Scholarship on contemporary Chinese art in Western languages has focused on its sociopolitical valence, often trumpeted as a free, diversified voice emblematic of global liberalism and, essentially, a cultural force of dissidents and exiles against the totalitarian regime. Hentyle Yapp's Minor China represents a marked departure in its proposed methodology and critical analysis by deploying the “minor” to disrupt and destabilize the hegemonic understandings of history, nation-states, power relations, identity, and geopolitics of contemporary art. The book thus introduces “minor as method,” a new conceptual lens to investigate and reconfigure contemporary Chinese art as it grapples with the liberal world and global market, on the one hand, and the party-state and surveillance, on the other. How do we understand contemporary Chinese art and performance, and specifically their internal, formal, and aesthetic intricacies and particularities from a Chinese/non-Western/minor perspective instead of indiscriminately succumbing to the portentous, omniscient logic of Western liberalism and universalism? Furthermore, apart from humanizing, conditioning, and totalizing China and Chinese experiences into the classical critical theory of the West, can we read China per se as theory, counter-theory, or global method?
In challenging the prevalent methods and discourses of global capitalism and Western representationalism of democracy, inclusion, and universality, Yapp breaks new ground with a notion and analytic tool of the “minor” that he asserts would help us “hesitate” from the “normative,” “legible,” “proper,” and “major” ways that non-Western arts and artists are imagined, labeled, and transfixed within the “overdetermined” Western context and frame. “This book thus uses the minor to rethink this dominant condition for transnational analysis” (p. 3). It eloquently pushes this debate into a bourgeoning yet entangled locus of contemporary Chinese art and its transnational transit, unraveling it with great insight, attention to critical details, captivating case studies, and academic sophistication.
Notwithstanding Yapp's assertion, however, the phenomenon of minor and the minorized forms have not gone “undernoticed” and “undertheorized,” nor has the method of “method” or “X as method,” with respect to transnationalism and globalization. The book basically opens with a synthetic approach drawing from the works of many scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frantz Fanon, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Lydia Liu, Rey Chow, Rebecca Karl, Wang Hui, Edouard Glissant, and Kuan-Hsing Chen to build what Yapp terms “a method of minor” (p. 5), “a model of molecularization” (p. 22), “a model of mediation” (p. 28), “a model of hesitation” (p. 30), and so forth. While the plurality of modes and reformulations that the book vigorously advances rightly offer a form of mediation or intervention that cuts across the disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries and expands our epistemological account of art and culture, I find this method—however innovative it claims to be—fairly eclectic and pompous. It reinscribes and reinforces—albeit inadvertently—the dichotomy between China and the West, tradition and modernity, state control and liberal capitalism, politics and aesthetics by privileging the aesthetic and affective minor and the cultural local instead. To a general, educated reader, the big lump of literature and the very density of the texts may appear less than ideal for those who otherwise desire to be informed in concrete and clear terms.
In my opinion, original scholarship and critical edge do not derive from abstract, high-flown rhetoric; instead, they are substantiated and materialized through Yapp's close reading of the artworks of Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, Yan Xing, He Chengyao, Cao Fei, Isaac Julien, and Samson Young in the following chapters. Hence, the strongest argument and greatest strength of this monograph reside in its wide-ranging, intricate exploration of contemporary Chinese visual arts across photography, performance, film, digital video, installation, exhibition, curatorial practice, and multimedia work to tease out the minor details and patterns that have been overlooked, homogenized, and universalized even in the conventional transnational and interdisciplinary studies. Yapp is, undoubtedly, at his most proficient in his microscopic scrutiny of the molecular structure, aesthetic form, and affective implication of notable works and his unfailing deconstructionist endeavor to anatomize the familiar scenarios, assumptions, and situations to pinpoint the inadequacies of global liberalism.
The two thrusts of affect and aesthetic sensibility therefore operate as key instruments of the minor. Chapter 1 offers perceptive readings of Cai Guo-Qiang's reconstruction of Chinese traditions and realities and his aperture into the labor and emotion of aesthetic production. Chapter 2 focuses on Ai Weiwei's formal employment of the aesthetic of mass repetition and racial anger as a structural affect to critique the racialist stereotype and liberalist limits of inclusion and multiculturalism as demonstrated. Chapter 3 examines Yan Xing's video and performance of Kill (the) TV-Set, which tackles the preemptive notion of the individual, national, and gendered body and creates a queer, fuzzy affect and relation. Chapter 4 looks at two modes of imagination—fabulation and meditation—in Zhang Huan and He Chengyao's durational performance and endurance art that registers a full spectrum of physical, haptic, olfactory, and audiovisual senses to complicate our understanding of time, space, nation, trauma, and subjectivity. Chapter 5 explores Isaac Julien's idiosyncratic portrayal of China and Chinese history through the prism of the minor and cinematic in his large-scale multiscreen installation that contends with capital, labor, and body politics and builds a renewed sense of relationality and tout-monde (all-world). Finally, chapter 6 surveys the experiment of Hong Kong artist Samson Young and his minor rendition and aesthetic of Muted Situation to minimize dominant sounds. I am tempted to say that it is this close observation, instructiveness, and empirical richness that hold the book accountable and make it a rewarding reading.
Writing against the supremacy of Western liberalism, Yapp prompts us to break down and jettison the binaries of the global/national, the West/East, and the major/minor. The book sheds new light and fills a gap in global scholarly discussions on contemporary art and performance by highlighting a minor method and calling for a relational, sensory, and aesthetic turn. However, the classification and configuration of contemporary Chinese art along the principal line of the minor elicits another set of thorny issues: what, then, is considered major, proper, and legible as opposed to minor, marginal, incoherent, and unfathomable? Should contemporary Chinese art be simply equated with a minor discourse for the sake of rupturing and contesting the Western hypotheses and categories? Or is there something more?
While Western audiences and critics remain fascinated by Chinese artworks that exhibit alternative and oppositional body politics at first-class international biennales and global art exhibitions, the Chinese state has increasingly co-opted and infiltrated the art sector. Official sponsorship of the Shanghai Biennale since 1996, for example, has projected a dynamic image of the country, reinvented Chinese cultural and national identity, and promoted Chinese influence and soft power at home and abroad. How, then, do we understand the different dimensions of Chinese art and the delicate, complicated, and ambivalent relationship and shifting boundaries between the major and the minor? How may the major, popular, and orthodox elements be yoked to minor expressions, and vice versa? Moreover, what about artistic productions and scenes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the broader Sinophone world that are minor to the central power of the People's Republic of China? And what of ethnic minorities within China?
Yapp's focused examination and framing of contemporary Chinese art on the global stage through the main apparatus of the minor can sometimes be limiting. But overall, the book presents a provocative and theoretically informed study that opens meaningful conversations about a relational experience between the minor and the major. It makes a fresh and significant contribution to the fields of contemporary performance and visual culture, global Chinese studies, Asian American studies, and critical theory at large.
