Spaces of disappearance: aesthetic responses to contemporary Beijing city planning

Abstract

The construction boom of the past two decades, primarily funded by the private sector, has engendered fierce aesthetic conflicts due to intense competition for limited space in rapidly modernizing Beijing. Contemporary Chinese artists both protest the commercial exploitation of traditional cultural sites, and appropriate market devices for their ends. In this article I analyze aesthetic strategies employed in experimental art, film, and fiction, which grapple with the tensions inherent in globalization and urban culture in late twentieth‐century Beijing. Examples include installations protesting the forced relocation of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1994 to develop a ‘City of Commerce’ in its place, and renting the Imperial Ancestral Temple in the Forbidden City to exhibit domestic experimental art, as a foil to the orientalist productions promoted at this site. While much contemporary Beijing cultural production shares a realist, documentary drive to address urban, post‐industrial anxieties relative to dislocation, Chinese artists deconstruct the present with a conspicuous absence of nostalgia. The contemporaneity of the ruin is one of the most prevalent expressions of the 1990s urban aesthetic, where the past, as human sentiment, is nonexistent. Rather than anachronistically violating chronology, these works are examples of what Ackbar Abbas terms achronicities, where past and present disappear in each other. As an aesthetic strategy, disappearance is a form of hybridity that resists delimiting not only temporal, but also conceptual and normative frames of reference. By highlighting hybrid effects rather than merely conceptualizing the tensions inherent in the global city, an aesthetics of disappearance functions as a site of resistance while also working to reposition artists at the center of commercial culture.

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