It seems apt that (Re)made in China: Material (Dis)connections, Art, and Creative Reuse, a collected volume of (primarily art criticism) essays on the repurposing and reuses of (waste) objects in (mostly) China might be fittingly compared to the scrap-bag of a quilter: an assortment of text(tile)s, some more intricately or densely woven than others, some short, some creased and folded, all with a potential to be assembled in relation to one another, according to a variety of taxonomies, into a larger form. The volume arose from the conference “Dis:connectivity in Processes of Globalization,” held in Munich in 2023, and is ably introduced by Anna Grasskamp—not an easy task as the research methods, time periods, reference literatures, and formats of the essays vary considerably. Grasskamp chooses to lay them out more or less chronologically in three sections: Historical Cases (four essays on topics from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth); Contemporary Positions (five essays, largely on contemporary eco-art in mainland and Taiwan); and Reflections (two brief thought pieces). Weaving together themes from material culture, discard studies, and eco-critical literatures, the volume leans most heavily towards eco-art criticism, and for readers (like myself) less familiar with some of these discussions, the Introduction provides helpful references and terms. Aside from finding certain essays and arguments particularly engaging and thoughtful, I found the most rewarding part of reading this volume to be scavenging after referenced essays, hunting the internet for the works of artists mentioned, and browsing online walking-tour videos of the temporary cardboard towns that domestic workers construct each Sunday in the covered walkways of Hong Kong (the subject of Evelyn Kwok’s chapter). The Introduction offers a wealth of insights and (dis)connections to help map the volume, but it is challenging to explain in a pithy sentence how it all fits together. Perhaps appropriately, the very last sentence in the volume might come closest to capturing a shared core question: “Who is empowered while reusing material artefacts?” (Valentina Gamberi, p. 232).

Three of the four historical cases in Part One recount specific forms of material reuse. In a concise piece, Dawn Odell performs a “dis:connecting” interpretative argument on a specific artefact: a blue and white Chinese porcelain shard re-made into an arrow point by unknown indigenous persons on the Pacific Coast sometime around 1700. Odell uses the object to ask what constitutes a cultural encounter, arguing that an object that historians today see as iconic of Chinese culture and the galleon trade was quite possibly grasped as culturally neutral and valued purely for its excellent material qualities by the indigenous artisan who transformed it. Next comes Pai Yen-tzu’s richly descriptive piece on the removal of decorative dragon motifs (a form of “Reverse Chinoiserie”) from European automatons for use in fashioning unique imperial hairpins. Mei Mei Rado’s chapter on the repurposing of Chinese skirts for European and American fashion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century acknowledges the historical context of power imbalance and cultural appropriation, but also argues that this framework can reinforce fallacies of cultural authenticity that foreclose our readings of these creative, ambiguous, and multifaceted objects. The images in the volume are generally excellent and crucial to the authors’ arguments, and for this essay the images of garments are particularly stunning. Finally, one of my favorite essays in the volume is Monica Klasing Chen’s piece on Republican-era satirical writings that lampoon material cultural symbols of the recently defunct Qing imperial regime as “wastes” that need to be preserved and put to proper reuse in a parody of home-maker journal articles that advise progressive housewives how to make economical use of waste and household detritus.

Parts Two and Three shift to a more contemporary context and in doing so are all rooted in addressing the planetary ecological polycrisis and its manifestations in greater China. One consistent argument across these essays: our encounters with waste—whether critical confrontations, exposés of toxicity, intentional acts of conservation, or celebrations of creative repurposing—are always acts in community and in relation to others, including at times the “others” of spirit realms and generations past. Marcela Godoy’s piece describes her pedagogical journey teaching her class “Re-Made in China” (its title repurposed to serve as the title of the volume) in which she centers migrant recyclers as skilled experts. Evelyn Kwok (in an essay anchored at its introduction and conclusion with references to Hong Kong migrant artists celebrating the cardboard box) explores how Hong Kong’s migrant domestic workers, whose working conditions profoundly curtail their private space and autonomy, transform the city’s public spaces every Sunday into thousands of temporary semi-private spaces built with cardboard.

The book’s remaining five essays and reflections are concerned with art and ritual objects related to waste. A theme all five authors raise in some form is the unsettling recognition that we now live in a world irreversibly altered by human synthetic interventions, a condition the scholar M. Murphy has termed “alterlife.” Tseng Shao-Chien writes about the works of Rahic Talif and Yeh Wei-Li, finding in them a common theme of using waste as a medium to memorialize “disappearing elements of Indigenous and vernacular cultures in a world characterized by rapid change and memory loss” (p. 169). The following two essays are in dialogue, with Meiqin Wang writing about the 2020 Chongqing Eco Art Festival as an inspired event catalyzing community engagement in environmental art projects that empower marginalized local residents to imagine local forms of creative sustainability, while Simone Müller riffs on several of Wang’s insights while also asking a couple of questions to trouble the waters: 1) what happens if the community does not really like or “get” the artist’s creative interventions (she describes a Kansas City Art Institute student who “returned” items residents had thrown in the trash to their porches in an altered form, eliciting complaints to the police); and 2) why is it that the art made with waste doesn’t literally stink, and what does this artistic sanitizing of waste tell us? Does garbage art still fall short of confronting our toxic way of life? The volume ends with two provocative thought pieces, one by Lisa Claypool on Yao Lu’s photomontages, which at first appear as traditional landscape compositions, but are in fact photomontages dominated by construction waste materials; the other by Valentina Gamberi, who proposes that the concept of sacred waste (for example desacralized Chinese god statues) might offer productive deconstructive possibilities in eco-critical and discard studies work.

This book has a great deal to offer a variety or readers: those interested in eco-art, discard studies, Chinese material culture, and eco-criticism more broadly. One need not feel committed to every essay to pick it up; it is an evocative gathering of vibrant scraps that provides plenty of inspiration, a fine field for gleaning.