Artistic interventions: Art,community,and media in China and beyond

Introduction

Since “art has expanded its boundaries since 2000” (Liu, 2022, p. 92), artist Qu Yan realized that a more intensive method of social intervention was needed and initiated his ambitious “Xucun Village Project” in Shanxi Province in 2008. As a representative artist of the “85 New Wave Movement” (bawu xin meishu), Qu spent 10 years creating the well-known artistic intervention project of Xucun, which has gone down in Chinese contemporary art history (Gao, 2021, pp. 480–482). Starting from Xucun, the nationwide distribution of artistic interventions in communities spread to North China (e.g., the “Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival” and “Shijiezi Art Museum”), Southwest China (e.g., the “Yangdeng Project” and “Baima Huatian Commune”), and Southeast China (e.g., the “Bishan Project” and “Qingtian Project”). This tendency echoes the quality-led urbanization and rural revitalization of China in recent decades, in which context art has gradually become a powerful force in bridging the urban‒rural divide for high-quality development via diverse approaches, including governmental policies, industrial development, civic participation, and community-based artistic practices. In this case, artistic intervention in community is not a conceptual art form but embodied as an “immaterial” (Weng, 2018) public aesthetic action or social activism for raising public awareness and promoting community engagement and, more importantly, for reconstructing “the affective community” (Qu, 2021, p. 11) among people.

This tendency also echoes a “remarkable proliferation of contemporary socially engaged art” worldwide (Kester, 2015, pp. 1–2) over the past few decades. Along with a radical shift toward post-contemporary art (McKee, 2013), the concept of “current art” (Gillick, 2016, p. 2) is aimed at challenging the dominance of North Atlantic art history (Elkins, 2020), which is generally perceived as a self-referential, global neoliberal modernist style. With a socially minded critique of art production, the new and vibrant “art form of social intervention” (Wang, 2019, p. 1) opposes the institutionalization, professionalization, and marketization of contemporary art through direct interventions into social reality. Artists have changed from creators in studios to onsite curators of art events, and a growing number of spectators have become integral parts of such artworks and art events. Artistic works are focused on the use of ready-mades from everyday life to intervene in society and provoke public participation. Community-based art projects transcend the confines of the “white cube” of galleries and take place in public spaces outside traditional venues. Community is the most common site from which both new genre public art (Lacy, 1995) and site-specific art (Kwon, 2004) emerge. Through the incorporation of human interaction and its social context into theoretical discussions of art, such event-based art projects aim to “raise civic awareness, foster new subjectivities, and stimulate alternative imaginations and collective actions for the betterment of society” (Wang, 2019, pp. 1–4).

Compared with media forms such as newspapers, broadcasting, or the internet discussed in communication studies, art media are often seen as materials, tools, or symbols applied for artistic creations and communication. Early examples of artistic interventions in community in China manifested as environmental art in which art was used to transform people’s living environments. Furthermore, sculpture is widely utilized as the major medium for the making of installation art. The “designers going to the countryside” (sheji xiaxiang, Zheng, 2021) campaign initiated the use of architectural design in the old town or village renovation. With the rise of new media technologies, the combined use of multi-media, such as AR, VR, and metaverse, has gradually been applied in socially engaged art projects to increase publicity. For example, Huang Sunquan, an art curator, started an art exhibition that combines artistic interventions with metaverse technology to make the history of Beibei old town during 1930 and 1940 reappear in the decentered virtual platform called “Decentraland.” The audiences and participants can access the open database to read the historical memory of Beibei and the ethnographic report of artistic interventions conducted by the MetaDAO team. The disappearing villages of Beibei are also restored in the galaxy cloud of the block chain. The past, present, and future of Beibei are revitalized through digital storytelling. Thus, through the blurring boundaries between concrete materials and virtual media, the concept of community is continually reinvented in art and new media practices.

In light of the advent of “the era of mass art” (Li et al., 2021, p. 11), this special issue presents research from scholars in interdisciplinary fields worldwide to extend recent dialogs on artistic interventions in community and its media practices in China and beyond. In this introduction to this special issue, to better understand the basic concepts of artistic interventions, we first review the literature on the changing avant-garde spirit in both global and Chinese art history. Second, as a major intervening field, the focus on community reflects the interflow of the theoretical search for communicative ethics and community reconstruction movements worldwide. Third, we examine the role of media in socially engaged art and its future implications.

