The global contemporary art world is changing, and the visibility and recognition of artists from China and its diaspora are being redefined in complex and often contested ways. In the context of Chinese contemporary art, is globalisation giving way to regionalisation, or even decoupling? Why has the representation of Chinese artists in Western institutions declined today? Is it due to the rise of other regional and community representations, including the Chinese diaspora? These changes raise a challenging question for art and cultural producers: How do we navigate these shifts when we are neither welcomed nor allowed to be marginalised? We cannot play the role of victims or minoritarians, yet complacency is not an option.

In 2019, curators Nikita Yingqian Cai and Xiaoyu Weng presented the exhibition Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman at the Times Art Center Berlin. The title inadvertently reflects the complexity experienced by many contemporary artists from China and its diaspora. This intricacy unfolded during the era of globalisation, a period that started with the end of the Cold War. It was marked by China’s entry into the global market through its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, and reached its peak around 2008, a year defined by both the Beijing Olympic Games and the global financial recession. At the time, cultural identity often served as an asset for many, inviting comparisons or, at least, acknowledgements of anything from cultural tropes to deeper patterns of societal development. Today, however, artists often rely on a series of ‘nots’ to assert their identities.

The Chinese and Chinese diaspora art worlds have always been too big and complex to be fully incorporated into the global contemporary art circuit. For institutions defining Chinese contemporary art, it is more convenient to have bite-sized representations. Over the years, the curatorial and scholarly quest for Chineseness has resulted in numerous research projects, including those in the postwar networks of abstract art, ink art, the history of diplomatic charm offensives, and the post-Cold War growth of contemporary art in mainland China. Some of these art practices remain introspective and self-referential, while others are driven by a desire for validation by the outside world, and many fall in between. In the golden era of globalisation, these positions were incorporated into the equally golden era of global contemporary art, measured by the mobility, visibility, and robustness of a thriving market. At the time, Chineseness was highly sought after, despite eschewing the question of whether one could speak about a country, a culture as vast as China as a whole. The global art world consumed what it understood as Chineseness: tai chi symbols overlaid on the body, traditional spiritual practices gaining a second life in the digital space, neatly arranged everyday objects, and images of factory workers toiling away. The catalogue is extensive.

In recent years, the trend has shifted. In critical contemporary art, mainland Chinese and Chinese diaspora artists are increasingly defined by their divergence from dominant ideas of China. In other words, Chineseness gives way to more granular experiences shaped by social and cultural environments, power, and deeper cultural feelings.

This year’s Sigg Prize—formerly known as the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA), founded by Dr Uli Sigg in China in 1998—provides a platform for artists reflecting on these differences in and around China. The finalists include those residing in the country and abroad, expanding the notion of diaspora to encompass both physical location and heritage. Yet, in the Western art world, Chinese and Chinese diaspora artists occupy different spaces of imagination, not by individual design, but by a tendency to cast them as flag-bearing political representatives. The Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition shows that there is much more to Chinese contemporary art and Chinese diaspora art than this incessant focus on partitioning the Chinese identity.

These days, discussions about China in the international art world are often ignored. At the same time, even as artists in China take a minoritarian position, their works do not warrant a similar degree of international attention as minoritarian political art does from Global South countries. In postmodern philosophy and literature, ‘minoritarian’ politics emphasises the power and potential of marginalised or minority groups and the shift away from ‘majoritarian’ views.^[1] To become minoritarian or assume such a position has become a mark of acclaim in the art world as it gives the person moral amnesty. It is certainly important for artists to continue mapping issues such as colonial differences and extractivist practices—practices driven by unsustainable resource extraction—that still plague the societies they live in or are concerned about. Despite this, many in the art world understand that tinkering with these problems verbally is far from tackling them at their roots.

