The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China

By Chang Tan

The Minjian Avant-Garde studies how experimental artists in China mixed with, brought changes to, and let themselves be transformed by minjian, the volatile and diverse public of the post-Mao era. Departing from the usual emphasis on art institutions, global markets, or artists' communities, Chang Tan proposes a new analytical framework in the theories of socially engaged art that stresses the critical agency of participants, the affective functions of objects, and the versatility of the artists in diverse sociopolitical spheres.

Drawing from hitherto untapped archival materials and interviews with the artists, Tan challenges the views of Chinese artists as either dissidents or conformists to the regime and sees them as navigators and negotiators among diverse political discourses and interests. She questions the fetishization of marginalized communities among practitioners of progressive art and politics, arguing that the members of minjian are often more complex, defiant, and savvy than the elites would assume. The Minjian Avant-Garde critically assesses the rise of populism in both art and politics and show that minjian could constitute either a democratizing or a coercive force.

This book was published with generous support from the George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501773198

Book preview

The Minjian Avant-Garde

Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China

Chang Tan

Cornell East Asia Series

An imprint of

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For my family

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1. The Proto-Minjian Avant-Garde: Exhibition Deconstructed

2. From the One to the Many: Writing Multitude

3. Art on the March: The Avant-Garde and the Periphery

4. Things Acquire Life: Minjian in Objects

5. Making (and Serving) Multitude: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei

Conclusion: Minjian beyond China

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1. The Yangdeng Co-op, Rural Woodwork, 2012.

2. The Yangdeng Co-op, Feng Douhua Art Museum, 2014.

3. Xiamen Dada, Burning of Exhibited Works of Xiamen Dada, 1986.

4. Huang Yong Ping, Memo to Rauschenberg in 1986 (Cut 25x25cm), 1986.

5. Xiamen Dada, Burning of Exhibited Works of Xiamen Dada, 1986.

6. Huang Yong Ping and the Xiamen Dada, Exhibition of Events that Took Place in the Fujian Province Museum of Art,1986.

7. Huang Yong Ping and the Xiamen Dada, Recycling Warehouse Activities, 1987.

8. Huang Yong Ping and the Xiamen Dada, Work—Handled as Garbage, 1987.

9. Huang Yong Ping, Proposal for Pull away the Art Museum, 1988.

10. Qiu Zhijie, Assignment No. 1: Copying the Orchid Pavilion Preface a Thousand Times, 1990–5 (?).

11. Gu Gan, Shanshui Qing, 1985.

12. Qiu Zhijie, photographs demonstrating hand positions, 1990.

13. Qiu Zhijie, April 8, 1999.

14. Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy, 1992-ongoing.

15. Qiu Zhijie, Monument—Archeology of Memory: Group 1, 2006.

16. Qiu Zhijie, Monument—Archeology of Memory: Group 3, 2006.

17. Photograph of Jiao Xingtao and Manager Jia, 2014.

18. Yangdeng Co-op, Policeman on His Watch, 2016.

19. Audrey Chan, Taxonomy of Auntie Roles, 2021.

Color Plates

1. Exhibition view, Continuum (Buxi), 57th Venice Biennale, May 2017.

2. Exhibition view with Yao Huifen and Wu Jian’an, Yaoshan Series, Continuum (Buxi). 57th Venice Biennale, May 2017.

3. Mao Xuhui, Exhibition, 1986.

4. Wang Xiangming and Jin Lili, Longing for Peace, 1985.

5. Mao Xuhui, Layout, 1985.

6. Mao Xuhui, About Eve, 1985.

7. Mao Xuhui, Boring Days, 1985.

8. Qiu Zhijie, Exhibition view in Food Is Paramount for the People—Qiu Zhijie’s Market Writings, May 1, 2021.

9a. Jiang Jie, Farewell to the Red Army: Remembering the Mothers of the Long March, 2002.

9b. Jiang Jie, Farewell to the Red Army: Remembering the Mothers of the Long March, 2002.

