Inside out: The remaking of home as an institution of critique

As the issue’s call for papers has rightly discerned, contemporary Chinese art utilized spaces outside of the art institution as the site of production and exhibition since its early developments. From the first Star Group exhibition in 1979 to Song Dong’s site-specific work in the 1990s, avant-garde Chinese artists have experimented with spaces that are parasitic or antithetic to the official spaces of the nation-state. Such practices might have successfully deconstructed the art institution and its symbolic orders in an earlier moment, they are nonetheless prone to the processes of institutionalization and canonization. This is especially true when museums, galleries and academics, together with market players, have claimed such spaces and artists as the place and subject of a new order known as ‘institutional critique’. Departing from this straightforward mode of institutional critique, this article identifies home as a critical space in contemporary Chinese art practices since the late 1990s and early 2000s. The production, exhibition and critique of art in China today. Joining what is known as the ‘third wave’ of institutional critique, this article reclaims what might constitute a new subject of cultural criticism precisely when state-sponsored art institutions are defunded and demolished by neo-liberal governments around the globe. Turning inside out, it reworks the dichotomy of interiority and exteriority as they are articulated by the bourgeois class to return art to that of the marginalized and disfranchised.