China refers to either a proper or common noun. As a proper noun that names a specific location, China becomes capitalized. As a common noun that names a general or nonspecific set of porcelain things, china is lowercase. This difference between China and china has been captured quite well by modernist writer Gertrude Stein: “In China there is no need of China, because in China china is china.”[1] Although the common noun china ordinarily refers to fine objects like bowls, teacups, and other collectible items, Stein considers another connotation for the common form. Proper China becomes common china, when the nation is not sensationalized in its prototypical mode as the West’s major dialectical other. This delineation between the common and proper for China brings to the fore how the nation is predominantly understood in its major form across a variety of areas, from world history and critical theory to the global art market.

Institutions that engage China rely on and reproduce proper understandings of the nation and its culture, since they are immediately recognizable. For example, the photo of a person standing up against a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, exemplifies the economized, proper, and major images that have become shorthand for China as authoritarian and its resistors as proponents of liberal freedom. Through the proper, the non-West’s legibility is prescribed through a discourse that appeals to established sense. The proper makes sense of and renders stable the objects we encounter. By contrast, when a nation is imagined as common, then we might begin to ask some clarifying questions: Do you mean an object? What kind of object? When does China become china? How so? And can this only occur within China or can China be china in the global? Rendering China common is impossible; however, it is the common that inspires an interrogative, hesitant mode. To lower-case China in this way does not simply mean to domesticate nor familiarize the nation. When institutions view other sites as equal or just another country, it merely expands the West’s purview of the world rather than reordering its logics and terms. Our goal should not be to make a non-Western site common and equal to all nations, thereby rendering it easy to include into discourse. In other words, Stein’s playful delineation between forms of China reminds us to hesitate from the immediate allure of arguing to be included and thus recognized as commensurate to other (Western) nations.

This chapter examines how the proper functions as a governing logic for the global art market and beyond. The proper informs the liberal logics of inclusion that propel the rapid circulation of cultural objects (through immediately legible means) and accumulation of capital. In other words, the proper lubricates the relationship across inclusion, circulation, and profit, bringing to the fore the dominant inflections of liberalism and late capital for institutions. This chapter describes and historicizes China’s entrance into the global art market in order to highlight how the proper undergirds many arenas well beyond art organizations. Most studies on the art market have focused on shifting forms of financialization, providing historical background on the key players responsible for the rapid rise in financial stakes.[2] Others offer a more intimate view of the art world through insider or ethnographic insights.[3] While some have been critical of the financial benefits and tax havens afforded by contemporary art transactions,[4] and most approaches situate the market in relation to changes in financialization, they generally do not provide a more global historicization in terms of its emergence and overlap with late liberalism, race, and capital. 

These approaches often leave in place visions of the non-West and a notion of culture that are predetermined; they do not adequately grapple with the role of this market in relation to capitalist modernity and to the global logics surrounding inclusion. To help bring this into view, I offer a broader contextualization of the market and show how the proper and China play central roles in these dynamics. More specifically, I furnish a general overview of the political, medial, and theoretical discourses that fuel the increased circulation of the proper non-West across a range of fields and practices that occurred at the end of the twentieth century. I do so to illustrate the expansive network that relies on immediately legible narratives of the non-West and its culture. I also offer background on China’s contemporary art scene in order to analyze how the proper limits more complex understandings of this history.[5] Overall, this chapter traces the overlap of aesthetics and politics discourse, the global art market, the culture wars, and interdisciplinarity around 1989 as it conditions the emergence of China and approaches to the non-West. To help illustrate how these issues intersect with contemporary art and artists, I end this chapter with a consideration of Cai Guo-Qiang, an artist whose Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (1999)—which won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale to great controversy—provides a particularly useful lens into these larger structures. 

Although one cannot per se produce a causal relationship across China, aesthetic politics discourse, multiculturalism, racialization as it relates to the transnational, interdisciplinarity, the culture wars, and the global market, these elements nevertheless coagulate and enable a condition of late liberalist logics to predominate. By looking across these contexts and institutions—but without trying to offer a definitive correlation across them—it is possible to trace the larger conditions by which proper China and liberal inclusion dictate our understandings of culture and the global. This chapter ultimately tracks a large range of discourses and illuminates the institutions and logics that uphold the proper. These are offered so as to rethink and highlight the limits surrounding the constant inclusion of minor subjects and minor geographic spaces in today’s world. In the literature on the global art market, little has been written on these multiple threads that construct the post–Cold War and postdecolonization movements that occurred globally to inform a specific and “proper” understanding of culture from the non-West for the art market.[6] But the logics of the art market, critical theory, academic field formations, and political institutions overlap in significant ways. To grasp the way China is rendered proper, it is essential to look closely at these connections, particularly by affectively approaching ideas of culture, the political, and history.[7] 

To do this, I focus on the year 1989, specifically as a lens for historicizing the above-mentioned coinciding contexts. Across this range of fields and institutions, 1989 is a notable year. Some use 1989 to mark the beginning of what have come to be known as contemporary art and world art.[8] Alongside the rise of the global art market, 1989 also marks a moment when the academic discourse on aesthetics and politics gained significant traction. How and why does 1989 become the year when both the global art market and the discourse on aesthetics and politics develop considerable momentum, although they each existed well before? Furthermore, at the same time as the art market and these discourses both increased in use, the global Left was also waning, as 1989 is often declared a wistful year for Marxist politics. Rather than provide a full historical account, I use this period to index how China is perceived, along with China’s own complicated relationship to the Cultural Revolution and late capital; 1989 helps trace a critical transitional moment in terms of modes of governance, with shifts from Maoism to Chinese capitalism. Of course, well before this key year, China existed in proper ways within the West’s imagination, from early trade routes established during the Qing empire to the Opium Wars and various immigration acts. Immediately preceding 1989, the Cold War, for example, shaped Orientalist visions of China as both foreign and threatening, with President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the academic industry surrounding area studies fueling the production of China as proper and translatable (after intensive study). Even when China has been seen as mysterious and its subjects inscrutable, the task for area studies and state intervention has been to methodically render the nation legible through accounts of its history, languages, and people taken as solidified truths and “ontological absolutes.”[9] 

Events in 1989 buttress this historical rendering of China as knowable and proper, even as the nation changes in status within the global imaginary. China’s position in the world radically shifts during the end of the twentieth century. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution come to be mediated through a different form of autocratic rule and relation to capitalism. As such, the widespread distribution of the mediatized events at Tiananmen Square in 1989 illustrate this change, particularly as it coincides with the global curiosity and interest in not only what are perceived as illiberal and autocratic forms of governance, but also culture through contemporary art. The events at Tiananmen directly preceded the inclusion of Chinese artists in one of the first shows that centrally featured non-Western artists, the Centre Pompidou’s 1989 exhibit Magiciens de la Terre. The Paris show helped produce interest in not only Chinese art, but also non-Western art more generally, as the exhibit featured over a hundred artists with 50 percent of them from the non-West. Moreover, the afterlife of the show illuminates the accelerated global art market interest in China. There was an explosion of shows explicitly focused on contemporary Chinese art following Magiciens at the Venice Biennale and other global art centers. Further, Magiciens catapulted the careers of the three Chinese artists and many of the other non-Western artists included in the show. 

As a result, there came a swift rise in the market share for Chinese art. And in 2016, Chinese art became the first to demand higher prices than American art in international auctions: China garnered 38 percent (for the US, it was 28 percent) of the $12.45 billion in public fine arts sales.[10] During the end of the twentieth century, shifts in financialization with global entities, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, facilitated faster trade that extended well beyond agriculture and consumer goods. And although other regions are currently gaining a larger share of the market, China nonetheless is the first non-Western space to eclipse Western nations to this degree. Further, for contemporary art auctions, the vast majority of the highest sellers are from the US and Europe; the non-Western artists included within the top sales are Chinese (Cui Ruzhuo and Zeng Fanzhi), with one Japanese artist (Yayoi Kusama). Additionally, Huang Yong Ping became the first Chinese-born artist to represent France at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Huang, who was featured in the 1989 Magiciens show, exemplifies the expansion of contemporary Chinese art beyond the confines of a single nation. Also, during the 1999 Venice Biennale, nineteen additional Chinese artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang, participated, which outnumbered the combined total of American and Italian artists that year. It is for these reasons that China offers a critical aperture into the larger logics of the market, particularly its turn toward inclusion.