10. Sui Jianguo, Marx in China, 2002.

11. Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, A Retrospective of Chinese Art in the 1990s, 2002.

12. Guo Fengyi and Judy Chicago, 2002.

13. The Long March project, Collective Creation of Pollock Style Abstract Paintings, 2002.

14. Dance performance on the stage of Jinhua temple, 2002.

15. The Long March project, Primary School Paper Cutting Education Project, 2008.

16. Lu Jie, Unknown and Anonymous, 2004.

17a. Han Feng, Made in China: Sunbucks Coffee, 2015.

17b. Han Feng, Made in China: Cori-Cola, 2015.

18. Liu Ding, Products, 2005.

19a. Jiao Xingtao, Huicheng Sculpture Group, 2014.

19b. Jiao Xingtao, Huicheng Sculpture Group, 2014.

20. Walter McConnell, A Theory of Everything, 2004.

21. Gao Yan, Grade A Forgery—Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano, 2011.

22. Li Mu, Qiu Zhuang—25 Steel Plates (Carl Andre), 2013–14.

23. Li Mu, Qiu Zhuang—Pop Mao (Andy Warhol), 2013–14.

24. Li Mu, Qiu Zhuang—55 Ring Lights (Dan Flavin), 2013–14.

25. Yangdeng Co-op, The Twelve Sights of Yangdeng, No. 1: Police on the Riverbank, 2017.

Acknowledgments

Like much of the artwork I discuss in these pages, my book has gone through many iterations and metamorphoses. It has also followed my own career as an academic vagabond who wandered from literary studies to art history. I want to thank Richard Shiff for steering me to this direction. My stellar team of advisors at the University of Texas at Austin, made up of Shiff, Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang, Neville Hoad, and Seth Wolitz, guided me through this unconventional transition with great wisdom and infinite patience. I also want to express my gratitude to Kathrine Burnett, who contributed generously as the only historian of Chinese art on my doctoral committee.

The earlier versions of individual episodes of the book have been presented at conferences and circulated among peers; the feedback and critiques I received in the process enabled me to revise and improve my manuscript. I want to thank Stanley Abe, Julia Andrews, Andrea Bachner, Allan Barr, Tamara Bentley, Chun Wa Chan, Kaiman Chang, Eileen Cheng, Susan Dine, Shaohua Guo, Man He, Christine Ho, Laura Kina, J. P. Park, Hai Ren, Carlos Rojas, Andrew Sturkey, Peggy Wang, Yang Wang, Winnie Wong, and Li Yang, for their valuable input. A special shout-out is reserved for my friend and esteemed colleague Christopher Rea, whose advice and support have been critical for the publication of this book.

My research would not have been possible without the information, materials, and help generously provided by many artists, to whom I am deeply indebted. I want to express my gratitude to Qiu Zhijie, Jiao Xintao, Mao Xuhui, Huang Yong Ping, Xu Bing, Lu Jie, Han Feng, McConnell Walter, Liu Ding, Li Mu, Gao Yan, and, in many cases, their studio assistants and gallery representatives. I have also received indispensable assistance from the Asia Art Archive (both its Hong Kong and New York offices), the Ethan Cohen Gallery of New York, Gao Minglu, Alexandria Munroe, and finally the artist and scholar Zheng Bo, who built the incredible website seachina.net on socially engaged art in China. On a different note, I want to mention with regret that Ai Weiwei, an artist I greatly admire, refused to grant me image rights because he disagreed with some of my interpretations of his artwork. In particular, he felt offended that I mentioned and partially acknowledged the artist Yue Luping, who once accused him of plagiarism. As a result, Mr. Ai’s artwork will be conspicuously absent from the list of illustrations in this book.

The institutions where I have worked through the years have offered me invaluable support, making the completion of this book possible. I want to thank my colleagues at Harvey Mudd College, the Claremont Colleges Consortium, and National University of Singapore, where my book reached its first phase, and my colleagues in the Department of Art History and Asian Studies at Penn State University, where the book arrived at its current state. The fellowship I received from the College of Art and Architecture facilitated my field research, and the subvention from the Department of Art History made the print of high-quality images in this book possible. Special thanks are owed to Cassie Mansfield and Chris Reed, who read my introduction with great care and offered most constructive feedback.

