ABSTRACT
This chapter features Wang Nanming, a Shanghai-based independent art critic, curator, and artist, and the first person in China to advocate socially engaged art through curating exhibitions, writing, and making artworks. Coming from a mixed academic background of law and art, Wang has worked to stimulate interest among art communities and broader intellectual circles towards the idea of art as a form of public opinion, social critique, and political participation. Analyzing a number of Wang’s key texts, exhibitions, and artworks as well as those of other artists promoted by him, the chapter examines the theoretical, interpretative, and institutional infrastructures that his art criticism helps to construct for the discourse of critical art in relation to the potential of citizen politics in contemporary China.
