A glossary of global art terms, alongside jargon and phrases coined in Southeast Asia. These definitions cite examples of artists, exhibitions, techniques, and more, in which the phrases have been applied.
Feminist artgenerally seeks to challenge the dominance of a patriarchal society, to gain acknowledgement and equality for women artists, and to question assumptions about womanhood and societal beliefs. Western feminist art has frequently gone together with women’s liberation movements and notions of feminism andfeminist art is often viewed through a lens oftransnationalism. However, themes in feminist art vary from culture to culture and modern and contemporary Eastern perspectives differ from those in the West, with vast differencesbetween countries.Source: AWDB team. AWDB highlighted artist: Amanda Heng.
Fluxus
Fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in the 1960s and still continuing today.Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across art forms, and with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element. Source: tate.org.uk. AWDB highlighted artist: Montien Boonma.
Formalism
Formalismdescribes the critical position that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form – the way it is made and its purely visual aspects – rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world. In painting therefore, a formalist critic would focus exclusively on the qualities of colour, brushwork, form, line and composition. Source: tate.org.uk. AWDB highlighted artist: Ash Ghazali.
