Curating Rural Reconstruction: Zuo Jing and Art for Community Development

This paper discusses Zuo Jing, an independent curator whose career trajectory exemplifies an important new direction of contemporary Chinese art in the past decade, that is the development of socially engaged art. First establishing himself as a curator of contemporary art in Beijing, Zuo was active in constructing infrastructure that promoted contemporary Chinese art through his involvement with independent art spaces, magazines, and festivals where contemporary artworks could be exhibited and discussed. Since 2011, however, Zuo has turned to embrace rural reconstruction as the field of his curatorial work and has charged himself with the mission of reviving traditional architecture, folk arts, and public life in the countryside through art and cultural programs. In various rural reconstruction projects launched or co-launched by him, such as the Bishan Project, Maogong Town Project, and Jingmai Mountain Project, he strives to expand the relevance of art to contemporary living with local-specific and community-based collaborative programs that foster the development of rural public life and the grassroots participation for the development of rural regions. Contemporary art, this paper argues, has become an approach for social engagement and a process for carrying out community development in Zuo’s rural reconstruction work. Consequently, Zuo’s curatorial practice has gone beyond perceiving art merely as the production of concrete art objects as he accentuates the interdisciplinary potential of contemporary art for creating new social spaces, new processes, and new relationships that are beneficial for the betterment of conditions for human living in various rural communities.