Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978–80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.
Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of East Asian Art in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
"Anxiety Aesthetics is the first monograph to focus exclusively on the crucial decade after the Cultural Revolution ended and China's art world began to open to the international community. Jennifer Lee's work is a timely and much-needed study of modern China in that crucial transitional period. It is indisputably a major contribution to multiple fields, including modern Chinese art history and interdisciplinary Chinese studies."—Kuiyi Shen, Professor of Art History, University of California, San Diego
"Original, subtle, and emphatic, Lee's book is an indispensable contribution to the rethinking of contemporary Chinese art. Breaking free from the conventional historiography that views the postsocialist transition as a break, Lee sheds much-needed light on the confusion, reluctance, remorse, anxiety, and excitement of the late Cultural Revolution and early Reform years. Her analysis is a must-read for those seeking to understand art in the aftermath of Maoist radicalism in China."—Yi Gu, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Toronto
"Defying conventional accounts, Lee unspools an analytical history of aesthetics and art practices in China's early 1980s. She illumines the liminal moments during which cultural producers fashioned new artistic possibilities just as the day-after-the-revolution-ended was dawning. Provocative and articulate, this elegant book is essential for anyone interested in how crises of ambiguously anxious times yield enduring experiments in culture."—Rebecca E. Karl, Professor of History, New York University
"Exploring newly emerging artistic practices and discourses in post–Cultural Revolution China at the crossroads of visual art, literature, and aesthetics, this original book offers a penetrating analysis of an extraordinarily creative yet ambivalent and anxious moment that has foreshadowed the development of Chinese art over the past forty years. Highly recommended."—Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago
208 pp.7 x 10Illus: 31 color illustrations
9780520393783$34.95|£30.00Paper
Feb 2024