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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until August 09, 2026

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Re-imagining Post-socialist Corporeality: Technology, Body, and Labor in Post-Mao Chinese Art

Huang, Linda
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1626084992452357

Abstract Details

2021, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History of Art.
Chinese media art has evolved in tandem with the growing enthusiasm for technological revolution since the post-Mao 1980s. While recent scholarship has analyzed the critical role played by the so-called “information fever” in propelling China’s transition to a technocratic society, the dynamic interplay between post-Mao techno-utopianism and the development of media art is yet to be historicized. My dissertation fills this gap by examining how artists negotiated new fantasies about information on the one hand, and anxieties about state control and social engineering on the other. Seeing information technology as a new form of power impacting post-socialist artistic practices, I investigate how media artists adopted new ideas and vocabularies from cybernetic theories to articulate the political manipulation of technology and the tension between control and communication. Through inspection of historical documents and audiovisual materials, my preliminary research suggests that the rise of a technocratic society profoundly reshaped subjectivity and corporeality in post-Mao China. As artists reacted to an increasingly precarious status of humanity, the socially and biologically reengineered human body appeared as a vital subject matter in media art. Based on these findings, I argue that media artists of the post-reform era transformed a cybernetic imaginary of the body into new inventive forms of embodiment. In doing so, they were able to visualize the alienating effects of modernization, activating an alternative political imagination that enabled them to rethink the politics of the “human.” Rather than framing Chinese media art as a derivative or an imported art form, my project illuminates its specific social and political context and its potential to resist the dehumanizing aspects of technology. As one of the first efforts to address the impact of technology on art and humanity in the context of post-Mao China, my study complicates a Western-dominated discourse of post-humanism by focusing on the artistic reconfiguration of the socialist body as a politically contested site within an increasingly connected and globalized world.
Julia Andrews (Advisor)
Erica Levin (Committee Member)
Kris Paulsen (Committee Member)
Namiko Kunimoto (Committee Member)
213 p.
Art History; Asian Studies; Science History; Sociology; Technology
experimental art, socialist history of technology, labor politics, body politics, new media

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Huang, L. (2021). Re-imagining Post-socialist Corporeality: Technology, Body, and Labor in Post-Mao Chinese Art [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1626084992452357

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Huang, Linda. Re-imagining Post-socialist Corporeality: Technology, Body, and Labor in Post-Mao Chinese Art. 2021. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1626084992452357.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Huang, Linda. "Re-imagining Post-socialist Corporeality: Technology, Body, and Labor in Post-Mao Chinese Art." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1626084992452357

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1626084992452357
© 2021, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.