Art in Action: Socially Engaged Art from Contemporary China

Professor Meiqin Wang explores the potential of socially engaged art as a critical and creative response to China’s top-down, pro-urban, and profit-driven social landscape. Analyzing various projects of engagement and intervention launched by contemporary Chinese art professionals in response to social and environmental injustices or the widening gap between the rural and the urban, she emphasizes how individuals may be agents of social critique and how changes can be made by grassroots projects. She highlights the practical, transformative, and activating power of art for social criticism, place construction, and personal development. 

Meiqin Wang is a professor of art history at California State University Northridge.  Her research focuses on contemporary art from China in the context of commercialization and urbanization of the Chinese world. She has written on topics such as art and cultural industries, art and urbanization, and socially engaged art.