ThoughtGallery.org > Linda Huang | Rethinking “Human”: Pond Society, Automation Fever, and the Disappearance of the Labouring Body

Linda Huang | Rethinking “Human”: Pond Society, Automation Fever, and the Disappearance of the Labouring Body

While American futurologist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave fuelled the craze for manufacturing automation in post-Mao China, Zhao Ziyang’s 1983 talk “New Technology Revolution” endorsed the country’s transition into a knowledge-intensive society. In response to the imagination of a coming information society where humans and machines become increasingly interconnected, the reconfiguration of socialist bodies became a popular subject matter in Chinese experimental art.

This study draws attention to the new mode of body aesthetics in the early paintings by Pond Society members Zhang Peili and Song Ling. By critically examining their peculiar rendering of machine-like young professionals, bodybuilders, and medical devices, Huang analyses how the elimination of heroic proletarian bodies in their paintings signals the reconstruction of socialist subjectivity enabled by an increasingly automated production mode. Bringing together the history of Chinese experimental art and the intellectual discourses of the 1980s, this study illuminates the social and political connotation of these paintings while rethinking the politics of the “human” in an emergent technocratic society. She argues that Zhang and Song’s remodelling of socialist bodies not only collided with the proliferation of humanity studies during the New Enlightenment Movement, but also unveiled a revived mania for human engineering in post-revolutionary China.

Moderator: Anthony Yung, Researcher of Asia Art Archive

Linda Huang is a doctoral student in Art History at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include post-humanism, socialist history of technology, new media, body politics, and the aesthetics of labour. Her dissertation project, “Re-imagining Post-socialist Corporeality: Technology, Body, and Nation in Post-Mao Chinese Art,” addresses how the fantasies of information during the post-Mao 1980s affected the development of Chinese media art.











When: Wed., Aug. 19, 2020 at 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: Asia Art Archive in America
43 Remsen St.
718-522-2299
Price: Free
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While American futurologist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave fuelled the craze for manufacturing automation in post-Mao China, Zhao Ziyang’s 1983 talk “New Technology Revolution” endorsed the country’s transition into a knowledge-intensive society. In response to the imagination of a coming information society where humans and machines become increasingly interconnected, the reconfiguration of socialist bodies became a popular subject matter in Chinese experimental art.

This study draws attention to the new mode of body aesthetics in the early paintings by Pond Society members Zhang Peili and Song Ling. By critically examining their peculiar rendering of machine-like young professionals, bodybuilders, and medical devices, Huang analyses how the elimination of heroic proletarian bodies in their paintings signals the reconstruction of socialist subjectivity enabled by an increasingly automated production mode. Bringing together the history of Chinese experimental art and the intellectual discourses of the 1980s, this study illuminates the social and political connotation of these paintings while rethinking the politics of the “human” in an emergent technocratic society. She argues that Zhang and Song’s remodelling of socialist bodies not only collided with the proliferation of humanity studies during the New Enlightenment Movement, but also unveiled a revived mania for human engineering in post-revolutionary China.

Moderator: Anthony Yung, Researcher of Asia Art Archive

Linda Huang is a doctoral student in Art History at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include post-humanism, socialist history of technology, new media, body politics, and the aesthetics of labour. Her dissertation project, “Re-imagining Post-socialist Corporeality: Technology, Body, and Nation in Post-Mao Chinese Art,” addresses how the fantasies of information during the post-Mao 1980s affected the development of Chinese media art.

Buy tickets/get more info now