RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series - Social Media Walls: Art as Social Movement in 1979 Beijing

In early post-Mao China, to post on social media was to make an installation in public space. Neither virtual nor digitized, the postings of dazibao-style (big character poster) messages in the years following the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) offered a direct platform to members of the general public for creative as well as social expression. In this talk, I foreground the marginal and ephemeral forms of art-making, ubiquitous during this time, to offer a fresh reading that resituates the first Stars art exhibition of 1979 in the context of the Beijing Spring (1978-1980). The Stars offered one among the multiple and ongoing interventions in social space that remediated creative expression in a fleeting moment of post-revolutionary envisioning. While the Stars exhibition taking place at the time captured a global art world's attention for appearing to signal the end of Maoist socialism and the freeing of artistic expression in China, I will show how the analogue forms of social media such as wall art and mimeographed citizens' publications (minkan), on which the Stars drew, reveal a far more complicated set of possibilities pertaining to the negotiation and restaging of social space. The Stars, along with everyday citizens, restructured existing forms of mass media such as small- and big- character-posters taking place in the capital, effectively repurposing the strategies of collective action and grassroots organization that had been established during state-led campaigns after 1949.