ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Beijing-based artist Wen Fang, who has embraced collaboration as her main approach since 2009 and has involved marginalized people such as migrant workers, rural women, and underprivileged children in making art and benefiting from their own creative labors. Analyzing her major art projects—such as Arts for Crafts’ Sake, Arts Program for “Little Migrant Birds”, and Maskbook—the chapter elucidates the progressive role she has enabled art to assume in promoting personal development, alleviating poverty, raising awareness, and fostering intersubjective exchanges and collective actions. It argues that by introducing art into the life of ordinary people, her collaborative work not only opens up new ways of making art but also constitutes a creative resistance to the government-sanctioned social discourse that centers on economic development and consumerism.
