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Hoping amidst precarity: Changing modes of hope in the vicissitudes of a Chinese art village

Focusing on an ‘atypical’ group of creative workers, viz., rural-to-urban migrant painters in China, this article takes hope as a lens to investigate an extreme case of creative work precarity. Drawing on the findings of a 42-month longitudinal ethnographic study, I demonstrate how wall painters cope with the precarious present by channelling their initial hopes for a future of freedom, original work and stability into three different, everyday practices: playing, creating and waiting. Approaching precarity from an intersectional perspective, this study explicates how the multiple dimensions of precarity interact with each other in forming wall painters’ shifting modes of hope. Manifesting the fluidity and contingency of wall painters’ hopes in the vicissitudes of Dafen during China’s post-industrial turn, this study reconciles the debate in creative labour studies that sees hope as either a utopian fantasy or an everyday practice and further contributes to the political economy of hope in creative labour studies.