Creativity Class

Abstract

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. This is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. The book shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new “market socialist” economy where value is produced through innovation. Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, the book combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, the book sheds light on an important facet of today's China.

A Linguistic Anthropology of Images

“…has necessarily led them to other types of semiotic phenomena, including images. For example, linguistic anthropologists have studied drawings and paintings (e.g., Chumley 2016, Hoffmann-Dilloway 2020; photographic images in print (e.g., Ball 2014, Sidnell 2021, film (e.g., Hardy 2014;Kirk 2016;Swinehart 2018;Nakassis 2020Nakassis , 2023a, television and video (e.g., Goodwin 1994, Pardo 2013, Urban 2015), and social media (e.g., Swinehart 2012, Calhoun 2019, Ross 2019; blueprints (Murphy 2005); emojis and memes (Soh 2020, Davis 2021); anime and video games (Silvio 2010, Nozawa 2013; and figurines and puppets (Wortham et al 2011, Barker 2019, among others. Linguistic anthropologists have also focused on images within their own practices, in transcription (e.g., Hoffmann-Dilloway 2021, Murphy 2021) and field recordings (e.g., Feld & Williams 1975, Murphy 2023, Zuckerman 2023.…”

“…Extending the Bakhtinian notion of voicing, Chumley (2016) has also explored such dynamics-what she calls "envisioning"-where processes of entextualization prefigure our seeing-as-other (what she calls "visions"). Just as we speak with the voices of others (Bakhtin 1981, Weidman 2021, we also see with eyes of others (Babcock 2022, Nakassis 2023b).…”

Is Creativity Masculine? Visual Arts College Students’ Perceptions of the Gender Stereotyping of Creativity and Its Influence on Creative Self‐Efficacy

“…Furthermore, visual arts students should understand the complexity of the cooperative networks through which creativity is evaluated (Chumley 2016). Artistic works, like all human production, are affected by joint activity in the art world (Becker 2008).…”

“…In contemporary China, the practice of creativity is considered the pursuit of ‘modernity’—meaning freedom, individuality, and knowledge—a concept located at the nexus of cultural and economic development (Chumley 2016). After the launch of the ‘reform and opening‐up’ (改革開放) policy in 1978, creativity became the keyword in education system reform projects as the creative industry in China began to grow (Welland 2018).…”

Poetics of Praise and Image‐Texts of Cinematic Encompassment

“…Indeed, I caution against them. Rather, my interest is the concrete processes and relations through which specific images are entextualized and interdiscursively taken up by variously interested projects to various effect (Murphy ; Chumley ). To this end, I look at the cross‐modal peregrination of a particular metonymic figure of reversible encompassment, following it from south Indian literature to literarized oratory in south Indian politics to politicized filmic form in south Indian cinema.…”