Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China, Chumley Lily

How Chinas art students develop their aesthetic styles and enter the nations creative economy

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of Chinas visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the countrys burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese governments explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new market socialist economy where value is produced through innovation.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in Chinas leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of todays China.