Zheng Bo

Creating Publicness: From the Stars Event

to Recent Socially Engaged Art

W
Wu Wenguang, China Village ithin the past few years, a number of socially engaged art
Documentary Project, 2009,
villagers in training with projects have emerged in mainland China. Here I will describe
cameras. Courtesy of the artist.
two examples, Wu Wenguang’s China Village Documentary
Project and my own work, Karibu Islands.

In 2005, documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang initiated the China

Village Documentary Project. When the EU-China Training Program
on Village Governance asked him to produce a documentary on village
self-governance in rural China, Wu made a counter proposal: rather
than making the film himself, he would help villagers to document rural
politics themselves. He placed an advertisement in Southern Weekend, a
popular newspaper, calling for proposals. He selected ten submissions and
invited the villagers to his studio, Caochangdi Workstation, in Beijing.
The ten villagers came from nine different provinces, their ages ranging
from twenty-four to fifty-nine. Wu trained them for a week and gave
each person a low-end digital video camera. The villagers went home and
captured elections, discussions, disputes, and everyday life. They then came
back to Beijing, and Wu’s team helped them to edit the footage into ten
short videos, each lasting ten minutes. In addition to being exhibited in
art venues, the videos have been screened in universities and cafés. These
screening events served as further opportunities for discussion, where
viewers could exchange opinions with one another and with Wu and the
villagers, who were sometimes present.

Vol.9 No.5 71
 My interest in socially engaged art Zheng Bo, Karibu Islands,
2008, “Birth Certificate” filled
came out of my own practice as out by a discussion participant.

an artist. Karibu Islands started in

2004 as a series of experimental
videos about an imaginary place
where time travels backwards. This
time reversal hypothesis leads to
many possibilities. For example,
human lives would be experienced
backwards. People would be born
old, gradually gain strength, go to
work, attend school, become babies,
and eventually leave this world
by climbing into their mothers’
wombs. In 2008, I decided to situate
this project within the queer community in Beijing. I organized a series
of discussions at Beijing Queer Cultural Center, established in April 2008
by two activist groups, Aizhixing and Tongyu. Participants first watched
the videos about Karibu Islands made in 2004, and then each filled out a
“Karibu Islands Birth Certificate,” imagining his or her condition at birth:
age, health, sexual orientation, openness, family composition, assets, values,
etc. They then gathered to compare and discuss their imagined lives. These
discussions allowed queer and straight participants to project their ideals
onto an imaginary site and to reflect and debate on issues of sexuality and
social progress from an alternative perspective. The documentation of this
work, including the “Birth Certificates” and discussion videos, was exhibited
in the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in 2008 and the first queer art exhibition,
held in Beijing in summer 2009.

Zheng Bo, Karibu Islands,

discussion at Beijing Queer
Centre, July 27, 2008. Courtesy
of the artist. (Image altered
to protect the identity of the
participants).

These two projects provide a glimpse of an emerging socially engaged

art practice in China. Artists collaborate with specific communities to
address social issues through dialogues. Grant Kester, in his 2001 book
Conversation Pieces, identifies several aspects unique to dialogic art: it
adopts “a performative, process-based approach” rather than the traditional
one of object making; artists are “context providers” rather than “content
providers”; conversations are staged in diverse locations beyond “the

72 Vol.9 No.5
institutional confines of the gallery or museum”; projects aim to intervene
in and transform current situations rather than merely represent them.1
Though Kester’s analysis is highly illuminating, an earlier book, edited by
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995), has more
succinctly identified the core of this practice as public engagement.2 The two
projects described above took different forms, addressed different issues,
and interacted with different communities, but they had several things
in common: they both took place in public spaces, worked with public
organizations, and circulated in public exhibitions; they brought citizens
into publics, featured public dialogues, and made public issues visible. In
short, they shared a strong commitment to the pursuit of publicness.

Over the past decade, the issue of publicness has received much attention
in Chinese contemporary art discourse. Encouraged by early advocates—
notably Huang Zhuan and Li Gongming—a number of critics have
written on this topic, arguing that publicness should become one of the
core values of Chinese contemporary art.3 Their writings are heavily
theoretical and have often relied upon foreign references. Missing from
the existing literature is research that actually looks into the three decades
of contemporary Chinese art to analyze how publicness has been realized,
at specific moments, by artists, critics, and other participants. Historical
investigation will not only ground the discussion in the Chinese context and
illuminate how artistic strategies have transformed over time, but also help
to guide the emerging socially engaged art practice.

