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This wide-ranging intellectual and media history traces China’s emergence as a modern state in which boundaries blur between art and design, education and psychological conditioning. Tracking the parallel development of set design and social engineering from the 1920s to the 1960s, Background Matters examines the concept of huanjing (environment), a neologism introduced at the turn of the twentieth century that evoked heated intellectual debates and inspired frenzied aesthetic experimentation. Weihong Bao shows how efforts to reshape the mind consolidated the idea and art of environment by advancing a new theoretical notion of set design: both as aesthetic organization across film, theater, radio, and television and as social experimentation in worldmaking across geopolitical and transnational contexts. Inventive and breathtaking in scope, this book radically rethinks environment not as an external object but as the nexus of mind, medium, and society.
Weihong Bao is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945.
"Background Matters will blow your mind. In this extraordinary book, Weihong Bao brilliantly historicizes the co-emergence of modern set design, psychology, and the 'environment' as dynamic stages for technical, aesthetic, and political experiments of worldmaking. Fascinating and deeply researched, this groundbreaking book expands our thinking about cinema, theater, television, architecture, and much more.”—Yuriko Furuhata, author of Archives of the Anthropocene: Visual Grammars of Deep Time
“A stunning, ambitious book. In this history of environmental design and media theory in China, Bao focuses on a period when the modern state was trying to optimize the human subject by fine-tuning communication technologies. Tracing the exchange of ideas between Chinese, American, and European researchers, she explores the tension that has come to define the twentieth century and its principles of atmospheric engineering: the threat of mass mind control on one hand and the promise of liberation from an isolated or alienated consciousness on the other. This history is far from over.”—Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene
"Bao makes some bold proposals—that defining environment means defining world and that scene setting is an act of cosmopolitics—within a stunningly fresh archive of audiovisual materials from modern China. As the ancient Greeks knew, and Bao knows just as well, theater is theory. To look is to behold—to make—a cosmos. A corrective to our lazily Euro-American histories."—John Durham Peters, coauthor of Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History
“Deeply researched, compellingly argued, and full of surprises, Background Matters asks that we profoundly rethink the meaning of set design, moving beyond the familiar sense of staging to find its logics at work across a surprising number of aesthetic practices during the twentieth century. A treasure trove for scholars in film studies, media theory, architecture, theater history, communications, and more.”—Craig Buckley, author of Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s “This is an immensely ambitious and important book. Bao excavates the genealogy of set design to radically reorient the way we talk about the environment in relation to media. In doing so, she tells a new history of Chinese technical media, from theater to cinema to radio to television. With a transnational framework that weaves together intellectual history, archival discoveries, and close analysis of media texts, she has written a book to shape the field.”—Daniel Morgan, author of The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera “By tracing the entanglements of set design in modern China with film, theater, television, psychology, education, and cybernetics, Background Matters reshapes our understanding of media environments across disciplines. Like her acclaimed Fiery Cinema, Bao’s new book will inspire students and scholars with rich historical excavations, revelatory close readings, and pathbreaking theoretical interventions.”—Jie Li, author of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China