Heritage in the Digital Era by Rodanthi Tzanelli

Author:Rodanthi Tzanelli [Tzanelli, Rodanthi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781136163364
Google: VJBuBAylgKQC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-03-05T04:45:39+00:00

5 Memory and protest

Yimou Zhang’s and Ai Weiwei’s artwork (2004–11)

Mobility and belonging in epistemic domains

Let us examine how the works of two of China’s controversial artists – namely cinematic director Yimou Zhang and activist-architect Ai Weiwei – endorse imaginative forms of travel that render metropolitan Chineseness translucent across cultural planes. Once more, travel and tourism are differentiated experientially (Boorstin 1962; Bourdieu 1984). But whereas experiential creativity functions as a token of authenticity (presenting them as educated travellers, Grand Tourists of sorts), both artists declare attachment to popular culture and audience participation, thus advocating common tourist practices by technological means. I use the term pilgrimage here in recognition of the spiritual dimensions of both artists’ journey but also to highlight its function as a human rite conducive to modern mobility cultures. Such analytical classifications conceal how the promise of demediation (experiential immediacy without technology) of travel experience is both ‘standard to the marketing discourse of tourism [and] constitutive of the travel mythos as propagated by the very travellers’ (Strain 2003: 4).

The mobility of ethnic style is a marketable feature in mediascapes, especially when it is tied to imaginative forms of touring foreign lands, as is the case with the Beijing Summer Olympics (2008) to which both Zhang and Weiwei contributed. Although the Olympics are not the chapter’s centrepiece, they bind the two artists’ passage from the private aura of ethnic artistic forms to the public domains of global fandom. I endeavour to show how, just as Vardalos, Zhang and Weiwei promote a form of organic art or artistic craft; and as members of a transnational epistemic community they were drawn into national and regional policy-making because their social identity and cultural status contributed to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aspiration to enhance China’s global political prestige (Haas 1992; Ong and Nomini 1997). Chinese policies strategically intertwined nationalist with cosmopolitan imperatives to this end (Conversi 2001; Drake 2003: 42). Following Den Xiaoping’s post-Maoist reforms, Chinese nation-building began to promote in new knowledge economies mergers of middle-classness with symbolic skills that hinged upon hegemonic narratives of art, but on the domestic stage it endeavoured to control and repress such identities because they clashed with traditional communist values (Xu 2007). The zeal to revive Confucian teachings in more recent years consolidated this oxymoron, whereby organic knowledge was both promoted and destroyed.

From the Maoist era the educated urban youth and intelligentsia were forced to move to rural or industrial areas in the CCP’s attempt to educate the peasantry and indoctrinate the middle classes into proletarian values. This phenomenon informs the biographies of Zhang and Weiwei. European social theory speaks of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ national cultures, domains of memory that define and are defined by the ethnic profiles of their human participants (Przeclawski et al. 2009: 173). This matches the relative ‘openness or closedness of an media product’ (Schrøder et al. 2003: 136): without denying the plurality of potential meanings in different global settings, taking the Chinese political context as an interpretative ground limits my readings of Zhang’s and Weiwei’s artefacts to a manageable size in this chapter.

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