Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Margarita Cabrera's Florezca (2011) are two performative works that exemplify a change in priorities in terms of the ways in which art conveys beauty and truth within the conditions of precarious life. In these works, the subject of the artisan/labourer is staged to complicate the mainstream views of China and Mexico as the derogated zones of labour, whereby the outsource worker and the undocumented worker are perpetually blamed for the loss of jobs in the United States. Ai's production of millions of ceramic sunflower seeds exported from the 'porcelain capital' of Jingdezhen, and Cabrera's thousands of copper butterflies, created by volunteers enlisted to work in her makeshift maquiladora, depict an 'affective labour' that has real consequences. The perspective from the new dialectics of precarity -intervening in art, labour and life -can be viewed in association to Lauren Berlant's return to 'affirmative culture', adapted from Herbert Marcuse's cultural ideal for happiness, goodness, and solidarity that coexisted with its negation by the material processes of life. Berlant's emphasis on the 'sociality of emotion' as a form of 'optimism of critical thought' aligns with the idea that, amidst the oppression of global empire, precarity offers the potential for new socialities and subjectivities.

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This article examines the function of the Venice Biennale as an ‘archive’ for documenting diasporic Chineseness: establishing a body of work by the Zhongguo ren gongtong ti ‘community of Chinese’ during the period of the 1990s to the mid-2000s when Chinese states were first included in the Biennale roster. The difference between cultural and national identity can be explored through the statist distinctions of the island-nation of Taiwan, the special administrative region of Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China represented at the exposition. The artists selected for the case studies of this article, Lee Ming-sheng, Lin Shu-min, Wu Mali, Stanley Wong, Ho Siu Kee, Zhang Huan and Cai Guo-qiang, have adopted the conceptual medium that showcases the body as the subject and/or object of the work of art – the medium contributes to the understanding of the human subject that Chineseness ultimately represents. The Biennale becomes a theoretical frame for contextualizing these representative works, contributing to a historiographic perspective for examining their inaugural moment. Ultimately, the exposition functions as an empirical stage for the analysis of the emergence of Chineseness in the global context for contemporary art.

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