Title
Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985
Abstract
Excessive worry. Persistent unease. Disquiet. Torment. A brain disorder. Just another ordinary feeling. Jennifer Dorothy Lee’s talk was based on her new book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985, which addresses the competing connotations and nomenclatures of the anxiety in in twentieth-century China. She argued that anxiety offers a crucial frame for perceiving the specificity of both contemporaneity and creative practices in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Lee honed in on the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular, the Beijing Spring, as both a springboard and site for post-revolutionary transformations.
Lee concluded the talk by introducing a new project, which turns to an earlier historical moment of subject-formation and creative practice by taking up Lee’s own family history of musicianship and migration from Shanghai to Paris, Tainan, and New York City in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Biography
Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of East Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee’s first book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985, was published in February 2024 by the University of California Press. Lee’s article on socialist abstraction and the painter Wu Guanzhong was also recently published in positions: asia critique. Lee’s next research project, tentatively titled Diasporic Longing, is a transnational study of family, migrancy, and music across China, Taiwan, France, and the US from the 1940s-1970s.