The avant-gardism of socially engaged art in contemporary China: Aestheticizing everyday lives at the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives

Four dining tables, modified by four contemporary Chinese artists, are installed in a local restaurant in Yangdeng, a poor and remote rural town in Southwest China. This restaurant is a typical small family business. A big wok and stove occupy half of the entrance. Behind the restaurant is a living space where the family watch television during their off-hours. Woodcarvings are found on top of each table: a pack of cigarettes, a pair of chopsticks, a small saucer, and a set of motorcycle keys. When visitors sit down to eat, they instinctively interact with the pieces of art on the table, by picking up the chopsticks, taking a cigarette from the pack, or sampling the hot sauce from the little plate (Figure 1). Then, they would realize that none of these items are actually usable. Although the sculptures look realistic they are imitations. They oscillate between the real and the fictional and blur the boundary between artworks and ordinary objects that the residents encounter and use in their everyday lives. The four sculptures are ‘Pandora’s boxes’, the magic of which transforms the small, narrow, and dark restaurant into a new space. The artists have renamed the restaurant ‘Fengdouhua Art Museum’, an artistically transformed space for local residents where they encounter something extraordinary within the everyday (Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A child playing a woodcarving in Fengdouhua Art Museum.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

A wood-carved cigarette pack.

The Fengdouhua Art Museum (2014) is a collaborative art project conducted by artists from the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives. In 2012, contemporary Chinese sculptor Jiao Xingtao launched the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, a long-term, socially engaged art project in the northern Guizhou Province which explores a collaborative format in contemporary art practice. Over the course of time, Jiao and his colleagues have created collaborative artworks with local craftsman, conducted participatory art projects during village market days, painted colourful graffiti on residential buildings, developed site-specific art museums in which they curated exhibitions, and installed land art projects at the riverbank, on school campuses, in the fields, on mountain tops, and on broken bridge foundations. Like the Fengdouhua Art Museum, the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives are interested in the ordinary things and activities of the local residents in their everyday lives, and their aim is to make meaning of the ordinary prominent through a series of aesthetic activities. This article sheds light on how this socially engaged art project aestheticizes the ordinariness of the everyday, and how it contributes theoretically to the question of avant-gardism in socially engaged art.

In socially engaged art practices, avant-garde gestures, such as promoting amateurish and collective working methods, still function. These gestures reject individual authorship, facilitate relationships between artists and participants, and strive for a wide range of participation. Furthermore, the avant-garde mission of ‘attacking the status of art in bourgeois society by reintegrating art into the life process’ ¹ more or less has an impact on socially engaged art as a criticism of consumer society and neoliberal ideology and as a pursuit of public awareness, civic engagement, and political participation. In art theory, Boris Groys’s ‘direct realism’ essentially explores the avant-gardism of socially engaged art. Direct realism refers to art that neither represents nor produces objects, but instead, produces practices. ² According to Claire Bishop, ‘socially engaged art forms the avant-garde we have today: artists devising social situations as a dematerialised, anti-market, and politically engaged project in order to carry on the avant-garde call to make art a more vital part of life’. ³ While these scholars regard socially engaged art as having an explicit connection to the legacy of the avant-garde, several art historians question this connection. For example, Grant Kester claims that the connection is not valid, since socially engaged art aims to corroborate a conventional system of meaning whereas the avant-garde usually challenges it. ⁴ The different opinions on the connection between socially engaged art and the avant-garde are not only caused by the various avant-garde tactics and strategies which artists employ in their socially engaged art projects, but also stem from how we understand avant-garde issues through reconsidering the relationship between politics and aesthetics formed by the artworks.

In China, avant-garde tactics and strategies were first adopted by artists in the New Woodcut Movement (1920s–30s). ⁵ They transformed the European avant-garde scene into proletariat art practices in order to mobilize the masses to participate in the national salvation. In the 1980s, the avant-garde was reintroduced by the first generation of Chinese contemporary artists through the '85 Avant-Garde Art Movement ⁶ as a way of seeking autonomy in art in reaction to the dominance of Socialist Realism in the socialist period, and as a strategy to reconnect artistic creativity with the praxis of everyday life after the initiation of reform and opening-up. ⁷ In the new millennium, artists have revived the avant-garde legacy of the '85 Movement and expanded their intervention to contemporary social circumstances. As Chinese art critic and curator Wang Nanming suggests, artists who employ their artistic training to investigate current Chinese social problems and initiate local-specific strategies of intervention and real social change are the avant-garde of contemporary China. ⁸ In fact, a series of avant-garde practices in 21st-century China have gravitated towards the new art genre socially engaged art. In this genre, the avant-garde has been employed by artists in their artistic pursuit of publicness, social criticism, community reconstruction, bottom–up citizen participation, grass-roots interests, and social justice in marginal places. Meiqin Wang describes these practices as ‘voices from below’. ‘Below’ here, according to Wang, refers to ‘the marginalised regions, marginalised people, and marginalised aspects of social life that socially engaged art practitioners tend to focus on’. ⁹

