Art under Lockdown: Artists, Bloggers and the China Nightmare in the time of Covid-19

When Xi Jinping announced the ‘China Dream’ (Zhongguo meng)—in analogy to the famous American Dream—as socio-political motto of his rule in 2012, he defined the ambiguous concept as the ‘rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’. Over the course of his government, it has become clear that there is not only the one single China Dream propagated by the official media, but many dreams circulating in China’s vernacular cultures as opposed to the officially ordained culture of the Party State. Moreover Xi’s China Dream has become overshadowed by a series of nightmares: The Covid-19 pandemic; the Ukrainian leg of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative in ruins; and prolonged internal lockdowns entailing public demonstrations demanding Xi’s resignation. Much scholarship and global media have examined the official China Dream, yet few studies have analysed China’s nightmares. This study seeks to redress this shortfall by analysing the nightmares of the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdowns from the cultural perspective. This study examines bottom-up responses to top-down control measures through the artistic lens, focusing on online visual art narratives by male and female artists and bloggers in China and abroad: Cao Fei, Ye Funa, Hu Yinping, Michael Leung, Hu Jieming, Sun Xun and Ai Weiwei. This study will shed new light on China’s contemporary vernacular culture in the digital age and its visual art narratives on the theme of the China Dream and its nightmares, experimenting with direct and indirect strategies to critique the regime.