Unlike Dafen Oil Painting Village down the road, whose booming industry was born out of copying Western art, the art being made in Wutong is not from other places but from other times. Gazing at the canvases that line artists’ studios (and up and down the village streets themselves), it’s like looking at a real or imagined Chinese past, long before Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping. People in Wutong mix Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian forms of thought. National arts academies, which are schools where children learn the ancient classics rather than the math, science, and Chinese that dominate the mainstream modern education curriculum, are in every village. In fact, the media called Wutong dujincun, or “Reading Classics” Village (link in Chinese). [...]
It’s part of a broader trend—the comeback of “the hermit”—which promotes the stillness of monk-ish mountain living. Others describe the mountain and its foothills as a place to live a free life—a treatment, or zhiliao. It’s a place to go when you want to recuperate from overwork, illness, or heartbreak; a location where you can leave the world and explore a new way of living that’s slow and scattered with art—utopic, even. [...]
In recent years, Beijing has declared a push for soft power. In a departure from merely wielding their might in large-scale industrial production and political force, soft power is a way to gain influence through culture and values. Still, art is not for art’s sake, as Chairman Mao once forbid. Soft power aims to make China prominent in the public eye and attractive as a nation—though sometimes it can be lucrative too, such as the recent Hong Kong-Hollywood collaboration, The Great Wall.
The art village designations are part of this effort. They’re a branding strategy to draw domestic tourism and encourage the consumption of art objects, leisure goods, and coffee. These sites are intended as areas for cultural production and consumption and are sometimes also places where artists live full time. Unused warehouse spaces, abandoned after decades of iron and steel production, are converted into artist studios, and the designation sometimes involves the building of structures like museums, art villas, and theaters to mark the space as a site of creative industry. But the government may not stick around to fill those spaces with programs or exhibitions. In the wake, people can come in and make these designations their own, carving out little spaces for creativity.
No comments:
Post a Comment