Bringing art back to life: the practice of artistic participation in urban China

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders the state-led, market-oriented, and elite-centered art framework in present-day China. Focusing on the rupture between art and public life, it aims to understand the structural forces that trivialize ordinary people’s aesthetic experiences. Utilizing the term “absent others,” this study first untangles historical and social circumstances that underlie the formations of the exclusionary feature in art. Against this backdrop, the second part of this study examines the case of a community-based art space in urban China. Focusing on its spatial practices and method experiments, discussions examine the efforts that art practitioners have made to revise the historical legacy, spatial order, and method issues in artistic practices that have continuously (re)produced stratification in cultural life in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural stratification
• “absent others”
• socially engaged art
• participatory art
• community art
• post-reform China

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the art practitioners who generously shared their experiences and ideas regarding the topic of this article and facilitated the formation of knowledge for this study. I also wish to extend my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors who offered insightful comments, helpful suggestions, and warm encouragement to revise and improve this manuscript.

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 For example, Chinese art critic Zha Changping (2017) coined the term “mixed-modern” to describe the complex realities of Chinese contemporary art. Using this term, Zha argues that premodern social and artistic structures, along with modern and postmodern cultural theories, simultaneously shaped the conditions of art creation in China.

2 When analyzing the artistic practices of an art space, it is not possible to comprehensively discuss art activities in such brief texts. Hence, this study focused on the limited number of events that occurred in Almost Four between 2019 and 2020.

3 In China, socially engaged art has increased in both quantity and scale over the last two decades. Two different types of socially engaged art can be observed from previous cases. In the early 2000s, artists organized various art projects in China’s rural areas, such as the Xucun Program in Shanxi, the Bishan Project in Anhui, and the Yangdeng Art Collective in Guizhou. Recently, more socially engaged art projects have been undertaken in urban areas, such as the Gathering-Community Public Art Festival in Chengdu and the Ecological Art Season in Chongqing.

4 For the street art festival, see https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/68zOV2b0K3_BsxRv4ym6yQ.

5 For Almost Four’s interview with China Residencies, see “Art space profile: Almost Four 肆空间 in Chengdu.” https://chinaresidencies.com/news/305.

6 For Wei’s exhibition, see https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4E_zN5iwVtUNN1T-ngNq-w.

7 For public workshops, see https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2JcJ7YN91mjDp7jqfbRhoQ.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jia Li

Li Jia is a PhD student at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She holds an MA in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London. She is currently conducting an anthropological study on artistic practices in urban China. Her research interests include cultural production in urban spaces and visual culture in contemporary China.