Anxiety Aesthetics
By Jennifer Dorothy Lee
“Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.”
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.
Author(s): Jennifer Dorothy Lee
Year: 2024
Pages: 208
Dimensions: 7’’x10’’
Cover: Softcover
ISBN: 9780520393783
Language: English
By Jennifer Dorothy Lee
“Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.”
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.
Author(s): Jennifer Dorothy Lee
Year: 2024
Pages: 208
Dimensions: 7’’x10’’
Cover: Softcover
ISBN: 9780520393783
Language: English
By Jennifer Dorothy Lee
“Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.”
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.
Author(s): Jennifer Dorothy Lee
Year: 2024
Pages: 208
Dimensions: 7’’x10’’
Cover: Softcover
ISBN: 9780520393783
Language: English