I feel fortunate that my book finds its home at the Cornell University Press, whose rigorous peer-review and editing process helped make the manuscript better. My editor, Alexis Siemon, has been incredibly kind, supportive, and resourceful in the entire process, and I could not have done it without them. I also appreciate all the attention, endorsement, and feedback I received from the acquisition editors, the editorial board, and the four anonymous reviewers.

Writing is a lonely task. The global pandemic made it even more so. Luckily, I have been surrounded by joy, curiosity, energy, affection—and sometimes chaos—in the past years, reminding me that scholarship, like the artwork I study in this book, is meant to be created in a humanistic and communal context. My wise, loving, and indefatigably hardworking partner Nicolai Volland and my bright, hilarious, and sweet daughters, Jacqueline and Jessamyn, are truly the best companions one could hope for, in good and bad times. I dedicate my book to this wonderful family that I am proud to call my own.

Note on Transliteration

I use pinyin for most Chinese names and terms cited in this book. For names that are Cantonese or Taiwanese in origin, I use Wade-Giles as according to convention. When Chinese characters are included, I use traditional characters for names prior to 1949, the founding of the People’s Republic, and simplified for those after. For Chinese names of cited authors, I place family names first for sources in Chinese, and last for sources in English.

Introduction

Visitors to the Chinese Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale could hear the folk even before they entered the building—traditional instruments such as suona, yueqin, erhu, cymbals, and gongs, performed by the shadow puppetry masters from Shaanxi, created a distinctive ensemble of sounds. Once inside, viewers encountered a dense forest of texts, images, and screens: the high-ceilinged exhibition hall was filled with towering, swaying and glowing objects, conjuring an immersive experience that was meant to evoke temple fairs (miaohui 庙会) (plate 1).¹ The artworks on display, created collaboratively by four artists, showcased the intricate craftsmanship of two folk artists alongside the equally elaborate skills of two practitioners of experimental art, both of whom in turn drew from folkloric motifs. The Yashan series by Yao Huifen (b. 1967) and Wu Jian’an (b. 1980), stretched horizontally at eye level, recreated eight versions of the Southern Song court painter Li Song’s surreal portrayal of street puppetry play, Kulou huanxi tu (骷髏幻戲圖 or The Skeleton Fantasy Show), in Suzhou-style embroidery; each version utilized a range of needlework techniques to produce a dazzling collage of textured surfaces (plate 2). Installed across the main hall, The Foolish Old Man Who Removes the Mountain, Jingwei Fills the Sea, and The Metamorphosis of Kunpeng, three shadow plays of primordial tales that allegorized the theme continuum,² were performed with handmade puppets by Wang Tianwen (b. 1950) against the digital imagery of mountains and waters created by Tang Nannan (b. 1969).

Minjian (民间), which the curator Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969) translated as the folk in his Biennale statement and highlighted as a main theme of the exhibition,³retains the exotic appeal of folk art but not the connotations of simplicity or rusticity associated with that term; on the contrary, minjian at the 2017 Venice Biennale was presented as sophisticated, diverse, and sensorially overwhelming. Its temporal and spatial distance from modern, cosmopolitan cultures was used to create strange yet absorbing spectacles.