This chapter illuminates these logics that inform and drive the swift rise in the market for contemporary Chinese art in order to resist the lure of and fervor for the further inclusion of other non-Western sites and minor subjects. This history points to how China indexes the operations of this market, alongside the limited ways in which culture comes to be understood. In particular, how China is included indicates the larger production of what has come to be known as non-Western or global art, particularly through racial logics. Immediately following China’s inclusion into the global art market, there was an uptick in contemporary art coming from regions outside of the US and Western Europe. Thus, rather than simply include more nations and bemoan the lack of attention paid to other countries that have yet to be considered in the purview of or recognition under canonical discourses, we should instead understand the structures and logics that maintain these uneven systems in the first place. China becomes the starting point by which to track what upholds such limited, proper notions of culture and the non-West. Thus, before illustrating throughout this chapter the particular institutions and discourses that maintain the proper from within China around 1989 and globally, I briefly sketch out these mechanisms and structures within the art market, film industry, culture wars, and academic discourse on aesthetics and politics.

Approaching China in this way helps us unravel the entwinement of racial logics, global capital, and practices of inclusion. Such an analytic and approach that historicize 1989 are necessary since this market interest has been shifting to South Asia, the Middle East, Central America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. Even as the list keeps on growing, the same disagreements and underlying assumptions remain. For China and other spaces, debates develop in predictable ways: primarily foreign scholars engage a site; arguments ensue around contextualization; locals demand specificity; universal-particular debates erupt; and then the market moves onto the next site, with certain collectors accruing returns from their art investments. This discursive pattern structures how non-Western art continues to be received and emerges from disciplinary fractures following Cold War policies and area studies. But to see how these discursive structures have imposed limits on our understandings of China, rather than enter debates over particularity, universality, or contextualization, it is important to analyze such disciplinary divides and the presumptions and terms (like culture, art, and the political) that construct these ongoing and predictable debates. The economy of the global art market relies on reproducing the proper forms of the non-West in order to enable a quick circulation of culture that translates into profits for art-owning classes.

The art market, of course, is not simply produced through the West. The São Paulo Biennial was founded in 1951 and is the second-oldest after Venice; and the Havana Biennial began in 1984 with a specific focus on artists from the Global South. Although China is not the first non-Western country to enter this global network, China comes to enter with a different intensity. Further, Asia has become quite central to the production of the market, with biennials and contemporary art museums emerging across the region at a rapid pace. Within mainland China itself, thirteen biennials currently exist, along with over 5,100 museums (a massive increase from the 349 that existed in 1978). Although many of these museums are not for contemporary art and are minimally used or resourced, the sheer number of museums exemplifies state and private investments in the notion of culture. Beyond China, biennials and museums have similarly arisen in quantity across Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam, among other countries. The art market is global in scope, and Asia has come to play an important role in its entrenchment.

Beyond the art market, the development and distribution of international art house cinema comes to similarly fuel the rise of proper understandings of China. Changes in media practices and distribution enable novel ways of circulating and consuming the non-West. The end of the Cultural Revolution and the expansion of art education in China sync with the growth of the film industry and art world. Although world cinema has existed since film’s inception at the end of the nineteenth century, it developed during the 1960s and gained momentum at the end of the twentieth century, alongside the growth of the art market. Further, although Chinese cinema has an established history well before the end of the Cultural Revolution, it is during the 1980s and onward that Chinese film comes to be enfolded with greater intensity into a larger transnational market. One can track these overlaps through the growth in recognition in both China’s film directors and artists: those known as the Fifth and Sixth Generations of directors arise at the same moment as art-world stars. In addition, at the end of the twentieth century, photojournalism intensified the circulation of images due to technological advances through the 1970s, such as increasingly portable cameras and improvements in lighting technology. This momentum in the circulation of images helped reproduce the rendering of China proper, notably the images of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The increased rates of circulation from journalism and cinematography, as well as visual art and performance through images and film, all buttressed this rendering of China proper. The proper thus facilitates this circulation through digestible and legible narratives about major China.[11] Even though many of these artists and artworks provide more formally and politically complex ideas, proper discourses obscure these presumed minor details.

Additionally, 1989 marks an important moment for changes in the logics of inclusion that were operating in both national and transnational contexts and across these medial spaces. In particular, 1989 heralds the culture wars inside and outside of the US academy and the subsequent rise and dominance of inclusionary logics. While curricula expanded to include gender and ethnic studies across a variety of disciplines, analyses of the non-West also gained traction. The assumptions and approaches around race and difference during this time inform how the non-West is understood and engaged: as minor, peripheral subjects to be enfolded into discourse. The end of the twentieth century indicated a broader inclusion of other sites that were historically excluded from the idea of the global. However, this extension did not simply render China into china. Instead, the larger reach of the global established and continues to maintain the non-West in its proper, racialized form: China remains China. Additional inclusion has not led to rendering China into a common entity but has rather further exacerbated its difference from the West.

More importantly, although inclusion expands our purview of certain areas across the world, it only does so with respect to areas that buttress the growth of late capital, what Rebecca Karl identifies as an “economically monotone, global space.”[12] Indeed, 1989 also depicts a moment when the global Left was waning, and, for many, the year has come to represent the production of a world dominated by late capitalist logics, or what Francis Fukuyama problematically called “the end of history.” This pivotal moment and its lingering aftermath have been heralded as a new liberalism, in the words of Roderick Ferguson, or a late liberalism, according to Elizabeth Povinelli.[13] As Ferguson establishes, new or late liberalism operates by “using difference to foster capitalist distribution while curtailing social redistribution for underrepresented folks.”[14] As both of these theorists emphasize, and as I historicize further below, inclusion occurs through legible and proper understandings of the non-West and does not fundamentally change how institutions function. Late liberalism, in other words, deploys inclusion and increased representation so as to facilitate the normative operations and growth of late capital.

Lastly, the time period around 1989 marks the publication of theoretical projects that establish aesthetics and politics as a discourse. Within art history, many grappled with the field’s relations to postmodernism and postcolonialism during the end of the twentieth century, with a push for scholars and curators to reconsider their own practices. Many drew from insights afforded by anthropology’s self-reflexive moment, along with the development of standpoint epistemology from feminist studies, to engage in these disciplinary shifts. Rasheed Araeen’s inauguration of the journal Third Text in 1987 demonstrates the push for such concerns around the non-West, theory, postcolonial critique, and the condition of the proper for the non-West. Further, Jacques Rancière’s initial musings on the framework of aesthetics and politics, arguably one of the most established approaches, was first published in 1990 in his book Courts voyages au pays du peuple. Rancière primarily attends to the experience of class in film and literature, further developing his theorizations on aesthetics and politics in texts that followed. Although Courts voyages focuses on the short voyages and experiences of class within Western Europe, he begins his book with the specter of proper China and the Cultural Revolution: “The dull gray of a winter sky upon concrete apartment blocks . . . of a shantytown can fulfill the traveler if it represents him with what he has long sought and can immediately recognize, in its very foreignness, as just like what he has already spoken, read, heard, and dreamed: the proletariat in person. Such was the flower, its living reality just waiting to be plucked, that a certain text of Mao Zedong’s promised to those who agreed to go out, leaving behind books and cities, and get down off their horses.”[15]

China appears in its proper form as represented by Mao, which becomes an animating force for many of Rancière’s ideas.[16] And beyond China, the notions of culture, art, and aesthetics are additionally engaged in proper ways. Under late liberalism, culture takes on a limited meaning, understood as apart from yet central to the political. The aesthetic and culture are in turn conceptualized as significant for politics because they are presumed to expand communal sensibilities around whom we value by increasing the representation of those minor voices that were previously excluded. The minorness of the aesthetic is not approached on its own terms or in its entanglement with social structures; rather, the aesthetic’s value is articulated through an appeal to late liberal logics, equating increased representation with progress through the broadening of communal sensibility. This chapter develops a theory of the aesthetic that is not based within a model of liberal representationalism so as to articulate culture’s relationship to the political. Contemporary theorizations surrounding the politics of aesthetics (or, aesthetics and politics) formulate the aesthetic to be as major as the political. As a result, culture comes to be fetishized as the recurrent place for possibility and resistance against the state. Culture is thus imagined as enshrined away from rather than entwined with the problems, limits, and possibilities of the political and social. Rancière’s discourse on aesthetics and politics recapitulates and reinforces this late liberal definition of culture, art, and aesthetics by producing agency for these minor terms in ways that separate them from the political so as to render them core to politics.[17] And when situated within the cultures wars of the ’80s and ’90s, this limited understanding of culture comes further to the fore.

The art market, theoretical discourse, proper China, multiculturalism, academic disciplines, the rise of neoliberal economic logics, and the transnational turn overlap in dynamic ways around 1989. This chapter traces through these unwieldy yet uncanny convergences to track how the proper predominates to fuel the circulation of capital and to buttress logics surrounding the global. China, as one of the first countries to be heavily enfolded into the global art market, established some of the rules of inclusion for other non-Western spaces. Before discussing this in more detail, however, it is important to bring into view some of the key discursive developments of contemporary Chinese art.  

