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Public Surfaces Beyond the Great Wall: Communication and Graffiti Culture in China

The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials and Chinese avant-garde artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution to make claims about and on behalf of Chinese society. This state/artist confrontation around a singular, fixed object contributes to an oppositional reading of China’s public sphere, a standoff between a monolithic state and a monolithic society around a singular symbol of antiquity. Graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai complicates this reading, and throws into sharp relief China’s status as a fraught territory trying to navigate the dual tides of globalization and cultural nationalism. Projects like Zhang Dali’s “Dialogue”/Duihua endeavor in Beijing and multiple graffiti interventions like those along Moganshan Road in Shanghai highlight the development of an emerging revision of Chinese public culture, with graffiti art acting as both evidence of and communicative infrastructure for often subtle but significant changes. Rather than mere embellishment, graffiti is a composition in traces: an enigmatic address by an author who is absent to an audience of unpredictable strangers. In contrast to models of “democratic” dialogue that are rooted in abstract claims to rights, practices of polemic and confrontation, and clear identities and interests, graffiti points to another idea of democratic communication. This alternative culture is always in process, based on affiliation between strangers with temporary bonds, and advanced by strategic use of available artistic resources in response to threats to shared living space such as urban renewal, cultural engineering, and national identity promotion. This essay will proceed in two movements. First, I will analyze Zhang Dali’s “Dialogue” project with attention to the way that the work both functioned to generate visibility for public spaces and places being erased by nationally-led urban renewal policy, and