We live in a society where the nature, definition, and perception of labor are undergoing fundamental changes. The notion of immaterial labor shows the rising weight of the affective, aesthetic, intellectual, and cognitive work in contemporary social reproduction. Digital technologies now allow individualized mass productions, where transnational capital relentlessly pursues creative expression and artistic connoisseurship of the users. This results in the expropriation of so-called artistic/creative labor and the reduction of aesthetics to social engineering, as well as the abstraction and commodification of artistic designing in tune with technological thinking and consumerism. What we witness is an increasingly impoverished and abstracted notion of art and an increasingly broad and ambiguous notion of labor. Such a separation between labor and art has prevented us from grasping the temporal/historical dimension of art, which does not stem from abstract contemplation but embodied praxis.

This session convenes four papers that reexamine the connection between art and labor through different media in socialist and postsocialist China, including film, children’s picture book, labor aesthetics, and science fiction. The four presentations not only showcase the complexities of China’s socialist and postsocialist culture and history, but also excavate the radical alternatives embedded in the Chinese revolution and its legacy, which can be useful for thinking about and imagining the future of humanity. They are thus important additions to the study of socialist and postsocialist China, as well as the culturalist critique of capitalist society and the alienated human relationships and thoughts.

The proposed session contains four papers, each will be no more than 15 minutes long. There will be a 15-minute Q&A period after the presentations.

The first paper, Hui Faye Xiao’s “Sounding the Everyday: Gendered Acoustic Aesthetics of Immaterial Labor and Female Leadership in Socialist Shanghai,” aims to challenge the rigid view that socialist labor aesthetics was highly abstracted and politicized. Using the film Colors of Spring (1959) as an example, Xiao shows that while the radical agenda of socialist revolution turns traditional “feminine noises” into revolutionary sounds, women also play an unprecedentedly leading role in shaping the parameters of the new sociopolitical agenda not only through joining the labor force to produce material goods, but also through expanding their access to sound-producing practices that should also be recognized as essential forms of gendered labor. Therefore, the socialist women’s liberation should not be reduced to a utilitarian top-down project of liberating the untapped potential of women’s labor power.

Virginia L. Conn’s paper “‘Such Great Sights’: Aestheticizing the Future of Labor in Lianhuanhua” critically examines the aesthetic absence of labor in depictions of the techno-utopian future in Ye Yonglie’s “Little Smarty Travels to the Future” published in 1979. Conn argues that lianhuanhua such as “Little Smarty” interpellate readers/viewers into the creation of a utopian post-scarcity society that both patronizes physical labor as beneath the dignity of utopian citizens while also being founded on other classes of labor that it renders invisible. Visualizing a future free from labor while refusing to see certain types of labor as part of that freedom meant that “Little Smarty” reproduced of some of the very ideological impositions against which it staked a claim.

Benjamin Kindler’s paper, “Factory Humanisms: Labor Aesthetics and the Fashioning of the Post-socialist Factory in Reform-era China,” takes as its point of departure a series of theoretical exchanges between China’s early reform period and the late period of Soviet socialism. Central to this process was the conceptual vocabulary of “labor aesthetics” (laodong meixue), which was deployed to designate those currents in Soviet aesthetic thought that extended the problems of the aesthetic beyond the delimited space of the artwork or literary creation to envision how labor, especially at the site of factory production, itself might attain the status of an aesthetic process, simultaneously productive and artistic.

The last paper, Ban Wang’s “Art, Labor, and Technology in Han Song’s Regenerated Brick,” explores the idea of artistic labor in the Marxist romantic tradition in Chinese science fiction. Examining Han Song’s science fiction Regenerated Brick (Zaisheng zhuan, 2016), Wang’s paper explores how art and labor break apart and reconnect through the making of bricks after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. Information technology, commodity fetishism, the media, and the Internet have estranged human labor from its corporeal and aesthetic engagement with nature and colonized human-nature relations. Skeptical and critical of these technoscientific fantasies, Regenerated Brick focuses on the residual and enduring links between the laboring body, craftsmanship, and Earth, seeking to integrate art and labor and to enchant labor with auras of history, memory, and pain.