Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)

This dissertation is a story about relationships between artists, their work, and the physical infrastructure of Beijing. I argue that infrastructure’s utilitarianism has relegated it to a category of nothing to see, and that this tautology effectively shrouds other possible interpretations. My findings establish counter-narratives and critiques of Beijing, a city at once an immerging global capital city, and an urban space fraught with competing ways of seeing, those crafted by the state and those of artists. Statecraft in this dissertation is conceptualized as both the art of managing building projects that function to control Beijing’s public spaces, harnessing the thing-power of infrastructure, and the enforcement of everyday rituals that surround Beijinger’s interactions with the city’s infrastructure. From the spectacular architecture built to signify China’s neoliberal approaches to globalized urban spaces, to micro-modifications in how citizens sort their recycling depicted on neighborhood bulletin boards, the visuals of Chinese statecraft saturate the urban landscape of Beijing. I advocate for heterogeneous ways of seeing of infrastructure that releases its from being solely a function of statecraft, to a constitutive part of the artistic practices of: Song Dong (宋冬b. 1966), Cao Fei (曹斐b. 1978), Lu Hao (卢昊b. 1969) and Ning Ying (宁瀛b. 1959) where it is reconfigured as a space of critique. Structured around four typologies, I begin with roads and Ning’s films where the outdated roads refuse to keep pace with the rise in private car ownership. From traffic, I move to Song’s trash based works that make visible the contemporary buying habits of Beijingers in contrast to earlier state policies of frugality and recycling. Then, I consider the migrant workers whose labour is building the city, whose multitudes the state strives to conceal, and whose bodies artists exploit as a medium. Lastly, from embodied practices and spaces, I excavate the buried fiber optic networks that produce the immateriality of the Internet to discuss how Cao’s online practice parodies China’s rapacious urbanization predicated on the real estate market. Iconic buildings of contemporary China colonize her works, but instead of being aesthetically pleasing monuments to the global contemporary, they are a critical commentary on state policies that monetize collectively owned land.Ph.D.2018-11-30 00:00:0