Regarding approaches, socially engaged art often blurs the boundary between artistic efficacy and ethical efficacy. This is what Chinese avant-garde art did not encounter in either the 1930s or the 1980s, because socially engaged art in 21st-century China tends to be more socially inclusive and less explicitly autonomous in terms of aesthetics. Wang Chunchen, a Chinese curator, proposes that socially engaged art should produce a ‘new sensible’ and establish a ‘new artistic relation’ in order to properly intervene in society. ¹⁰ These two phrases about the ‘new’ implicate what Jacques Rancière calls ‘mixing the strangeness of the aesthetic experience with the becoming-life of art and the becoming-art of ordinary life’. ¹¹ Re-evaluating the relationship between aesthetic experience and ordinary life results in a number of new avant-garde gestures that socially engaged art could approach. One of them is aestheticizing the ordinariness of everyday life. I term the outcome of the aesthetic process as ‘ordinary aesthetics’, which is associated with a series of imaginative, inventive and creative practices of the everyday. It is the aesthetics in everyday ordinariness.

The ‘ordinary’ of the everyday is a depleted form of life, often characterized as a culture of boredom, routine, habit, and familiarity. ¹² For instance, Raymond Williams saw the ordinary as a commitment to the messy, provisional and deeply corporeal ‘whole ways of life’ of a community, a culture. ¹³ According to Williams, the ordinary is the absence of creativity. Henri Lefebvre focuses on the critique of the alienation of ordinary life in the urban environment and calls for a site of possible transformation. Similarly, Michel de Certeau emphasizes the imaginative and inventive practices of the everyday, and criticizes the theoretical position that sees the social saturated by the dominance of powerful interests. In recent studies, Ben Highmore describes the ordinary as just nothing ‘much’. ¹⁴ Like his predecessors, he seeks aesthetic experiences to produce imaginative acts for thinking the seemingly impossible. ¹⁵

I structure the concept of ordinary aesthetics in this cultural context. Thus, ordinary aesthetics signifies that an ordinary life is already aesthetic as it is lived in a world, sensually and sensorially shaped by a whole panoply of form that includes artistic materials. However, this aesthetic would not be visible if artists did not promote a series of aesthetic experiences negotiating life. While the power of ordinary aesthetics can be harnessed to improve the quality of life, it can also be used to serve a political agenda to shape a Rancièrian understanding of aesthetics in which art generates dissensus in society and distributes the sensible. ¹⁶ In this article, ordinary aesthetics is examined through a case study of the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives. It is analysed as a means to rediscover the avant-gardism of socially engaged art. I argue that in order to promote ordinary aesthetics, artists engage in local residents’ everyday lives by making their ordinary lives, which tends to be considered as lacking creativity, extraordinary through art. Technically, the artists blur the boundary between the real and the fictional to aestheticize local residents’ everyday lives.

To map out how ordinary aesthetics reformulates the avant-gardism of socially engaged art, I first introduce the reason for launching the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives by contextualizing this art project within the rural transformation in China over the past four decades. This transformation, which was mainly caused by the effect of the market economy, has impacted the traditional rural society and resulted in an increasing number of social problems exacerbating the precarity of local rural life. I then take a close look at the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives by examining how artists engage in local residents’ everyday lives and promote ordinary aesthetics by blurring the boundary between the real and the fictional in their various works such as sculptures and site-specific activities. The theoretical section of this article focuses on an analysis of the avant-gardism of socially engaged art. It demonstrates how this new avant-gardism can be understood as an aesthetic manifestation of the ethical dimension in a new relationship between politics and aesthetics.

The Yangdeng community in the rural transformation of China

In the new millennium when Chinese contemporary art achieved market prosperity, a number of artists declared the countryside as a place for contemporary cultural production. Their practices not only criticize the overwhelming urban-centric and commercialized art production, but also critically respond to the unsustainable rural development in the country.

