Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China by Lily Chumley (review)

Lily Chumley’s book, Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China, places a valuable and hitherto largely absent focus on art education as a vector of cultural creativity in contemporary China. Chumley’s assessment of art education and cultural creativity in contemporary China as fundamentally enmeshed with wider disciplining sociopolitical and economic discourses is convincing and well supported by primary research. That assessment is, however, insufficiently expansive in its accounting for the relationship between aesthetic modernity and society in the particular contexts of China.

The “art academy” is a vexed institution in relation to the development of post-Enlightenment visual cultures. As an institutional means of transmitting established cultural values, it has, since its inception in France during the eighteenth century, been a persistent locus of orthodoxy and exclusivity. Following the emergence of a nascent avant-garde during the mid-nineteenth century, the art academy also became a point of reference for the fomenting of radical secession and, in the context of high-modernism and postmodernism, a recognized site of heterodox self- and collective actualization. As the lyrics to The Jam’s song “Art School”—a late 1970s subcultural celebration of a by then well-rehearsed Mod(ernist) self-expression in the UK—opine, “Any taste that you feel is right, wear any clothes just as long as they’re bright, say what you want ’cause this is a new art school.” Indeed, within Western Europe, the U.S., and other heavily Westernized contexts the art academy has now become established as a place for the theorizing and enacting of cultural and political dissensus, arguably making its curricula paradoxically into a new form of rhetorical “politically correct” academicism.

Within China the picture is somewhat different. Art academies comparable with those in Western contexts were first developed there during the early twentieth century in major urban centers, including Shanghai and Hangzhou, in part as means of supporting a localized vision of aesthetic modernity based on the adoption of Western post-Renaissance realism as a locally apposite breaking with the elitist abstractions of China’s long-standing aristocratic literati traditions. As Chumley rightly indicates, indebtedness to the locally perceived radicalism of realism continues to cast a long shadow over art education in mainland China. It also contrasts strongly with the defamiliarizing avant-gardist and post-avant-gardist tendencies espoused by (supposedly) progressive Western art academies. Discussion of the dissensual potential of such tendencies in China takes place for the much greater part outside the official academic curriculum. Since the ending of dynastic rule, official promotion of realism as both socially/culturally progressive and resistant to the deracinating effects of Western modernity has been continuous in relation to successive republican, socialist, and postsocialist political regimes within China. Artistic creativity is thus durably framed as politically useful even as that framing effectively forecloses open criticism of governmental authority.

As Chumley’s particular social ethnographic take on the subject emphasizes, today the lot of most “creative” workers in China—as elsewhere—is to contribute in politically consensual ways to postindustrial economic development. The vast majority are destined to become drones in the monstrous and ultimately unknowable hive of postmodern productivity and consumption. Chumley’s assessment of art academies in mainland China as sites of “self-styling” that reproduce elitist forms of social stratification and make manifest governmental initiatives toward the building of a modern creative economy is a persuasive one. That analysis is substantially buttressed by the author’s sensitivity to cultural-linguistic nuances in light of extended firsthand involvement with art education and artistic communities in mainland China. Perhaps most novel and engaging is Chumley’s discussion of the entry and examinations processes that from the outset prime students for transformation into necessary cultural capital and for participation in facilitating cultural networks—processes that, though made to fit the current purpose, carry undeniable traces of a prior socialist command economy...