Before 1989: The Cultural Revolution and Proper China 

The Cultural Revolution is one of the main events that informs our understanding of modern China. This is widely evidenced across global, political, aesthetic, art, journalistic, and academic discourse. Consequently, the majority of art historians and curators within the global art market situate contemporary Chinese art with the Cultural Revolution. With the defeat of the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) Party to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, the larger project of unifying China through communism came to be a critical yet daunting task. What media, political maneuvers, organizing, labor, education, language, infrastructures, agricultural development, and artistic production were needed to facilitate the unification of about 500–600 million people over 3.7 million square miles? Art, along with all other areas of life, was expected to directly mediate the interests of the CCP. Mao Zedong, as its chairman, led the efforts to deploy every form of social and private life for the sole purpose of communism. A series of efforts came under the framework of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. The goal was to reeducate China’s urban elites to understand the realities of rural workers. With the support of student activists known as the Red Guard, Mao solidified his leadership of the CCP and inspired a movement for widespread socialism. The Red Guard and enforcement of the Cultural Revolution led to the creation of reeducation and labor camps in rural areas and the persecution, and, at times, execution, of millions of individuals not seen as fully sympathetic to the cause.

The Cultural Revolution, which Mao declared over in 1969 but which did not halt until Mao’s death in 1976, has come to shape most every narrative surrounding modern and contemporary China—particularly notable in the discourse of contemporary art. These narratives are focused on the traumatic effects of the Cultural Revolution on artists, intellectuals, citizens, and daily life. However, from an analytical perspective, it would certainly be possible to think of the Revolution as serving many other purposes. For example, looking at the radicalization of youth cultures during the 1960s, the Red Guard, and the student movements informs how the world received Maoism during global revolutions of the 1960s and, for French Maoists, May 1968. Further, the revolution demonstrated profound aesthetic shifts that went beyond mere propaganda. A number of scholars have turned to thinking about the aesthetic qualities of the revolution through notions of kitsch and political change.[18] But even if these other approaches consider the revolution in more nuanced ways through youth cultures and aesthetics, most accounts of contemporary Chinese art and artists tether artists’ psyches to their artistic production.       

For those artists who immediately experienced the Cultural Revolution as adults, their works are often framed as responding directly to state abuses (usually through realist techniques). For those who were children or born during the revolution, their art objects are understood as contending with witnessing state abuses upon their families and responding with less of a direct critique or sense of urgency (thus, a turn to abstraction). For those born after 1976, their works are often situated as not being as burdened by the aftermath of the revolution and seeking to imagine other pasts, presents, and futures for China (hence, they deploy more open explorations with form and content). This generalized framework dominates how most artists are understood within a formula that links generational relations to a proper historical event, psychoanalytic states, and aesthetic output. Realism corresponds to immediate trauma; abstraction responds to slight distance from the event; and experimentation reveals a less direct mediation with the past. The revolution thus becomes the shorthand by which to particularize China into the proper. This schematic, of course, is not meant to discount the import of such frames; however, it is their predominance and repetition that arrest China into the major and proper.        

For example, the 2012 exhibit On/Off at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art relied on this temporal logic that weds historical context to artistic production. The show focused on artists born after 1975 to illuminate a generation’s concerns beyond the anchor of the Cultural Revolution. Curators Bao Dong and Sun Dongdong chose the title to reflect the online proxy networks that younger Chinese use to circumvent the government’s firewall. By focusing on those born after the Cultural Revolution and media surveillance, the curators narrow the analytic possibilities of the works in On/Off. Their curatorial frame replicates the assumption of a direct relation between generational status and artistic production. This oft-deployed framework presumes an immediate and legible mediation across history, psyche, and creative output. The works presented, however, exceed the logics of historical contextualization. Li Liao’s performance Consumption (2012) involved documentation of time spent working at Foxconn, one of Apple’s manufacturing plants. Upon earning enough to purchase an iPad, the artist left the factory and ended his performance. Although the piece certainly deals with new media and aesthetic experimentation, Li Liao’s performance additionally allows us to consider a deeper history. For example, although the artist experiments with and directs us to the divide between material and immaterial labor in today’s digital world, such concerns have ramifications surrounding the state of postsocialism. In particular, a direct return to the Cultural Revolution might help us grapple with changes in labor practices as they demand different approaches for socialist ends. Yet, the curatorial frame limits this piece within generational concerns that are delinked from longer temporal arcs. Earlier exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art have similarly relied upon the Cultural Revolution to serve as the legible historical anchor that explains artistic concerns. On/Off illustrates this developmental logic, as Li Liao’s and others’ works are primarily framed as working beyond the Cultural Revolution through aesthetic experimentation. The overdetermined relation between object and context economizes how China and other non-Western spaces have come to be understood.      

This turn to context, with the Cultural Revolution as the organizing moment, was necessary because earlier journalistic and art historical discourses tended to minimally situate the works in relation to China’s history. As such, many Chinese authors demanded further historicization and localized accounts of the art’s emergence.[19] In other words, the force of law, as discussed in the introduction, shaped the immediate reactions by Chinese theorists and art historians. In these bids to show the vibrant dynamics and realities of Chinese art, however, the discourse came to congeal in immediately legible and proper ways. The predominance of such demands for context limits other possible engagements that might appear minor or decontextualized at first blush. The continual demand for specificity and particularity has culminated into the solidification of the non-West as properly knowable when translated by native informants. 

Following these initial preoccupations, the second wave of criticism primarily cataloged key artists and movements, a framing that continues today.[20] The Cultural Revolution nonetheless remains a central anchor, even as a fuller picture of art practices across China has emerged. Scholars with art historical knowledge of Chinese art explore histories that expand the temporal parameters of contemporary Chinese art and broaden the central figures involved in the movement. In particular, academic research began to examine art groups that emerged between 1984 and 1986, specifically those experimenting with form and media, most notably the Stars, Northern Art Group, Pond Association, and Xiamen Dada. They were located in divergent geographic locations across China and had different aesthetic agendas. 

Following this expansion of the historical parameters and figures involved in contemporary Chinese art, historians and theorists also focused on issues surrounding migration, diaspora, globalization, and modernity.[21] Most edited collections on contemporary Asian or Chinese art follow this arc from contextualization to globalization.[22] Even amid turns to the global, proper forms of China are reproduced, particularly through accounts of exile. These narratives reinforce a discourse about the authoritarian state without engaging “the artists’ creative efforts and the cultural-intellectual values of the work.”[23] Curator Hou Hanru locates this as a “methodology of the Western official ideological propaganda during the Cold War.”[24] Hou notably points us to proper formulations of China that predominate over other understandings of this body of art. This overview of the discourse reveals a reliance on historicization, with the Cultural Revolution and state authoritarianism as its central anchors. Although later trends in criticism have turned toward the global, the organizing logics around the state and generational divides nonetheless predominate as exemplified by the curatorial frame for the On/Off exhibit. Proper understandings of China as authoritarian continue to shape more recent accounts of this art in its distribution and circulation. Although the demand for context initially emerged to counter earlier Eurocentric discourses, it has reigned in ways that further condition China through the proper.  

The 1980s and the Mimicry of the Non-West  

After the death of Mao in 1976, struggles around control of the CCP arose. Most leaders sought a shift in politics from that of the Cultural Revolution. Under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping, China liberalized its approach to education and economic development. As part of this process, many art institutions reopened during the 1980s. Film, literature, art books, and theoretical texts were easier to access. Art journals proliferated, specifically Jiangsu Pictorial (Jiangsu huakan), Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao), and The Trend of Art Thought (Meishu sichao). Further, works from and accounts of contemporary Japanese and Western art became increasingly available in Chinese; art objects from Europe and the US were exhibited with greater frequency. An exhibition that is often cited by artists and historians is Robert Rauschenberg’s 1985 exhibit at the National Art Museum in Beijing. The Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange exhibit was the first American show in China in fifty years and included over 125 works. After an apprenticeship at the world’s oldest paper mill in Jingxian, Rauschenberg sought to tour his show to Beijing. The exhibit attracted an estimated 300,000 viewers in its twenty-day run. Rauschenberg’s show inspired a renewed emphasis among Chinese artists on experimental practices, although many of the practices that gained energy at this time were already occurring before 1985. This moment of avant-garde and conceptual art came to be known as the ’85 Art New Wave.

