Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface Edited by Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 324 pp. €95.00; £85.00 ISBN 978-94-6298-223-9

Abstract

One of the most striking features of China's megacities is the ubiquity of construction and demolition in the urban landscape. This structural ephemerality has provoked a range of artistic responses from film-makers, photographers and visual artists keen to document the spatial transformations unfolding in the built environment. The subject of a growing body of scholarship, recent volumes including Wu Hung's Remaking Beijing (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Robin Visser's Cities Surround the Countryside (Duke University Press, 2010), Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen's Spectacle and the City (De Gruyter, 2013) and Meiqin Wang's Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art (Routledge, 2016), to name but a few, have provided wideranging critical analyses of the representation of the Chinese city. Joining this growing corpus of literature comes Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang's edited volume, which promises to offer a "multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China" (p. 13). Thematically split into two sections: representations (chapters one to five) and urban interventions (chapters six to ten), the anthology brings together scholars of art history, film studies, visual culture and the social sciences to probe the sociopolitical dimensions of Chinese urbanization, extending scholarship "into the realm of cultural activism in urban China" (p. 16). Major themes that emerge from the essays include the role of migrant labour in the transformation of China's cities, the impact of widening socioeconomic disparities and urban demolition, the temporal-spatial restructuring and staging of the Chinese city and an exploration of artistic creativity contingent on the built environment. A short review of a multi-author volume by necessity precludes a full summary of each chapter, and while I won't discuss the invaluable insights offered by Maurizio Marinelli, Jiang Jiehong, Judith Pernin and Minna Valjakka, I would like to discuss some of the volume's individual contributions. In chapter one, Zhen Zhang explores the digital video (DV) turn in documentary film through the lens of Yang Lina. Tracing Yang's career, Zhang not only situates her as an "emblematic transitional figure between Urban Generation cinema, DV documentary and independent feminist film-making" (p. 38), but also demonstrates how she "re-embeds the sidewalk xianchang documentary aesthetic within a 'spectral realism' that anatomizes contemporary Chinese urban life" (p. 35). Focusing on the conceptual photography of Ni Weihua, Meiqin Wang's individually authored chapter examines his response to the saturation of Shanghai's urban spaces with both state-produced and commercial images, illustrating how these works represent the artist's efforts "to simultaneously document and deconstruct China's official discourses of economic development and consumerist urbanization" (p. 117). In chapter five, Stefan Landsberger provides an important counterpoint to these arguments in his analysis of posters...