Dreams of Shanshui: Negotiating Landscape Aesthetics in China's Environmental Modernization

UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies hosts a talk with Andrea Riemenschnitter

Speaker: Andrea Riemenschnitter, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich
Panelist/Discussant: Pheng Cheah, Rhetoric, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Environmental China Colloquium 5

In the spring of 2015, a series of shanshui landscapes by early modern cartoon artist Feng Zikai decorated official China Dream posters in conjunction with slogans to protect the environment. Appropriated by the government, Feng's post-traditional sceneries are meant to assist China's project of environmental modernization. Hailing national values and citizen participation, the official take on landscape as shanshui aesthetics possibly opens up a space for the renegotiation of core issues in China's state ideology. Yet a monumentalizing approach threatens to neutralize both, Feng's and contemporary literary and artistic trajectories. While attempting to ease new anxieties with ancient wisdom, the posters as well as other official materials are haunted by this same wisdom's cultural memory of collective violence and vision of anarchic freedom. In this lecture, Shanghai artists' participation in the making of an environmental China Dream will be investigated by looking at several ongoing exhibitions. It will be argued that, by greening and aestheticizing the official China Dream, Xi Jinping strives to harmonize society by incorporating narratives of ecocultural contestation and appeasing any kind of opposition to rampant industrial pollution and heritage demolition. Furthermore, the government attempts to popularize the national policy of environmental modernization, and to maintain ideological control over proliferating demands for change with respect to political participation and economic development. The cultural sphere, on the other hand, defends its critical position by taking the government's tampering with traditional ethico-aesthetic standards at its word.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321