How China's art students develop their aesthetic styles and enter the nation's creative economy

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China.

"A fascinating study." * Choice *
"Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China places a valuable and hitherto largely absent focus on art education as a vector of cultural creativity in contemporary China. . . . Convincing and well supported by primary research."---Paul Gladston, China Review International
"Chumley’s careful observation and analyses of art test fever reveal the contradiction between the values reproduced through the exam system and the values emphasized by the Chinese educational and economic reforms."---Cong Zhang, Vanessa L. Fong, Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Lily Chumley is an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.