“Be water, my friend” Non-oppositional criticalities of socially engaged art in urbanising China

This study attends to different forms of socially engaged artistic and cultural practices in China. These practices address a range of social issues in Chinese cities, including the progressive diminishment of spaces available for civil engagement, unequal treatment of migrant workers, and denigration of urban villages. Through anthropological fieldwork in 2015 and 2016 (with updates till 2019), and critical analysis, I explore how social practice art offers critical perspectives on these problematics in the context of the contemporary Chinese regime. In particular, I stress how arts practices in China have developed forms of criticality that avoid explicitly opposing the political authorities. I conceptualise four forms of entangled non-oppositional criticality: “reconfigurative criticality”, “connective criticality”, “uneasy criticality”, and “quotidian criticality”, respectively from the practices of Theatre 44 and Sunset Haircut Booth (2016-ongoing) in Guangzhou, Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society in Shanghai, documentary theatre Home (2016) in Beijing, and 5+1=6 (2014-2015) in Beijing. I argue that critical art can go beyond oppositional critique by being “a bit off”. By this, I mean that it can partially eschew the system—but not by entirely escaping or turning against it. Rather, these forms of criticality work by smuggling something external into the system (or something internal out of it); becoming “inappropriate/d”, embodying an alternative way of life; or working towards the otherwise in the future. This research tries to contribute to the discourse of criticality, and the discussion of socially engaged art in China and beyond.