Abstract

Socially engaged art since the 1990s has become a global trend. The practices of socially engaged arts, while creating new kinds of arts and opening up the entire institutional domain of the art world, are inseparable from the practices of museums that undertake significant changes. In this essay, I theorize the concept of “socially engaged art museum” - a practice that unveils art as an aesthetic force for rendering everyday life performative or playful - to examine both socially engaged arts and museums under what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “aesthetic regime of art” (2009). Comparing with the current scholarship that mostly examines European and American examples, I examine cases from Chinese contemporary art. Specifically, I discuss artistic practices of the Yangdeng Art Collective in Southwestern China. My argument is that a socially engaged art museum - qualitatively different from a conventional art museum that engages social life through its curated collections and exhibitions - is both a context-specific artwork of aesthetic experience and a technology of the individualized self in contemporary risk society. Not only does this study question the common scholarly view of socially engaged arts as “post-autonomous” or “anti-aesthetic,” but it also advances a notion of sociality that accounts for the complexity of everyday life.