This essay is organized into three sections. First, I will briefly review
the public sphere theory and articulate a set of interconnected values
that constitute the notion of publicness. Next I will return to the Stars
exhibitions in 1979 and 1980 and re-examine this historical event through
the perspective of publicness. I will demonstrate that many aspects of the
Stars events—from the artworks to viewer comments, from the initial
exhibition in the park to the demonstration on the street—embodied
struggles for publicness. The Stars event, widely regarded as the first
milestone in the development of contemporary Chinese art, has been
discussed in numerous studies including two monographs published after
2000,4 yet its publicness has not been fully attended to. In the last section,
I will compare the two recent socially engaged art projects—China Village
Documentary Project and Karibu Islands—to the Stars event to highlight
how artists continue to strive for publicness while adjusting their approach
according to China’s changing social realities.

The Meaning of Publicness

Publicness refers to the qualities of the public sphere, a concept developed
by Jürgen Habermas through his study of European bourgeois societies
from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. According to Habermas:

By “the public sphere” we mean first of all a realm of our

social life in which something approaching public opinion
can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion

Vol.9 No.5 73
 of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation
in which private individuals assemble to form a public
body. . . . Citizens behave as a public body when they confer
in an unrestricted fashion—that is, with the guarantee
of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom
to express and publish their opinions—about matters
of general interest. In a large public body this kind of
communication requires specific means for transmitting
information and influencing those who receive it. Today
newspapers and magazines, radio and television are the
media of the public sphere.5

Since the public sphere is a concept rooted in European history, there

has been much debate on whether it can be applied to studies on China.
Some historians, like Philip Huang and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., consider
it inappropriate to use the concept in China because “although there has
been a continuing expansion of the public realm since 1900, this has not
led to the habituated assertion of civic power against the state. Instead,
state coercive power has continually grown, and most Chinese citizens
appear to conceive of social existence mainly in terms of obligation and
interdependence rather than rights and responsibilities.”6 Richard Madsen,
on the other hand, contends that Habermas’s concept can be useful “if
it is used at the proper level of abstraction.”7 He argues that the public
sphere theory provides an effective framework to analyze actually existing
Chinese social movements that “seem to be seeking a form of life in which
authority is accountable to common norms based on widespread, open,
rational discussion among citizens.”8 In fact, the two sides are not so
much in disagreement as they are focused on two different aspects of the
Chinese situation. While the public sphere—a stable realm of democratic
public opinion making—has not been fully instituted in China (Huang
and Wakeman’s argument),9 struggles for such a realm have existed and
continue to be waged in contemporary China (Madsen’s argument).
Therefore, in the Chinese context, the public sphere serves more as a
normative ideal than a historical construct.

As Miriam Hansen points out, “the German term Öffentlichkeit encompasses

a variety of meanings that elude its English rendering as ‘public sphere’”:
it indicates “a spatial concept, the social sites or arenas where meanings are
articulated, distributed, and negotiated”; it suggests a human grouping,
“the collective body constituted by and in this process, ‘the public’”; and
it denotes “an ideational substance or criterion—‘glasnost’ or openness
(which has the same root in German, ‘offen’)—that is produced both within
these sites and in larger, deterritorialized contexts.”10 Habermas, in the
foundational text of public sphere theory, The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere, set the scale of analysis mostly at the national level in
Great Britain, France, and Germany. Since then, many studies have treated
public spheres as social sites geographically bounded by national borders.11
Recently, in Publics and Counterpublics, literary scholar Michael Warner
made two methodological interventions.12 He shifted the perspective from
sites to human groupings, treating publics as the main category of his
investigation. And by so doing, he was able to conduct analysis on a range of

74 Vol.9 No.5
scales: from a group of drag queens gathered in a New Jersey house posing
for each other’s cameras, to the imagined public addressed by the diary of
Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s 1984. Many Chinese
cultural critics have chosen to focus on the third aspect of Öffentlichkeit,
what Hansen calls the “ideational substance or criterion,” and use the word
gonggongxing (publicness) instead of gonggonglingyu (public sphere) in their
writings. Similar to Warner’s publics, publicness deemphasizes the spatial
aspect of the public sphere and shifts the focus of analysis to communicative
practices. It also offers the flexibility for us to discuss the public qualities of
specific events or specific groups even when the public sphere, on a national
scale, is yet to be realized in China.