In addition to the Cultural Revolution, Rauschenberg’s show became another anchor for theorists and historians of contemporary Chinese art. The show brings to the fore larger issues surrounding how contemporary Chinese art has come to be narrated through debates over the art as derivative of and mimicking Western art. This moment of increased global circulation usually results in disagreements over originality—a common debate for non-Western art at large. Most famously, the political pop movement of the 1980s and cynical realism of the 1990s were both dismissed for being derivative of Western contemporary art. The aesthetics of these two movements shared characteristics with that of Andy Warhol, including his use of everyday commercial objects, and Max Ernst, particularly his hyperbolic and surrealist depictions of the body. However, many viewed Chinese artists as simply replicating these Western “masters” while adding Chinese characteristics. Holland Carter, the New York Times art critic, opened his 1996 review of the Asia Society’s exhibit Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia by quoting a friend who accompanied him to the exhibit: “Contemporary Art in India? There is no contemporary art in India.”[25] This anecdote illustrates how Asian artists are myopically situated within notions of tradition, making any gesture toward formal experimentation seem unimaginable or else merely derivative. Vishakha Desai picks up on this account to note how the early discourses on contemporary Asian art primarily questioned the originality of contemporary Asian works, foreclosing other modes of engaging the art beyond this proper discourse surrounding innovation and derivation.[26] 

To counter such critiques, scholars have emphasized the need for deeper contextualization and historicization—a turn to specificity. For example, Gao Minglu in Total Modernity encapsulates this demand for the particular: “It becomes unlikely, therefore that either of these [avant-garde] theories (Marx’s alienation nor Bürger’s institutionalized capitalism and avant-garde) will work for the Chinese model of the avant-garde, because the Chinese institutional system has been constructed in a totally different way.”[27] This push toward specificity is meant to complicate discourses on derivation and originality. However, the continued insistence on particularity reinforces the proper, as it is meant to be the most legible way to respond to presumptions of the non-West as derivative. Such concerns were privileged over more minor ones, such as the formal, emotive, relational, and theoretical aspects of these works. As such, the discourse takes shape from the privileging of major notions like history and context in order to respond to Eurocentric and racist dismissals of art from the non-West. But this example further highlights the general trend surrounding how other non-Western spaces have come to be theorized in relation to culture: questions around derivation and the West emerge, critiques of Eurocentrism are launched, and an emphasis on history and context ensues. In this way, to be legible within this situation requires that an artist be discussed within the proper. 

Curating 1989 and Beyond 

In addition to the Cultural Revolution and debates over originality, the Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989 shape the narration of contemporary Chinese art. Global interest in Chinese art increased following the incident, as the event reinforced and played into discourses surrounding the authoritarian state. The year 1989 indexes changes in China’s forms of governance from the decentralization of power given to the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution to a more centralized autocratic rule. Amid this shift in global perceptions surrounding the nation-state, publics came to transfix the art through this proper narrative that conflates autocracy with authoritarianism.

Before the June episode at Tiananmen, however—and pointing to the existing discourse on China connecting the authoritarian state to proper China—there was already a global proclivity toward the eventual reaction to the Tiananmen Square student protests. For example, earlier in 1989, one of the largest shows of experimental art practices in China opened in February: the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at Beijing’s National Art Gallery. Although plans for it first occurred around 1986, the show came together after a series of negotiations with the CCP. The symbol for the exhibit was a “No U-Turn” traffic sign, which represented the inability to turn back. The 1989 showing extended throughout six exhibition halls totaling about twenty-two thousand square meters, with the inclusion of visual art, performance art, installation, and sculpture. The event, however, was temporarily shut down twice. On the opening day, it was first closed due to an unscheduled performance entitled Dialogue by Xiao Lu and Tang Song. The original installation involved a mirror with two phone booths, one on each side. In the unplanned performance, Xiao Lu entered the museum and shot a gun at the installation. As a result, the police shut down the show for five days. The second instance involved a fake bomb threat, which closed the gallery for three days. Increased national and international interest followed both of these closures, with narratives surrounding the authoritarian state rapidly circulating. 

One exhibition that benefitted from the timing of the China/Avant-Garde exhibit and the events at Tiananmen was Magiciens de la Terre, which opened in Paris in May a month before the 1989 televised protests. Magiciens exhibited over a hundred artists and was the first show to include contemporary Chinese artists within Europe or the United States. The show was envisioned as a critique of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. The 1984–85 MOMA show was accused of limited representations of non-Western art, when the proper then took the form of primitivism. The head curator of Magiciens, Jean-Hubert Martin, sought to showcase a broad array of art from around the world, particularly the non-West.[28] As part of this massive gesture of inclusion, three Chinese artists were part of this show: Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, and Yang Jiechang. Fei Dawei served as Martin’s interlocutor, introducing him to artists across China. Magiciens de la Terre is important for the way it underlines how curatorial choices render the non-West proper, along with the shifting logics in what makes the proper legible. This show, moreover, highlights how the proper toggles across primitivism to historical context around the unmodern state. Put differently, the racialization of the non-West remains proper by locating backwardness in either its people or the state. For China around 1989, backwardness came to be located in the latter. In the coming years, many other large exhibits would go on to focus on contemporary Chinese artists. For example, in 1993, the Forty-Fifth Venice Biennale included contemporary Chinese artists for the first time.[29] Then, in 1999, ten years after Magiciens, China had its own pavilion at Venice. This trend of including Chinese artists in highly visible global art exhibits occurred within a span of about ten years and illustrates how quickly the conversations surrounding inclusion in the global art market took shape. Along with this, a growing need arose to rapidly develop a discourse to contend with art emerging from these diverse contexts. These exhibitions, along with many others that proliferated across the globe at this time and which consistently framed Chinese art and artists through the lens of the proper and relied on liberal approaches to inclusion, were central to the distribution of contemporary Chinese art.[30] In the section below, I turn to tracing the broader global dynamics that catalyzed this movement.  

Beyond China, c. 1989 

As outlined in the previous sections of this chapter, the conditions that enabled the entrance of China into transnational consideration—specifically the global rise of late liberalist logics that facilitate the very conditions that produce the minor as subject—have rendered China properly understood as a subject/object to be included through contextualization and state discourse. In this section below, I outline the historical and academic conditions that dictate how minorness—a key method for grasping the larger structuration of proper China—becomes primarily ascribed and limited to a subject or geographic position. I additionally locate the roles of culture and the aesthetic as they relate to these concerns.

Roderick Ferguson and Sara Ahmed have offered trenchant accounts of the connections between the operations of the global and understandings of diversity. According to Ferguson, “the U.S. constitutional project would give birth to twins—the modern idea of empire and the modern idea of difference; under that ideological formulation, the management of the international would coextend with the management of diversity.”[31] Within this framework, China is situated within the logics of inclusion that similarly conceptualize the enfoldment of racialized nations with the inclusion of minority difference. In both cases, the minor other only becomes a knowable and specific subject to be included, rather than a source to methodologically rethink the operations of established frameworks and terms. However, in order to understand how China is rendered within larger structurations of power, it is critical that we interrogate how minorness became primarily ascribed to a subject or geographic position. 

China is indicative of the rise of late liberalism and its logics of inclusion; China offers a blueprint to understand how otherness becomes enfolded into discourse, art markets, and history. The global rise of liberalist logics is not simply evidence of the triumph of liberalism, or as Fukuyama would have it the “end of world history.” Instead, liberalism has come to buttress the proper and to delineate accepted presumptions across a liberal and illiberal divide. Proper logics are informed by liberal forms of recognition: representation and inclusion. China becomes legible within a global order when it is recognized as representing its proper form as authoritarian and the West’s dialectical other, with contemporary culture and aesthetic production as revealing possibilities and resistance to major China. In other words, China is properly illiberal, with culture envisioned as its proper liberal antidote. This comes to be the oft-deployed formula when discussing the non-West.

Many art historical accounts provide a broad contextualization of global art in relation to post–Cold War sensibilities and the economy.[32] However, it is important to extend the purview of these critical works toward these logics of inclusion as buttressed by not only neoliberal ideologies but also late capital and late liberalism. Povinelli has argued that it is necessary to move beyond liberalism as a historical marker in order to understand ways of contending with difference following global decolonization and other key movements, like Maoism, that occurred around and after the middle of the twentieth century. Unlike neoliberalism, late liberalism responds to questions around liberalism’s legitimacy following the production of decolonized, utopic spaces. To contend with this, late liberalism shifted liberalism toward “a crisis of how to allow cultures a space within liberalism without rupturing the core frameworks of liberal justice. In short, in late liberalism to care for difference is to make a space for culture to care for difference without disturbing key ways of figuring experience—ordinary habitual truths.”[33] Povinelli emphasizes the need to contend with the aftermath of earlier formations surrounding area, ethnic, gender, and queer studies. She establishes how  these previous approaches to inclusion have led to a new demand whereby the minor other only finds value in its proper form. We tend to include at a more rapid rate without disturbing our dominant order and logics; we have arrived at a place where we now presumably care more about (or, perform care for) the other, but we do not invest in changing how we understand and approach the other and world. After all, such changes would involve letting go of established privileges, along with a redistribution and revolution in how property and power have been allocated. In addition, Povinelli directs us to the role of culture in this process, which has come to be understood as separate from yet significant to the political, institutional, and structural. 

