Displacements: An Affective Approach to Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Art

Abstract

Contemporary Chinese diaspora art has been regarded as a space to perform Chineseness. This thesis offers an affective theorization of contemporary Chinese diaspora art as an alternative to the prevalent ethnonational categorization. Focusing on the embodied displacements engendered by the move from one place to another, this thesis analyzes the dynamics of contemporary Chinese diaspora art that are grounded in the fluctuating globalization. By tracing the artistic production and circulation of displacement from the 1980s to the present day, this thesis sketches the contours of an art genealogy that is entangled with that of mainland China yet underrepresented in the mainstream homogenized narrative of Chinese art history. Through the lens of displacement, contemporary Chinese diaspora art can be understood as both a representation of and an intervention in the embodied experiences of migrancy rooted in the postcolonial asymmetric relations. Intersecting the affective approach with the postcolonial perspective, this thesis explores how embodied experiences of displacement are internalized and constitutive of the migrant subjectivity, externalized in a way that regulates self-transformation, and participate in the intersubjective relations that reshape the ecology of contemporary Chinese diaspora art. In their performance of the cross-border move lived and negotiated on an embodied level, Chinese migrant artists illuminate from a microhistorical perspective the changing conditions of migrant subjectivity and resistance to the static view of cultural differences. The artistic reconfiguration of these experiences opens a productive space to interrogate the Eurocentric othering and the Sinocentric unifying discourse of Chinese art history.