Spectacles of remembrance: nostalgia in contemporary Chinese art

Nostalgia, especially imagined nostalgia, thrives in the art works of the 1990s in China as it helps artists ‘fashion’ a dialogic role between commodity and cultural critique. The art works I have sampled here demonstrate how three artists inventively hitch‐hike commodified settings to engage in transitory yet constructive social commentary on China's headlong plunge into a market‐driven society. All three favor the mode of ‘photographic remembering’ which enables them, not to reject or bypass, but to work in and through consumer culture in order that they can give full play to the more emancipatory and enlightening potentialities implied in their humanistic pursuit.