Concurrently, hidden in the remote Guizhou Province on the southern border of China, a different group of artists was exploring territories that were equally marginal to the art world. Starting in 2012, they took residence in the small town of Yangdeng, designing projects and organizing events that responded to the oddities they witnessed in the daily lives of local residents. They collaborated with unemployed carpenters to make furniture that bordered on sculpture (Yangdeng Co-op, Rural Woodwork 乡村木作, 2012) (figure 1), sold framed cash at a county fair at a price that doubled its value as currency (Yang Hong, Selling Cash 卖钱, 2013), created buzz for a hole-in-the-wall restaurant by carving trompe l’oeil objects on its dining tables (Yangdeng Co-op, Feng Douhua Art Museum 冯豆花美术馆, 2014) (figure 2), paid volunteers a small fee for freewheeling conversations (Lou Jin, Chatroom 说事室, 2016), and asked residents to select twelve famous sights in town, which were then painted and turned into postcards to promote tourism (Yangdeng Co-op, Twelve Views of Yangdeng 羊磴十二景, 2016–17). They also discovered several aspiring folk artists in Yangdeng and organized exhibitions of their works.⁴

Figure 1. Several oddly shaped woodworks, such as a chair linked to a table and a two-legged bench, are scattered in the front yard of a village house. A group of villagers watch the carpenters at work.

Figure 1. Yangdeng Co-op, Rural Woodwork , 2012. Dimension varies. Yangdeng village, Guizhou, China. Courtesy of Jiao Xingtao.

Jiao Xingtao (b. 1970), the leader of the group, describes the project’s aims as opening new contact zones between experimental art and minjian, and he defines minjian as the the ongoing reality of life and culture in the lower strata of society.⁵ He explains that Yangdeng was chosen for its apparent lack of characteristics (meiyou tedian), which makes it a good specimen of the sort of grassroots culture they want to engage. Yet he also states that the seemingly quotidian life of minjian is in fact full of fresh vitality and creativity and can reshape art.⁶ Most of the works described above, for example, were designed in collaboration with those from minjian and used to address their (expressed or hidden) needs.⁷ Having experimented with one imported, highfalutin art concept after another,⁸ the Yangdeng artists were in desperate need of something new, real, and close to home, and the humble minjian provided them with both the novelty and the authenticity.

Figure 2. Several rural residents sit and stand in a crowded space. A child puts his hand on a highly realistic “pack of cigarettes” carved on the table.

Figure 2. Yangdeng Co-op, Feng Douhua Art Museum , 2014. Yangdeng village, Guizhou, China. Courtesy of Jiao Xingtao.

The artists of Continuum and the Yangdeng Project define and engage minjian in distinct ways, yet they both adopt and perform selected aspects of minjian and craft them into something new and radical. They belong to a group of art practices I call the minjian avant-garde: art that uses the material, demographic, and territorial marginality of minjian as a means to critique, revitalize, and transform itself and, at the same time, to engage and bring changes to the minjian it encounters. The word minjian, the etymological and historical complexity of which I will elaborate below, has no exact equivalent in English. It can be rendered as the folk, the grassroots, the multitude, or, more generally, the broad, non-elite public. The artists incorporate minjian into their practices via two interlinked approaches. Materially, they generate objects that are collaboratively made, multiple, site-specific, and conspicuously imitative, and thus affiliating themselves with the mass-produced crafts and commodities and setting themselves apart from the so-called fine art, which is still defined by its singularity. Demography-wise, they form a collectivity of bodies with communities within and beyond their own circles; in particular, they strive to approach and mix with those from lower strata of society, which may refer to the poor, the rural, or the downtrodden but could also be anyone who is not a member of the cosmopolitan elite.

Both approaches are evident in Continuum and the Yangdeng Project. In Continuum Qiu Zhijie set multidirectional, cross-generational, and transnational collaborations as the default mode of artmaking and presented the works in a way that highlighted abundance, multiplicity, and interconnection.⁹ The Yangdeng artists not only practiced collective production and communal display but also allowed their works to travel, take new shape, or even disappear in the world of mundane activities and objects.¹⁰ Both art projects also took techniques, narratives, and peoples that were seen as outsiders to the arena of global contemporary art and turned them into cultural capitals of their own in the same arena, while providing services to the outsiders they ostensibly admired. Similar attitudes characterize all the art practices discussed in this book, which span from the 1980s to the present. The artists found a new, edgy approach in art via the minjian they discovered—away from institutions, among ordinary things, and amid a broad public. Minjian, as a sociopolitical force as well as an artistic concept, has taken up a large portion of the public discourse in China since the onset of modernity, and its many metamorphoses in the past continue to haunt the minjian avant-garde today.

