Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic by Hentyle Yapp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic by Hentyle Yapp Kai Hang Cheang (bio) Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, by Hentyle Yapp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Xv + 271 pp. $25.60 paperback. ISBN: 9781478011552 Over the past few years, Asian/American cultural criticism has shown a renewed interest in China. Complicating the traditional interpretation of China as a geographical origin point for the Chinese diaspora, the Asian/American scholars behind this twenty-first-century turn to China–including Christopher B. Patterson and Y-Dang Troeung (2019), Nan Z. Da (2020), and Christopher Fan (2021)–attend to how the West's shifting significations of China and Chinese-ness in video games, science fictions, and memoirs reflect the world's imaginations of China's rise in the age of the new Cold War. Hentyle Yapp's monograph Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic imparts further nuance to the topic of China by bringing Asian/ American cultural criticism and transpacific critiques, such as Lisa Lowe's "hesitant method" and Petrus Liu's "material Marxism," to bear on analyses of post-1989 Chinese art and cultural productions to make distinctions between multiple "Chinas." Not to be confused with the two Chinas in Petrus Liu's Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (namely, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China), "minor China" is "a method that highlights the epistemological assumptions and ontological conditions [which] uphold the order of things, the major" (5), whereas, the major is the short hand for the "major narratives around resistance and romanticized notions of liberal free speech" (1). Per Yapp's characterization, Asian American studies and area studies are among the disciplines that propagate "major China," since they are driven by reading methods informed by liberal ideals like agency and subjectivity, interpretations that the critic argues flatten out subtle nuances in analyses of China. As a corrective, Yapp offers up "minor China," a "molecular" (15) interpretive method that employs fine-grained, affective, and aesthetic approaches which seek not to judge or criticize but to hesitate before, or pause and ask questions of, liberal logics of inclusion that too often value post-Tiananmen art as heroic efforts of aesthetic resistance in the face of authoritarianism. [End Page 111] Yapp exemplifies the problematic liberal logic in chapter 1 as he discusses the way China and Chinese artists were superficially included in Magiciens de la Terre (1989) despite the show's ostensible attention to China when it televised the concurrent Tiananmen Square protests. The chapter then goes on to show how the liberal logic of inclusion distracted Western curators and audiences from noticing the discursive criticisms made by Chinese artists. To make that case, Yapp turns to Cai Guo-Qiang's reproduction of Wang Guangyi's 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard for the 1999 Venice Biennale. Most critics at the Biennale focused on the grimaces on the faces of the workers and therefore framed the exhibition as a critique of socialism. Yapp argues that this understanding of Cai's piece misses a minor remedial detail: the display of the artists crafting the sculptures in front of the audience, an act that re-centers artistic labor in the installation and highlights the value of it under liberal capitalism. Chapter 2 extends the critique of the logic of inclusion by analyzing Ai Weiwei's art project Fairytale (2007). There, Yapp traces the effects of the hostility the group endured from racist Europeans and the anger that some of the tourists expressed (most memorably the Chinese woman who complained about the exclusion of her son from the tourist group because of some anti-police comments that he posted online). The "minor" here means anger and spite, which Yapp reads as affective exhortations that direct readers "to an ethics, practice and method that inquire who might been missing" (101). In chapter 3, Yapp studies Yan Xing's piece Kill (the) TV Set as well as Liu Ding, Carol Lu, and Su Wei's collective curation project Little Movement. Homing in on the "minor" (the dispassionate expression on the face of Yan in his embrace of Agu Anumudu) and ambiguous pieces like 1996.8.26, a work that shows...