Anxiety Aesthetics: A Conversation with Jennifer Dorothy Lee

University of California Press, 2024), Jennifer Dorothy Lee asks how the aesthetic and cultural projects of the socialist period should be understood in the immediate aftermath of Mao Zedong's death.Focusing on the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Lee argues that the activist practices of the socialist period persisted through a crisis consciousness that expressed itself through an aesthetic of anxiety.Where others narrate the early reform era as a time of dismantling the intellectual projects of the socialist period, Lee instead sees surprising continuities with the Maoist era-even a defiance of periodisation.Crisis consciousness underwrites events such as the first outdoor art exhibition of the Stars Art Group, which Lee narrates as an aesthetic intervention into public space through the social practices of the revolutionary mass campaign.In her telling, anxiety is a reaction to deferred closure that facilitates the internal transformations of the visual and political expressions of the revolutionary period.It can explain how, in the 1980s, the Marxist theoretician Liu Zaifu could compare the artist's labour to an automated process of computer processing, or how the artist Wu Guanzhong could resurrect abstraction as a project of Maoist scientism.By the book's end, Lee makes a compelling case for understanding the emergent cultural and intellectual transformations of the early 1980s as the groundwork for the sense of global contemporaneity that continues to define China today.