Various Chinese critics have emphasized different aspects of the notion

of publicness. Wang Hui, in his introduction to the influential anthology
Wen hua yu gong gong xing, writes, “Publicness is not some product
of human beings’ common essence. . . . Publicness exists in different
perspectives and their interconnected relations.”13 Sun Zhenhua states that
publicness lies essentially in “an artistic democracy”14 and is preconditioned
on recognizing and respecting each human being’s political, economic,
and cultural rights and “free thinking and independent character.”15 In
a recent conversation with artists Qiu Zhijie and Sui Jianguo, Huang
Zhuan describes publicness as an “obligation,” arguing that, as the Chinese
society swings from collectivism towards individualism, we need to
attend to “public boundaries and public ethics.”16 While Wang Hui, Sun
Zhenhua, and Huang Zhuan’s remarks are all valid, they do not capture the
comprehensive meaning of publicness.

We need to understand publicness not as a single trait, but as a set of

values. Publicness rests on four interconnected elements: the freedom of
private citizens to express critical opinions, the attention to matters of
general concern, the accessibility of the site, media, and discourse, and
the commitment to reflective communicative practices based on reason
and affect rather than status, coercion, or profit. Each of these elements is
indispensable. The analysis in the next two sections will further substantiate
the significance of these four dimensions.

China and the West face different obstacles in the pursuit of publicness.
Western mass democracies have seen an erosion of the public sphere, a
process described by Habermas as the “refeudalization” of the public sphere.
“Large organizations strive for political compromises with the state and
with each other,” turning to the market and mass media for publicity and
“excluding the public sphere whenever possible.”17 The main question
confronting the West is, in Thomas McCarthy’s words, “can the public
sphere be effectively reconstituted under radically different socioeconomic,
political, and cultural conditions?”18 The question for China, on the other
hand, is how to strive for publicness when the state is not subordinated to
public control, when citizens’ rights to speak, associate, and publish are not
protected by an independent legal system, and when the media is not free
from state censorship. The lack of these basic institutional guarantees means
that, in China, efforts to realize publicness often appear “underground,
heretical, and rebellious,”19 as we will see in the Stars event.

Vol.9 No.5 75
Publicness of the Stars Event
On September 27, 1979, a small board was placed next to the entrance to the
National Art Museum of China. A poster on the board informed museum
visitors that the Stars Outdoor Art Exhibition was being held in the small
park east of the museum. Early that morning a group of twenty-three young
artists had hung over one hundred and fifty artworks on the fence between
the museum and the park.20 The exhibition soon attracted passersby: men
and women, young and old, a few carrying children in their arms. Two days
later, the exhibition was removed by the police. The artists responded with a
demonstration on October 1, the National Day, defending their freedom of

expression. After some negotiation mediated by the Artists’ Association, the Ma Desheng at the Stars
Exhibition demonstration,
government allowed the exhibition to continue in November in Huafang Beijing, 1979.

Pavilion in Beihai Park. A year later, in August 1980, the second Stars
exhibition was held inside the National Art Museum, attracting over eighty
thousand visitors.

The Stars exhibitions occurred at a moment when the state’s monopoly on

social life was showing the first sign of loosening. Between 1949 and 1978,
the Chinese Communist Party attempted a total integration between the
state and the society. Sociologist Deng Zhenglai points out that the state
employed a tri-part strategy: it nationalized all industries, organized all
citizens into the danwei system, and vigorously circulated its ideology, thus
leaving no possibility for independent characters.21 In the late 1970s, as
the country verged on a total collapse, the state was forced to abandon this
strategy. After the state relaxed its control in 1978, grassroots movements
quickly emerged throughout China. In Beijing, a number of independent

