Rendering Obedience: Visual Discipline, Subjectivity, and Resistance in Exam-Based Art Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Beyond the Traditional: Critical and Contemporary Examinations of Normalized Narratives, Perspectives, Curriculum, and Practice Across Disciplines

Abstract

This study addresses a critical gap in art education research: the lack of insider perspectives on how exam-based systems politically structure disciplinary learning. Focusing on China’s Art College Entrance Exam (Yikao), it examines how standardized training codifies aesthetic knowledge, regulates subjectivity, and enforces emotional and bodily discipline. Grounded in Foucault’s theory of power and critical autoethnography, the author reflects on personal experience to analyze how techniques, ike shading and composition, serve as tools of aesthetic governance. Yet students enact micro-resistances within these constraints. Reframing art learning as a politicized, affective process, the study challenges deficit views of exam-trained learners and calls for inclusive, historically grounded curricula that recognize diverse epistemologies and the emotional labor embedded in learning art.

Author

• Jiayi Guo, University of Georgia