Artists

The globalization of artists and their work refers to the transfer of artistic practices and the works of art in various art media, such as the visual arts, performing arts, and media arts, from one culture to another. Through their migration, artists directly influence art beyond national or regional boundaries. Artists have an increasingly important role to play in the emerging field of global studies. Whether art is seen as a response on the part of artists to nature and the evolving manifestations of civilizations or is mainly a product of the artist's imagination, it holds an important place in the global world past and present. Together with [Page 89]language, works of art offer important symbolic means for human expression and communication of diversity and harmony both within and between cultures.

The movement of artistic practices from one culture to another often accompanies religious, commercial, or political interventions. Such efforts are not new to the 21st century. Western art first traveled to China by way of the Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. In this instance, art was a part of the Jesuits' strategy for introducing Christianity to the Chinese. These efforts met with limited success, as Chinese viewers interpreted the symbols of Christian iconography, such as the Virgin Mary or Christ, as referring to Chinese Buddhist figures. On the other hand, Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione, who came to China in 1715 and was appointed as court painter at the Imperial Palace in Peking under three successive emperors, successfully adapted his art to Chinese taste.

Western ventures into the Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic cultures involving the arts were more likely to follow the paths of commercial or diplomatic channels. For example, paintings of European artists depicting scenes with orientalist costumes and interiors were one manifestation of the globalizing connections between Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the Enlightenment in Europe. From the 1850s on, following the British occupation of India, art in India was officially guided by British-founded art schools in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Hegemonic efforts of the British to dominate art in India by founding British-run schools and by presenting exhibitions of British art were offset in part by revival efforts of the Bengal renaissance in the early part of the 20th century reviving traditional Indian art. Today's Indian artists such as Surendran Nadir and Vivan Sundaram have established their places in the international art world.

Globalization was also evident in the movement of modernist art from Paris to New York at the beginning of the 20th century. The result was that Paris artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse dominated American art until the post–World War II era when American artists established Abstract Expressionism as the first original art movement in the United States. This movement featured American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

From the mid-20th century on, international contemporary art fairs, gallery representation of international artists in major cities across the world, and international museum exhibitions have advanced global art. Since the 1980s, a main path of global traffic has been between artists in the West and the East. For example, as Pop Art from the United States and England, based on Western commercialism and everyday life, became known in China, Chinese artists such as Wang Guangyi responded by developing their own Political Pop Art. At the same time, Chinese artists such as Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, and Wu Shanzhuan took their art to the urban centers of the United States and Europe and became active participants in the global art market as well as recognized museum artists of international stature.

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