Socially engaged art and the affects of Chinese rural community: A case study of ‘Someone Nearby’

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Yangdeng Cooperatives, a socially engaged art project in the rural area of Guizhou Province, Southwest of China (2012–present) with a special focus on an artwork named ‘Someone Nearby’ (2016). The work is created by a young artist Zhang Chao, also a member of Yangdeng Cooperatives. Zhang uses his Wechat, a digital chatting App popular in mainland China, to set up a dialogical system between the artist and the local residents in Yangdeng Township in order to explore local residents’ daily life in detail. By using contemporary affect theory, with a special focus on Lauren Berlant’s (2011) discussions of ‘cruel optimism’, I investigate how a socially engaged art project in the rural area of China reveals local residents’ daily life dilemma. Moreover, I attempt to explore how this dilemma is operated by the affective apparatus of Yangdeng society, which is driven by the cruel optimism related to people’s attachments to their good-life fantasy under the precarious condition of China’s urbanization. I argue that ‘cruel optimism’ is the everyday affects of the local residents which is used to deal with the ordinary crisis that they are encountering every day, and Zhang Chao’s work examines the ‘cruel optimism’, the product of the affective apparatus of Yangdeng society, through its social engagements.