Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

The following materials are the product of a studio, sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley, which critically investigated a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. These sites ranged from Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, which exports hundreds of thousands of trade paintings around the world, to Xiaozhou Village in Guangzhou, where local artists and art teachers transformed village houses into studios and galleries, and to the collaborative architectural project of Japanese architect Fujimoto and Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. The studio aimed to analyze the ways in which villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers, entrepreneurs leverage art practices in order to reimagine urban life and urban citizenship. Texts by Winnie Wong and Margaret Crawford, designed by Ettore Santi with artworks by José Figueroa, images and research by Story Wiggins, Xiuxian Zhan, Valentina Rozas-Krause, Sben Korsh; sponsored by the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative.