Anxiety Aesthetics

"Anxiety Aesthetics is the first monograph to focus exclusively on the crucial decade after the Cultural Revolution ended and China's art world began to open to the international community. Jennifer Lee's work is a timely and much-needed study of modern China in that crucial transitional period. It is indisputably a major contribution to multiple fields, including modern Chinese art history and interdisciplinary Chinese studies."--Kuiyi Shen, Professor of Art History, University of California, San Diego "Original, subtle, and emphatic, Lee's book is an indispensable contribution to the rethinking of contemporary Chinese art. Breaking free from the conventional historiography that views the postsocialist transition as a break, Lee sheds much-needed light on the confusion, reluctance, remorse, anxiety, and excitement of the late Cultural Revolution and early Reform years. Her analysis is a must-read for those seeking to understand art in the aftermath of Maoist radicalism in China."--Yi Gu, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Toronto "Defying conventional accounts, Lee unspools an analytical history of aesthetics and art practices in China's early 1980s. She illumines the liminal moments during which cultural producers fashioned new artistic possibilities just as the day-after-the-revolution-ended was dawning. Provocative and articulate, this elegant book is essential for anyone interested in how crises of ambiguously anxious times yield enduring experiments in culture."--Rebecca E. Karl, Professor of History, New York University "Exploring newly emerging artistic practices and discourses in post-Cultural Revolution China at the crossroads of visual art, literature, and aesthetics, this original book offers a penetrating analysis of an extraordinarily creative yet ambivalent and anxious moment that has foreshadowed the development of Chinese art over the past forty years. Highly recommended."--Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago