Hoping amidst precarity: Changing modes of hope in the vicissitudes of a Chinese art village

Abstract

Focusing on an ‘atypical’ group of creative workers, viz., rural-to-urban migrant painters in China, this article takes hope as a lens to investigate an extreme case of creative work precarity. Drawing on the findings of a 42-month longitudinal ethnographic study, I demonstrate how wall painters cope with the precarious present by channelling their initial hopes for a future of freedom, original work and stability into three different, everyday practices: playing, creating and waiting. Approaching precarity from an intersectional perspective, this study explicates how the multiple dimensions of precarity interact with each other in forming wall painters’ shifting modes of hope. Manifesting the fluidity and contingency of wall painters’ hopes in the vicissitudes of Dafen during China’s post-industrial turn, this study reconciles the debate in creative labour studies that sees hope as either a utopian fantasy or an everyday practice and further contributes to the political economy of hope in creative labour studies.

‘The show must go on!’: Hustling through the compounded precarity of Covid-19 in the creative industries

“…Recent research on creative work, especially on “precarious geographies” (Waite, 2009) has shown that despite abominable levels of precarity and radically uncertain conditions of work in the sector, creative workers develop and pursue hopeful and agentic strategies for coping with precarity ( Alacovska, 2019 , Chen, 2021 , Jamal and Lavie, 2021 ). Such scholarship has refused to cast creative workers as endlessly bounce-backable, resilient, and pliable subjects able to overcome crises by effortlessly dealing with precarity and returning to a state of stability, plenty, and fame.…”

“…We, thus, theorize the resourcefulness, improvisation, and savviness displayed by creative workers not merely as a survival reaction, but an agentic effort to turn the vicissitudes of life into both individual and communal advantage and opportunity. In so doing, we contribute a novel empirical exploration of coping with compounded precarity during the pandemic to the growing literature on creative work that has examined the multifarious, informal, and hopeful ways in which creative workers deal with heightened patterns of precarity in conditions of protracted crisis such as abject societal fallout, enduring war, and post-industrial economic disintegration ( Alacovska, 2019 , Chen, 2021 , Jamal and Lavie, 2021 ).…”