76 Vol.9 No.5

The Stars Exhibition, Beijing,
1979. Courtesy of Huang Rui.
literary journals were founded,22 political activists posted treatises on the
so-called Democracy Wall,23 and small art exhibitions were organized.24 The
Stars exhibition in 1979 was not an isolated event, but part of this larger
cultural-political outburst.
The Stars artists had wanted to hold their first exhibition inside an official
venue. Failing to obtain such a space, they resorted to the park next to the
National Art Museum. This decision ensured the public’s access to the
artworks and vice versa. The park’s spatial openness also strengthened
the discursive openness of the event. Although all spaces in China were
ultimately governed by the state, the park was far more public than the
museum. Unlike the museum, the park was neither fenced nor guarded.
The park did not constitute a danwei, an institution with a permanent
administrative staff integrated into the state bureaucracy. Whereas the
museum carried an ideological weight accumulated through its history of
state-authorized exhibitions, the park was considered an apolitical space
for urban residents to relax. When a group of policemen came to the park
on the second day of the exhibition and tried to shut it down, a few viewers
objected: “This is a people’s park. Why do you ask us to leave? We don’t
want to leave.”25 The police then declared that “the people” complained
about the artworks. The crowd responded: “We are also the people, and
we feel this exhibition is good!”� Thus, the viewers challenged the police’s
logic that the state represented the people, an abstract social totality. They
defended the exhibition by showing their approval publicly and by claiming
their subjectivity as a public, a portion of “the people.”
Vol.9 No.5 77
The freedom of private citizens to express their opinions is one of the Huang Rui, The Will, 1979,
oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm.
four essential elements of publicness. “Privateness and publicness cannot Courtesy of the artist.

be severed,” Wang Hui writes, “when artists or viewers lose their private
subjective experiences, art’s publicness is also lost.”� The statement that
accompanied the first Stars exhibition declared: “We see the world through
our own eyes and participate in the world through our own brushes and
knives. Each painting contains its own expression, and each expression
confesses one’s own dream.”� The Stars exhibitions had no unifying themes.
The large number of artworks encompassed a wide range of mediums,
styles, and subject matters.

Huang Rui alone presented three different kinds of works. First, in a series
of paintings titled The Funeral, The Will, and The Rebirth, Huang combined
the familiar imagery of Yuanmingyuan Park with his own imagination.
A set of stone columns in The Will was transformed into five fingers
sprouting up from the ground in The Funeral and into human figures in
The Rebirth. Next, Space was an abstract piece dominated by geometric
shapes in various shades of blue and brown. Thin white curves were drawn
on the surface to create a sense of dynamism. Lastly, there were four single
portraits, of one child and three young women. Featuring expressive
brushwork, vibrant colours, and decorative patterns, these works departed
from the realist doctrine that had dominated Chinese art since the 1940s.
In addition, the sitters were not engaged in production or political activity,
but simply posing for the artist. The lack of any apparent ideological code
allowed the viewer to focus on the formal aspects of the works and perceive
the figures as actual individuals rather than revolutionary stereotypes.
The heterogeneity in Huang Rui’s portfolio affirmed his identity as an

78 Vol.9 No.5
Huang Rui, The Funeral, 1979,
oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

Huang Rui, The Rebirth, 1979,

oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

imaginative and expressive individual, insisting on his right to paint freely

and challenging the stylistic boundary imposed by the state at that time. In
other words, Huang Rui painted as a private artist.

Both classical Confucianism and state socialism advocated a moral principle

of dagongwusi, the annihilation of the private for the well being of the
public.� The Stars artists challenged this ethic. They insisted on making
their private experiences and expressions public, conveying an alternative
view that the private and the public are not antithetical but continuous.
When the artists decided to protest against the government’s decision to
close down the exhibition in the park, they also turned to the constitutional
rights of private citizens. In the preparatory meeting, after one person
expressed doubt that “the many [rights] stated in the Constitution, such as
freedom of speech, publishing, association, congregation, demonstration .
. . are all fake tricks,” Mang Ke shouted, “even if [we] lose, [we] should still
fight!”� During the demonstration on October 1, 1979, the artists and their
supporters chanted, “[We] demand political democracy! [We] demand
artistic freedom!” “The right of citizens to engage in social cultural activities
must be protected!”�

Vol.9 No.5 79
While Huang Rui’s portfolio represented the diverse, private pursuits of
individual artists, the works by Wang Keping and Qu Leilei exemplified
the critical attitude of the exhibition. In an interview with Li Xianting
published in 1980, Wang Keping described the making and meaning of his
wood-carving piece Silence:

I had a piece of wood with Wang Keping, Silence, 1978,

wood, 48 cm high. Courtesy
a big knot in it and was of the artist and 10 Chancery
Lane, Hong Kong.
planning to sculpt a human
head. I started working on
the mouth in a realistic
manner, and then I noticed
that the knot actually looked
like a mouth plugged up with
a wooden stopper. When
I was working on the eyes,
one of which was closed, I
felt that this wasn’t exactly
what I wanted. Closed eyes
give the impression of a
reluctance to see what is going on. Then I came up with the
idea of deception: hadn’t the Gang of Four tried to pull the
wool over the eyes of the Chinese people and cut China off
from the rest of the world? How could I express that? I could
wrap the eyes with gauze, but gauze wouldn’t look good
with wood, and so I thought about exploiting the contrast
between natural wood and carved wood, and finally came up
with the idea of carving some X’s where the eyes belonged,
to show that they had been sealed with tape.32

Wang Keping took advantage of the material’s natural qualities and wood-
carving techniques to create a dramatic political commentary. Through irony
Silence also expressed the desire to speak, a fundamental right of citizens.
Qu Leilei’s pen drawing We Don’t Want Laws Like This used an assembly
of different faces—one showing a surge of violent anger while another
carries an obsequious smile—as a metaphor to satirize the hypocrisy of law
enforcement and to voice his hope that “the principle of ‘equality before law’
could be realized.”33 Many other works also commented on contemporary
politics and communicated the authors’ opinions to the viewers visually.

The issues raised by the artists—freedom of expression, legal justice, and

the depoliticization of everyday life—were matters of wide concern after
the Cultural Revolution. Both exhibitions in 1979 and 1980 attracted a
large number of visitors. Many viewers appreciated the exhibition’s critical
attitude. One documentary photograph shows a group of young people
gathered in front of Wang Keping’s wood carvings, with hearty smiles on
their faces—a rare scene in that era—as if saying “Yes! Exactly!” In the
comment books, a textile worker wrote, “Wang Keping is an artist with a lot
of courage. Using his graver, he exposed the reality’s vileness. Awesome!”34
A student of the Central Academy of Craft Art wrote, “Comrade Wang
Keping, salute to your bravery. Your ruthless graver cut open the society’s
shamelessness, vanity, and deception. . . . Paintings and sculptures, as art, are
not meant to colour up the society! [Art] should inform people, and inspire
people. You did well, and [I] hope more wonderful works will be born.”35

80 Vol.9 No.5
 Another viewer wrote, “Here, right here, I understood art’s people-ness
(renminxing). Art is never a synonym for aggrandizing or singing praises!”36

The comment books served as the medium of a public forum. Fourteen

albums were filled with viewer comments. Not all comments were
positive. As Li Xianting reports, “Praise constitutes 70% of all opinions,
[basic] endorsement 20%, and objection 10%.”37 One viewer wittily
commented, “Among ten viewers, one claims ‘to understand’; among ten
who ‘understand,’ there are ten different interpretations.”38 This seemingly
disapproving remark in fact validates the publicness of the event. Rather
than delivering standard ideological messages prescribed by the propaganda
department using familiar visual codes, the Stars artists instilled in their
works a certain unfamiliarity, demanding that viewers form their own
interpretations, thus opening up a discursive space for debate. The level of
attention paid to viewer response in the Stars event was unprecedented in
Chinese art history. By enabling the public to speak through the comment
books, the Stars artists also obtained the much–needed public support for
their rebellious actions.

Wang Keping explaining In summary, the Stars exhibitions enabled the artists and viewers to voice
artworks at the Stars
Exhibition, Beijing, 1979. critical opinions on matters of general concern through artworks and
Courtesy of Huang Rui.
comment books. When the state tried to suppress the event, the artists and
viewers defended their access to public space and public discourse through
rights-based rhetoric and public use of reason.

Publicness in Recent Socially Engaged Art

Three decades of reform have transformed the economic system and
raised the material quality of life, but much of the political system remains
unchanged. Direct elections, introduced to the village level in the 1990s,
have not been expanded to higher levels of government. The party-state
remains a totalitarian power above the law. Citizens enjoy substantial liberty
in economic affairs, but freedom of expression, association, and publication
still lacks institutional guarantees. The state encourages charities in the area
of disaster and poverty relief, but suppresses groups that advocate citizens’

Vol.9 No.5 81
rights.39 On the other hand, a strong bottom-up desire for civil society has
emerged in recent years, characterized by the rapid growth of non-profit
organizations and increasing visibility of activism. With the establishment
of private properties, citizens increasingly resort to a rights-based rhetoric
to defend their interests. While all media are still subject to state censorship,
the Internet has made it easier for citizens to voice and circulate their
opinions, however temporarily. Outspoken individuals like writer Han Han
have encouraged a boldness in young netizens to express critical views. This
mixture of stagnation and progress provides the context for recent socially
engaged art and its pursuit of publicness.