In 2000, Li Changping, a rural cadre from Hubei Province, wrote an open letter to Premier Zhu Rongji, which was later published in the newspaper Southern Weekly (南方周末), entitled ‘A township party secretary’s innermost thoughts’. In this letter, Li claims that ‘peasants are really suffering; villages are really poor; and agriculture is really in a crisis’. ¹⁷ Calling attention to the sufferings and grievances of the peasant population, the letter initiated a nationwide debate, and directed intellectuals’ attention to a critique of the ‘three rural issues’ (三农问题), a term proposed by Chinese sociologist Wen Tiejun, which either literally refers to ‘agriculture, peasants, and rural societies’ or alludes to the decline in these three categories. ¹⁸ According to Wen, the three rural issues were caused by the economy-focused rural modernization beginning in the 1980s, which resulted in a dramatic decline in peasant living conditions and rural society, brought greater rural activism, and increased resource expropriation. ¹⁹ In other words, the issues were a result of the rural–urban dichotomy that placed too much burden on the peasants.

In their response to the three rural issues, artists strived to countermand globalization and over-urbanization, reiterated the importance of local problems, and tried to explore an alternative path of development in China, through various practices in rural villages and towns. ²⁰ Over the past decade, rural socially engaged art has emerged in Shanxi (Xucun Art Commune, 2009–present), Gansu (Shijiezi Art Museum, 2009–present), Guizhou (Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, 2012–present; Maogong Plan, 2015–18), Yunnan (Jingmaishan Art Project, 2016–present), Guangdong (Qingtian Plan, 2016–present), Zhejiang (Xuaodi Art Festival, 2019–present), and other areas of mainland China. As Meiqin Wang suggests, these projects collectively aim to ‘revitalise the deprived countryside through art and cultural activities, foster the growth of place-specific civic spaces, and accentuate the participation of local, grass-roots populations, as well as the collaboration of urban intellectuals from various backgrounds’. ²¹

The Yangdeng Art Cooperatives was launched within this context. This project, on the one hand, demonstrates the artist’s breakthrough in the market-driven logic of art production. As Jiao explained in his presentation at a seminar in Taipei in 2013, the whole project began with his doubts about market-driven Chinese contemporary art. He said, ‘One day in the year 2008, I sat in my studio and looked at my works. They were packed, but never had a chance to be shipped somewhere else. I sensed something. Although it was unclear, I strongly felt that all the flourishing would suddenly diminish.’ ²² On the other hand, the launch of the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives represented Jiao’s ambition as a public intellectual to participate in the reconstruction of rural communities. After conducting intensive research on his contemporaries, with a specific focus on the Bishan Commune, ²³ Jiao discovered Yangdeng, a rural town in Northern Guizhou Province, in his search for alternatives. Unlike Ou Ning, one of the initiators of the Bishan Commune, Jiao is not interested in rural reconstruction at any political or economic level. As he explains in an interview, ‘I think for artists, to influence the politics and economics of a rural community is too grand a narrative. He [Ou Ning] makes art too hard. I want to make art easier.’ ²⁴ Jiao and his team pay attention to the everyday activities of every individual. They aim at renovating local residents’ everyday lives.

The project began with a series of fieldwork. Collaborating with cultural anthropologists, Jiao and his team spent almost one year exploring the ecological system, folk culture, local religions, social organizations, and the cultural and economic transformations in the greater Yangdeng area. They even purchased a house (for less than US$15,000) in town to serve as a residence for artists, a museum for exhibitions, an archive for public education as well as academic research, and a base for communication between artists and the local people. Their field research concluded with an understanding of China’s dramatic rural transformation after reform and opening up which has impacted the individual activities, social norms, and emotional relations of this rural community.

Specifically, they studied Fei Xiaotong, a leading Chinese anthropologist, to gain an understanding of traditional Chinese ethnic groups. Fei uses the image of water rippling from the centre as a metaphor for the organization of Chinese rural society. He proposes the term ‘society of familiars’, which relates to the self with regard to the social relations bound by kinship. ²⁵ Fei’s research indicates that the social organization of rural China is not strictly regulated by rationalism and legislation but, instead, it is determined by emotional relations. Jiao and his team also thoroughly read the research of the Central China School of Rural Studies to understand how agricultural marketization and rural modernization after reform and opening up have loosened traditional emotional relations. ²⁶ He Xuefeng, the leading figure in the Central China School of Rural Studies, points out that the commercialization of rural China shapes a more rationalized community, which he characterizes as ‘modern contract relations’. ²⁷ This relation has transformed Chinese rural society into a ‘society of semi-familiars’. ²⁸ Compared to the society of familiars, in which behaviours and decision-making are based on local social norms, the latter society of semi-familiars demonstrates the weak effects of local social norms as well as the strong effect of market regulations on behaviour and decision-making. ²⁹ Since the logic of market priority diminishes the emotional relations tied to the society of familiars, local residents’ emotional relations in the society of semi-familiars are either determined by kinship or impacted by market profits. Therefore, the transformation from a society of familiars to that of semi-familiars implicates that the rural marketization in China is not only at an economic level but also at an emotional level. This transformation results in emotional relations among the peasants, which is bound by their common emotional attachments to the city and commercial society. Such emotional relations regulate the logic of peasants’ actions in their everyday lives. Jiao and his team use these theoretical frames to better understand the social fabric of Yangdeng, a poor rural town is located in the countryside of Tongzi County, Guizhou Province, in Southwest China (Figure 3). In the local dialect, yangdeng means a goat standing on a precipitous terrain. Difficult terrain has negatively impacted daily life in Yangdeng. Due to the poor state of transportation and inefficient communications, mobility is limited and the development of local education and health care systems is slow. The illegal coal mining industry not only pollutes the Yangdeng River, the main water source of the greater Yangdeng Township, but also severely damages the local underground water system. Like most of the rural areas in China where the widening socio-economic and cultural gap between the countryside and the city drives young peasants to the cities, Yangdeng has experienced a rapid decline, with its young people, the township’s active human resource, relocating to the cities.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

