Comparative Relational Aesthetics: Zha Changping’s “World Relational Aesthetics” and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics”

This is an article I’ve wanted to write for over a decade now, ever since I began translating texts written by Professor Zha Changing on the theory of world relational aesthetics. These translations from Chinese into English were never easy, despite my acquaintance and later friendship with the author. Texts on world relational aesthetics introduced terminologies, logic, hetoric, theology, and registers diverging from my academic training in Western philosophy and aesthetics. Indeed, world relational aesthetics constituted a sort of “foreign land” with which I had slowly to get accustomed to, learning to speak its local dialect. As a system, world relational aesthetics are intensely cogent, operating as a self- sustaining ecology of thought, operating independently from Western aesthetic theory. The clearest link I found between Zha’s unique system of aesthetic thought and Western relational aesthetics was Professor Zha’s use of the term “relational aesthetics”, coined by curator, art critic, and historian Nicolas Bourriaud in the latter’s book titled Relational Aesthetics. In this paper I will first introduce some basics of each paradigm of thought, then comparing and contrasting key points. While I have come to understand Zha’s theory of world relational aesthetics on its own terms. I have been waiting for this opportunity to study and write about how Zha’s theory of world relational aesthetics compares and contrasts to the movement and genre of art known as “relational aesthetics”, as Nicolas Bourriaud wrote about it.