Duke University Press Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)

In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the "universal." Yapp engages with art ranging from photography and performance to curation and installations to foreground what he calls the minor as method-tracking aesthetic and intellectual practices that challenge the predetermined ideas and political concerns that uphold dominant conceptions of history, the state, and the subject. By examining the minor in the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Cao Fei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carol Yinghua Lu, and others, Yapp demonstrates that the minor allows for discussing non-Western art more broadly and for reconfiguring dominant political and aesthetic institutions and structures. Review "Hentyle Yapp's deconstruction of the dialectic of authoritarian regulation and artistic resistance in Chinese art is certain to attract critical attention from scholars in numerous fields. Minor China is an outstanding book that sets a new standard for analyzing non-Western art and politics otherwise."--David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania "How do China and Chinese artists become legible in contemporary global circuits? In this informative study, Hentyle Yapp handles this question and its vast ideological ramifications by gauging late-capitalist art market aesthetics, academic discursive politics, and transnational multimedia dynamics. Most commendably, he asks us not to lose sight of the preemptive liberalist biases advanced by many Western accounts of non-Western cultures."--Rey Chow, author of "Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture" About the Author Hentyle Yapp is Assistant Professor of Art and Public Policy at New York University and coeditor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value.