Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520393776)

Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978-80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.

Author: Jennifer Dorothy Lee
ISBN-10: 0520393775
ISBN-13: 9780520393776
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 02/06/2024
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 10.00h x 6.70w x 0.70d