Contemporary Chinese Art and the City: Beijing Art Districts 1989­‐2013

Abstract

As themes in Chinese art since economic reform, space and the environment have been crucial. Many artists have focussed on issues of urbanisation, globalisation, and the radical spatial reorganisation of Chinese society during the reform and post-­‐reform era, and many scholars have written about these artists’ spatial concerns. What, however, of these artists’ formative relationship to space itself? What might we learn by going beyond the text and asking how space has produced these artists – and their work – and what places their communities and culturalactivities have produced in turn? This thesis presents an alternative history of the emergence of China’s Contemporary Arts scene, focussing on these artists’ everyday engagements with the rapidly transforming space of Beijing in the years between 1989-­‐2013. Drawing on a series of case studies, it traces the emergence of the residential ‘painters’ village’ (huajiacun 画家村) through to the transnationally networked ‘international art district’ (guojiyishuqu 国际艺术区) and state-­‐endorsed ‘creative industries precinct’ (chuangyi chanye jujiqu 创意产业聚集区), foregrounding the agency of participant artists within these new socio-­‐spatial formations throughout its research. By taking a spatial approach, this analysis identifies modes of political engagement beyond those typically identified within the work of art history. In considering the ways in which these artists worked tactically from within the country’s new spatial disorder, it also seeks to illuminate a politics that is not disruptive, but which capitalises instead upon ambiguity and ambivalence. Such a politics is described with the use of concepts developed across the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, among other cultural and spatial theorists. The political function of the thesis itself, however, is considered in dialogue with the work of Inter-­‐Asia Cultural Studies, and Lawrence Grossberg’s writings on contextual and conjunctural analysis. To this extent, this study is both a history of these artists’ interventions within the disorder of Beijing’s urban change in these years, as well as a reflection on the ways and reasons such a history might be told. While advancing its own interpretation of this particular era, it is also self-conscious about the act of its own interpretation, theoretically addressing the situatedness of different forms of knowledge, the contingency of its own propositions, and the material effects of epistemological work.