As the histories outlined above reveal surrounding how scholars came to react against past universalist discourse, the continual exclusion of China informs the force of law. This force demands proper legibility to counter Eurocentric and racist understandings around the minor other. However, in late liberalism, inclusion has become normalized whereby the minor as subject continues to be further included and represented but only in its proper form. In addition, the aesthetic and culture have been reduced to merely tools that assist in this project of increasing representation. In this way, I offer the minor as method to rethink and reformulate these late liberalist logics surrounding not only inclusion but also culture and the aesthetic. 

Interdisciplinarity Goes Transnational 

This reigning late liberal order arises from the production of the global, and it extends well beyond China and the art market, although the areas to which it extends are often intricately connected. For example, in universities, considered central for the production of knowledge and often interwoven with broader art market and curatorial discourses, the same liberal logics underpin many disciplinary boundaries and approaches—something that feeds back into the aesthetic and politics discourse on contemporary art and proper China. The notion of interdisciplinarity, which is often presumed as the vanguard for intellectual projects, is a useful illustration of this. In the context of the university, interdisciplinarity has emerged due to fractures between existing departments. For instance, area studies arose following the Second World War and was further consolidated during the Cold War to provide intelligence about nations central to US expansionism and economic concerns.[34] Area studies is therefore often separated from ethnic studies (in this case, Asian American studies). And as Karen Shimakawa and Kandice Chuh have pointed out, Asian American studies emerged from a history of student activism informed primarily through race and critiques of imperialism, both of which distinguish themselves from the goals of area studies.[35] More recently, Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel have located the interdisciplinary field of queer studies to reconsider the import and problems with both area and ethnic studies.[36] The project of interdisciplinarity, which is meant to smooth these fractures but which engages liberal logics of inclusion, does not resolve these foundational issues. Instead, they are glossed over and even entrenched, particularly when considering the transnational. 

Within what has been called the transnational turn, interdisciplinarity is interwoven with late liberalist approaches to inclusion. The project of interdisciplinarity presumes that the increased representation of global otherness is the key goal, rather than reconsiderations of academic protocol and disciplinarity amid engagements with the non-West. Moreover, as Ferguson has noted, the logics of interdisciplinarity extend well beyond the university and art market toward state interests and capital accumulation: “Interdisciplinarity becomes much more than a matter contained within the academy. It becomes the episteme that organizes the regimes of representation for academy, state, and capital. . . . Hence, the institutionalization of difference becomes a question much larger than any single institution but becomes a logic of practice that establishes a network between all institutions in the United States.”[37] When situated in relation to turns toward the non-West and the transnational, interdisciplinarity often limits such understandings of structural power that extend well beyond the university. With a dominant focus on increasing the representation of global otherness, interdisciplinarity expands our attention to different geographic locations through what Ella Shohat has called an “additive operation,” without fully grappling with uneven foundational theories, frameworks, and the global dynamics surrounding capital accumulation and extraction.[38] 

Put differently, we often include and increase representation without reordering. The proper conditions academic approaches, as they, at times, view a non-Western space as simply another site to be included without revising intellectual protocols and assumptions and without understanding the non-West as a source of methodological and theoretical import. When considering contemporary Chinese and global art within this turn to the non-West, we must contend with how minor subjects (from national minorities to non-Western sites) are operationalized through the proper. The minor, when rendered solely as a subject, prohibits other conversations beyond context and history. These broader turns within the university, and public and political discourses, inform the way proper China is rendered, while also illuminating how contemporary Chinese art comes to be established within late liberal logics of representation and inclusion. Our academic approaches often minimize other possibilities and models for deploying minoritarian and non-Western thought and production. 

The 1989 Magiciens de la Terre exhibit illustrates these late liberalist approaches that inform both academic and curatorial modes of inclusion. Magiciens sought to place non-Western art tout court at the same “level” as Western art, according to the show’s curator. The show exhibited Western and non-Western artists alongside one another, attempting to communicate a sense of equality and commonality across regions. This manifested in the curation of half of these artists coming from the West and the other from the non-West. By doing so, the show did not contend with the material differences and historical structures of colonization and race that have continually placed the non-West as proper (and as debtor nations). In other words, the late liberal logics of inclusion facilitate the forgetting of race and history in ways that equalize countries through the act of inclusion (rendering them theoretically common). The academic analogue to this is to include more non-Western sites and forms of social difference into curricula without considering how these populations afford a revision of the academic project at hand. 

Late liberalism glosses over structural and historical issues, particularly when culture and the aesthetic are in play. Culture and the aesthetic are seen as mere indexes of and apertures into the non-West; they are not presumed as embedded in and, hence, as complex as the structural. In this way, acts of inclusion through culture are understood as safe, quaint, and appropriate ways to access the other. And even as contemporary discourses argue for the aesthetic to possess agency and to be significant for the political, the aesthetic and culture are nonetheless rendered separate from yet central to politics, structures, and political economy. As such, the continual reliance on a narrative of art as representing resistance against the state perpetuates limited formulations of the aesthetic; this discourse fulfills the desire to make the aesthetic valuable and worthy of study and momentarily placates those who have been under- or misrepresented. Such inclusion through culture renders the other legible and as an equal to the “West,” while delimiting a full engagement with the histories around racialization, imperialism, and capitalist extraction that have afflicted the non-West and have unevenly produced our discourses, frameworks, and political imagination.        

Consider Martin’s opening remarks in Magiciens’s exhibition catalog: “However, from the idea of an investigation on the creation of the world today, one could imagine only presenting artists not from the Occident, knowing that we do not doubt the existence of art from our own centers. This would continue to place these creators in a ghetto, within an ethnographic category that comes from the archaic legacy of colonialism, while it is important to affirm their existence in the present moment.”[39] Martin’s approach uses inclusion to place non-Western art at the center; however, by framing these art practices as equivalent and common to all, he avoids explicitly contending with the structural and historical racism that has rendered such art proper. In turn, the show’s curation deployed a universalizing frame to rationalize the inclusion of these divergent works: “All these objects, from here or elsewhere, have in common the possession of an aura. . . . It is the word ‘magic’ that captures what we find in common with one another in the lively and inexplicable influence that art exercises upon us.”[40] This turn to Benjaminian aura becomes the vehicle by which to sidestep a deeper contention with what these multiple non-Western sites might provide as a method. These sites and the aesthetic could have been used to direct us to the structural barriers that render the non-West and culture putatively proper. Instead, the organizing framework for the show became “magic” as a way to universalize the function of art on the psyche. The mystical, however, perpetuates proper and historically racialized understandings of the non-Western other as the source of mysterious power requiring decoding and knowledge. In this case, the proper shifts from the primitive to the mystical. In other words, the turn to “magic” or aura nonetheless upholds the logics surrounding the non-West as proper even with the good intention of inclusion. As such, good liberal intentions only get us so far. 

Such late liberal logics can be traced more specifically in the curation of China and Chinese art within Magiciens. Chinese artists are described in terms that make them immediately legible to US and European audiences. Gu Dexin’s use of earth-toned plastic resembling organs and other ambiguous matter provides space to conceptualize not only human and social waste, but also affects like disgust and discomfort. Although his work involves a complex melting of plastic objects resembling organs and uncanny shapes, the catalog places his piece within the discourse of Duchampian readymades. Moreover, for the works of Marina Abramovi? and Ulay that were presented in the show, China, as represented through the Great Wall, served as a mere backdrop. Both of their contributions drew from their solo time walking across two different ends of the wall. Their performance documents their eventual meeting and encounter in the middle of the Great Wall. The exhibition catalog describes this performance as the culmination of their travels. The catalog traces their work with aboriginals in Australia and locals in Thailand to their final meeting in China. China becomes just another global space for these artists to traverse and include, providing an apt metaphor for the operations of late liberalism.

In the case of Gu’s work, he is situated within China in its proper form, as the artist’s piece is rendered immediately legible through Western discourse, as a Chinese version of Duchamp. For Abramovi? and Ulay, China remains proper China as well, as it serves as a mere backdrop for their performance. China, when refracted through either a Chinese or non-Chinese artist, cannot become common in ways that broaden theoretical and aesthetic concerns beyond the legibility of context. In other words, China operates in its prototypical proper form regardless of the artist involved. China remains China, never china. 

The non-West is taken in its proper and legible forms so as to facilitate an ease in circulation and accumulation. Circulation and accumulation, however, occur at many different levels: private collectors, curators, state-sponsored institutions, private museums, attendees, artists, and the media. Since these levels operate at varied intensities, it is difficult to trace causal relations across them. What might be more helpful then is to understand how the proper lubricates the ease with which the non-West is presumed knowable and objects obtain value. This art market system, however, does not simply occur in the West. As noted earlier, there is an established history of biennials and other contemporary art festivals throughout the non-West, with a particular rise across East Asia. Specifically, Hong Kong has become a central locus for international art fairs. Similar to China entering the “global” stage in terms of governance and control, the rise of East Asian centers for the art market is not simply cause for celebration. Instead, their inclusion should force us to track the logics that permit entrance into this global order. They become another center of accumulation for late capital, broadening its reach. Their growth and inclusion indicate and ensure that this system runs with greater capacity and ease.  

