Joining a growing number of publications that have sought to reexamine China’s socialist legacy, two new books examine the ways in which contemporary art practice and discourse reengaged the social and political commitments of the Maoist period (1949–76). Jennifer Lee’s Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 focuses on the roughly eight years immediately following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to examine how artists and intellectuals reconfigured socialist aesthetics for the post-Mao era. In The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China, Chang Tan looks to a later moment in the 1990s and early 2000s when artists deliberately invoked, thematized, and incorporated the “minjian,” or the nonelite mass public, in their art practices. While both books focus on the search for artistic subjectivities that are informed by the contradictions of the post-Mao transition, they take fundamentally different approaches.

Anxiety Aesthetics covers an understudied period in current art historical scholarship. While many scholars have focused on contemporary art well after the end of the Cultural Revolution and others including Julia Andrews, Denise Ho, and Yi Gu, have looked back to reassess the Mao years, few—with the exception of Jane Debevoise and Martina Köppel-Yang— have paid close attention to the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Lee shows us that this period of artistic transition is indeed worthy of our attention.

Focusing “less on object-oriented approaches to works of art and more on a holistic portrait that takes up the discourse, intellectual history, and events that together form the maker of art,” Anxiety Aesthetics foregrounds socialist aesthetics—a lineage of socially engaged art practices and aesthetic theories—which constitutes what Lee sees as a prehistory of contemporary art in China today (5).

Lee distinguishes her account from previous efforts to examine appropriations of Mao-era imagery in contemporary art by her aims to take socialism seriously. Lee hones in on what she calls a period of revolutionary failure to develop her key concept of “anxiety aesthetics,” which she defines through John Dewey’s concept of a “structure of feeling,” as a “a persistent revolutionary episteme, an order of knowing the world through both radical practices and the language of socialist materialist logic” (11). Anxiety offers Lee a way to situate this period and its artists within a more expansive history of postsocialism that connects strains of intellectual thought both before and after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In exploring how the intellectual and discursive genealogy of socialist art was earnestly taken up by artists and critics after the end of the Cultural Revolution, her account challenges the longstanding paradigm of a radical break between the Mao and post-Mao years. Instead, she argues that artists and intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution did not simply reject socialist aesthetics wholesale, but rather painstakingly reworked it in ways that reasserted art’s political engagement in social life.

Balancing three chapters focused on artists and their art practices with two chapters focused on the analysis of art criticism, Lee introduces readers to a key group—artist and activist Huang Rui who founded the Stars Art Group, artist and critic Wu Guanzhong, artist Qu Leilei, and critic Liu Zaifu—who sees art practice as a continuation of socialism’s commitments to the transformation of social consciousness. Their anxiety to transmit art’s social aims, Lee argues, can be linked to a longer legacy of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals who “worried about China” and who saw their creative output as having the power to guide and transform society.

Chapter one connects the artistic activity of the well-known Stars Art Group with their political participation in the Beijing Spring (1978–80) and collective actions centered around the Democracy Wall. These activities included the posting of big and small character posters—a practice that continued from the Cultural Revolution—and the publication and display of citizen magazines, including the new poetry magazine Today. Focusing on the social and political significance of the Stars’ activities rather than their works’ visual qualities, Lee analyzes the ways in which the group’s exhibition techniques “reproduced and repurposed strategies of collective action and grassroots organization established during the Mao-era campaigns after 1949” in order to “push against the government’s promotion of a slow historical amnesia that represses collective memory” (17).

Chapter two analyzes Huang Rui’s 1981 painting Democracy Wall, which captures key cultural agitators of the Beijing Spring against the backdrop of the eponymous wall where many of their collective actions occurred. Lee explores Huang’s art practice as a process of self-definition and the ways in which the artist negotiated his identity as both artist and activist. Huang’s painting and its various preparatory sketches, she argues, can be understood as an act of bearing witness to and memorializing the democratic aspirations of the Beijing Spring.

Chapter three, a particularly strong chapter that showcases Lee’s deftness with literary history and theory, examines the artist and critic Wu Guanzhong’s attempts to redefine and promote a distinctly socialist strain of abstraction in the post-Mao period. In a move consistent with the author’s discursive approach to art, Lee locates Wu’s aesthetic contributions squarely in the realm of discourse rather than in his prolific art practice and the paintings themselves. Tracing the strains of intellectual thought that inform Wu’s seminal 1979 article, “Formalist Aesthetics in Painting,” Lee uncovers the convergence of art historical concepts of abstraction with notions of abstraction in Maoist scientific socialism. Lee’s achievements in this chapter have much larger implications as it outlines a lineage of abstraction that was historically specific to the postsocialist Chinese context. As Lee reveals, “abstraction maintained meanings in China that diverged . . . from its canonical positioning in modernist critique throughout North America and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century on” (72). By taking socialist aesthetics seriously, Lee manages to illuminate a different set of urgent stakes for abstraction that go beyond the conventional Cold War ideologies around American abstraction versus Socialist bloc realism.