A panoramic view of Yangdeng.

Jiao finds that although the whole rural area suffers many social, economic, and environmental problems that make life difficult for the local residents, these locals are never pessimistic. Instead, they are passionate and optimistic. As Jiao explains, ‘Local residents in Yangdeng dramatically pursue living in the present with incredible optimism, even though poverty has frustrated their survival.’ ³⁰ They have an emotional attachment to city life, which is expressed in local residents’ desire for commercial products and urban styles, such as real estate advertisements, square dancing, ³¹ KTV houses, ³² foot massage shops, and a local supermarket. These novelties result in attachments that make them feel optimistic. Jiao is interested in the contradiction between the residents’ life struggle and optimism in Yangdeng. He believes that apart from commercial products and urban styles, art could be another emotional attachment to shape the optimism in this rural community. Thus, he attempts to bring quality to their everyday lives through art practices, to aestheticize their everyday lives, and to demonstrate the extraordinary in their routine. What comes after the aesthetic process is ordinary aesthetics: aesthetic scenes mixed with the everyday reality, through which the sensible in their everyday lives can be redistributed. In order to technically achieve ordinary aesthetics, Jiao and his team produce artworks to blur the boundary between the real and the fictional. Art here emerges as a transverse medium enhancing real life. As Jiao claims, ‘Art is a needle which can pierce through life.’ ³³

Between the real and the fictional: Aestheticizing the everyday

Artists’ operations in the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives disavow five common practices: collecting folk songs and music, learning through personal experience, rural reconstruction by cultural means, art charity and philanthropy, and preplanning and predetermining goals. ³⁴ According to Jiao, the core of the five principles is not about what type of art that could be produced, but, rather, about what type of art that should not be produced. ³⁵ This logic of self-negation rejects meanings of art by regarding the context as what it is. In this sense, negotiating and collaborating with local residents and producing works of art according to the local context have become the artists’ main method. The artists use this method to transform the real context via the fiction of art. By engaging art with the real, they create a new fictional context. The blurred boundary between the real and the fictional produces a dreamscape and transforms people’s daily routines.

In Fengdouhua Art Museum, the four objects on the top of the dining tables are imitations (Figure 4). The sculptors use a technique to create perfect copies of real objects, which prompts viewers to question the difference between fake and authentic. At the same time, the space in the restaurant is called an ‘art museum’, which could be either an actual restaurant or an art space. The real and the fictional fluctuates between the two scenes – a place for dining and a space for art production and consumption (Figure 5). The four carved objects present what Jiao calls ‘new realistic sculpture’, an idea that was proposed in his monograph of the same title. According to Jiao, new realistic sculpture stresses the hyperrealistic technique that transforms the fictional into the real or vice versa. ³⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Four carved objects on tables in Fengdouhua Art Museum.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

A view of Fengdouhua Art Museum.

Jiao first explored this sculptural technique in the early 2000s when he was invited by Kunsthochschule Kassel to attend an exhibition. This international art trip offered him the opportunity to visit the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), where he was impressed by the hyperrealist sculptures of Maurizio Cattelan, Ron Mueck, and Chen Zhen. ³⁷ In an article entitled ‘Marginalised sculpture and the peripheries of sculpture: Encountering the Biennale’, Jiao is passionate about hyperrealistic techniques: ‘They are either real or fictional, either human or non-human . . . Through revisiting details and sizes, the two fundamental relations in sculpture, they rethink the concept of “the real”.’ ³⁸ He was also impressed with Jeff Koons, whose works deal with popular culture and everyday objects. ³⁹ By combining hyperrealistic techniques with Koons’s endorsement of commercial products, Jiao created a series of fiberglass sculptures from 2003 to 2008. These sculptures are in the form of a kneaded Wrigley’s Doublemint Chewing Gum cover. For him, representing commercial products hyperrealistically signifies not only a celebration of the consumer society in contemporary China but also the diminution of the profound meaning of the ‘quotidian’. ⁴⁰