How We’ve Done Things to Culture 

This overview of how China arises in the art market and academic discourse brings to the fore the import of grappling with how we conceptualize culture, art, and aesthetics. Although these terms are usually understood as minor in comparison to the major realm of politics, they are often rendered proper and to be as important and effective as the political. These minor notions surrounding the aesthetic, when paired with the non-West, operate in service of late liberal approaches to difference, minor subjects, and the proper. In particular, the rise in the art market of the non-West informed academic fields to what has come to be called global art and world art studies. In 1992, John Onians coined the term world art studies, which was also part of the renaming of his own university’s department, to produce a universalist approach to art capable of understanding culture’s power.[41] Moreover, in order to render culture central for considerations of the global, Onians relies unsurprisingly on interdisciplinary methods, ranging from anthropology to literature and visual art. World art studies approaches culture through a universalist frame, akin to Magiciens’s reliance on magic and aura, so as to focus on the individual object or singular artist as the means to communicate to others. Culture’s power and its effects are thus imagined as universal in nature and inherently arising from the artist or art itself. 

Such an approach, however, obscures the structural and historical aspects at play that predetermine what even counts as universal, art, culture, and subject. Interdisciplinary fields that are invested in the aesthetic and culture are often seeking to evidence their worthiness for study; however, in such bids for legibility through narratives of culture’s power, we limit culture from being fully theorized as implicated with larger apparatuses and structures. We hinder theorizations of the aesthetic for both its import and limits in our rush to render it as central to the political or as contributing to the universal. We either insularly fixate on culture or else argue for its value to our world at large. However, for this latter goal, we tend to then analyze culture’s import for contributing to other material areas of life by obscuring the drawbacks of the aesthetic. 

In the overlap between art market and academia, this late liberal notion of culture is consolidated around 1989. This definition of culture comes to the fore when considering the broader context of the culture wars of the late ’80s and ’90s. Although China does not necessarily have a central place in this primarily US-based history, the culture wars illustrate the late liberal logics at play. More specifically, the assumptions around what is considered culture within the culture wars buttress the operations of the global art market and academia. As Povinelli reminds us, culture has a complex relationship to anthropology, along with the production of art: “In the first instance, culture had to become equivalent to artifact—something that could be said to have specific qualities that could then be measured and evaluated.”[42] Under late liberalism, since culture is equated to artifact, art and the artist are conceptualized as fully knowable and, most importantly, limited in scope. This definition of culture narrowly specifies its parameters to solely an object and its maker and avoids understanding how we come to understand what counts as object, maker, and culture. In other words, culture comes to be delinked from the structural. Even if culture possesses a universal appeal or effect (as magic, let’s say), it nonetheless is delimited to an individual’s creation. And when this limited notion of culture is placed within a transnational context, culture is further relegated as artifact and as an aperture into its non-Western site of origin.

The culture wars rely on this precise definition of culture, resulting in debates over what or whom we value rather than how we value. The culture wars of the late ’80s and ’90s argued over what counts and should be included within the confines of culture, as opposed to how we have come to arrive at our very definitions and what structures and histories have led to them. Multiple texts on the culture wars reproduce this late liberal conceptualization of culture, as they maintain the locus of critique on culture itself rather than upon the failures, presumptions, and operations of liberalism. Texts like James Hunter’s Culture Wars place blame on moralism and how “people determine whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, and so on.”[43] This text is emblematic of other works that direct their focus on the question of cultural morality for the culture wars, which presumes that culture is merely about what society deems of value and collectively decides to include (in other words, a community’s sensibilities). 

This view of culture is advanced in contemporary discourses that theorize the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The aesthetic and the realm of culture are seen to remedy the lack of representation surrounding minor subjects and those coming from minor geographic spaces; the logic goes that if only we are able to represent more minor subjects through the aesthetic, we can then expand what our sensibilities, our common sense, consider of worth. The aesthetic becomes the liberal antidote that extends what and whom society values. Put more explicitly, liberal logics and a liberal model of representationalism undergird the dominant theories that attempt to articulate the aesthetic’s relation and significance to the political. Might we develop a theory of the aesthetic beyond such a model?       

These understandings of culture are perpetuated and furthered across fields. The structures and histories, along with the dominance of the proper, that produce our value systems and the dominant idea of culture are placed aside. In other words, the ongoing focus and theorizing of the aesthetic as expanding and including more into what we value displaces and obscures an analysis of how we value. This late liberal notion of culture permeates not only the culture wars and art market, but also the discourse on aesthetics and politics that is reinvigorated around 1989. Peter Osborne notes the reappearance of these terms at the end of the twentieth century: “Furthermore, in its recent Rancièrean and (on occasion) Deleuzian guises, it has provided a medium for posing, once again, the now-classical modern question of art’s relationship to politics, after a period in which both directly intellectual and politics issues were progressively excluded from critical discourse.”[44] Although this question of art and the political has been a trenchant one from the likes of Aristotle to Lu Xun and Adorno, a sense of urgency for these questions arose around 1989, particularly as academic and aesthetic concerns turned further toward the global.[45] Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics has dominated the discourse, becoming institutionalized in university curriculums and curatorial frameworks.[46] The rise in aesthetics and politics as a curatorial frame can be traced toward the end of the twentieth century, particularly through his ideas. 

Rancière’s notion situates aesthetics at the center or core of how politics are produced. According to his model, it is possible to change “the distribution of the sensible” by including and bringing in those voices and perspectives that have been historically denied.[47] In this way, the aesthetic represents possibility; the aesthetic becomes the means to expand the political. Rancière’s framework relies on the aesthetic to be a direct form of mediation with the political, as the aesthetic is conceptualized to directly respond to, shape, and possess agency with regard to the political through the production of what is considered sensible. When Rancière explains that the politics of aesthetics involves “the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community,” his theorization of the aesthetic relies upon its separation from the political in ways that render and sanction the aesthetic as pure possibility.[48]

Through this model, the aesthetic operates akin to the logics of liberalism and democratic representationalism, whereby the inclusion of culture by more minor subjects presumably remedies the historical lack of representation. According to this framework, the aesthetic expands representation and, in turn, our common sense surrounding what and whom we value. The minorness of the aesthetic by minor subjects comes to possess major possibilities for the political. However, the increased representation of minor subjects through the aesthetic has not translated into substantive institutional change, as the notion of late liberalism helps explain. And as outlined in the introduction, the rampant inclusion of underrepresented perspectives has created limits and a larger set of problems for these exact populations. More importantly, however, this dominant model relies on the aesthetic as being theorized apart from the political, as the source of possibility.

Of course, it is understandable that one might argue for the significance of the aesthetic, given the long history of dismissal surrounding the aesthetic along with the glorification of the aesthetic as a universal and sanctioned realm untainted by the political. However, in contemporary bids to argue for the centrality of the aesthetic as it relates to the political, we have merely centered it without considering the underlying assumptions of what the political and major are that render the aesthetic minor. In other words, instead of hesitating on this minor form in ways that help us understand the structures, histories, and systems that maintain its minorness, we have merely entered the minor of the aesthetic into the major and within its underlying liberal assumptions. 

As such, the established discourse on aesthetics and politics inherits and perpetuates the late liberal definition of culture. With less of a focus on structuration and on the failures of liberalism, the discourse primarily assumes culture, art, and aesthetics as identifiable objects (artifacts) separate from the political that have an agency and are constitutive of politics. With the aesthetic and culture having agency, they are thus presumed unique from yet central to the political itself. This has resulted in a conceptualization of the aesthetic as the remedy for institutional problems, rather than as entangled with them. In other words, culture tends to be heralded as outside of power and as the answer, hope, and possibility for social ills (in ways, à la Rancière, that increase representation, what we consider to be common sense, and what we value). Culture is not often understood as fully imbricated and implicated (as problem and possibility) with the political and systemic. However, when they are understood within the structural, culture and the aesthetic possess the ability to index how we value, our systems and assumptions. 

As a result, the realm of the aesthetic is often used to absolve the failures of liberalism and inclusion, which ultimately displaces blame onto culture and individuals. This  proper formulation is set up to fall short. When these efforts to use the aesthetics and culture of the other to remedy societal ills fail (which they most always do), it is blamed not on the structures and assumptions of our institutions but rather on the notion that the art, artists, and culture were just not good enough (particularly those that do not work in the proper ways). And even when such art or artists are deemed worthy, it is often achieved by being immediately legible through the proper. This ultimately limits the parameters surrounding how we analyze art by minor subjects and those coming from minor geographic spaces. As such, the proper is sustained, thus maintaining the systems and logics that determine what is deemed legible and of value. We tend to debate the merits of aesthetic objects, rather than focus on the structural frames and terms that dictate these very debates (how we value). When art by racialized, queer, trans, non-Western, and other minoritarian subjects is critiqued, it is primarily directed at the artists’ identities or at the quality of their art, as opposed to the ways we define culture and otherness through the proper. In other words, these criticisms do not to focus on the value systems in place. 

