Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body

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.

Author: Ari Larissa Heinrich
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/05/2018
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780822370536
ISBN10: 0822370530
BISAC Categories:
- Science | Philosophy & Social Aspects
- History | Asia | China
- Art | Conceptual

About the Author
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.