Minjian: A History of Remaking

Minjian, Sebastian Veg posits, is one of the most difficult Chinese words to translate.¹¹ Literally meaning among/between the people, it describes the populace as opposed to both the elite (jingying) and the authoritative (guanfang): the minjian public that is excluded from the solipsistic world of high culture, and the minjian thinkers who keep cautious distance from the officially sanctioned institutions. Used as an adjective in the context of cultural studies, it has often been translated as the folk, evoking the preindustrial artisanal as well as the rural ethnographic. Applied to more contemporary scenarios, however, it bears resemblance to grassroots, referring to individuals who identify with the lower and marginalized social strata. This conceptual fluidity is a result of the historicity the term embodies. The word minjian appeared in Chinese as early as the fourth century BCE but acquired its current meanings only at the turn of the twentieth century, as min, the people, began to be perceived as citizens in need of enlightenment instead of mere subjects to be governed.¹² Since then the term minjian has enjoyed wide currency, but it has been reconfigured by thinkers and political parties to suit a wide range of interests and agendas. The term’s importance has grown and retreated; its trajectory was neither one of progressive change nor of sudden rupture but of constant remaking.¹³

Minjian first entered the public discourse at the onset of the New Culture Movement (ca. 1915–22), when a generation of intellectuals sought to modernize the cultures of China as a means of revitalizing the young Republic (founded in 1912). Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) and Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), two leading scholars of the time, began to collect, publish, and study folk literature (民間文學 minjian wenxue) in the 1910s, including songs, legends, and tales that were created communally and distributed orally.¹⁴ A main goal of the New Culture Movement was to promote vernacular literature as a pathway toward democratizing politics, and the appeal of folk literature was obvious: its simplicity served as an antidote to the elitism of classical literature; its broad base could facilitate popular mobilization. At a time when Western culture was increasingly seen as superior, to rediscover and promote the folk also strengthened a Chinese ethnocultural identity. In this sense the pursuit of minjian was part of the worldwide nostalgia for the volk, the primitive, and the mingei (民芸), which emerged in reaction to industrialization and colonialism, spurred experiments in aesthetics, techniques, and materials, and, at the same time, lent legitimacy to nationalism, Orientalism, and chauvinism.¹⁵ To unleash its potential, however, this folk literature had to be selectively recorded, translated, and distilled into something cogent and powerful—its undesirable aspects purged and modified; its messages reinterpreted in order to liberate and transform the general public.¹⁶ As the young nation faced turmoil and, after 1931, the threat of Japanese aggression, minjian became increasingly subservient to the needs of the state. As Li Hsiao-ti compellingly argues, the earlier academic and aesthetic appreciation of folk culture was already replaced by the militant calls to mobilize mass culture by the 1930s, and the civic term min gave way to zhong, the undifferentiated masses.¹⁷

The (re)discovery and reform of folk art (民間藝術 minjian yishu) in China followed a parallel path, although its transition from the aesthetic to the political was even quicker. Artists and intellectuals discovered folk art in the early 1930s, when the cultural sphere was already becoming militant, and their praise for the creative accomplishments of the folk was invariably accompanied by the call to replace the old forms with what was new and politically potent.¹⁸ Among myriad types of folk art, nianhua (年畫 New Year pictures) received the most attention. The simplicity and directness of these prints were echoed in the modern woodcut movement, which aimed to educate and organize the masses. The same qualities also proved useful for propaganda art during the Sino-Japanese War.¹⁹ Yet nianhua—and folk art in general—gained true prominence in China only under the patronage of Mao and the Communist Party, who urged artists to learn from the peasants. New nianhua, as a genre, developed during the party’s Yan’an period (1936–47) and dominated the early years of the People’s Republic (founded in 1949). Combining folk art features such as clear outlines and flat, bright colors with linear perspective, melodramatic gestures, and hierarchical compositions, the nianhua format strongly impacted the aesthetics of propaganda posters as well as oil and ink paintings throughout the socialist period.²⁰ What actually happened, however, was not simply the triumph of folk art over that of the elite aesthetics but the unprecedented penetration of an authoritative and homogeneous culture into every corner of minjian, displacing, if not eradicating, what had once been deemed rural, marginal, and diverse.²¹