Reclaiming the avant-garde spirit

The concept of “artistic intervention” is essentially about the changing relationship between art and social life. In modern Western art history, the theoretical discussion of avant-garde art revolves around the dialectics between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy. Since the internal exploration of art form began with the romanticism of the 18th century, modernist artists and theorists of the early 20th century have insisted on the nonutility of art. In other words, they believed that the avant-garde spirit of art should be regarded as independent of society and ideology (Greenberg, 2004). The slogan “art for art’s sake” provides a critique of aesthetic modernity against enlightenment modernity. Aesthetic autonomy that is independent of social and cultural context is widely expressed in modernist art forms such as Constructivism, Supremacism, and Abstract Expressionism. For example, in Mondrian’s painting works of the Abstract Expressionism style, the grid form represents a defamiliarized aesthetic taste of antireality that opposes the rule of representation. The avant-garde spirit lies in a sense of shock that is derived from the defamiliarized reality created by art.

For the sake of the defamiliarization of art, the polarization of avant-garde aesthetics demonstrates the theoretical divergence between “art for art’s sake” and “art for society.” The latter wave of avant-garde art tradition originated in the 19th century’s symbolism and thrived in Duchamp’s well-known artwork, “Spring.” Through the complete negation of aesthetic taste and separation of art from aesthetics, this ready-made urinal is presented as a work of art. Art is not a judgment of beauty but rather in which context it is art. As Burger refers to the attack of the art regime and the revolution of life, this avant-garde art tends to integrate art into social life instead of being confined to the enclosed aesthetic autonomy. The avant-garde art tradition foments dissensus, which could date back to Dadaism’s response to the First World War’s “grandiose slaughters” (Ball, 1996) through a series of theatrical, chaotic, avant-garde performances (Wilson, 2020). The aesthetic heteronomy of social concern was widely expressed in Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. For example, Italian Futurist Serata insists on the inflammatory impact of performance art to express the antisociety standpoint. Artists attempted to attack or irritate their audiences by throwing eggs and vegetables or blowing a whistle. Another example is the Russian Proletkult Theatre, which encouraged interactive communication between the actors and the audience by setting up an equal stage. The actors could distribute flyers to the audience, and the audience was entitled to the freedom of access to the stage. A performance titled “The Mystery of Freed Labour” showcased tens of thousands of working classes participating in a nonhierarchal and anti-capitalist stage performance in 1920, which demonstrates the collective aesthetics of “proletarian identity” (Bishop, 2012a, p. 74). Instead of demonstrating a strong political concern through artistic interventions, Dadaism aims to express an anti-ideological and anarchistic attitude that emphasizes individuals’ participatory experiences. A typical case is the Dada event on 2 May, 1920. André Breton read Dada Manifesto loudly, which attracted many audience members to participate and subsequently created a new public space.

Compared with the overall social criticism toward the capitalist system during World War I, the neo-avant-garde trend that flourished in the 1960s paid special attention to everyday life critiques of the alleged alienated society of spectacle at that time (Debord, 2006). The social critique of art was widely expressed in anti-art Situationist International in the mid-1960s and in the Happening Art and Fluxus Art of the 1970s. The artistic strategies of Situationist International can be considered derived, detournement, and constructed situations, which aim at creating subversive relationships in capitalist and urbanized societies. For example, in a 1962 collage painting titled “L’Avant-Grade se rend pas” created by Asger Jorn, artists initiated a campaign to tear off the posts everywhere in the city, deconstructing capitalist visual dominance through subversive and contextualized art practices. As the presenter of the Happening Art, Allan Kaprow advocated the ordinary value of ordinary things and accidental encounters in everyday life in his well-known article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (Kaprow, 2003). The Fluxus Art proclaims that everything is art and that everyone is an artist. Social sculpture theory, referenced by Joseph Beuys, maintains that art should be understood as an interconnected web in which everyone has the potential to make a change toward society. Beuys’ “7000 oaks” for the 1982 Documenta in Kassel constituted a significant turn in the art world, which successfully activated an environmental concern through art discourse and public action. Artistic practices such as the “detritus of daily life” and “ready-mades” (Dittmar & Entin, 2014) are aimed at challenging the social political order and subverting the hegemony of capitalist dominance in public spaces in the postpolitical democratic era (Mouffe, 2008).

