Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic

At first glance, the title of the book, Minor China, seems to counterintuitively belie China's dominance in the global economic and political order.However, Hentyle Yapp temporarily suspends the political condition of China and returns China to a minor epistemological position in order to trenchantly challenge the proper noun "China," which has been bracketed and seen as the Other or counterpart to the West.By reorienting readers' attention to affective and molecular movements (proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), minor methods rescue Chinese contemporary art from being assimilated by the global art markets, either in discourses or international exhibitions.Yapp uses the term "minor," which resonates with Marxist ideas of social structuration, to reflect on theoretical assumptions entrenched in ideologies of liberalism, inclusion, and racialization (5-6).For him, "minor" is a strategy to undo the overdetermined Western frameworks that presuppose universal ideas and liberal languages in gauging minor subjects and non-Western art. 1 His project