Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985

Jennifer Dorothy Lee

Univ of California Press, Feb 6, 2024 - Art - 208 pages

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.

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About the author

Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of East Asian Art in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985
• Author: Jennifer Dorothy Lee
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Univ of California Press, 2024
• ISBN: 0520393775, 9780520393776
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Art / Asian / Chinese; Art / Asian / General; Art / General; Art / History / 20th & 21st Century; Art / History / General; Political Science / General; Social Science / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / Asian Studies