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Individuals – the Individual as the Site of Critique

The Return of Repressed Subjectivity in China: Feng Jizhong and Wang Shu

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Pages 433-451 | Published online: 12 Oct 2020
 

Abstract

In the Chinese architectural field, subjectivity has been repressed first by political ideology in the Mao era and later by commodification under market conditions. By analyzing two architectural projects – Feng Jizhong’s Garden of the Square Pagoda and Wang Shu’s Xiangshan Campus, this paper examines how subjectivity has been repressed and returned. It draws on two complementary approaches toward subjectivity: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on bodily experience and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power. Whereas the garden presented a subtle critique of the ideological and political repression of individual creativity, Xiangshan Campus protested the hegemony of instrumental reason in contemporary architectural production. By using productive power to articulate sensuous experience, the two architects endeavored to forge a resistant subjectivity, that challenges current tendencies to disarticulate mind and body, subjects and objects, emotion and rationality, architecture and lifeworld.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lorens Holm, Jonathan Hale, and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions and criticism that improved the piece.

Notes

1. Liu Zaifu, “Lun wenxue de zhuti xing,” Wenxue pinglun 6 (1985): 11–26.

2. Feng Jizhong (1915–2009), who graduated from Technische Hochschule, Vienna in the early 1940s, promoted progressive Modernism at Tongji University.

3. Feng Jizhong, “He lou xuan da ke wen,” Time + Architecture 3 (1988): 4–5 + 58.

4. Wang Shu, “Xiaoti dazuo: He lou xuan bitan,” in New Observation: Collection of Architectural Criticism, ed. Shi Jian (Shanghai: Tongji University Press, 2015), 302–306.

5. Ibid., 306.

6. Nick Crossley, The Politics of Subjectivity: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing, 1994).

7. Feng Jizhong, “Ren yu ziran: cong bijiao yuanlinshi kan jianzhu fazhan qushi,” Architectural Journal 5 (1990): 39–46.

8. Wang Shu, “Xugou chengshi” (PhD diss., Tongji University, 2000).

9. Hing-Wah Chau, “Wang Shu’s Design Practice and Ecological Phenomenology,” Architectural Research Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2018): 361–370.

10. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 426.

12. Jane Flax, “Multiples: On the Contemporary Politics of Subjectivity,” Human Studies 16 (1993): 33–49.

13. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. and ed. Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007).

14. Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2000), 51–52.

15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxii.

16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

17. Athanasios Gkoutzioulis, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: On Foucault’s Notions of Power, Subjectivity, Freedom and Their (Mis)Understanding in IR,” Global Society 32, no. 1 (2018): 88–110.

18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982): 777–795.

20. Zhou Rong, “Shijian de qiju yu xingcun zhe de weidu: cong songjiang fangtayuan huiwang zhongguo jianzhu sanshi nian,” Time + Architecture 3 (2009): 24–27.

21. Qi Wang, Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

22. Feng Jizhong, “Fangtayuan guihua,” Architectural Journal 7 (1981): 40–45, 29.

23. Jonathan Hale, Merleau-Ponty for Architects (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 110.

24. Feng, “Fangtayuan guihua,” 29.

25. Wang Shu, “Xugou chengshi,” New Architecture 3 (2002): 80.

26. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 45.

27. Wang Shu, “Na yi tian,” Time + Architecture 4 (2005): 97–106, 105.

28. Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 41.

29. Wu Rensan, “Xiandai de, zhongguo de songjiang fangtayuan sheji pingjia,” New Architecture 2 (1984): 14–16.

30. Jonathan Hale, “Found Spaces and Material Memory: Remarks on the Thickness of Time in Architecture,” in The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter, ed. Matthew Mindrup (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2015), 169–180.

31. Feng Jizhong, Jianzhu rensheng: Feng Jizhong zishu, ed. Zhao Bing (Beijing: Oriental Publishing Center, 2010), 248.

32. Feng Jizhong, Yugu weixin: Fangtayuan guihua, ed. Zhao Bing (Beijing: Oriental Publishing Center, 2010), 129–132.

33. Qian Xuezhong, “Fangtayuan de yiduan wangshi,” in Feng, Yugu weixin, ed. Zhao Bing (Beijing: Oriental Publishing Center, 2010), 147–152.

34. Feng, Jianzhu rensheng, 249–250.

35. Yi Ji, “Shanghai songjiang fangtayuan de quanshi: chaoyue xiandai zhuyi yu zhongguo chuantong de xin wenhua leixing,” Time + Architecture 3 (1989): 30–35.

36. Guanghui Ding, Constructing a Place of Critical Architecture in China: Intermediate Criticality in the Journal Time + Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2016): 146–163.

37. Xu Jiang, “Xiangshan sanwang,” Time + Architecture 4 (2005): 112.

38. Wang Shu, “Women congzhong renchu: ningbo meishuguan sheji biji,” Time + Architecture 5 (2006): 84–95.

39. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

40. Amy Allen, “Power, Subjectivity, and Agency: Between Arendt and Foucault,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, no. 2 (2002): 131–149.

41. Nick Crossley, “Body Subject Body Power: Agency, Inscription and Control in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty,” Body and Society 2, no. 2 (1996): 99–116.

42. Simone Brott, Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2011), 7.

43. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 56.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Fundamental Research Funds for Beijing Universities [X18237].

Notes on contributors

Guanghui Ding

Guanghui Ding is Associate Professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture in China. He is the author of Constructing a Place of Critical Architecture in China: Intermediate Criticality in the Journal Time + Architecture (Routledge, 2016) and co-author of A History of Design Institutes in China: From Mao to Market (Routledge, 2018, with Charlie Xue).

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