Why do certain preferences seem to exist so that, for example, artworks on environmental degradation in the Amazon receive more spotlight than similar pieces focused on Chinese regions? Scholarship on Global South extractivist economies reveals how some societies become dependent on revenues from raw materials export rather than higher value-added goods. While scholars have developed theories on dependency and peripheral capitalism that point to the power asymmetry in global trade and financial arrangements, Chinese cultural producers may be seen as disingenuous when referencing such theories. Relativism is at play here, where the severity of these issues is viewed in relation to the state’s capacity to alleviate them. Hence, despite China’s large population in poverty, its size and influence in the global economy mean that its internal struggles are often overlooked. Even environmental calamities are less noteworthy compared to similar crises happening in countries with weaker state capacities. Another case of relativism is the frequent invocation of neoliberalism in Western critical humanities and art circles—particularly in privatising companies formerly in public ownership, deregulation, and small governments—as a generalised source of the world’s problems. Therefore, it is difficult to square the argument for China, where the state often positions itself as a defence against neoliberalism.

For many Chinese artists, it is hard to exercise moral blackmail by following the Western critical art approach, where one side claims moral rights, and the other is left to acknowledge power structures through ongoing self-scrutiny. As long as this performance of critique continues, art theory and production do not have to offer real solutions—they just need to look like they are trying. The global art world’s decoupling from China is evident not only in the declining representation of Chinese artists, but more so in the shrinking intellectual space available to them. There is no easy target for critique, nor is there a simple formula for moral leverage. This places China in an odd position: Its exceptionally high state capacity makes it both immanent to the problem and antithetical to it. If one blames the extractivist economy for environmental degradation or the violation of workers’ rights, then in China, the state is the solution. Likewise, if one condemns the neoliberal economy, the state again appears as the solution. This means their orbit of thinking cannot revolve around blaming others, but must instead address more complex questions.

The speculative construct of Nikita Yingqian Cai and Xiaoyu Weng’s exhibition is based on ‘a fluid state of mind and a diasporic mode of living and working’.^[2] While this is a desirable vision, it is no longer universally viable when the era of deglobalisation retreats into known and narrow categories of identity. This shift limits the philosophical space for being fluid and reduces visibility and mobility. In response, the Western art world is pushing back by doubling down on claims of agility, in-betweenness, and various formulations of undoing (‘unlearning’, doing ‘otherwise’, etc). While such resistance is highly necessary, such methodological details require closer scrutiny.

The global art world has thrived on the infrastructures of peak globalisation, internalising its value systems. These include the belief that liberal democracy is the only acceptable form of governance, that states should be progressive, that they should deliver public good, and that economic stability is a given. These ideas became aligned during the era of globalisation and are now treated as inevitable, rather than as historical contingency. Together with the crisis of globalisation comes the existential reckoning of the global art world.

I call this condition ‘art in a multipolar world’^[3], where cultural producers should not merely reproduce the moral geographies of geopolitics defined by the logic of friend versus foe. More urgently, we need to work out the precept of art as it shifts in relation to post-globalisation multipolarity, the changing role of the state, and the permeation of value pluralism. The art world is shifting in correlation with—though often slower than—things outside it. This will influence how art is discussed, and crucially, how it is made. Responding to such complexity demands foundational knowledge in history, social and political sciences, economics, and development studies, among others. The alignment of knowledge-building and art-making is reflected in the practices of Sigg Prize 2025 finalists Ho Rui An (born 1990, Singapore, works Singapore) and Hsu Chia-Wei (born 1983, Taichung, works Taipei and Maastricht). Their works also call for evolving contexts to understand the contradictions of global politics.

Admittedly, the crisis of liberalism is felt today in various aspects and many corners of the world: the rise of populism, increasing demands from major Western countries to de-globalise, and irrational international relations that shatter the post-Cold War liberal global order, keeping critics busy from taking real accountability. Simultaneously, liberal arts professionals are voicing similar concerns as their own field faces one of its biggest existential crises. The survival of art’s exceptionalism depends on its realism. Perhaps we should pause, look deeper into ourselves, and ask how we have arrived here—and where we can go next.