Whereas in the Stars event the artists expressed their opinions vocally and
members of the public spoke only by way of commenting on the exhibitions,
in both China Village Documentary Project and Karibu Islands the artists
have remained in the background after creating the platform for ordinary
citizens to come forward to speak. In Karibu Islands, many participants
combined ideas about the fictional place with visions for Chinese society.
When asked about his decision to choose 2018 as his year of birth on Karibu
Islands, one gay participant declared, “Now is 2008. I think after 10 years
of efforts the Chinese government should reach a correct recognition on
the issue of homosexuality. Many countries have embraced it.” When Wu
Wenguang invited the villagers to Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing, the
villagers acquired a sense of confidence in addition to a set of technical skills.
They learned that as citizens they were also entitled to producing social
commentaries, a right previously considered exclusive to “cultural folks.”

Caochangdi Workstation and Beijing Queer Cultural Center (where

Karibu Islands discussions were held) exemplify a new kind of public space
in China. They are owned by individuals or organizations registered as
companies, but function as public institutions. Caochangdi Workstation—
Wu Wenguang and his partner Wen Hui’s home and studio—is a large
courtyard complex located in Caochangdi village. Beijing Queer Cultural
Center is housed in a 90-square-metre apartment in a high-rise building.
While both are accessible to the public, visitors have to ring a doorbell to
get in. Compared to the park where the first Stars exhibition was held in
1979, Caochangdi Workstation and Beijing Queer Cultural Center appear
more closed spatially. On the other hand, they are far less susceptible to state
control and provide ongoing access, rather than temporary occupation,
for public activities. Their spatial and institutional enclosure also creates a
safer environment for participants to engage in discussions, share personal
experiences, and exchange critical opinions.

The Stars exhibitions drew large crowds in 1979 and 1980 partly because the
artworks touched on political and social issues of wide concern. The issues
addressed by China Village Documentary Project and Karibu Islands—What
is the status of village democracy? How should the Chinese society treat
different sexualities?—appear more relevant to specific segments of the
population. Over the past three decades, China has changed from a highly
homogenized society to one of serious economic and social disparity. This
means that now different social tiers often face distinct problems. The zoom
into more specific issues by recent socially engaged projects can be seen as an
appropriate response to China’s increasing stratification. On the other hand,
as Xu Jilin observes, public concern is being threatened by the pervasive
ideology advocated by the state and the market that “everyone should be

82 Vol.9 No.5
Zheng Bo, Karibu Islands
(video stills). Courtesy of the
artist.
content with maximizing his individual interest in the private sphere.”�40
Socially engaged art now has the added responsibility to preserve and
cultivate public concern. The screening of China Village Documentary Project
in universities and urban cafés and the inclusion of straight participants in
Karibu Islands discussions represented efforts to bring the issues to a wider
public and to encourage understanding across social barriers.
The discourse of the Stars event was pivoted on a set of art objects. The
comment books served as the medium for viewers to participate in
the discourse. Recent socially engaged art has become de-materialized.
Conversations are brought into the frame to constitute the artwork itself.
What the artists did, in the two projects under discussion, was to create
a premise for strangers to come together to form a public and install a
set of mechanisms that facilitated reflective communicative practices. In
Karibu Islands, for example, each participant was asked to imagine his or
her own life before entering group discussion. This process encouraged
personal engagement over detached, abstract opinion-making. The
hypothesized place with a reversed time provided a site with greater
openness to imagine alternative social constructs, yet its position as the
mirror image of our reality always prompted the discussants to reflect
back on Chinese society. What the artists refrained from doing was to set
an instrumental agenda for the participants. Discussions in Karibu Islands
were left open-ended. Similarly, the villagers in China Village Documentary
Vol.9 No.5 83
 Left: Wu Wenguang, China
Village Documentary Project—
Shao Yuzhen Photographing,
2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Right: Wu Wenguang, China

Village Documentary Project—
Jia Zitan, 2009. Courtesy of
the artist.

