The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China

Chang Tan The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024. 224 pp.; 28 color ills.; 29 b/w ills. Hardcover $46.95 (9781501773181)

Joining a growing number of publications that have sought to reexamine China’s socialist legacy, two new books examine the ways in which contemporary art practice and discourse reengaged the social and political commitments of the Maoist period (1949–76). Jennifer Lee’s Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 focuses on the roughly eight years immediately following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to examine how artists and intellectuals reconfigured socialist aesthetics for the post-Mao era. In The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China, Chang Tan looks to a later moment in the 1990s and early 2000s when artists deliberately invoked, thematized, and incorporated the “minjian,” or the nonelite mass public, in their art practices. While both books focus on the search for artistic subjectivities that are informed by the contradictions of the post-Mao transition, they take fundamentally different approaches.

Anxiety Aesthetics covers an understudied period in current art historical scholarship. While many scholars have focused on contemporary art well after the end of the Cultural Revolution and others including Julia Andrews, Denise Ho, and Yi Gu, have looked back to reassess the Mao years, few—with the exception of Jane Debevoise and Martina Köppel-Yang— have paid close attention to the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Lee shows us that this period of artistic transition is indeed worthy of our attention.

Focusing “less on object-oriented approaches to works of art and more on a holistic portrait that takes up the discourse, intellectual history, and events that together form the maker of art,” Anxiety Aesthetics foregrounds socialist aesthetics—a lineage of socially engaged art practices and aesthetic theories—which constitutes what Lee sees as a prehistory of contemporary art in China today (5).

Lee distinguishes her account from previous efforts to examine appropriations of Mao-era imagery in contemporary art by her aims to take socialism seriously. Lee hones in on what she calls a period of revolutionary failure to develop her key concept of “anxiety aesthetics,” which she defines through John Dewey’s concept of a “structure of feeling,” as a “a persistent revolutionary episteme, an order of knowing...