With the rise of populism, the ‘common people’ are foregrounded again in political theory and mobilisation. This stands in contrast to the minoritarian impulses of critical art producers. The weakened influence of liberal and leftist positions in the West is not only political, but also conceptual and historically rooted.^[4] We could ask the liberal position today: Is it fair to blame the common people? But the reverse is also true. Some orthodox leftists tend to overcorrect, politicising or glorifying the common people without sufficient evidence. As a result, Western leftists and liberals oscillate between the positions of blame and expectation, each side treating its perspective as the sole explanatory power for today’s predicaments.

To go beyond this ‘neither/nor’ state, we need to exercise practical reasoning in the changing realities of a world thrown off balance. For example, historian and liberal thinker Qin Hui argues that while leftists in Western welfare states should oppose globalisation, those in China should welcome it while advocating for reform so that the Chinese working class and the disadvantaged can benefit from it.^[5] In this context, practical reasoning involves recognising institutional and political structures and separating between public and private motivations. Qin’s analysis is relevant to both sides: The West should use China as a mirror, just as China could reflect on the West. This type of reflection rarely happens in politics, but it could happen in art and culture.

The global art world often enshrines the idea of liberal individual rights, in which earlier liberal thinkers posited as negative freedom (freedom from something). However, this must be balanced with positive freedom (the freedom to act, to become), or otherwise formulated as freedom construed for individual desires (preferences, according to scathing critics) versus collective self-rule. Sociologist Zhao Dingxin proposes a ‘principle of reverse movement’, that as any organisation, political system, idea, culture, or institution gains ascendancy, the opposing, undermining forces concurrently intensify. From this long-term perspective, the height of US power at the end of the Cold War also foreshadowed the root causes of its decline. This ascent can be traced back to President Jimmy Carter’s shift in promoting human rights diplomacy. In 1977, he famously said: ‘Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere’. This allowed the US to avoid military or political intervention, a sharp contrast to the Soviet Union, which was mired in its intervention in Afghanistan at the time. This sense of moral responsibility was marked by a shift from purely strategic, power-driven politics, and it emboldened civil society groups and dissidents in the Soviet satellite states to speak out. According to Zhao’s principle, liberalism, after its triumph in the past two to three decades, now finds itself in crisis.^[6] Individual and group rights, such as freedom of speech, have been reduced to more simplistic interpretations that overlook their broader social and historical contexts, and are sometimes claimed in skewed forms by right wing groups. Now, the question is: What is the reverse movement inherent in the current rise of populism and nationalism?

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek once retold an unverified anecdote about Zhou Enlai. In Geneva, in 1954, a foreign journalist asked the first premier of the People’s Republic of China what he thought of the French Revolution. Zhou replied, ‘It is still too early to tell.’^[7] This kind of distance from the present may offer artists a better position to tease out the latent forces of our time and work out what is to come. Rather than commenting on the present in the most common-sense way, they are challenged to push into unfamiliar fronts. This is a tall order for artists, but Chinese cultural producers are in a better position to respond to it. Without their own choosing, their reality is one of decoupling and multipolarity. Yet, it often feels disingenuous for them to have to choose sides. In moments where there is no clear answer to difficult questions, we can look to positive freedom.

In order to move forward, we should start from a place of humility, one based on understanding others’ views of the self, while maintaining a distance from our own perceived teleology. This calls for a moment of reflection: Can I challenge the deeply held assumption that anything I see to be ontologically necessary might be contingent? Have I considered that I could be wrong, that my references could be self-centred? Am I open to mediated positions, such as accepting that I might be right, but others are right too? Have I ruled out all alternative explanations? We can be self-critical, self-sceptical, and tactical, but not cynical or intellectually resigned. We must remain open to critique, espouse contradictions, and most importantly, resist simplified narratives. This is the position Chinese and Chinese diaspora artists must deeply invest in.