UC Berkeley

This dissertation, through its ethnographic account of a creative industry site in the People’s Republic of China called 梧桐山, Wutong Shan, or Wutong Mountain (hereafter referred to as Wutong, Wutong Shan, or Wutong Art Village), has several aims. While creative industry is usually associated with the contemporary, my site shows an unintended result of creative industry, especially in Shenzhen and in an ecologically protected area–the resuscitation of a cultural past. I engage Wutong Shan as a site for observing the tension between state demand for creative industries and an artistic orientation that moves away from practical goals to aesthetic desires produced by yearnings for a cultural past. Yet this re-orientation, which involves a resurgence of national arts, somewhat fulfills another state demand–that for national rejuvenation: the return to “Chinese culture,” linked to Chinese philosophical traditions. In order to study this ethnographically, I consider what Wutong residents are doing “aesthetic work,” resulting from a particular kind of labor that is interwoven with the production of urban space. I forge new understandings of how art history can be a framing device, thinking with contemporary art and eco-art history about the relationship between image and place in China as articulated through landscape painting. Following new experiments in ethnographic writing, this dissertation queers the established methods of writing such an account by writing through the situation as I experienced it, rich with affect and confusion. Wutong Shan is an unusual situation that affords an exploration of a strain of post-socialism informed by a yearning of return to the countryside, and of imagined simpler times before communism, of urbanites seeking traces of the past that speak to the heart.