As a member of the second generation of Chinese contemporary artists, Jiao interprets the quotidian of his generation as both a critical departure from Socialist Realism, which is still the mainstream style in the college art field, and as a celebration of postmodernity after 1989. His early works are associated with the last wave of Cynical Realism, a genre of Chinese contemporary art, which employs a neutral method of imitation, reappearance, and duplication to create a scenario and then connect it to a completely different context in order to create a different fakeness and a masquerade, achieving a humorous effect of being rather prudish. ⁴¹ Jiao’s cynical tactics are embodied in his contemplation of the appearance, presence, and ordinariness of the everyday when interpreting the quotidian. His expression of cynical humour is closer to showing ‘boredom’ and ‘meaninglessness’, rather than activists’ satire, irony, parody, and caricature. This type of humour lies in the fact that humour can diminish the profound meaning of art by viewing art as how it appears as such. This is exactly what Slavoj Žižek has observed in Hegel’s theory of comedy. As Žižek argues, in comedy, the universal appears directly because the sense of humour overcomes the limits of representation. ⁴² In other words, when humour is employed as an artistic strategy, the appearance undermines the profound meaning represented by artistic mediums.

By viewing art according to how it appears as such, Jiao deconstructs the real of the everyday and of the fiction of art and he entangles the two. In his 2012 solo exhibition ‘Ordinary, Invisible, and Site Specificity’ at the Whitebox Art Center in Beijing, Jiao transformed a gallery space into his studio. ⁴³ The gallery was a juxtaposition of real tools, furniture, objects, and hyperrealistic fake copies which the artist produced by using sculptural techniques. This juxtaposition blurred the boundary between appropriation and originality of objects, and the reality and fiction of the site (Figure 6). He was inspired by the ordinary and transformed it through art. The shining bright appearance of his fibreglass sculptures or the juxtaposition of the authentic and fake, the real and the fictional, demonstrates Jiao’s art philosophy about our existence. As he contends in an interview, ‘The real does not exist and the meaning is not there.’ ⁴⁴ When Jiao launched the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, he expanded this philosophy.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Jiao Xingtao’s solo exhibition ‘Ordinary, Invisible, Site Specificity’ at Whitebox Art Center, Beijing, 2012.

I now analyse three projects conducted by the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, thereby exploring how artists interact with ordinary objects, ordinary spaces, and ordinary incidents. By blurring the boundary between the real and the fictional, artists aestheticize the ordinary and make the everyday compelling.

In the Countryside Carpenter, the first project initiated by the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives in 2012, five artists collaborated with five local carpenters to make objects that were neither functional nor visually beautiful. This ‘neither-nor’ logic blurs the boundary between art and life and turns the real into the fictional. For example, Carpenter Lou who specialized in making coffins and his collaborator artist Zhang Xiang decided to change the size of each coffin slightly and overlapped them like Brancusi’s Endless Column. Likewise, Carpenter Xie who specialized in making furniture, such as wooden stools, chairs, closets, and beds, and Artist Yang Hong collaborated with him to produce four models of Xie’s best furniture, which were half the original size, and they connected each piece to produce a unified structure (Figures 7 and 8). The coffins Lou made and the furniture Xie produced are representative of ordinary carpentry in Yangdeng. However, when the artists slightly changed the size and form of the woodwork, they created pieces that were no longer objects of daily use.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Yang Hong (middle) and Zhang Xiang (right), both artists, in discussion with Carpenter Xie.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 8.

Collaborative artwork by Carpenter Xie and Artist Yang Hong.

These objects were neither visually beautiful nor technically functional. Although they could be regarded as ordinary objects, their ordinariness was transformed via the changes in scale and composition. This is similar to Martin Heidegger’s reflection on the tendency of modern art, which is preoccupied with objects that are worn out, damaged, disfigured, destroyed, and dysfunctional. ⁴⁵ It deconstructs the primary manifestation of objects – the tools – existing in the world. Unlike modern art which secures its ‘low visibility in geometry shapes’, ⁴⁶ the objects produced in the Countryside Carpenter are realistic with high visibility. This places the artworks close to the real objects, despite several minor changes to the real which are supposed to be an obstacle to achieving the real. In fact, the Countryside Carpenter explores the edge of the real by working on ordinary objects that villagers use as daily tools. Similar to the Fengdouhua Art Museum, these artistically changed objects produce an ordinary aesthetics that transforms the ordinariness of the everyday into extraordinary scenes. Regarding the local carpenters, participating in art practices not only emancipates them from their daily routine but also helps them to regain their dignity as craftsmen and to become aware of the value of their local cultural heritage. Inspired by such contemporary art strategies, Carpenter Guo, one of the participants, produced a series of wood carvings and held a solo exhibition in the LP Art Space in downtown Chongqing in 2017, several years after his participation in the Countryside Carpenter project (Figure 9).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 9.

Master Guo’s sculptures.

In the project Cake Shop Art Museum (2014), artists painted a wall sweet pink and used it as a backdrop for a series of group activities. The Cake Shop Art Museum was remodelled on the basis of a local cake shop run by local resident Liang Daqiang on the main street of Yangdeng (Figure 10). Unlike other restaurants and businesses that sell Chinese food such as steamed buns and baozi, this shop sells European-style cakes, which are perceived as ‘symbols of an outside culture’ by the locals. The gradual decline of the local mining industry brought recession to the small town. Many young people had gone to cities to find employment. For some time, Liang stopped selling cakes and leased the space until he witnessed the success of the Fengdouhua Art Museum. Liang was motivated to re-open his cake shop, and the artists decided to assist him after consultations with him.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 10.

Liang Daqiang making a cake for his customers.

Specifically, the artists compiled an album consisting of 20 European landscape paintings of famous places and cities in Europe, including Amsterdam, Moscow, and Rome. Customers who purchase a birthday cake would receive a framed photograph for free. The artists use Photoshop CS to merge the two images together to create a final image of a customer posing in the landscape of their choice (Figures 11 and 12). They name these artistic activities ‘Purchasing a cake, touring Europe’. Local residents, especially children, are eager to participate. They are excited about eating delicious cakes and being photographed against a background of a beautiful European landscape. Participation in the photography session is a virtual experience of touring Europe – an artistically rendered journey of the imagination. The labour and knowledge of art become essential to a consumer’s participation in the production of an imaginary tour. Albeit fictional, the 20 European landscape paintings demonstrate local residents’ desire to be part of the real Western world and modern life. The whole environment is decorated as an art museum, a place of ordinary aesthetics in which art products and activities shape the everyday business actions of selling and purchasing into aesthetic actions. By turning an ordinary place into an art museum, the cake shop attracts customers, and Mr Liang is pleased that his business remains open. He said several years later, ‘They saved my business. Without their art engagement, the shop would probably be closed like many other businesses in town.’ ⁴⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 11.

A child being photographed in front of the pink wall of the Cake Shop Art Museum.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 12.

The same child in a photoshopped image with a windmill in the background.

The Consecrated Policeman, a project that included 20 interviews conducted by an artist Huang Jiaqi and myself with local residents, demonstrates how the real and the fictional are entangled in the local religion and customs. In the summer of 2016, Lou Jin and Wang Bi, two artists from the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, purchased a statue of a policemen and installed it on the east bank of the Yangdeng River (Figure 13). Plastic policeman statues are usually installed on the side of a highway to warn drivers about the speed limit, which makes installing a plastic statue on the river bank seem meaningless. However, a rumour that spread in the village one year after the statue was installed made this meaningless action meaningful.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 13.

Artists installing the plastic policeman statue on the bank of Yangdeng River.

In April 2017, a middle school student threw a stone at the statue when he was playing with his classmates after school. He then developed a pain in his leg and died a few days later. Although throwing a stone at the statue and the death of the young student were essentially two different incidents, some local people connected the two and according to their own logic they believed that the death of the student was linked to his disrespectful action towards the river deity, that is throwing a stone at the statue. As the rumour spread, an increasing number of local residents began to believe in the gossip that the statue was a river deity. The project Consecrated Policeman is based on a series of investigations on this rumour. Both Huang and I agreed that our goal should not be about finding the truth but, rather, that we get close to the truth by paying attention to the investigation process, not the results.

One of the participants I interviewed was an employee from a white-water rafting company. When I asked him about the incident, the middle-aged man firmly stated that his company had installed the ‘policeman’ to warn drifters about the deep water. He emphasized that the statue has divine power to protect tourists and local residents from being drowned. The interview which was recorded, went as follows: Zhou Yanhua (Z):

Have you ever heard that there was a child in the town who touched the policeman standing on the river bank and died?

In reality, the statue was a commercial product installed by the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives. However, during the interview, the man tried to convince us that the policeman was installed by his company and someone else said that people held the consecration ceremony to give the statue divine power. Furthermore, most residents insist that the policeman should have divine power. Although from the interview it is clear that they did not witness the consecration ceremony, they believe that divine power exists. The rumour about the Consecrated Policeman is irrational. However, with most of the residents believing this rumour, the real and the fictional becomes interchangeable. The local residents trust the story more than the truth, because the story fits into their daily logic. Thus, following our investigation, we did not correct the misperception and allowed fiction to continue, even though we knew the facts.

