Urbanized interfaces: Visual arts in Chinese cities

Abstract

In the past two decades, unparalleled urbanization in cities across mainland China has deeply affected and transformed Chinese visual arts. Critical artistic and creative examinations of the interfaces between urbanization, society, culture, arts and people in Chinese cities have produced a great variety of new visual forms and agencies. In this introductory essay, we argue that the complexities of reciprocal relationship between urbanization and the visual arts deserve greater scholarly attention than they have been given so far, and we call for continuous and multiple-perspective research into the subject. The visual arts not only mirror the city but they actively participate in city-making processes. The investigation of artists, filmmakers and urbanites into the changing urban space in which they live has given birth to a post-socialist urban aesthetics, which, as Robin Visser proposes, functions as a new realm to envision, experience and assess the city. In doing so, it enables new forms of civic agencies to emerge. Visual art, as indicated by Yomi Braester in his study of Chinese films, interacts with political decisions and architectural plans, creating both material and ideological constructs of the cities. We maintain that the varied forms of visual arts and agencies discussed in this special issue not only reveal and interpret how the processes of globalization and urbanization are interrelated, but also participate in the reconstruction of sociospatial relationships and the reconceptualization of the city at local, national, and even global levels.

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