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Abstract

The urban-rural dichotomy is a prominent issue in modern and contemporary China. With the country’s rapidly changing political and social environment, artists’ depictions of the countryside and their artistic practices in rural areas have undergone constant changes over time. In this dissertation, from the perspective of geographical movements between urban and rural areas, I follow artists’ rurally engaged practices and analyze how their relationship with the countryside and the peasantry changed between the 1980s and 2010s. The bidirectional movement patterns of artists between city and village formed the basis for the structure of the dissertation, which is divided into three chapters. In each chapter, I choose the practices of two artists for in-depth case studies. Through an analysis of artists Xu Bing and Lü Shengzhong’s practices in the 1980s, the first chapter explores why and how artists, with a zhiqing background, went back to the countryside to depict rural scenes as well as research and experiment with folk art in rural regions. An attempt is made here to show how their individual practices were connected with the main trends of thought in 1980s China. By making comparisons, I also investigate how artists’ rurally engaged practices and their relationship with the countryside in this period were associated with their predecessors in Mao’s period and how these artists in the 1980s deviated from the socialist doctrine. The second chapter provides insight into the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when some artists abandoned stable jobs within the state apparatus and moved to the outskirts of big cities to form artist communities, and peasants rushed into cities to look for jobs known as the “peasant worker rush.” In this chapter, my attention is focused on the urban-rural fringe zone, a peculiar topos on the edge of a city inhabited by peasant workers and artists. With case studies on artists Wu Wenguang and Cao Fei, the discussion focuses on how artists were actively involved in this urban-rural fringe zone and the life of peasant workers via their physical presences and artistic practices. The last chapter deals with changes that have taken place since the advent of the new century. Rural China has been drastically hollowed out by immigration flows into cities, but some artists have voluntarily returned to the countryside to document villagers’ traumatic memories and enthusiastically participate in rural reconstruction. Through the practices of two artists, Jin Le and Zhang Mengqi, I discuss how the enactors of these site-specific experiments have interacted with the local environment and people, as well as the various ways in which they deal with the dire economic and cultural crises in rural China.