The socially engaged art practices in the 1980s and 1990s varied under different conceptual frameworks, such as collaborative art, new genre public art, relational art, dialogic art, contextual art, and site-specific art. In a 1993 exhibition “Untitled” in 303 Gallery of New York, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija distributed his homemade Thailand curry to the audience, through which the participation of the audience became an integral part of the artwork, and the exhibition hall turned into a canteen. The relationship among the audience, the artist, and the art museum has been profoundly reshaped by these participatory art works. Another case is a social intervention project of drug control initiated by Wochenklausur, an Austrian art group. Owing to a long-lasting dialog among artists, reporters, politicians, and sexual workers of different social backgrounds, the dialog itself becomes the artwork filled with agency. The 1993 “Culture in Action” exhibition curated by Mary Jane Jacob focused on the low-income community in the suburbs of Chicago. This art project was cocreated by artists and local community members in terms of a series of art events and interactive activities. Briefly, socially engaged art practices have facilitated interactive and interrelated relationships among artists, artworks, participants, and the scene. Audiences have become the participants of art works so that artists are not the sole creators but rather the coordinators of art events. An increasing number of everyday life spaces in both urban and rural settings, instead of art museums and galleries, have become exhibition venues. Thus, art opens up comprehensively toward daily life.

Unlike the upsurges of global avant-garde art, which were swept along by the tidal wave of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art movements throughout the 20th century, the Chinese avant-garde consciousness in contemporary art came to the forefront during the “post-Cultural Revolution” period, particularly under the auspices of the term “85 New Wave Movement.” This Chinese modernist art movement was started by the Star Exhibition and included a series of works created in 1979 by painting clubs titled “Anonymity and Star,” which demonstrated the passionate pursuit of freedom of creation, distinguishing it from the highly politicized art of the Cultural Revolution period. In the mid-1980s, some youth artist societies, such as the Northern Art Group and the Zhejiang 85 New Space, attempted to establish new cultural value through full Westernization (Wang, 2018). This type of artistic language was distinguished from the “traumatic” realism initiated by “the generation of educated youth” at that time and differed from postmodern formalist art, which was largely dominated by the famous painter Wu Guanzhong in academic circles. Instead, as a part of the “aesthetic wave” of the 1980s, which sought to pursue the liberation of thought and disown its own culture, the 85 New Wave Movement inherited the spiritual heritage of the enlightenment culture of the “May Fourth Movement” while paying special attention to the humanistic ideal of building new societies after China’s historical catastrophes over the years. Through a comprehensive transformation of Chinese fine arts traditions such as Daoism and Zen into contemporary art, this “humanistic avant-garde” (Gao, 2015, p. 140) trend shows its dual critical attitude toward the Oriental artistic tradition and Western modernity through a specific focus on Chinese people’s everyday lives.

Wu (2002) suggested the use of “experimental art” to understand the specificity of contemporary Chinese art, which is different from the Western art tradition. With the advent of “post-Cold war” politics and globalization in the 1990s, Chinese avant-garde art constantly “recreated” (Liu, 1996) itself through activism, transcendence, resistance, and pathos, which are manifested in the following types of art: first, “political pop,” which juxtaposed socialist elements and Western popular culture to reflect the artists’ critique on socialist revolution and consumption culture; second, “conceptual art,” which countered the existing pictorial tradition and emphasized the social criticism of artworks; and third, “performance art,” which investigated “the role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art” (Berghuis, 2006) and expressed artists’ thoughts on everyday life and people’s mental states. Unlike “disturbing” and “masochistic” art projects such as “Add One More Meter to the Unnamed Hill” and “To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond,” avant-garde art works in recent years have focused on social intervention and public activism; one such example is Li Liao’s semifictional autobiographical work “Irrelevant Commission,” which takes art as the energizing power behind public action.