Chapter four examines the diary images and drawings of the artist Qu Leilei, a founding member of the Stars Art Group, to reveal how the artist drew upon earlier twentieth-century modes of publicly oriented formats that combined text and image such as woodblock prints, posters of the socialist laborer or Mao imagery, into more private, internalized forms of historical memory and creative subject-formation.

Chapter five returns to literary history by analyzing the writings of Liu Zaifu, a scholar writing on the subject of literary subjectivity in the mid-1980s. The chapter delves deeply into early Mao-era Chinese socialist discourse that drew from Marxist writings and includes close reading of dense literary passages to uncover the ways in which Liu’s writings were informed by this longer tradition of Marxist thought. Lee shows how Liu repurposed Maoist socialism in order to formulate an emergent post-Mao subjectivity that was commensurate with Reform Era society in the mid-1980s.

Deftly extrapolating an expansive intellectual history from a tight temporal timeframe, Anxiety Aesthetics paints a picture of Maoist legacies that reveals it to be neither monolithic nor unchanging. Rather, socialist aesthetics emerges as a rather malleable set of material practices and intellectual traditions that its inheritors can and do actively reshape in their efforts to redefine a postrevolutionary subjecthood characterized by an anxious sense of individual agency and social responsibility.

In The Minjian Avant-Garde, Tan turns to a later period to also examine how artists and artworks revived and reworked aspects of the socialist legacy for the present. Whereas Lee tracks a discursive and intellectual history to tell a history of socialist aesthetic theory, Tan emphasizes a more object-oriented approach that foregrounds artmaking, artworks, and artistic networks. Examining the “minjian avant-garde,” which she defines as “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,” Tan puts critical pressure on the contradictions between these dual and often competing goals (4).

Like Lee, Tan maintains that the art practices she examines are a domestic phenomenon, albeit one that comes to intersect with the global art world that Chinese artists increasingly encountered into the 1990s and early 2000s. Acknowledged throughout the book—particularly in Tan’s references to the tension between “the singular” and “the multitude”—is the way in which the minjian avant-garde is related to the global development of socially engaged art or collaborative art practices described in studies by Grant Kester and Claire Bishop, among others. Tan attends to these international influences as well as the competing sets of artworlds and value systems that motivated the minjian avant-garde, ultimately suggesting that this global context plays no small role—and perhaps even more consequential of a role than any distinctly postsocialist domestic intellectual lineage—in shaping the concerns of Chinese artists during this period.

Chapter one shares the greatest overlap with Lee’s study. It examines Mao Xuhui and Huang Yong Ping, two “proto-minjian avant-gardes” and their works from the mid-1980s. Tan contextualizes their art practice within the post-Mao culture of the 1980s, a period when new notions of individualism and self-expression had to be reconciled with an increasingly pervasive mass commercial culture. Through collages featuring texts and images culled from print culture, the appropriation of found everyday materials, or the relocation of artworks outside of institutional museum spaces, Mao and Huang challenged art’s singularity by foregrounding intersections between avant-garde art and minjian popular culture. Yet as Tan points out, the avant-garde artists’ desire to engage audiences often resulted in unexpected results of public hostility and misunderstanding—a tension further explored in several of the following chapters.

Chapter two focuses on the artist Qiu Zhijie’s use of calligraphy to blur the boundaries between the private and public as well as the individual and the collective. Tan argues that through methods of copying and sourcing writings from everyday individuals, Qiu privileges the act of “writing words” over the elite “art of calligraphy,” ultimately framing writing—an impersonal, collective act that is informed by repetitive training, rules, and regulation—as an embodied “archive” of the minjian. Tan’s attention to the dynamics of the individual versus the collective that undergirds Qiu’s work allows her to offer a nuanced account of Qiu’s seminal piece Assignment No. 1: Copying the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ 1,000 Times, which she argues was not simply a cynical act of self-erasure, but an attempt to articulate an alternative mode of selfhood that is “embodied, affectively potent, yet neither self-contained nor singular” (53). Yet, as Tan points out, Qiu’s embrace of calligraphy as a minjian practice also stems from his encounters with multiple art worlds, and his broader aims to recuperate the minjian to counter both Eurocentric standards of art and Sinocentric discourses on calligraphy. Ironically, these goals ultimately redirect his interest and audience back to the elite contemporary art world.