Project were encouraged not to emulate television programs to always

present clear narrative structures and closures. Moments of everyday
life—the construction of a new house, the quarrel between a young couple,
the laughter of a group of children, and so on—were seen together with
formal meetings and elections. In some scenes, multiple people were talking
simultaneously, making it difficult to follow the conversation. A reflective
communicative practice is not necessarily a streamlined discussion leading
to consensus. In fact, as Miwon Kwon suggests, a “competitive, formless,
and inconclusive process” composed of “disjunctive conversations and
incommensurate points of view” is a better model for the democratic public
sphere than a unified discursive space.41

Compared to the Stars event, recent socially engaged art has become less
confrontational. No political statement was issued, no demonstration
organized. Artistic experiments appear more tactical, yet more enduring.
Both China Village Documentary Project and Karibu Islands continue to
unfold. After the initial China Village Documentary Project ended in 2005,
four of the ten farmers have carried on filming their villages and, with
the assistance of Wu Wenguang’s team, produced several feature-length
documentaries. For the new phase of Karibu Islands, earlier this year I
organized a small online competition, inviting proposals for a “Karibu Islands
Marriage Law.” These projects do not lead to groundbreaking events but
attempt small efforts that gradually cultivate a public mindset among citizens.

In this essay, by linking the Stars event and two recent socially engaged art
projects, I suggest that there exists a symbiotic relationship between Chinese
contemporary art and the pursuit of publicness. The notion of publicness
has provided critical momentum for Chinese contemporary art at specific
moments in the last three decades, both politically and aesthetically; in
turn, artistic experiments have enriched the notion of publicness and
injected creativity into social struggles. Much further research is needed
to develop a better understanding of this symbiotic relationship. Such an
understanding will also help to nudge the discourse and the practice of
Chinese contemporary art towards a more public future.

The author would like to thank Joan Saab, Franziska Koch, Geng Yan, Sohl Lee,
Godfre Leung, and Steven Lee for their valuable feedback.

Notes
1 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 1–16.
2 Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
3 For articles, see Huang Zhuan, “Xun qiu dang dai yi shu de gong gong xing ji qi she hui xue fang
fa lun (1999),” in Yi shu sheng tai bao gao (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chu ban she, 2003), 323–24;
Li Gongming, “Lun dang dai yi shu zai gong gong ling yu zhong de she hui xue zhuan xiang,” in Yi
shu xin shi jie, eds. Pi Daojian and Lu Hong (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chu ban she, 2003), 119–31;
Gu Chengfeng, “Yi shu gong gong xing yu gong gong xing de wu qu,” in Wen yi yan jiu, no. 5 (2004);
Zha Changping, “Dang dai yi shu de gong gong xing yu ge ren xing,” in Yi shu yu she hui, eds. Lu
Hong and Sun Zhenhua (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chu ban she, 2005), 224–35. For books, see Weng