The appropriation of minjian during the Mao era (1949–76) went beyond the adoption of folk forms; propaganda art also simulated and then displaced the minjian modes of production and distribution, which are characterized by collectivity and multiplicity. The drive toward the collective and the multiple preceded the Mao era. Progressive intellectuals and artists of the early twentieth century had already called for the negation of the artist’s petit-bourgeois individuality and advocated a low-cost, easily reproducible art that could serve the general population.²² Much artwork of the 1930s and 1940s was made in a rush and meant to be ephemeral, but the pieces reached a broad public through rapid reproduction and easy transmission across media.²³ Such practices became codified after 1949, resulting in a mass-line creative method and a distribution network that infiltrated venues such as incense shops, small book stands, itinerant peddlers through which folk and popular art once circulated.²⁴ The mass-line creative method certainly felt repressive or even punitive for many artists at the time, but the collective production of the Mao era was not devoid of agency or creativity. Artists continued to experiment with modes of collectivity that ranged from guided collaborations among art academy professors and students to coproduction by farmers, workers, and the student Red Guards, with the ostensibly utopian goal of eliminating the division between artistic labor and manual labor.²⁵ Christine Ho argues eloquently that the collective process was in fact dynamic and nuanced, involving triangular interactions among artists who researched the subject matter as a group, the masses who offered feedback on earlier drafts, and the party, which demanded revision or gave approval. Often it was also a process of multidirectional teaching and learning between artists of different backgrounds and styles, resulting in a cacophony of voices that reflect an an external, intersubjective, collective consciousness at the expense of art-world ideas of professionalism.²⁶ In these cases, the fruits of collective labor became the very embodiment of collectivity, and the process of collaborative making could potentially lead to generative transformation of individuality. Such a promise of transformation, as we shall see, was also important to the minjian avant-garde artists of the later era.

The term minjian lost its appeal in the post-Mao decade of the 1980s, when the new Deng Xiaoping regime supported economic reforms and an openness to the outside world. Having been forced to work within the narrowly defined space of a politicized People’s art for years, intellectuals and artists enthusiastically embraced a previously forbidden high culture, which translated to the Western and the modern.²⁷ Minjian, meanwhile, was seen as either residual folk culture, and hence backward, or equivalent to the emerging pop culture (tongsu wenhua 通俗文化), and hence vulgar.²⁸ An influential article by the scholar and art critic Lang Shaojun expressed this sentiment openly. Lang criticized the idea, sanctioned by Mao’s theories on literature and art, that folk forms (民间形式 minjian xingshi) constitute the core of national forms (民族形式 minzu xingshi) and hence are the proper art for China. Instead, he advocated an elite art (jingying yishu) that was philosophical, individualistic, original, and cosmopolitan. He called on the elites to transform the masses (化大众 hua dazhong) with high-minded art rather than catering to the popular tastes (大众化 dazhong hua), which he defines as the tenet of both the old minjian and the emerging commercial art.²⁹ Lang’s view epitomizes the prevailing enlightenment complex felt by many educated Chinese in the 1980s—a complex that, as scholars have argued, originated in the early twentieth century, persisted in the Mao era, and became the target of intense scrutiny in the aftermath of the 1989 popular protests and the Tiananmen massacre.³⁰ Despite their urge to transform the masses, the elites’ actual impact on minjian remained limited. As I will discuss in chapter 1, the avant-garde artists’ attempt to reach out to and transform minjian often ended in frustration.

