Who is occupying wall and street: graffiti and urban spatial politics in contemporary China

Abstract

This paper examines three cases of graffiti production characterized by showing the connections between three key ideas (aura, carnival, and publicity) in the context of contemporary China. This paper attempts to construct a paradigm for this particular cultural phenomenon by analysing three cases situated in three different social levels. First, graffiti as artwork, as exhibited by the contemporary artist Zhang Dali, is discussed. Second, sponsorship of graffiti culture by the local government is studied. The last and most controversial topic of discussion is how graffiti's online circulation reflects civil society in China. This paper explores the complex intersection of street culture, public space, and media. In revolving around the questions of what defines graffiti producers and spectators, what can be said about graffiti-writing practices, and who has the ability to speak out, this discussion illustrates the extent to which graffiti can be understood as a means of public communication against the backdrop of, and amid the moments of crisis in, the construction of modern Chinese cities. This paper illustrates how the aesthetics and the politics of representational forms and their intermediality are mobilized in a variety of contested spaces, where producer and spectator change and exchange identities.

Notes

^1. See news reports from, e.g. Information Times(2006) and Nanfang Daily. Similar conclusions can also be found from my own constant observations of the online forums and communities of Chinese graffiti lovers.

^2. Ibid.

^3. Although concerns on the negative influence of graffiti on urban appearance and its potentially unappreciated cultural meanings (which largely come from the unintelligibility of the graffiti) are expressed among the general public, there are also reports on public reactions towards graffiti that are seen to be less anonymously hostile; instead, curiosity and tolerance can easily be traced. See reports in Information Times (2006), Nanfang Daily, and other news reports.

^4. See Cresswell (1992) on the differentiation between form and process of graffiti in terms of the mediation involved.

^5. Figures 1 and 2 are photographed by and © Zhang Dali, Figure 3 is photographed by Yong Wang, Figure 4 is photographed by 设屋攻業 X2R2, and Figure 5 © 小米 Jason

^6. More than 20 articles on Zhang's graffiti can be found in Chinese and overseas media from 1998 and 1999, all convincingly talking about Zhang's painting as art.

^7.Asiaweek (magazine, Hong Kong), April 1999, pp. 40–41, ‘Democracy Walls' by Frankie Fathers

^8. Wu Hung points out the lack of dialogue in one of the graffiti photos by Zhang Dali: ‘In fact, even though the head seems to thrust forward in an aggressive manner, it does not generate any interaction or dialogue, neither with the words/images next to it nor with the man napping underneath it. A more appropriate title for the photograph may be No Dialogue. Back in Beijing, Zhang could now speak in his native tongue, but the Beijingers had to learn the language of graffiti art' (Wu 2000, 754).

^9. The Construction of Huangjueping Graffiti Avenue (黄桷坪涂鸦艺术街的建设情况), 8 June 2007. http://www.cq.xinhuanet.com/2007/2007-06/08/content_10248702.htm

^10. ‘World's First Graffiti Avenue Opens Tomorrow at 9 a.m.', Live Broadcasting by Xinhuanet (世界第一涂鸦街明开街明早9点本网现场直播), 8 June 2007. http://www.cq.xinhuanet.com/2007-06/08/content_10240779.htm (accessed 27 March 2012). According to these official representations of the campaigns, both cases share three common purposes: first, mobilizing the masses to participate in state-directed events, be it international sports events or urban revitalization projects, in a festival atmosphere. Second, graffiti is seen to construct new guidance for visual language and creativity. Finally, graffiti is meant to speak to a certain actual or imagined public in mind, to display the achievements of these campaigns.

^11. At this point, one may also reconsider the idea of ‘open-society' in the post-socialist context. Groys astonishingly argues, ‘One can also speak of openness with regard to a communist subject ruling in an isolated country. The internal division, and the internal tension to which this division gives rise, even allow openness to become manifest much more clearly in the thinking of a solitary and finite subject than in the bad, undialectical infinity of a boring repetition of ever-same communication, the work of difference and the establishment of heterogeneity … The open subject instead comes into being by appropriating the open and divided field of language as his own, dividing himself and making himself paradoxical and heterogeneous' (2009, 96). It is therefore no wonder to see a ‘recent article published in The Huffington Post was titled “‘Beijing Was More Open-Minded': Street Artists Speak Out Against London's Olympic Clean Up”' (Look 2012, 33). The extent to which the dialectical nature of communism continues, discontinues, and transmutes in the post-socialist China is a tricky but stimulating point to reflect upon the very definition of ‘openness'.

^12. The concept of We-Media is well elaborated in We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor (2004). The book's theorization of the grass-roots-based journalism calls the attention for a new method of information production, where members of the popular mass provide and share the realities and news themselves with the help of digital technology and the global knowledge system.

^13. According to Bruns, produsage is characterized by (1) ‘open participation, communal evaluation”, (2) ‘fluid heterarchy, ad hoc meritocracy', (3) ‘unfinished artefacts, continuing process', and (4) ‘common property, individual rewards'.

^14. Ardent on space of appearance: ‘Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly' (1998, 198–199).

^15. See Arendt (1998, 199).

^16. See Arendt (1998, 26).

^17. See Bakhtin (1984, 129–30) on Carnival.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lu Pan

Lu Pan received her PhD from Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Hong Kong, she studied in Shanghai and Bayreuth in literature and cultural studies. Her current research interests include visual culture, urban space, war memory and theories of aesthetics. Pan was visiting fellow in Berlin Technical University (2008 and 2009) and Harvard Yenching Institute (2011–2012). She is now teaching in The University of Hong Kong and HKU SPACE Community College.