Rebuilding a dialogical community

As an increasingly important domain for keeping the tradition of avant-garde art alive, community becomes an indispensable intervening field where artists prefer to conduct artistic interventions in the living spaces to which people have become accustomed (i.e., the native villages of artists or marginalized communities in suburban areas). Apart from artists’ participation in renovating hard infrastructure or improving physical surroundings, artistic interventions in communities also aim to reconstruct a collaborative and negotiated value system on the basis of shared history, tradition, belief, custom, and so forth. Since postmodernism implies “all that is solid melts into air” (in Marshall Berman’s words), the proliferation of popular culture in the 1970s profoundly changed the regime politics of art. Art is constantly being absorbed into the global market and media industry. In China, contemporary art has acquired legitimacy in the global art market since the 1990s, and artists who had conducted experimental art in the 1980s achieved fame through fiery narratives of fighting against convention and embracing Western modernism have achieved great success in overseas biennales and auction markets. Only a small number of artists promoted artistic interventions in marginalized urban‒rural communities, and these artists have been troubled by the fact that the cultural industry has destroyed the autonomy that has always been a necessary part of art, especially in the case of artists whose works and actions were not acknowledged by the wider art world for many years (Xu, 2014). Only in recent years did the scholars begin to acknowledge the legitimacy of the artistic interventions and spatial reconstruction projects that have been underway long enough to become rooted in everyday life (Fang, 2017). Here, the value of these socially engaged art projects consists of both the substantive changes they have brought to certain communities or to residents’ lives and their interventions in the field of Chinese contemporary art, in which “art is always moving toward the next moment’s affect” (Mao, 2019); during this time, art also moved in the direction of a “social turn” (Li, 2011). What Zhou calls “the ethical turn” (Zhou, 2017, p. 174) of art explains the need to rebuild communalism while confronting the dissipation of critical consciousness of modernist art in a postcapitalist era (Smith, 2019, p. 356). Hence, artistic interventions in communities represent a sort of dialogical, social, and remedial intervention that attempts to create a flexible social structure grounded in public participation in a critical way and initiate a sensory battleground of “inoperative community” (Nancy, 2007), in which all the artists and participants coexist together as heterogeneous yet articulated singularities. In other words, a more “generalized ethical issue” (Bishop, 2015, p. 50) of artistic interventions foregrounds a social and cultural agenda related to communitarianism.

According to our immersive participatory observation of curatorial practices in “On the Road: Exhibition of Symbiotic Community Art Projects,” which was curated by the Guan Shanyue Art Museum in Shenzhen in 2020, some recent community-based art projects are expressed in the following four features: the generation of current events that are employed for the creation of art, the “disruption” of scenes and viewers to realize social intervention, the use of individualized expression to achieve collective cooperation and mass participation, and the mixing of existing everyday life experiences to construct new dialogic settings. First, community-based art is no longer a matter of Kantian aesthetic judgments concerning “taste” but rather a denotation of commonplace matters because everyday life becomes such an event within an artist’s “performance.” For example, the artist Ma Yongfeng’s installation work “Guerrilla Living Syndrome” renames familiar temporary shelters, such as tents and sheet-metal houses, as “guerrilla architecture,” relying on nimble arrangements to explore the possibilities of alternative living practices in different nooks and crannies of the streets. Second, the “theatricality” (Zhou, 2017, pp. 68–71) characterized among different subjectivities eliminates the uniqueness of aesthetic experiences, which involve viewing artwork in silence without perceiving it or its meaning. Community-based art places even greater emphasis on the effect of the field on the artist’s creation. For example, the curator of the “Hua Jiadi Biennale: Look! Look!” moved the high-end contemporary art exhibition, typically held in an elegant and classy venue, to an ordinary apartment in the Huajiadi community, Wangjing Subdistrict, Beijing, and artists placed over 100 works of art throughout the apartment’s nooks and crannies. No exquisite or elegant works of art were included, only the mundane and superficial details of everyday life, and this absurd presence and contextualized design repeatedly reminded the artists to ponder where the fields of the occurrence of art were, transforming the creation of art into provisional and chance encounters. Third, via the complex, multidirectional, interactive relationships among artists, viewers, works, and fields, community-based art seeks to employ “dissensus” (Rancière, 2004, pp. 7–15) in real life to establish an imaginary “flipped” space. The “Electronic Music Party Project,” held in Jixiang Village in the southern suburbs of Xi’an, attempted to explore the differences between new and old entertainment and culture among local residents and migrants. Unlike older residents, who are accustomed to relaxing in the village’s bathhouses, karaoke establishments (KTVs), dance halls, and internet cafes, younger residents who have moved to the village from other locations generally prefer Western, Japanese, and Korean electronic music. In this case, the electronic music festival created a dialog space that was specifically designed to ease intergenerational conflict. In general, in this “anti-art” movement in Chinese contemporary art, the occurrence and settings of art and the subjective and objective relationships among the creation, goals, and functions of art have undergone profound changes.

