Colour revolution : Aesthetic theory and commodity production in the Chinese 1980s

The Chinese 1980s was marked by a ‘colour revolution’, in which the theoretical discourse of colour, epitomized by the field of secai xue (‘colour science’), provided the foundation for a range of theoretical discourses as well as the transformation of social life. This article takes up the changing configuration of colour in the early reform period by drawing connections between the revitalization of aesthetic theory on the one hand and, on the other hand, the expansion of commodity production and consumption. In the former case, the article examines the role of the perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, whose rapid dissemination and translation in the Chinese 1980s, including by none other than Li Zehou, allowed for a reconceptualization of the subject of aesthetic perception, in which a receptiveness to colour played a central role. In this frame, the receptivity of the subject to colour came, for Chinese theorists, to authenticate an understanding of the subject in universalist, humanist terms, in place of the class-based theorization of aesthetics that had prevailed in the Maoist period. In the second case, this theoretical understanding came, in turn, to license the expanding commodity economy of the same period. The popular periodicals that emerged in connection with new sectors such as fashion, most notably Shiyong meishu (Applied Arts), invoked theoretical discussions around colour in its relation to the aesthetic subject in order to celebrate the expansion of the commodity economy. In the popular discourse, commodity production and consumption in the reform period would, in contrast to the assumed frugality of the Maoist past, provide for the needs of China’s new consumers, above all through the sensorial experience of colour in the course of everyday life. By taking colour as its thread, then, this article sheds new light on the theoretical, aesthetic and lived dimensions of post-socialist China.