Chapter three examines The Long March: A Walking Visual Display (2002), a multisited curatorial project initiated by the UK trained curator Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, in which artist participants re–walk the historical journey of the Red Army during its retreat to Yan’an during the Chinese Civil War. Along the way, artists engaged locals in collaborative art projects and challenged the mythical status of the revolutionary past. As Tan explains, however, these attempts to collaborate with villagers and initiate art activities that connected to their everyday lives resulted in only a few rare cases of affective connection, among interactions largely characterized by misunderstanding and miscommunication. Invoking Hal Foster’s critique of art’s “ethnographic turn,” Tan points to the pitfalls of avant-garde art’s “primitivist” tendencies and the ways in which the minjian avant-garde “share the predicament of all participatory and socially engaged art” (92). Yet Tan also suggests that this predicament is “uniquely compounded by the Maoist heritage” (92). Without further elaboration, however, the reader is left to wonder—with a nod to Lee’s more discursive methodology—how the artists might have had to reframe the aims of collectivism and populism given its excesses during the Cultural Revolution or how the historic experience of young urban intellectuals “sent down to the countryside” might have complicated the relationship between the minjian avant-garde and villagers during the project. In this chapter, further attention to the discursive specificity of China’s postsocialist condition would have enhanced the conclusions Tan draws from this case study.

Chapter four examines several artists who engage the minjian primarily through their interest in commodity objects and mass culture. From Jiao Xingtao’s recreation of a commercial sculpture studio as an installation in an art museum to Li Mu’s staging of reproductions of well-known works of contemporary Western art in the everyday spaces of his rural hometown or the Yangdeng Co-op’s efforts to collaborate with villagers on projects that responded to their daily lives in a small town in the remote Guizhou Province, these art practices aim to challenge hierarchies between creative and productive labor and between the rarefied status of contemporary art and everyday material culture and spaces. As Tan demonstrates, however, these projects either end up reaffirming the distinctions between avant-garde art and the minjian, or becoming so thoroughly absorbed into the conventional everydayness of minjian life that they end up losing their critical edge.

The last chapter focuses on the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, who has most visibly championed minjian causes through large-scale socially engaged projects. Tan sees Ai as the minjian avant-garde artist par excellence: his ability to combine the singular and the multiple in both his artworks and his public persona reflects the appeal and the socio-political aims of minjian-based art practice, yet it is also rife with the many internal contradictions that are central to her critique of the minjian avant-garde. Tan foregrounds Ai’s ability to mobilize and connect networks of human and financial resources both domestically and internationally to promote the minjian, but also points to the ways in which his cultural capital and the ability to move flexibly across different worlds fundamentally distinguish him from the disenfranchised minjian he seeks to represent. Like many of the artists discussed in the book, Ai’s incorporation of members of the minjian in his projects allows him to draw on their “marginal” status to re-present his work as a radical alternative to the global art world despite the ways in which he and his art projects are part and parcel of it. Ultimately, Tan argues that Ai’s centrality as the singular artist orchestrating his works, undercuts his invocation of the multitude and underscores “the fundamental inequality and disconnection between the one and the many” (134).

Throughout the book Tan maintains a critical attitude towards the minjian avant-garde, highlighting its uneasy alliance with the state’s neo-socialist policies, its uncritical embrace of the banal aspects of mass culture, its disconnect with its purported subjects, and its overdetermined motivations in positioning avant-garde art practice within domestic and international arenas. The crux of these problems, as Tan reveals, is the fundamental contradiction between the avant-garde imperative to critically stand apart from the masses and the ideals of becoming indistinguishable from the minjian—a condition, which Tan acknowledges in the end may never be fully resolved.

Anxiety Aesthetics and The Minjian Avant-Garde both offer illuminating accounts of the complexity of art practices after the Maoist period and the ways in which artists sought to articulate and act upon the aims of a socially and politically engaged art practice. If, as Lee asserts in the conclusion of her book, this postsocialist aesthetic lineage has significant consequences for our understanding of contemporary art after the 1980s, one would expect vestiges of these intellectual concerns to be found in Tan’s analysis of the minjian avant-garde. Yet the two sets of artists described in each of these books seem to inhabit entirely separate discursive worlds and orientations. At least in Tan’s portrayal, artistic engagements with the minjian feel more pragmatic and appropriative, than the kind of anxious, yet earnest working through of socialist aesthetics ideals described by Lee. As Tan insightfully notes, avant-garde art’s nativist turn toward the minjian is simultaneously also an outward turn to situate their art practice in relation to the global contemporary art world. This disparity would appear to reaffirm the longstanding periodization of the rupture between the 1980s and the 1990s that Lee argues against at the outset of her book and is evidenced by the “global turn” in contemporary art from China. To my mind, this only goes to prove how singular and important Lee’s account of the overlooked decade between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the mid-to-late 1980s is. Lee has given us the prehistory to the postsocialist contemporary; what still remains to be written is a history of where this socialist intellectual legacy in contemporary art from China goes from there.