The making of social and moral imagination in Chinese contemporary art

Drawing on fieldwork, artwork analysis, and ethnographic writing, this dissertation explores the making of social and moral imagination in Chinese contemporary art. Based on fieldwork conducted in Guangzhou, South China, this study focuses on the daily experiences and cultural activities of artists who strive to distance their art creation from official cultural production and commercial cultural markets. It addresses two main purposes. First, it explores how China’s market-based social transition since the late 1970s has reconfigured the socioeconomic situations of cultural production. Then it proposes the analytical lens of “creating on the margins” to conceptualize how artists in this research make experimental efforts to conduct art activities on the peripheries of China’s mainstream art world. This study also engages with moral anthropology and ethnographically illustrates how artists turn art into a moral site in which they re-envision and cultivate the meaning, value, and role of art in present-day China.