In(dependence), Industry and Self-Organization: Narratives of Alternative Art Spaces in Greater China (original) (raw)

2015, Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia

New attempts to define and expose uncharted territories have only time and again found themselves in blind service of hegemonic structures. The "natural" character of Chinese characteristics, and even its introduction into the contemporary lexicon, has been carefully handed down as a predetermined strategy and ideological principle based upon economic development. The fantastic rise of the Chinese art market parallel to such top-down molding in the last thirty years may be seen in certain senses as part of the success story, but the increasing complexity of socio-economic relations grounding contemporary artistic creation also appears to follow a path of the mappable, with keywords such as added-value, cultural district development and art superstars highlighting its legend. Underneath this map, however, is the enormous fissure between such top-down initiatives and another topology of grassroots intervention. Marked by ruptures in physical space and an ongoing play between autonomy and heteronomy, the perspective of a socalled "alternative arts practice" in China offers instead an image of the "unmappability " circumscribing a political, cultural, and economic flux. The following analysis seeks, therefore, to embrace the very contradiction that occurs with its production. Case studies of several artist-initiated practices will explore a politics and aesthetics in the making; that is to say, one which has yet to be, or one that defies the certainty of mapping and an art market categorization. What emerges therein is a politics of exception, whereby the complexities of Mainland sociopolitics cannot delineate a formula for artistic production but only be navigated as a realm of singularities, affects, and encounters. The particular circumstances which have led to the creation of spaces such as Womenjia Youth Autonomy Lab (Wuhan), WooferTen (Hong Kong), Lijiang Studio (Lijiang), and HomeShop (Beijing) exemplify such spontaneous modes of artistic practice. Their genealogies are traced here to highlight a micropolitics embedded within and counter to the prevailing forces of a socialist market economy. It is from within these structures that a meta-analysis will look beyond these groups as a pegged phenomenon and rather as a series of narratives involving practices, engagements, and relations that undo a common thinking of resistance.