Furthermore, when this larger discourse and conceptualization of culture consolidates around 1989 alongside the rise of the global art market, non-Western artists are further entrenched within this standard. Although there is not a direct causal relationship between global art and Rancière’s framework, I highlight the late liberal logics at play so as to better understand how and why the proper predominates for the non-West. These minor subjects from minor geographic spaces only become legible and worthy of circulation when they demonstrate and fit under a rubric of their aesthetic production as being central to and formative of the political. As such, the narrative of the resistant artist against the authoritarian state comes to predominate, since this narrative is proper and immediately legible as it reifies the aesthetic as social possibility. Moreover, it should be of no surprise then that the disagreements over Chinese art as derivate of the West afflicted its emergence and continue today. Those who dismiss non-Western art as derivative presume that the only value in this art is anthropological in that it indexes truths about proper understandings of minor subjects and minor places; there is nothing of formal or aesthetic worth—let alone political. Under this late liberal logic, the worth of minor art is primarily gained through proper understandings of context and history (expanding the inclusion of other sites to our halls of knowledge and what we value), whereby minor art cannot formally innovate like the West nor rethink the value systems that uphold our world. In this vein, to solely argue for the increased inclusion and representation through art and culture of minor subjects from minor places furthers this dominant late liberal logic. And as such, we ultimately ignore the very structures that dictate our understandings and approaches to culture, art, and value.

Revisiting 1979 and 1989 in 1999: Cai Guo-Qiang in Venice 

The overlap of theory, art markets, and the university around 1989 illustrates the proper as shaped by late liberalism. The controversial reproduction by Cai Guo-Qiang of Wang Guangyi’s 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard for the 1999 Venice Biennale helps demonstrate the overlap of these multiple areas, along with the effects of late liberalism that have informed the expansion of the global art market. Among others in this book, Cai is an art-world star. With the liberalization of China’s markets, artists began to enter new labor relations with the state. They were able to move away from state-sponsored roles in art practice to become freelance artists within and outside of China. With such a shift, both artists and curators have been able to accumulate capital at much faster rates. These changes in labor practices facilitate the distribution and profits for the art market. The art-world star and curators are of course not absolved from critiques of capital but are rather quite central to its functioning (hence, the aesthetic is not pure possibility but it also cannot be dismissed as merely an expressive causality arising from capital). Many of the artists’ careers that I focus on in this book have been built around proper understandings of China and culture, and these renderings enable the art market, academic fields, and theoretical discourse to operate with ease. I highlight this fact so to avoid exceptionalizing the artist as a figure of potential even for the minor. As I’ve been arguing, culture, art, and artists are imbricated with the problematics of the social and political; these entities are not merely outside or resistant. In addition, there is an inherent tension in a focus on art-world stars as depicting minoritarian concerns. These figures do not per se represent minoritarian or proletarian interests; however, their access to these worlds and how they are understood highlight the ways minoritarian politics are flattened through the proper. The art star’s circulation indexes how minoritarian concerns come to be delimited as global publics learn about the other. 

At the 1999 Venice Biennale, Cai won the Golden Lion Award for a reproduction of Wang Guangyi’s iconic sculpture. The original 1965 work was lauded by Chinese revolutionaries, since it directly depicted and mediated socialist ideals. The piece involves multiple life-sized clay figures that are arranged doing intensely laborious tasks across twenty-six scenes: pushing goods, tilling the soil, and picking crops. The faces of the workers are not cheerful about their pastoral lives; instead, their pained expressions reveal a critique of previous feudal realities which the Cultural Revolution sought to remedy. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, praised the original 1965 work for embodying socialist ideals. Within this earlier context, the work demonstrated a direct mediation across aesthetics and politics, whereby socialist political goals were depicted by the plight of the rural proletariat living under abusive, feudal relations. Although Cai’s reproduction was acknowledged by the international art world, the piece caused massive controversy. The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute threatened to sue the Venice Biennale for lack of copyright. 

Cai’s Rent Collection was continually filtered through the proper. For the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Cai’s goals veered away from the institution’s desire to provide laudatory images of China. Controversy over Cai’s reproduction ensued through debates over copyright, along with the fact that Cai was not considered properly Chinese. The press release by the Fine Arts Institute frames Cai’s rendition as an “appropriation” that is done by “an overseas Chinese artist, domiciled in Japan, and then subsequently reproduced and renamed Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard for the 48th Venice Biennale, without copyright permission.”[49] The press release is preoccupied with the original proper meaning of the work, along with Cai’s status as an overseas Chinese subject. Since the original piece has become quite iconic, the press release insinuates that it can only be recreated by someone who deploys artistic production to reveal Wang Guangyi’s original intent, purpose, and politics. In addition, for the global art market, Cai’s reproduction was celebrated, especially as the work referenced a legible moment in Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution. For Venice and the art world at large, Cai’s version of China is nonetheless understood as proper China, with the artist viewed as reproducing a legible formulation of the aesthetic. In particular, most critics during the opening of the 1999 Biennale described Cai’s work as “political” and as an aperture into the realities of China with the work “reminding people that life might be tough under Mao, but it was horribly worse under feudalism.”[50] In other words, Cai’s art comes to be framed as demonstrating a political statement against illiberal Maoist and feudalist states, thereby making the aesthetic properly legible as critique and resistance. In this vein, Cai’s work is continually understood through late liberalism and Rancière’s framework, whereby art and the aesthetic not only increase the representation of the non-West, but also perpetuate our sensibilities surrounding what we value and what we deem properly political. 

Cai, however, offers less direct forms of mediation surrounding socialism and the Cultural Revolution. For his reproduction, the artist hired some of the sculptors who had previously worked on the original piece; the team recreated the sculptures in real time throughout the festival. Cai’s larger aim was to focus on it as a performance to renegotiate our relationship to sculpture: from one of “looking at” it to “looking at the making of sculpture.”[51] The artist sought to consider how performance helps us think differently about this iconic piece—from a true and immediate depiction of politics to a less linear understanding or mediation between art and the political. By allowing audiences to watch the making of sculpture in the Arsenale building at Venice, the artist highlights the labor surrounding aesthetic production, bringing to the fore culture’s imbrication with the social and political. Put differently, Cai was not trying to solely demonstrate a resistance against the illiberal state or to critique the state for current and past (feudal and Maoist) ills. Rather, he sought to revisit previous socialist ideals in order to reconsider labor under Mao and within late capital and to understand the idea of the state as shifting in form, in theory, and a becoming. 

In particular, Cai uses tensions across media (sculpture and performance) to highlight differing understandings of labor. By deprivileging the final product as a sculpture, Cai reminds viewers through the sculptors’ labor as performance how living labor and aesthetic production are closely entwined (perhaps one and the same). This condition around labor and the aesthetic is one that ultimately helps us take stock of the place of work, particularly changes in our relations to labor from socialism (before 1979) to late liberalism (1989, 1999, and beyond). Through mediation, Cai also highlights how such a rethinking is important to grapple with the idea of work as it relates to the past, present, and future of socialism and China. As such, the artist nuances the state and attempts to render China common by examining how socialist ideals have shifted since the original work was created, complicating understandings of the state beyond authoritarianism. And by focusing on the production of the work, Cai uses performance to consider how older and newer generations of sculptors could become part of this work beyond state-sanctioned discourse. Cai discusses this piece as one that takes stock of the shifting “relationship between artists and their time and politics,” which requires a more capacious articulation across aesthetics and politics due to the role of history and changes in the state and its political ideals (from socialism to liberalized markets).[52] However, the institutional apparatuses of the art market and late liberalism render these concerns opaque, privileging proper formulations of China as articulated through a legible historical moment and a direct relation between aesthetics and politics. Through the proper, Cai’s focus on socialism becomes illegible, unimaginable, and illiberal. 

