reach Europe from the Middle East and Africa. In doing so, he is putting European governments rather than the Chinese state ‘on trial’ while adding a ‘transcultural’ dimension to his work. Still, even his most recent endeavours stem from the same philosophy he has espoused throughout his career.Type:journal articleVolume:2017 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Courtesan Editor: Sexual Politics in Early Modern ChinaThis article focuses on female editorship and sexual politics in late Ming and early Qing China, using Hua suo shi, an anthology edited by the courtesan poet Xue Susu, as a case study. It traces textual production and transmission, and reconstructs the literary and cultural contexts of this work to explore the courtesan’s editorial gaze and representation of gender through a close reading of it. The analysis of its two main themes—women as commodities, and women as agents—shows how the courtesan editor re-imagined China’s cultural landscape from her point of view. New examples of female agency are discovered in analyzing the cultural process of editing as a “web of discourses,” providing a window on the emergence of a new female editorial voice in early modern China’s cultural discourse.Type:journal articleJournal:T'oung PaoVolume:99Issue:1-3Scopus© Citations 2 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, The making of an online celebrity: A critical analysis of Han Han's blogIn the ‘society of the spectacle', according to Guy Debord, ‘smug acceptance of what exists can also merge with purely spectacular rebellion' and dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity. Drawing on his reflections on celebrity and the spectacle, this article analyses the highly popular blog of novelist and racing car driver Han Han (born 1982). By doing so, it explores the relation between Han Han's celebrity and his voice as a social critic. The analysis focuses on how Han Han's blog thrives on the combination of his celebrity status and Everyman image; how it contrasts ‘anti-intellectualism' in the tradition of Wang Shuo (born 1958) with elements of literati ideology including moderate loyal criticism and cultural nationalism; and how it negotiates the tension between commercial spectacle and the expression of sociopolitical concerns. The article also argues that unlike citizen journalism, Han Han's blog relies on editorial commentary on hot topics and acts as a ‘safety valve' blog. This article aims to contribute to understanding the rise in China's cybersphere of a celebrity who merges the images of rebel, opinion leader and cultural entrepreneur.Type:journal articleJournal:China InformationVolume:29Issue:3Scopus© Citations 15 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Twitter Bodhisattva: Ai Weiwei's Media PoliticsThis article investigates artist and activist Ai Weiwei's media politics. In 1997 Ai Weiwei imagined a modernist movement that would practise a "non- compromising vigilance on society and power" and since 2005 he has embraced blogging and micro-blogging to enact such intent. We argue that his "communi- cation activism" is part of a broader artistic and political program that long pre- dates his online presence. The study examines how the artist has experimented with blogging and micro-blogging to spread his message of "awakening" in defi- ance of censorship and surveillance. It shows how Ai Weiwei's communication strategy combines an international celebrity status, criticism, irony and a round- the-clock interaction with his netizen audience and the media. It also critiques the effectiveness and coherence of this mode of activism from two perspectives - namely, Jean Baudrillard's analysis of "private telematics" and Jodi Dean's "blog theory" - and finally assesses its impact. The study aims to enhance our understanding of the web-based communication strategies of Chinese activists, shedding light on cultural production and consumption in Chinese cyberspace as a socio-political barometer.Type:journal articleJournal:Asian Studies ReviewVolume:39Issue:1Scopus© Citations 18 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, A New Spectacle in China's Mediasphere : A Cultural Reading of a Web-Based Reality Show from ShanghaiDaria Berg's study offers a cultural reading of the web-based reality show Soul Partners (2007) from Shanghai. Soul Partners serves as a case study to explore how 21st-century Chinese cultural discourse debates the transformation of urban society in China, providing insight into the Chinese cultural imagination, perceptions of the globalizing metropolis and the impact of consumer culture. This reading positions Soul Partners within the discursive context of Chinese popular, postmodern and post- socialist culture and in relation to the cultural import of the reality show genre into China's mediasphere. Analysis focuses on the quest for authen- ticity in the Chinese discourse on perceived reality and the way Soul Partners generates new urban dreams for China's Generation X. The analy- sis of Soul Partners sheds new light on the dynamics of transcultural appro- priation in a globalizing China and the social and political implications.Type:journal articleJournal:The China QuarterlyVolume:205Scopus© Citations 14