This ordinary incident shows how the fictional becomes mixed with the real in local residents’ everyday activities. The Consecrated Policeman is a symbol of the mysterious divine power in this town. It provides an explanation for the unexpected death of the young boy, as well as for the insufferable reality in this rural town. The plastic policeman that is essentially a material of art was conceptually transformed into a religious statue by the local residents. Furthermore, through investigating the death of the child, the rumour was transformed into a work of art by the artists. During the processes of installing the plastic policeman and investigating the incident, Huang and I switched between reality and fiction or rumour. We did not see art as objects or actions, because it was embedded in an ordinary incident and became a part of the reality. In fact, it is the alternative of the real and the fictional that produces ordinary aesthetics, because art aestheticizes the ethical value of the incident.

Louis Althusser rests on the certitude that today there is nothing between the real and reality, and that reality is no longer divided into infinite paths leading towards a hidden truth. ⁴⁹ Endorsing Althusser, Nicolas Bourriaud indicates that art does not have the task of illustrating; instead ‘art no longer reflects the real, but plays with reality, showing its appearance’. ⁵⁰ Likewise, Rancière suggests that ‘the relationship between aesthetics and politics is not a passage from fiction to reality, but a relationship between two ways of making a fiction’. ⁵¹ Influenced by these aesthetic theories, Jiao and his team explore the relationship between fiction and the real in their art practices through engaging in the social reality of Yangdeng: rural marketization, the disappearance of folk craft, labour recession, and superstitions that fill the villagers’ everyday life practices. For Jiao, Yangdeng is a society in which the real and the fictional are so intertwined that it gives art space ‘to play with reality rather than to illustrate it’. ⁵² To this extent, I argue that the modus operandi of the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives revisits the connotation of the avant-garde in socially engaged art through an exploration on the aesthetic potential of the ordinary and the relationship between aesthetics and politics that the artworks engender.

Ordinary aesthetics: The avant-gardism of socially engaged art

Is socially engaged art avant-garde? To what extent is it avant-garde? While avant-garde tactics and strategies have been applied to socially engaged art practices and its relevant art genres since the 1990s, such as relational aesthetics, new genre public art, and community practices, the avant-gardism of socially engaged art has not been explicitly analysed as an academic question in the contemporary art field. There has been insufficient attention paid to the differences between Kester and other art historians such as Bishop, which I briefly mentioned in the introduction.

According to Kester, avant-garde art sought to challenge, rather than corroborate, conventional systems of meaning. ⁵³ He states that socially engaged artists ask whether ‘it is possible to reclaim a less violent and more convivial relationship with the viewer while preserving the critical insights that an aesthetic experience can offer to objectifying forms of knowledge’. ⁵⁴ Therefore, Kester’s work is much more about an examination of ‘the earlier, communicative, model of the aesthetic’. ⁵⁵ In contrast, Bishop views the relationship with viewers from the opposite side: ‘this art arguably forms what avant-garde we have today . . . [it] carries on the avant-garde call to make art a more vital part of life’. ⁵⁶ Likewise, Groys proposes direct realism to describe the avant-garde dimension of contemporary art. In Groys’s view, contemporary socially engaged art (he uses the term ‘relational aesthetics’) presents the continuity of the avant-garde scenario. In my opinion, we should take the divergence of opinion seriously not because it is necessary to question whether or not socially engaged art is avant-garde, but because we must reconsider how it is avant-garde or in which format it manifests as avant-garde in contemporary art practices. As Jiao writes, ‘Facing the system we are in today, I believe the avant-garde today is not the “guerrilla” style, but the total mobilization of life itself.’ ⁵⁷ In other words, the avant-garde is not related to techniques but is associated with aesthetics. Bearing this in mind, I examine the avant-gardism of socially engaged art by reconsidering the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Applying this idea to the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, I suggest that the avant-gardism of the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives should be reframed by looking at how we re-evaluate the aesthetics of the ordinary.

