From Autonomy To Heteronomy

The last decade from around 2010 has witnessed an unusual wave in Chinese contemporary art,which is known as the “art rural construction”.It is not a new school of art or art statement and does not have an integrated demand.Rather,it is more like a social movement in which artists who share similar intentions participate in their own ways.Today,with the development of launched art rural construction projects,we can find that most of the “art rural construction” are not successful,or to say that they do not have noticeable results on the improvement of current rural situation in the launched areas.Nevertheless,it did not impact the enthusiasm in the art with the launch of more and more local art rural projects.From artists’ independent and autonomous rural constructions in the beginning,to the launch of “art town” project with the engagement of power and capital recently,villages and towns have become the favorite spot for contemporary art exhibitions and art festivals of various kinds.This change does not only include artists’ autonomous persistence in creation,but the heteronomous intervention from the power and capital.The art rural construction area also reflects the change in the transitional relation of artists and art capital from confrontation to cooperation.Under the current art situation,the paper aims to study the formation of art rural construction in China,its rationality of development and situation from the perspective of field operational mechanism in sociology.The “art rural construction” in the paper refers to the art activities in Chinese contemporary art aiming to reform and construct the relatively lagged ecology of art in rural areas in the last decade from around 2010 with art as the primary means,which borrows the idea “rural construction movement” in early 20 th century in China.It also consists of local art creations that share similar practice of the idea “rural construction”while do not emphasize its motivation,as well as the resulting large number of artexhibitions and art education activities launched in towns and villages.The originality of the paper is that it is not a brief introduction of art rural construction cases or a review on current results of construction projects.First,the paper critically analyzed artists’ strong art autonomy in their independent rural constructions in the beginning but failed to accomplish the constructions with the lack of enough intervention.Second,with the introduction of the “field” concept by sociologist Bourdieu,the paper investigated the essence of art rural construction which was to engage in element competition in the field of art with the forming capital of rare cultures.The paper concluded that the current results of “art rural construction” did not reflect on the specific change of rural environment,but on the forming capital of rare cultures in art brought by art rural construction.More economic and social capital thus turned their attentions to the area,contributing to the establishment of “art town” and“art village”.With the involvement of heteronomous elements in art rural construction,artists,local people and government had achieved a positive balance,which was the important achievement of art rural construction in the last decade.