Anti-Utopia and the Poetics of Ruins, 1978–2018: A View from Visual Art and Poetry

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15210%2F23%3A73618542" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15210/23:73618542 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Anti-Utopia and the Poetics of Ruins, 1978–2018: A View from Visual Art and Poetry

Original language description

Ruins feature pervasively in the post-1978 Chinese imagination. During China’s transformation following the socialist era, innumerable works of photography, cinema, literature, and art have turned demolition sites, construction debris, unfinished buildings, disaster areas, and the remains of ancient buildings into ruins. Moreover, intellectuals have portrayed their relationship with tradition, the demise of socialism, the shattering of reformist ideals, and the fate of their own work through the symbolism of ruin and decay. Following Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, we approach ruins as the product of a “discursive, conceptual, and visual intervention and framing.” The term does not merely describe broken and collapsed structures, but projects “expectations and culturally determined assumptions about the reality and meaning of these remnants, as well as their agency and aesthetic potential.” Drawing also on insights from Wu Hung and Kiu-wai Chu, this chapter advances a novel interpretation of ruin landscapes from the 1990s to the 2000s and analyzes two recent examples of ruin aesthetics, namely the short film Rumba II: Nomad (2015) by Cao Fei (b. 1978), and “Ruins” (“Feixu”, 2018), a poème en prose by Yaming. While Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s associated ruin imagery with utopias of national progress and dystopias of cultural crisis, Cao Fei’s film and Yaming’s writing depict heterotopias of ruins—vestiges haunted by a dislocated and alienated humanity, now bustling with non-human life.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50901 - Other social sciences

Project

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Continuities

O - Projekt operacniho programu

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Sinophone Utopias: Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream

ISBN

978-1-62196-646-3

Number of pages of the result

22

Pages from-to

287-308

Number of pages of the book

484

Publisher name

Cambria

Place of publication

Amherst

UT code for WoS chapter

000895793700015