Minjian, reimagined as a force that subverts through its marginality, emerged again as powerful praxis in the discourses of the 1990s. After the Tiananmen crackdown and the silencing of China’s intellectuals, trust for the state evaporated, and the elites’ lofty role as cultural leaders was discredited; minjian rose in this vacuum. In two seminal essays published in 1994, the literary critic Chen Sihe describes China’s minjian culture as what circulates in remote and primarily rural regions, where state power is relatively weak. As a result, it remains freer from moral or political constraints, and it contains both the essence of democracy and unpalatable filth. Chen tracks how intellectuals before and during the Mao era colonized minjian with Western, revolutionary culture, and how minjian stubbornly returned, as the hidden structure beneath the propagandist model plays (样板戏 yangban xi) of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) or, after 1989, as the aesthetic choice for the new realist fiction (新写实小说 xin xieshi xiaoshuo), which describes the quotidian and the obscene in unflinching detail.³¹ At the same time, the scholar Qian Liqun started using minjian to describe the outsiders (圈外人 quan wai ren) who were unaffiliated with cultural institutions and hence able to think more freely than established intellectuals. Those outsiders, Qian argues, formed minjian thought villages (民间思想村落 minjian sixiang cunluo) that survived and thrived even during the most oppressive times, although they are often left out of the accounts of history.³² In this sense, as Veg eloquently argues, minjian became a badge of honor among sociologists, historians, filmmakers, journalists, legal professionals, and activists from all walks of life from the 1990s to the early years of the twenty-first century. Minjian, as it was now seen, was characterized by a deliberate (though often partial) detachment from both the state and the market, active participation in a pluralistic media sphere, and strong connections to marginalized, vulnerable groups (弱势群体 ruoshi qunti).³³ Both definitions of minjian—as the de facto margin due to its remoteness or backwardness and as the performative margin due to one’s choice of being an outsider—were adopted by the minjian avant-garde of the 1990s and beyond.

Chinese artists’ renewed interest in minjian were motivated by not only these domestic intellectual developments but also their own entrance into the global art world in the same decade. On the global stage, artists from China earned unprecedented profit, but they also felt more marginalized than ever before. Scholars have long argued that experimental artists sought self-marginalization after 1989 in order to distance themselves from mainstream culture and politics.³⁴ The story of their stellar rise in the global market has also been told many times: how a selected group of artists went from Bienniale novices to darlings of auction houses, from slum-dwelling bohemians hiding from the police to owners of grand studios filled with assistants, thanks to the recognition and purchasing power of the West.³⁵ These artists’ actual experiences and reactions on entering the global arena, however, have only recently received critical attention. Wu Hung describes the disillusionment and anger many Chinese artists felt when they received condescending treatments or were pigeonholed by their national identity.³⁶ Peggy Wang has tracked those sentiments in greater detail and argued that, in response, Chinese artists were determined to craft their own positions in the world, on their own terms.³⁷ The artists’ turn to minjian was such a strategy of self-positioning. Acutely aware that they remained peripheral in the eyes of Westerners, the artists challenged the global hierarchy through their perceived as well as factual marginality, which, in the lexicon of the avant-garde, may translate into edginess. Avant-garde artists elsewhere have used comparable strategies to destabilize the Eurocentric topography of modern art.³⁸ For the Chinese artists, minjian, with its geographical and demographic marginality, serves as an apt metaphor. It was both apparently native, hence authentic, and outside of the global networks of institutionalized art, hence subversive. Minjian, in other words, could be avant-garde itself.

But of course, as its history throughout the twentieth century clearly shows, minjian was never entirely authentic or subversive. In the twenty-first century, it was again being co-opted by the state. As portions of traditional culture began to enjoy a state-sponsored revival, certain types of folk arts received substantial governmental support: they were designated as intangible culture heritage (非物质文化遗产 fei wuzhi wenhua yichan, or 非遗 feiyi) and used, with the imprimatur of the United Nations, to signal national pride and soft power. Academically trained artists are now once more encouraged to study and master those art forms, to ensure their survival and to enhance their aesthetical appeal.³⁹Continuum was in fact closely connected to those new policies.⁴⁰ The geographically marginal and economically subaltern minjian,