The redefinition of fine art also coincides with the community reconstruction movement that developed widely throughout the world in the second half of the 20th century. Since World War II, cultural-led urban regeneration has profoundly changed urban development in most Western societies. As an effective tool for revitalizing the ever-changing ramshackle settlements and promoting the urban leisure economy, artistic interventions in communities are varied and characterized as promoting urban transformation (Sharp et al., 2005, p. 1006), enhancing social cohesion (Cartiere, 2004, p. 14; Ingalls, 2016), constructing new territorial identities (Nelson, 2015, pp. 3–5), enhancing citizens’ poor living conditions, rectifying international inequalities in political rights, solving apartheid, and reconstructing communities after war (Beasley, 2012, p. 5; Becker, 2018, pp. 3–9; Huss et al., 2015, pp. 675–679). In East Asia, the community construction movement in Japan has focused on spatial reconstruction, environmental improvement, historic heritage preservation, traditional cultural revitalization, folk customs performance, regional autonomy, and the everyday activities of residents. This bottom-up grassroots movement is generally initiated by voluntary associations and local societies and is characterized by cultural belongingness related to humanistic categories such as religion, folklore, and ethnicity. The emphasis on cultural landscapes rather than natural landscapes endows each community with the quality of “charm of people who value these places” (Nishimura, 2007, p. 19). Artistic intervention projects and art festivals such as Echigo-Tsumari Art Field and Setouchi Triennale reflect that art has been thoroughly integrated into “nature, landscape, agricultural culture, and real life” (Dong, 2015, p. 12). In Taiwan, the Cultural Construction Committee (wenjianhui) proposed the governmental plan of “overall community construction” (shequ zongti yingzao) in the mid-1990s. Policymakers advocated that each small-scale regional community should be reconstructed through infrastructure improvement and civic participation. Going back to the locale means that the artists and residents begin to value the historic site and local tradition. At that time, many nongovernmental organizations and local associations engaged in the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage, as well as the promotion of local characteristics in terms of artistic activities, cultural festivals, and creative industries. For example, Land Dyke’s path to farming in Yilan County is practicing a paradigm shift from “agricultural craft” to “agricultural art,” remaking the value system of agriculture in modern society (Cai & Wu, 2018, pp. 59–60).

In mainland China, the prosperity of “artistic intervention in rural communities” (yishu xiangjian) has spread over the past several decades. If community-based art practices in urban settings tend to advocate civic participation outside the “white cube” of art museums and art galleries, artistic interventions in rural settings involve the restoration of the “locality” (He, 2018) of Chinese ethnic art and the structural reform of rural governance. Compared with the Western polemics of socially engaged art on whether the role of art is “collaboration” (Bourriaud, 2013, p. 3; Kester, 2006, pp. 22–25; Lacy, 2004) or “antagonism” (Bishop, 2015, pp. 54–59) in the neoliberal context, the Chinese experiences of artistic interventions in communities follow similar trajectories under postsocialism. On the one hand, most artistic interventions in communities have formulated participatory networks in collaboration with local governments, cultural enterprises, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and artists. For example, if the “Qingtian Plan” includes efforts to establish a multicenter network of participatory cultures connecting diverse actors, including villagers, village sages, village committees, and players from welfare foundations, universities, the local government, and artist-in-residency programs to maximize public benefits, the “Bishan Plan” focuses on refining numerous symbolic elements from local knowledge and then establishing a variety of aesthetic scenes that cater to the pastoral imagination of the bourgeois (Li et al., 2021, pp. 4–5). One typical practice of artistic intervention in rural communities is “industrial empowerment” (chanye funeng; Xiang, 2021). Creative laborers and cultural entrepreneurs work to promote rural revitalization by reinventing folk handicrafts and developing cultural tourism. In fact, artistic intervention in rural communities has promoted a series of diverse art projects, art events, and art festivals with general concerns about spatial reconstruction, heritage preservation, craft revitalization, and so on. Zhou (2019) reminds us of the historical experiences of the “mass line” (qunzhong luxian) inherited from “art for the worker-peasant-soldier” (wenyi wei gongnongbing fuwu) during the Yan’an revolutionary period. As a socialist approach of art elites embedding deeply into the everyday lives of villagers and directly engaging the masses to compel public participation in village affairs and foster the own subjectivities of local people, this “institutionalized avant-garde art” can be understood as “a parallel approach to democratic participation in the West” (Zhou, 2020, p. 40). From the perspective of official propaganda, artistic intervention in communities in China is described as a combination of top-down and bottom-up efforts with a social concern for fulfilling all the subjectivities of the “people” (renmin), in which the academies of fine arts across China have played an intermediary role to cooperate with the local government and send teachers and students to rural areas to make new art. Some ethnographic studies of artistic intervention in rural communities have justified the legitimacy of the collaborative approach of Chinese experiences (see Jiao, 2019; Liu, 2022; Qu, 2021).

