What happens when the body becomes art in the age of biotechnological reproduction? In Chinese Surplus Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life. From the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art," he shows how vivid images of a blood transfusion as performance art or a plastinated corpse without its skin-however upsetting to witness-constitute the new "realism" of our times. Adapting Foucauldian biopolitics to better account for race, Heinrich provides a means to theorize the relationship between the development of new medical technologies and the representation of the human body as a site of annexation, extraction, art, and meaning-making.
What happens when the body becomes art in the age of biotechnological reproduction? In Chinese Surplus Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life. From the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art," he shows how vivid images of a blood transfusion as performance art or a plastinated corpse without its skin-however upsetting to witness-constitute the new "realism" of our times. Adapting Foucauldian biopolitics to better account for race, Heinrich provides a means to theorize the relationship between the development of new medical technologies and the representation of the human body as a site of annexation, extraction, art, and meaning-making.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Chinese Body as
Surplus 1
1. Chinese Whispers: Frankenstein, the Sleeping Lion, and the
Emergence of a Biopolitical Aesthetics 25
2. Souvenirs of the Organ Trade: The Diasporic Body in Contemporary
Chinese Literature and Art 49
3. Organ Economics: Transplant, Class, and Witness from Made in
Hong Kong to The Eye 83
4. Still Life: Recovering (Chinese) Ethnicity in the Body Worlds
and Beyond 115
Epilogue. All Rights Preserved: Intellectual Property and the
Plastinated Cadaver Exhibits 139
Notes 159
Bibliography 227
Index 239
Ari Larissa Heinrich is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University . He is the author of The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures.
“A compelling account of how the aesthetics of corporeal politics
has come to condition the rhetorics and epistemologies of life,
realism, existence, authenticity, technology, reproduction, and the
body itself, Chinese Surplus will forever change the way we think
about the power of visual embodiment in an age of increasing angst
over property/propriety rights, technological determinism, and
human’s role in their imbricated historical legacy.”
*Journal of the History of Biology*
"Chinese Surplus is an ambitious project that weaves together a
transnational and transhistorical consideration of aesthetic
production and biomedical commodification. . . . Heinrich’s project
does the groundbreaking work of connecting the global power
dynamics of contemporary cultural productions engaged with
fragmentation and labeled inauthentic with longer histories of
imperialism."
*Catalyst*
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