Art for the worker in postsocialist China

Throughout the 20th century, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the dominant subject matter of visual art in China was the worker, peasant, and soldier, happily carrying out physical labor in the name of socialism. In the decades following Mao’s death in 1976, China underwent radical market reforms, profoundly changing the social and economic status of manual laborers. Millions of farmers were displaced and forced to illegally move to the cities to work and live precariously as migrant laborers. This paper examines the art created throughout the reform era with the laborer as its subject, exploring shifts in the ways artists have critiqued the injustices faced by manual laborers under the conditions of global capitalism against the backdrop of the internationalization of contemporary Chinese art. In the late 1990s, artists made performances asking migrant workers to reenact the movements of their own labor in a museum setting, reifying Marx’s concept of alienation under capitalism. After the turn of the century internationally sponsored artists organized projects designed to liberate the creative potential of the laborer, exhibiting their creations in galleries or museums as contemporary art. In recent years many artists have focused attention on the countryside, creating projects that attempt to draw migrant laborers back to their hometowns. This paper demonstrates how these works inspire new ways of thinking about the changing nature of Chinese postsocialism from the ‘90s to the present and how these changes have affected the ways the Chinese laborer is valued on a domestic and international scale.