However, some artistic interventions do push at the boundaries of the permissible in China. For example, the Shijiezi Art Museum Project (2008) was an art education program initiated by artists Jin Le in rural Gansu. By allowing local villagers to participate in art exhibitions, art festivals, and art activities curated by outside artists, as well as attracting artists to participate in the residency program in Shijiezi village, artistic intervention has a social aftereffect of helping villagers live with dignity. As a typical case of “experimental communities” (Li et al., 2021, p. 6), this art project has opened a public domain for intersubjective negotiation and dialog. Unfortunately, Jin Le passed away in 2021 and “became one of the shining stars in the night sky to light up the dream of Shijiezi” (Cui, 2021). Artist Mao Chenyu also made his ethnographic film through a deep connection with his hometown, a remote village on the shores of Dongting Lake in Yueyang, Hunan Province. As an artist with multiple identities, such as writer, filmmaker, architect, farmer, and anthropologist, Mao created the “Paddy Film project” with the uniqueness of a mixed hypermedia system that includes notes, diaries, graphics, sounds, installations, and video works. His aesthetic concept was to embed his embodied experiences in the local context and to respond to the decay of a deteriorating rural world. As the most common crop grown in southern China, paddy rice is appropriated as an anthropomorphic art language for understanding the rural ecological system, which encompasses “crop ecology, production technology, folk customs, scientific methods, and cultural anxieties” (Li, 2024). Along with the unconcealing of the relationship between the land and human beings, a cognitive framework in terms of art is constructed to understand the local experiences of environmental damage and sociocultural changes in rural China. Instead of being bathed in the radiance of the rural revitalization movement, these art practices are relatively unaffected by the constraints of institutional systems and maintain a certain distance from the market, and they typically express the vanguard spirit of skepticism and rebelliousness in contemporary Chinese art. However, most of these art projects confront the pressure of censorship. For example, Mao takes a subterranean route in learning from the land, his works can be circulated only in independent Chinese films or avant-garde art circles, and his theoretical monograph has been prohibited from publication. Reminiscent of Mai’s (2020) comment that Zuo Jing changed his approach to cooperate with the local government and promote rural tourism in other rural art practices after the failure of Bishan utopian, the avant-garde spirit in the Chinese context is in a constant process of dancing with the authorities. In fact, the dispute of “streetlight versus stars” (e.g., being an integral part of rural tourism or in a state of outsider or subversive) in artistic interventions in communities reflects the never-ending tensions of the Chinese contemporary art world, in which “art has been institutionalized as a form of cultural production with formal-idealistic autonomy but at the same time is under the protection of the state and ideological protection in the reform era” (Zhang, 2014, p. 214).

The role of media in socially engaged art

The question of the role of media in socially engaged art is not always visible since it is usually taken for granted as being solely functional. This is one reason we proposed this special issue to highlight the meaning of media in the new development of the artistic participation movement. More importantly, the new media era has also transformed traditional fieldwork-based artistic participation into technologically driven modes of participation.

Participatory art is an art form based on local communities and explores art not as a final artistic product but as a media and catalyst for public political engagement. Through dialogs among artists, local residents, and other third parties, new subject relationships are established, and important social issues such as community education, urban‒rural differences, political empowerment, and marginalized groups are addressed and resolved. Traditional participatory art often focuses on the concept of place. They physically connect people in terms of their bodies and actions, focusing on building emotional memories unique to communities and places and advocating for targeted regional development. For example, the “Dai Zhi Project” aims to collect historical and cultural information scattered in Hangzhou and Suzhou and compile it into comprehensive artistic forms; the “Shanghai Community Art Garden” and “Shumeikeng Creek Art Action” strive to change local people’s environmental awareness and promote local green and sustainable development; and a series of art rural reconstruction activities in Xucun, Bishan, Qingshan, and Yangdeng inject artistic vitality into villages while renovating local architecture, economic activities, and cultural life.

