AN4AA Talks 2025 | Yu-Chieh Li | Approaching Autonomy: Post-socialist Conceptualism in Chinese Art

This talk will be held online only as part of the Australasian Network for Asian Art program in 2025

In this book talk and conversation, Dr Yu-Chieh Li explores the evolution of conceptual art in post-Mao China, drawing on understudied archival materials and qualitative research. Her book examines artists’ struggles for creative autonomy, revisiting Robert Rauschenberg’s 1985 Beijing exhibition and analysing Chinese artists’ use of appropriation, emotion, dehumanisation, and collective practice since the ’85 New Wave. Li reveals a consistent thread in the politics and aesthetics of post-socialism, as artists navigate their search for a space of expression from the 1980s to today.

Dr Yu-Chieh Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research engages with aesthetics of performance art in Asia, art historiography emerging from decolonial struggles, and media art histories. Her first monograph Approaching Autonomy (Brill-De Gruyter, 2025) examines the issues of autonomy and affect in post-socialist China. Currently, she is developing her second book on performance art communities in Asia and Europe since the 1990s. Her articles have appeared in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Third Text, and World Art. Li has held research positions at the Tate Research Centre: Asia, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and UNSW Art and Design, Sydney. She is co-founder of the media arts platform SCREEN, and has co-curated exhibitions at Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Taipei Contemporary Art Center.

The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a group of researchers including academics and curators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated listserv serve as a platform to share research, promote events and exhibitions, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.