The Conflicting Self: Art in the Chinese Middle Class Home

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Traditions, Ideologies, and Modernity

Abstract

In an attempt to test the cultural capital theory and to better understand the emerging middle class in China, this paper explores the possible relationship between social class and art in the home. Survey data and qualitative research methods are used to examine emerging Chinese middle class families’ presentation of art in the living room. By probing the relationship between one’s social class and art consumption – the number of artworks one displays in the living room and the probability of one liking or owning abstract art – this paper shows that the taste of the Chinese middle class might be open to a diversity of possibilities, rather than being constructed and led to a single direction advanced by the cultural capital theory. Further, even for people with a higher social status, the extent of their exposure to abstract art is easily exaggerated. There is a disconnect between how middle class people present themselves in public and how they present themselves in their own homes, which indicates a Goffmanian management of self-presentation. Moreover, the preference for the “new” Chinese painting (xin shuimo) shows the taste of the middle class can be both conventional and radical. This reflects a conflicting self in the emerging middle class in China, in which the notion of betweenness and moderation of the “middle” class provides a reconciliation between these conflicting selves in the course of cultural formation and transformation.

Author

• Jun Fang, Northwestern University