Lily Chumley's Creativity Class offers “a critique of creativity through a series of ethnographies of creative practice in China” (p. 18). The book's goal is to describe “how ideologies of creativity and practices of self-styling contributed to the formation of a variety of bourgeois, liberal, individualistic, decadent and pessimistic subjectivities” (p. 1). The adoption of a cultural studies approach – where artists are deemed to be one kind of “cultural worker” produced for cultural industries by art schools – fuses the sociology of education with assessment of the gains and losses of a new economy, and with the ideological return of a socialist mentalité which can now be reconstituted in a new image economy. This allows the author not to get tied up by the conventional art historical quest of stylistic relations between works or by real and aspired genealogical linkages across generations of artists.
In her second chapter, “Thirty years of reform,” Chumley offers a definition of cultural industry as “fields of work that produce aesthetic form (graphic design, packaging, product design, fashion, architecture and interior design, film and television, visual art)” (p. 21). Why art and artists as a cultural field should be productive for such cultural industries and turn out required cultural workers is not a question which concerns the author, who does not apparently understand the conundrum, since Art Deco in Europe in the 1920s, that if fashion was once a parasite of art, art may under current economic and ideological conditions have become a parasite of fashion. Some histories of changes in contemporary art are introduced, including the notion of nostalgia about objects which denote change – such as the domestic television receiver shown in her figure 2.2 of a work by Chen Xi. The author's disregard for the physical nature of the objects which are produced shows by her caption not indicating that the work is an oil on canvas of 2008, 150 × 180 cm in size [see http://en.cafa.com.cn/chen-xi.html]. Thus among several insightful comments on works which use “the temporal signposts of material culture to call up a national narrative of transformation” (p. 53), the reader does not find out accurately about the works which actually constitute those signposts. Nor indeed are the makers of such works described in detail, such as Zhuang Hui who is introduced as the maker of an installation (p. 54) but about whose previous works as a conceptual photographer we do not learn. The book as a whole surprisingly gives neither the characters for names of artists, other persons and institutions mentioned, nor for extensive snippets of Chinese conversation it includes. There is a disconnect with the kinds of (art) object which exist in an (art historical) order from which the author chooses to remain distant, and the training and practice of making in which her participant observation will take place.
This book is as much a contribution to applied anthropology and ethnology as it is to Chinese studies, one whose contribution would have been aided by more careful use of sources and less free-and-easy adoption of the highly problematic concept of “cultural worker.” This is a complex field, as my own work below has indicated, but Chumley's early generalization (p. 3) about over 1 million of the 19 million Chinese university students studying art and design only refers to the generic statistical page of Ministry of Education for 2011 (http://ww.moe.edu.cn) and not a specific page or table, so it is difficult to tie down her argument on an important issue. However, examination of the table titled “Number of Students in Regular HEIs by Discipline” (http://en.moe.gov.cn/Resources/Statistics/edu_stat_2011/201305/t20130529_152542.html) gives the “number of graduates for next year” in a very generic field now re-titled “Artistic Design and Mass Media” as 463,522, a long way short of Chumley's million and even then, based on other years' figures, maybe containing only about 61,854 “art” graduates. I am really not sure what the grounds for her argument are, beyond saying that “the number of students taking vocational design degrees has increased enormously since 2000, particularly given changes in the fee-earning potential for art schools who need this income, and the employability prospects of such students.”
However, the significant contribution comes in the third chapter, which deals with the practice and social functions of art tests as part of the generalized high school graduation system for admission to tertiary art and design schools. This allows a discrimination between the kind of drawing and its implicit aesthetic ideology which is tested in entrance selection, and the kinds of informal, non-state training groups (huaban) which provide some of the successful entrants. Indeed one would like to know more accurately how much of the art school intake is produced from such a system and for which courses: research in 2008 indicated that about 60 per cent of the recruits to the Central Academy in Beijing were from the attached specialist high school, so one of the reasons – apart from the increased social demand – for the intensity of high school examination is the narrowness of the channel through which the selection passes because of the effective pre-selection by attached high schools (see John Clark Asian Modernities, Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980 to 1999, Sydney: Power Publications, 2010, 189–192, based on research done by Shao Yiyang of CAFA). Chumley significantly identifies a gap between the neutrally assessed pictorial skills required for entry and the “slogans, titles, descriptions, analyses and arguments that used to go along with these pictures” (p. 62), in short their socialist realist aesthetic ideology. The functions of these tests and the huaban are important for Chumley because everyone working in her variously defined creative worker occupations under the age of 40 had studied drawing in them and art or design in an art school where these skills were required for entry (p. 73).
Taken together with her discussion of what are basically reader/writer analyses of the indexicality of vision in answer to the question “what kind of envisioner is indexed by these pictures?” (p. 102) these impositions via the drawing method used for entry examination may indeed lead to the revised socialist realism she proposes, reinforced as they are through politically motivated propaganda and commercial advertising. Of course, these are not necessarily interdependent domains and doubtless for many ordinary Chinese consumerism is a domain of individual freedom which has been privileged by the state, probably in compensation for many other un-freedoms.
Chumley's most ambitious work is in attempting to ally recent anthropological theories of personhood (such as Xin Liu, The Otherness of Self, University of Michigan Press, 2002) with the kinds of self-reflection generated by creativity class at art school. Here it would have been useful to know more about the printmaker Li Fan, who conducted the class(es) for which Chumley was a participant observer, since this artist's work is a discernible field of reference in its own right whose interpretation may be directly relevant to his sense of the creative self. Her argument that the creative workers constitute a separate class falls down when the attention is directed, in this instantiation at least, to a narrow fine arts stream, in whose understanding more straightforward art historical analyses would have served better (see Stephen H. Whiteman et al, Floating Time, Chinese Prints 1954–2002, Power Publications, 2016, pp. 62, 63). There are no such examples from the training of any of the other persons, such as designers who might be called “creative workers,” so the legitimacy of her extending her arguments to this class remains largely unargued and unproven.
In short, this is a useful book from an ethnological perspective with some great insights into the actual practice of the Chinese tertiary art school entrance and teaching systems. It is so despite also being over-theorized: even with some familiarity with semiotics I had to think carefully about the interpretive gain of certain expressions, e.g. “rhematizing the qualia” (p. 140), and “entextualize” (p. 142).
