Self-styling: Practicing creativity and remaking aesthetics in post-socialist China

This dissertation examines how changing ideologies of creativity and practices of style have transformed political and commodity aesthetics in post-socialist China. In a time when art schools built to produce propaganda workers are called upon to cultivate creative individuals, and art students outnumber those in science, math, education, economics, law and agriculture, art education offers key insights into the contradictions of "market socialism". Tracing the expansion of art and design fields and art education institutions over thirty years of reform (1978--2008), I argue that the visual culture industries have played a central role in constructing China's unique form of post-socialism. This dissertation describes how standardized art school entrance tests have given rise to new genres of Soviet-style socialist realism; how these new genres of socialist realism link multiple genres of contemporary visual culture, including the official and the avant-garde; how students who test into state-run art institutes "find themselves" in creativity classes where they learn to perform creative personality by mastering genres of speech and narrative, and develop personal styles by orienting to aesthetic communities; and how art students graduate into the art and design practice communities where they negotiate markets as entrepreneurs and freelancers. Throughout the dissertation, I describe how art students' processes of self- and style-formation are, like the genres of art and design they work in, informed by post-socialist anxieties about commodification and narratives of national transformation.