Since the 1960s, participatory art has been trying to address the relationship among people, art, and society. In the 21st century, the relationship between art and technology has become a new focus. In the aforementioned art actions, a concrete city and village are indispensable. These diverse localities, as squares, provide opportunities for face-to-face communication and make collective action possible. Carol Becker once said that people must face each other and communicate in squares to create microutopias that have never been imagined before and to stimulate imagination. However, does this place have to be physical, and does the construction of public life have to be based on identity, kinship, or geographical relationships? This viewpoint has been challenged by the emergence of a range of auxiliary digital media technologies and devices, as well as the widespread popularity of online social interactions. Additionally, participatory art rooted in locality not only has requirements for embodiment but also raises some issues of power and institutional risk. For example, tendencies in local policies, financial allocations, and corporate development directives not only expose artists and art organizations to the risk of becoming creative tools but also challenge the effectiveness of exposing conflicts of interest, alleviating inequality, and enhancing social justice. Therefore, can the introduction of digital platforms weaken or eliminate these problems? How do media technologies specifically change the production, reception, and participation of art, and how do new platforms and means alter practices on the basis of dialog or resistance? The ubiquity of digital technology greatly increases opportunities for sharing and discussing cultural commodities (Bourgonjon et al., 2016; Tepper & Hargittai, 2009; Verboord, 2011, 2014). Smart spaces provide broader public access to artworks (Wilson-Barnao, 2018). In terms of the internet society, the relational space involves a shift in cognitive logic, which may enable the realization that public space is produced from the bottom up rather than constructed by an external watchdog (Staeheli et al., 2009). In this case, from physical to digital, what are the new possibilities and limitations for participatory art brought about by changes in the field: new square spaces challenging the dichotomy between public and private, openness and concealment, digital and analog.

If we take the example of the Yangdeng art project in 2018, in which rural residents were invited by an artist to upload their creations to the Douyin app, we can find that the new medium allowed the participants’ exchanges and convergence to overcome the limitations of body and place and facilitated the transmission of ideas and the implementation of actions. Certainly, the impact of new digital platforms and media technologies on participatory art is twofold. On the one hand, the internet has greatly increased our opportunities to share and discuss cultural commodities, and participants can not only consume but also actively generate and create their own online content, making targeted critiques possible. Electronic databases and archives provide wider public access to works of art, and we no longer need to be physically present to actually participate in a participatory art event or to find their electronic archives. Another example comes from the artists managing to create connectedness in the period of COVID-19 pandemic, which is reinforced through technological connectivity (Snels, 2022).

However, there are many problems with the intervention and presentation of participatory art on electronic platforms, and one of the issues most criticized by scholars is the capitalization and unconscious emotional labor of internet platforms. Bishop (2012b) argues that one of the major problems with participatory art is the use of socially engaged art to replicate capitalist power structures, which has sparked many debates about social justice. She suggests that although participatory artists are opposed to neoliberal capitalism, many other acts of their artistic practice fit more closely with the newest forms of neoliberalism (networks, mobility, project work, and emotional labor). However, the third-party platforms responsible for triaging authors and convening audiences have long operated in a position of invisibility, with the goal of avoiding critiques. The capital collection and unconscious emotional labor of internet platforms seem to have created new problems in the practice of participatory processes. As Cruz (2012) notes, being political in our field requires a commitment to revealing the conditions of conflict and the institutional mechanisms that perpetuate it. In China, these new circumstances need to be further explored.

