ABSTRACT
This chapter relates a cultural economy of Yiwu, China's self-styled "Commodity City" in eastern Zhejiang Province. It attempts to read the visual and the material within the context of the commodity imperative and Yiwu's urban space as a function of the constitutive onto-epistemological interrelationships of matter and meaning. The chapter focuses on the constitutive relationships between the visual and material, yiwu and its urban exhibition logics are significant for several reasons. It proposes that if critiques beginning from the perspectives of phantasmagoria, fetishism, and ideology privilege the visual, they can sometimes do so at the expense of addressing how the social is enrolled from agential negotiations between thing and thought. Yiwu's peculiar, if also very dull, exhibition spaces and associated visualities are predicated on the assumptions and expectations inherent to commodities. These commodities and their visual spaces construct multiple social and cultural affordances both for China, and for global economic imaginaries.