84 Vol.9 No.5
 Jianqing, Gong gong yi shu de guan nian yu qu xiang: Dang dai gong gong yi shu wen hua ji jia zhi
yan jiu (Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 2002); Sun Zhenhua, Gong gong yi shu zai zhong guo
(Hong Kong: Xin yuan mei shu chu ban she, 2004); Wang Hongyi, Gong gong yi shu gai lun (Hangzhou:
Zhong guo mei shu xue yuan chu ban she, 2007); and Wang Zhong, Gong gong yi shu gai lun (Beijing:
Beijing da xue chu ban she, 2007).
4 Yi Dan, Xing xing li shi (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chu ban she, 2002), and Huo Shaoxia, Xing xing yi
shu jia: Zhongguo dang dai yi shu de xian feng, 1979–2000 (Taibei: Yi shu jia, 2007).
5 Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique 3,
(autumn 1974), 49.
6 Frederic Wakeman, Jr., “The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate: Western Reflections on
Chinese Political Culture,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (1993), 108–38.
7 Richard Madsen, “The Public Sphere, Civil Society and Moral Community: A Research Agenda for
Contemporary China Studies,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (1993), 183–98.
8 Ibid.
9 Some researchers have argued that the public sphere was developed in select urban regions in the
late Qing and the Republican era. See William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese
City, 1796–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), and Hankow: Conflict and Community
in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Xu Jilin, “Jin dai Zhongguo
de gong gong ling yu: xing tai, gong neng yu zi wo li jie—yi Shanghai wei li,” Shi lin no. 2 (2003), and
Fang Ping, Wan qing Shanghai de gong gong ling yu (1895–1911) (Shanghai: Shanghai ren min chu
ban she, 2007).
10 Miriam Hansen, “Foreword,” in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience:
Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix, no. 1.
11 Many titles reflect this phenomenon, for example, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century
France” (by Keith Baker, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun [Cambridge, Mass:
the MIT Press, 1992], 181–211), “The Public Sphere in Modern China” (by William Rowe, Modern
China 16, no. 3 [July 1990], 309–329), “Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India” (by U.
Kalpagam, Journal of Historical Sociology 15, no. 1 [march 2002], 35–58), etc.
12 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
13 Wang Hui, “Dao lun,” in Wen hua yu gong gong xing, eds. Wang Hui and Chen Yangu (Beijing: Sheng
huo, du shu, xin zhi san lian shu dian, 1998), 45.
14 Sun Zhenhua, “Zhe shi shui de gong gong xing,” Dang dai mei shu jia no. 6 (2006).
15 Sun Zhenhua, Gong gong yi shu zai zhong guo (Hong Kong: Xin yuan mei shu chu ban she, 2004), 32.
16 Huang Zhuan et al., “Zi you zhu yi yu gong gong yi shu,” Dushu no. 2 (2008).
17 Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” 54–55.
18 Thomas McCarthy, “Introduction,” in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1989), xii.
19 Li Gongming, “Lun dang dai yi shu zai gong gong ling yu zhong de she hui xue zhuan xiang,” 125.
20 Wang Keping, “Stars Stories,” in The Stars: 10 Years, ed. Chang Tsong-zung (Hong Kong: Hanart 2
Gallery, 1989), 23.
21 Deng Zhenglai, Guo jia yu she hui (Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 2008), 10–11.
22 The most prominent ones include Today (Jin tian), Si wu lun tan, Wo tu, Beijing zhi chun, Ren quan
tong meng, Tan suo, and Qi meng. Many members of the Stars group were also members of Today.
23 By December 1978, cultural and political activists had gravitated to the Xidan area. Many posters, in
the form of dazibao, appeared on a wall next to a busy bus stop. The wall soon acquired its historic
name, the Democracy Wall.
24 The April Photography Group held an exhibition in Zhongshan Park in April 1979. The No Name Group
showed their landscape paintings in Beihai Park in July 1979. At least two exhibitions—one by Xue
Mingde, and another by five young artists from Guizhou—were held outdoor in the Democracy Wall
area in 1979. See Huo Shaoxia, Xing xing yi shu jia: Zhongguo dang dai yi shu de xian feng, 1979–2000,
46–47.
25 Wang Keping, “Stars Stories,” 24.
26 Ibid., 25.
27 Wang Hui, “Dao lun,” 45.
28 “Di yi jie xing xing mei zhan qian yan,” in The Stars: 10 Years, 73.
29 See Chen Ruoshui, “Zhongguo li shi shang de ‘gong’ de gai nian ji qi xian dai bian xing,” in Gong gong
xing yu gong min guan, ed. Liu Qing (Nanjing Shi: Jiangsu ren min chu ban she, 2006), 3–39.
30 Wang Keping, “Stars Stories,” 28.
31 Ibid., 29.
32 Li Xianting, “The Stars Talk About Their Work,” in The Stars: 10 Years, 84.
33 Ibid., 86.
34 “Viewer comments on two ‘Stars Art Exhibitions,’” in The Stars: 10 Years, 70.
35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Li Xianting, “The Stars Talk About Their Work,” 85.

38 “Viewer comments on two ‘Stars Art Exhibitions,’” 70.
39 For example, two highly respected rights-based organizations—Gongmeng (or Open Constitution
Initiative) and Women’s Legal Aid Center—have been forced to close in 2009 and 2010.
40 Xu Jilin, “Liang zhong zi you yu min zhu—dui ‘zi you zhu yi’ yu ‘xin zuo pai’ lun zhan de fan si” (2001),
http://www.chinese-thought.org/yjy/02_xjl/002507_3.htm, accessed June 28, 2010.
41 Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” in In the Place of the Public Sphere?, ed. Simon Sheikh
(Berlin: b_books, 2005), 22–32.

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