This essay presents a case study of the widely known—and at times controversial—artist Ge Yulu and his interventionist practice. Through an account of Ge’s life and career, including his early years as a grassroots migrant artist navigating precarity in Beijing, the essay explores how radical artistic gestures are gradually tempered, and often reshaped into more palatable forms that conform to institutional aesthetics. At the same time, it shows how a persistent critical impulse—despite the risks of censorship, social marginalisation, and financial hardship—sustains hope and continues to provoke public engagement.

On 30 March 2024, ‘Questioning Silence: A Trio Exhibition on Family Histories’ (追问沉默) by Chinese artists Lan Yi, Da Xi, and Huang Xiaoxing opened at Making Space (新造空间), an independent research-based contemporary art space on the southern banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, dedicated to socially engaged art through transdisciplinary collaboration. This was the […]

China’s post-socialist modernisation and economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s have led to great political and institutional changes and deepened structural inequalities, creating a large marginalised subaltern group whose lives have been shaped by shifting labour markets and migration policies (Hillenbrand 2023; Pun 2016). Today, the stories of China’s ‘subaltern’ are widely heard, from […]

Wang Chunchen’s 2010 monograph on the changing role of art in Chinese society opens and ends with accounts of the forced resettlement of artists and the sudden demolition of their studios in Beijing’s Chaoyang District between December 2009 and February 2010. In what this prominent art critic and curator viewed as the continuation of a […]

Liu Cixin’s the Three-Body Problem book trilogy is one of the world’s bestselling Chinese sci-fi series, being read and endorsed by figures such as George R.R. Martin and Barack Obama. In Chinese public debates, however, critics highlight the series’ social Darwinist, misogynistic, and totalitarian tendencies, raising concerns about how the trilogy has been used by […]

During the 1950s, the construction of large-scale water engineering infrastructure emerged as a crucial undertaking for the socialist state. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of engineers, Party cadres, and workers, this monumental task brought about revolutionary transformations to the landscape of China. Concurrently, a multitude of artists were commissioned to visit these projects and capture their essence. By closely examining and analysing some of these works of art, this essay aims to highlight the profound technological grandeur and immense labour intensity expressed in them, while also shedding light on some of the aspects that remained invisible within the state-sanctioned visual representations of these projects.

William Somerset Maugham is probably one of the most commercially successful but least critically appreciated writers of the twentieth century. If today he is remembered mostly for his 1915 masterpiece Of Human Bondage and a few other outstanding novels, back in his time readers looked upon him as the cantor of the decadence of the […]

In response to the renewed emphasis of the central government on national security, in November 2015 the authorities of Jilin province, in northeast China, introduced a hotline to report possible spies. The dilemma was how to recognise a spy. Local officials instructed concerned citizens to look out for eight revealing signs (Yang 2015). First, spies […]