Introducing the special issue

Wang (2023) presents a vivid portrayal of the multidimensional Tracing public art project, which was initiated by Shanghai-based artist Ni Weihua, within the ever-changing context of China’s urban redevelopment. This article explores Ni’s process of creating images among the crumbling walls of abandoned industrial complexes, the ramshackle buildings of residential areas, and the urban peripheries of Shanghai’s anonymities. It is based on a mixed and flexible use of methodologies that include art historical analysis, visual analysis, and onsite and virtual ethnography. This ongoing collection of site-specific artworks demonstrates the creative fusion of media art, performance art, conceptual art, graffiti, drawing, and documentary photography to create a multi-media experience. Looking back at the beginnings of Ni’s artistic interventions in community from the early 1990s, the constantly changing artistic experiments from Tracing 1.0 to Tracing 4.0 demonstrate his commitment to art in line with the shifting urbanization discourses in Chinese megacities over the previous few decades. For example, the Tracing series focuses on various urban “vestiges,” such as inexpensive and instantaneous “small-ads,” the inconspicuous walls of urban ruins, the propaganda character of Chai (demolish), written in bright red color that is widely manifested in the abandoned industrial zones, and the soon-to-be demolished areas of marginalized residents or disenfranchised social groups. Ni’s strong social concern about urban poverty and spatial inequality within the socioeconomic context of Shanghai is further reflected in his aesthetic preference for abstract expressionism. Since top-down urban planning and bottom-up grassroots resistance are at odds due to state-driven and capital-led urban regeneration, Ni’s avant-garde, intervention, and playful artmaking approach uses an anti-spectacle and socially critical art strategy to break free from the mainstream portrayal of Shanghai as a symbol of economic prosperity. More importantly, Ni uses social media to increase the interactive aspect of this project and transform it into a collaborative public art action. As a result, the Tracing series evolved into an international participatory art and activism initiative focused on avant-garde expression and emotional connections, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, Ni’s efforts to capture the visual rhetoric of quickly evolving urbanscapes not only bring the public’s attention to the urban peripheries but also further the understanding of how art and everyday life are blending in response to urbanization in China and elsewhere.

The Pearl River Delta’s public art practice is examined by Zhong et al. (2023), who provide empirical evidence to support their theory of everyday creativity and alternative communitarianism in China. Through creative experimentation and public dialog, the conceptual framework of “nearby art” seeks to restore empathic collaboration among people, in contrast to the eradication of urban dynamics and the atomization of urban dwellers under functionalism. Making art is as commonplace as picking up groceries or growing flowers in the community, as demonstrated by the example of FEI Arts. The SoengJoengToi instance illustrates that communities should be dynamic “fields” for the cocreation of artwork, public engagement, and civic education. The case of Nantou Ancient City looks at how the Shenzhen–Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, the Vanke real estate business, and the city government of Shenzhen worked together to construct a sustainable creative intervention in the historic area. In Baishizhou, a typical Shenzhen urban village, the artistic rehabilitation of alienated social relationships is the central subject of the Handshake 302 case. The case studies cited above are consistent with scholarship on contemporary artistic interventions in community and discussions about the role of art in the public sphere as a catalyst for changing people’s living conditions. However, more in-depth community-based ethnographic research is urgently needed for future studies because local knowledge of artistic interventions in community in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is still relatively uncommon in the literature.

For the other contributing authors, the role of the media and its practices are emphasized in the process of artistic interventions in communities. For example, Wan (2023) uses the case of LIGNA’s radio ballet to discuss a new approach for reshaping the order of social space and sound, with its technologies becoming the central concern. In particular, the dynamic interaction between the participants serving as a bodily community and the sound as an art practice, with its inherent spatiality, demonstrates body politics and forms a decentralized social space. Moreover, a posthumanistic approach, in contrast to Wan’s approach, is proposed to treat water as an elemental medium and an intermediary when considering China’s heritage construction (Xi, 2024). This new approach to analysis encourages us to further consider the role of media when it is regarded as playing a central role in art practices. According to Fan (2024), creative documentary film is treated as an interactive entity that invites public engagement in a more active manner. In contrast to Xi’s critical stance toward digital technology, Fan highlights the importance of digital witnesses in reshaping the stigmatized narratives of contemporary social issues. All of these factors make us rethink the entanglement among physical, digital, human, nonhuman, media, art, and social engagement.

In conclusion, by examining the emergence of a new media art form and its social ramifications, the case studies in these articles first cover a variety of local contexts, including public art practices in Chinese megacities, alternative heritage preservation in southern China, and audio or visual art practices in Berlin and Canada. Second, interventionist activities are not just private avant-garde experiments; rather, these artistic endeavors focus on the potential for civic engagement and public awareness in various social agendas, as well as living justice in urban environments and spatial revitalization in rural contexts. Third, artistic interventions take place in a variety of settings, including both real-world locations and online groups. As we mentioned above, the reconceptualization of a sense of community is implied by socially engaged art as a means of resisting urban redevelopment and social alienation, as well as by online visual storytelling as a means of enhancing social engagement in the digital age. We hope that this special issue is a starting point for exploring the evolving relationship between art participation, community regeneration, and media interventions by pluralizing the dichotomies between the local and the global, the private and the public, and the physical and the virtual.