Aesthetics, here, refers to the original meaning of the Greek word aisthesis, relating to the perceivable or sensate, rather than the German Romantic understanding which often regards aesthetics as beauty. According to Rancière, aisthesis concerns the sensible fabric of experience within which it is produced. ⁵⁸ It shows how a regime of perception, sensation, and interpretation of art is constituted and transformed by welcoming images, objects, and performances that seem most opposed to the German Romantic understanding of art. ⁵⁹ By regarding aesthetics as aisthesis, Rancière deconstructs the hierarchy between aesthetics and politics. ⁶⁰ As he points out,

On the one hand, politics is not a simple sphere of action that comes after the ‘aesthetic’ revelation of the state of things. It has its own aesthetics: its ways of dissensually inventing scenes and characters, of manifestations and statements different from the inventions of art and sometimes even opposed to them. On the other hand, aesthetics has its own politics, or rather its own tension between two opposed politics: between the logic of art that becomes life at the price of abolishing itself as art, and the logic of art that does politics on the explicit condition of not doing it at all. ⁶¹

The Yangdeng Art Cooperatives project is avant-garde, not because it embraces the rhetoric of avant-garde rupture, such as shock, disruption, political provocation, and antagonism, but because it facilitates aesthetic experiences that arise from the extraordinary aspects of daily routine. The wood carvings on the top of the dining tables in the Fengdouhua Art Museum, the furniture/sculptures designed as a result of the cooperation between artists and local carpenters, the sweet pink wall in the Cake Shop Museum, and the rumour surrounding the statue of the Consecrated Policeman show how ordinary objects, spaces, and incidents are defunctionalized and aestheticized through a series of techniques of merging the real and the fictional.

The central concern of this mode of avant-gardism resides in the aesthetic manifestation of the ethical dimension of the work of art. In other words, aesthetics is manifested in the newly established sensate components of the everyday activities of the local residents. As we have seen throughout this article, the practices of the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives produce ordinary aesthetics that uplifts local residents from their daily routine and turns passive artistic viewers into active social participants. This identity transformation is significant for the local people in Yangdeng who are struggling for survival in the face of problems caused by the uneven economic reform and social transformation of China after reform and opening up.

Conclusion

What is the avant-gardism of socially engaged art? While the legacy of the avant-garde is employed by artists in socially engaged art practices, the question of whether or not the two are the same or to what extent they are similar should be further addressed. Current scholarship seems to assimilate the two categories, though only a few scholars have discussed the differences. This article focuses on the issue of what avant-gardism is in socially engaged art and how it is reformulated in practices. The Yangdeng Art Cooperatives’ investigation into ordinary aesthetics demonstrates an alternative experimentation of this issue. Ordinary aesthetics in the practices of Yangdeng Art Cooperatives is an outcome of an aesthetic process. It demonstrates potential connections throughout our everyday lives and redefines the relationship between aesthetics and politics by regarding aesthetics as a perceivable sensate rather than as beauty. This Rancièrian understanding of aesthetics has an intrinsic link to politics, because it takes the two factors – aesthetics and politics – out of their own realm and makes art a subversive power that dissensually emerges in everyday social practices.

In the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives, ordinary aesthetics is created by art practices that fuse the real and the fictional. Through transforming the real into fiction or vice versa in various artworks including sculptures, site-specific art, and even social practices, artists engage in local residents’ everyday lives by aestheticizing their everyday activities. In the process, the ordinary objects they use, the ordinary spaces they work and live in, and the ordinary incidents they encounter in their daily lives are artistically transformed into extraordinariness. Overall, the practices of the Yangdeng Art Cooperatives suggest that the avant-gardism of socially engaged art can be reframed through how we re-evaluate the aesthetics of the ordinary.

Why is it necessary to reformulate avant-gardism in socially engaged art? The premise of this question is that not all socially engaged practices are avant-garde, especially in China where a top–down mode of social engagement in art activities used to dominate various mass campaigns in the socialist period. ⁶² Moreover, an increasing number of Chinese artists today aim to seek what Mai Corlin depicts as ‘guanxi aesthetics’ in their socially engaged practices, compromised strategies such as gentrification, cultural tourism, and commercialism that artists employ when navigating the grey areas of governmentality and censorship. ⁶³ In this sense, the reformulation of avant-gardism in socially engaged art in China particularly matters, because it not only highlights the criticality and antagonism of art toward authoritarianism in the 21st century, but also reactivates the historical meaning of the truth of art in the everyday, which helps people to alleviate suffering and precarity in this neoliberal time.

In Yangdeng, a poor and remote rural town, where the local ecological system has been damaged by illegal milling industries, the traditional social and emotional structures deconstructed as a result of agricultural marketization and rural modernization, and the major labour sources drained by urbanization, reactivating avant-gardism is even more significant because it redistributes the sensible in local residents’ everyday lives and uplifts them from their daily routine. It provides an opportunity to alleviate suffering and persistent precarity in this declining rural town, in which the whole society is experiencing the disappearance of tradition, the recession of labour, the depression of the local economy, the pollution of the environment, and the struggle of the ‘bare life’. ⁶⁴