Contemporaneity, Media, and Meaning: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Artistic Practices in China and North Macedonia

Abstract

This research examines contemporary artistic practices in China and North Macedonia through a comparative perspective that brings together medium-based and conceptual correspondences within the broader context of globalization. Rather than relying on historical parallelism, the research focuses on works produced after 2000 with the intention to trace how different artistic approaches engage similar concerns—particularly those related to identity, memory, and the shifting nature of visual language. The analysis places Chinese artists such as Cao Fei, Yang Fudong, and Xu Bing in relation to Macedonian artists including Robert Jankuloski, Slavica Janešlieva, and Monika Moteska. While operating within different institutional and cultural conditions, their practices converge around questions of body, memory, and language, articulated through materiality, image construction, and archival and spatial processes. Rather than establishing direct historical equivalences, the study highlights the aesthetic resemblances across different media, emphasizing how artists in both contexts respond to globalization through distinct yet comparable visual and conceptual approaches. Although centered on contemporary production, these works are understood as shaped by earlier post-socialist transformations that continue to shape artistic and institutional conditions. The paper argues that globalization does not produce homogenization but rather allows for the emergence of parallel aesthetic strategies that reflect both shared global frameworks and specific local trajectories. By bringing medium, visual language, and conceptual structure into the foreground, the study proposes a model of comparison that prioritizes aesthetic relations over chronological symmetry, thus contributing to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary art in China and the post-Yugoslav contexts.