Boundary Forms: Calligraphy and the City at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo

Abstract

This article maps the ways that the arts of the brush are being conscripted at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo to define the Chinese state’s vision of an ideal city. Calling them “boundary forms” that support the logic and rationality of the state-promoted urban grid map, it asks how calligraphy and ink painting might also slip through those grid map boundaries toward something invisible and unmappable. The article draws upon Jean-Francois Lyotard’s conception of ideological practices in the supermodern age of technological reproducibility and takes Cai Guo-Qiang’s concurrent exhibition at the Shanghai Rockbund Museum as an immediate and relevant means of questioning the brush line’s status at the Expo. Rather than demanding a politics of deconstruction or a radical response which would only replicate, or mirror obliquely, the state’s ideological and economic agendas for urban construction and development, the paper considers the fugitive morphologies of ink that prevent it from being reduced to formulaic propaganda and instead open up new ways—inarticulate and idiosyncratically felt—of thinking about and seeing the city.