Since the mid-1990s, growing urbanization has led to the rise of new forms, needs and sites for visual self-expression in urban public space in mainland China. Drawing on periods of intensive fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong since 2006, this article suggests a new approach for examining the spatial politics of urban art images in China based on the concept of ‘site responsiveness’. Inspired by discussions on site-specific and site-oriented art and street art, this article aims to clarify the importance of both aesthetic analysis and comparative contextualization of urban art images in relation to (1) the reciprocal relationship between the urban art images and the site, and (2) international developments in the discourses on ‘graffiti’ and ‘street art’. This dual approach provides a starting point for a comprehensive sociospatial interpretation of the visual phenomenon in China while challenging the unproblematized use of the concept of graffiti in existing studies and offering two umbrella concepts – urban art images and creator of urban art images – to facilitate more nuanced research. By examining actions of visual self-expression at the grass-roots level, this article brings attention to an often neglected but crucial perspective to discussions of the city as a living organism and to the interrelations between art and urbanization.

This article focuses on the emergence of graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai as an intriguing part of the contemporary art scene. Approaching graffiti through the framework of visual culture and analyzing both the visual and social aspects of creating graffiti images, I argue that contemporary graffiti in these cities can be regarded primarily as creative self-expression emphasizing aesthetic intention and a renaming process, not as vandalism. Deriving primarily from information gathered during my fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, I also discuss the development of graffiti in China and its characteristics. In the Euro-American context, graffiti is still commonly regarded as criminal activity that destroys public property. This allegation, however, fails to take into account how the international graffiti culture has become an enduring genre of art with strong emphasis on style and aesthetic evaluation. Although creating graffiti is a controversial issue in China also, graffiti nevertheless exists, especially in the so-called art areas (districts known for their numerous art galleries, artist studios, art-related activities and, occasionally, art museums), or in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

The current understanding of urban resilience focuses on economic, environmental, and social responses. While the significance of art in enhancing social resistance has been acknowledged, the full potential of (un)authorised artistic and creative practices in initiating and strengthening the strategies of urban resilience is not yet recognised. Based on extensive fieldwork in 2012-2017, this paper delineates how urban hacking challenges the sociopolitical and spatio-aesthetic dynamics of the urban public space in Hong Kong as a form of cultural resilience that can contribute to a more holistic understanding of urban resilience. The diversity of urban hacking is indicated in an analysis of selected case studies of urban knitting and digital hacking that question the prevailing perceptions emphasising hacking as a method of illegal and arbitrary destruction. I posit that varied forms of urban hacking have a growing power to raise awareness of sociopolitical issues, enhance solidarity, and renegotiate space for new strategies and subjectivities aiming for more versatile co-authorship of the city. Keywords Urban hacking • Urban resilience • Cultural resilience • Civic engagement • Co-authorship of the city • Artistic and creative practices

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Although Chinese contemporary artists are often criticized for creating superficial works that parody Chairman Mao without any deeper meaning, the employment of parody is a far more complex phenomenon. Instead of being representatives of Jamesonian pastiche, many artists employ varying methods of trans-contextual parody to express their mixed and even controversial intentions and notions. With a detailed structural analysis of the art works, and taking into account the socio-cultural context and the artists’ own intentions, I will show that the common assumptions—that parodying Mao is equivalent to political pop or that political pop represents pastiche—are oversimplifications of this complex phenomenon, especially when caricaturing is used as a method to violate the visual norms.