As such, a theory of the aesthetic that is not based in liberal ideals or late liberal logics is needed. Cai’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, along with the artists and art objects in the remainder of this book, offers moments to take note of our dominant tendencies and gestures toward ways to develop less linear engagements across aesthetics and politics. Even though late liberalism reinforces proper China, the proper non-West, and narrow understandings of culture, we must attend to these minor aesthetic and medial details of artworks. They enable a method that highlights the dominant assumptions, epistemological foundations, and ontological conditions that limit how we engage non-Western art and artists. In particular, Cai’s aesthetics attend to socialism in ways that bring to the fore how the illiberal and Marxist thought come to be obscured under late liberalism. Although 1989 has been noted as a wistful moment for the global Left, Cai’s performance and sculpture remind us of the import of socialism. It offers a deeper consideration and theory of social structuration, as the aesthetic and culture are not heralded as pure possibility but rather understood as elements entangled with the limits of our world.[53] Thus, as Michael Dutton notes about Cai’s work, these returns to socialism help us deal “with humanity and the question of the political differently.”[54] Cai brings to the fore the illiberal, whereby culture and the aesthetic not only enmesh with the problems of the social, but also revise proper formulations of China and what we consider to be political. The remainder of this book attends to the complexity, illiberality, and indirect mediation of works like Cai’s that expand our understandings of the political and aesthetic beyond the proper and toward the common, indirect, minor, and improper. 

Notes

[1] Stein, Geographical History of America, 64.

[2] Adam, Dark Side of the Boom; Horowitz, Art of the Deal; Schnayerson, Boom; Don Thompson, $12 Million Stuffed Shark.

[3] Findlay, Value of Art; Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World.

[4] Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art helpfully situates the art market to global capital.

[5] I offer historical background on contemporary Chinese art to revise it in both this chapter and chapter 3. In chapter 3, I discuss how curators Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei differently approach and revise this history. Curation is a critical mechanism by which to understand how the proper and China intersect; these curators use the minorness of affect to curate the history of Chinese art beyond the notions of import, value, and teleology.

[6] In addition to the historicization of the culture wars, the art historical accounts of the global art market place art production in relation to capitalism. Isabelle Graw and Titia Hulst offer a broad overview of the global art market. See Grew, High Price; and Hulst, History of the Western Art Market. Further, it is the larger ethnographic and sociological turns toward the art world that have provided a trenchant grounding on the context of neoliberalism and financialization that informs the global art market. Nestor Canclini and Matti Bunzl direct us toward the corporatized logics of museums and the art world. The shifts in financialization highlight the growth of the art market for which China plays a crucial role in these multiple sectors. See Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde; and Canclini, Art beyond Itself. Further, for Marxist analyses of such shifts, see Stallabrass, Art Incorporated; Paul Werner, Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006); and Wu, Privatising Culture.

[7] This chapter follows Michael Dutton who offers a helpful method by deploying affect to understand an event like the Cultural Revolution. (Dutton, “Cultural Revolution as Method.”).

[8] Some have debated over the historicization of the category of contemporary art from marking years like 1945, 1960, and 1989. See T. Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?

[9] Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 31. I return to a discussion of minor subjects as ontological absolutes in chapter 3, as the concept relates to work by Yan Xing and notions of diaspora.

[10] Scott Reyburn, “The Biggest-Selling Artist at Auction Is a Name You May Not Know,” New York Times, June 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/arts/china-art-auction-zhang-daqian.html?_r=0&mtrref=www.google.com. 

[11] One of my anonymous reviewers was helpful in directing me to the overlap between the art market and film industry. And although this book does not focus on the film industry or journalism, I mark these parallels to better understand the overlap of the art market with other aesthetic practices and industries. Chinese film studies has an established discourse. For some key texts that inform my approach, see W. Bao, Fiery Cinema; Chow, Primitive Passions; Dai, Cinema and Desire; Ma, Melancholy Drift; McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity.

[12] Karl, Magic of Concepts, 25.

[13] Ferguson, Reorder of Things; and Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment.

[14] Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 192.

[15] Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, 2. The original version was published in French in 1990.

[16] The Frankfurt School is a clear precursor to aesthetics and politics discourse; however, I focus this chapter on Rancière since his theories animate many contemporary debates. Further, Maoism and the Cultural Revolution are important events that inform Rancière’s famous break from Althusser.

[17] In this chapter, I conflate culture, art, and aesthetics for purposes of this argument surrounding the proper. In my teaching, I emphasize the need to conceptualize each of these terms differently, and I certainly find value in understanding and tracing the unique genealogies surrounding each idea. However, I place culture, art, and aesthetics under a similar rubric here so as to produce my argument around the proper and emphasize how although each might differ in definition, they are often discussed as having agency to contribute to and shape the political. I could theorize the aesthetic as distinct from proper and dominant formulations of culture. However, such a move merely replicates the enshrinement of the aesthetic. I thus use these terms together in order to show a larger, late liberal trend that continually depicts culture, art, and aesthetics as possibility and significant for the political. This is further theorized at the end of this chapter, particularly as it relates to Rancière’s oft-cited discourse on aesthetics and politics.

[18] Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution; P. Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution.

[19] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity; Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China.

[20] See J. Clark, Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium; Debevoise, Between State and Market; and Gladston, “Avant-Garde” Art Groups in China. 

[21] Of note, recent books shift away from major narratives surrounding contemporary Chinese art, opening up space to consider the works in relation to a larger project surrounding theory. See Heinrich, Chinese Surplus; Welland, Experimental Beijing; and Wong, Van Gogh on Demand.

[22] Most collections begin with a history of China after the Cultural Revolution and then open up into discussions over globalization and circulation. See Chiu and Genocchio, Contemporary Art in Asia; Gao Minglu, Total Modernity; and Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art.

[23] Hou Hanru, “Entropy, Chinese Artists,” 61.

[24] Hou Hanru, “Entropy, Chinese Artists,” 61.

[25] Holland Carter, “The Brave New Face of Art from the East,” New York Times, September 29, 1996.

[26] Desai, Asian Art in the Twenty-First Century.

[27] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity, 6.

[28] Magiciens de la Terre also had its share of controversy. Most notably, there was a special issue of Third Text following the exhibit that heavily critiqued the show. More recently, in 2014, the Asian Art Archive in New York held an event which revisited the construction and controversy surrounding the show, particularly in relation to Chinese artists.

[29] Wang Youshen, Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Fang Lijun, Li Xianting, Feng Mengbo, Wu Shanzhuan, Geng Jianyi, and Liao Wen were initially a part of Venice.

[30] For a thorough overview of many of these shows, see Erickson, “Reception in the West.”

[31] Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 24. See also Ahmed, On Being Included.

[32] J. Harris, Global Contemporary Art World; Horowitz, Art of the Deal; and Zarobell, Art and the Global Economy.

[33] Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 26.

[34] Harootunian, “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious.”

[35] Chuh and Shimakawa, Orientations.

[36] Arondekar and Patel, “Introduction: Area Impossible.”

[37] Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 36–37.

[38] Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, 2.

[39] Jean-Hubert Martin, Magiciens de la Terre (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989), 8. Translation mine: “Pourtant, de l’idée d’une enquête sur la création dans le monde aujourd’hui, on pouvait imaginer de n’exposer que des auteurs non occidentaux, sachant que l’existence de l’art dans nos centres ne fait pas de doute. C’était persister à mettre des créateurs dans un ghetto, dans une catégorie ethnographique de survivance archaïque issue des expositions coloniales, alors qu’il importe d’affirmer leur existence dans le présent.”

[40] Martin, Magiciens de la Terre, 8–9. Translation mine: “Tous ces object, d’ici ou d’ailleurs, ont en commun d’avoir une aura. . . . C’est par le mot de ‘magie’ que l’on qualifie communément l’influence vive et inexplicable qu’exerce l’art.”

[41] Onians, “World Art Studies.”

[42] Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 26.

[43] Hunter, Culture Wars, 42. See also A. Hartman, War for the Soul of America; and Rodgers, Age of Fracture.

[44] Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 8.

[45] For an overview of China’s relation to arts and politics, particularly around figures like Lu Xun to Mao Zedong, see Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism.

[46] Rancière’s framing of the sensible has become so central that Artforum dedicated an entire issue in 2007 to his work. It is important to historicize Rancière’s work as it relates to the Frankfurt school, since someone like Adorno is a key interlocutor to discourses on aesthetics and politics. I do not delve into the Frankfurt school in this book; however, I find this an important area so to more expansively consider how discourse on aesthetics and politics has shifted.

[47] Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 40.

[48] Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 13.

[49] Erickson, “Rent Collection Copyright Breached Overseas,” 55.

[50] Adrian Searle, “Dearth in Venice: The Gory Chinese Influx Makes a Refreshing Change,” Guardian, June 15, 1999; Carol Vogel, “At the Venice Biennale, Art Is Turning into an Interactive Sport,” New York Times, June 14, 1999.

[51] Cai Guo-Qiang, “Wenhau zhijan de yaobai,” 6.

[52] “Boris Groys and Cai Guo-Qiang: A Conversation from a Studio Visit,” e-flux, February 9, 2017, https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/boris-groys-and-cai-guo-qiang-a-conversation-from-a-studio-visit/7625.

[53] This chapter has been gesturing towards the need to return to earlier discourses surrounding causality and Marxism. These earlier debates could be revisited through a deeper attunement to the global and racial so as to further what I have offered here. 

[54] Dutton, “Fragments of the Political,” 134.