Creativity Class - by Lily Chumley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How China's art students develop their aesthetic styles and enter the nation's creative economy

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China.

From the Back Cover

"With a fluid writing style, "Creativity Class" describes the self-styling practices of visual art workers in three decades of post-Socialist China and looks at the training that Chinese students receive in art prep schools and academies. This book stands out for its focus on student training and provides much-needed insight into how creativity is practiced in one of the fastest growing creative industries in the world."--Ling-Yun Tang, University of Hong Kong

"Based on extensive fieldwork in Beijing and smaller Chinese cities, this important book paints a vivid portrait of the roles that institutions, social networks, and imagined communities play in the creation of artists and creative industry workers in China. With telling details, Chumley sheds light on the globalization of creative industries and the contradictory effects that China's ambitions to acquire soft power through cultural influence abroad are having on the lives of young people."--Teri Silvio, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica

Review Quotes

"Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China places a valuable and hitherto largely absent focus on art education as a vector of cultural creativity in contemporary China. . . . Convincing and well supported by primary research."---Paul Gladston, China Review International

"A fascinating study."-- "Choice"

"Chumley's careful observation and analyses of art test fever reveal the contradiction between the values reproduced through the exam system and the values emphasized by the Chinese educational and economic reforms."---Cong Zhang, Vanessa L. Fong, Political and Legal Anthropology Review

About the Author

Lily Chumley is an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.