Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China

by Lily Chumley

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2016

About the author

Lily Chumley is an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

Reviews

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astute read on the pulse of the world’s rapidly growing culture factory. Chumley’s word choice is precise and visual without dipping into reductive metaphor. She puts to words many ideas floating in the air. Highly engaging, it prodded me to think about art and social critique in my own culture differently.