Bringing art back to life: the practice of artistic participation in urban China

This article reconsiders the state-led, market-oriented, and elite-centered art framework in present-day China. Focusing on the rupture between art and public life, it aims to understand the structural forces that trivialize ordinary people's aesthetic experiences. Utilizing the term "absent others," this study first untangles historical and social circumstances that underlie the formations of the exclusionary feature in art. Against this backdrop, the second part of this study examines the case of a community-based art space in urban China. Focusing on its spatial practices and method experiments, discussions examine the efforts that art practitioners have made to revise the historical legacy, spatial order, and method issues in artistic practices that have continuously (re)produced stratification in cultural life in China.