Is a lack of “aesthetic education” to blame for bizarre architecture and artistic confusion in modern China?
Every year, prizes all over the world are awarded to spectacular architecture. But Archcy.com, a Chinese website on architecture, takes the opposite approach: It has been giving “awards” to the 10 most hideous buildings in China every year since 2010.
The Razzies of the (domestic) architecture world, the “China Ugliest Building Survey” seeks the opinions of a jury of industry experts and invites ordinary people to cast their votes on the website. Notable structures to have received the “accolade” include the Tianzi Hotel in Langfang, Hebei province, an hour’s drive from Beijing, which takes the form of the gods of Fortune, Prosperity, and Longevity in Chinese mythology; the Taiyuan Museum in the capital of Shanxi province, composed of five inverted cones supposedly inspired by red lanterns, but compared by locals to “five extra large ramen cups”; and a wealth of cheap replicas of the
Arc de Triomphe, the White House, the Temple of Heaven, and the Tian’anmen Gate.
The aim of the survey, according to the organizers’ website, is to “raise architecture professionals’ sense of social responsibility” and “provoke reflections about what is beautiful and what is ugly among the public.”
While many of the aforementioned buildings have caused no shortage of discussions on Chinese social media, there has been relatively little public conversation around the underlying lack of aesthetic education that may well be partly responsible for such projects.
Well-known educator Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培) first introduced “aesthetic education (审美教育)” into China, a concept developed by the German philosopher Friedrich von Schiller. Agreeing with Schiller that aesthetic education served to restore humanity and cultivate morality, Cai imagined that aesthetic education in China would become a substitute for religions and inspire philosophical and spiritual discussions.
After the founding of the PRC, public art in China was dominated by socialist realism, a style developed in the Soviet Union and characterized by its figurative depiction of socialist values, such as brave soldiers fighting for the country and the emancipation of the proletariat. Abstraction, pure formal beauty, or anything devoid of a clear message had little place in revolutionary China. In 1979, in an article entitled “The Formal Beauty of Painting” in Art Magazine, Wu Guanzhong (吴冠中), considered one of the greatest contemporary Chinese painters, advocated for “more independent artworks” that carry formal beauty and no “extra tasks” of conveying certain narratives. The article caused an uproar in the art world at the time.
In the article, Wu shares an anecdote: While painting in the countryside near Shaoxing, he was drawn to the ripples and reflections on a small pond dotted with red and green duckweed; however, he was certain that he would be condemned for capturing such a scene as an “untitled painting,” so he came up with the idea of adding the reflection of red flags and peasants working to
make the painting politically fitting.
Since the reform period in the 1980s, a plethora of other art styles started to gradually appear in China, but the preference for utilitarian and literal messaging lingered. In another essay written in 1984, Wu laments that “there are few illiterates today but many who are illiterate in art,” suggesting that the Cultural Revolution has severed the “bloodline of art” and undermined the public’s ability to appreciate beauty.
Today, it can be hard to argue that there’s been a significant change. Of course, examples of excellent
Problems of this kind are not limited to the architectural sphere. “My biggest headache is that clients and I are not on the same wavelength,” says Du Tingyun, a wedding stage designer. “Often, they don’t even know what they are looking for and just don’t grasp any of the proposals that we have come up with.” A fashion designer working in China, who prefers to remain anonymous, shares with TWOC that her boss “wants to imitate popular products from other brands with no consideration as to whether they can combine to form a cohesive style.”
Both the central government and local administrators have attempted to address problems in public aesthetics. In order to beautify streets, some local governments mandate that shops use standardized signs (which have attracted their own criticism for looking too boring).
In a 2016 document, China’s State Council criticized the tendency in urban architecture of “seeking to be excessively big, exotic, and bizarre” and pointed out that buildings should be “suitable, economic, green, and pleasing to the eye.”
In addition to attempting to provide guidance for ongoing projects, there are also efforts to rectify the situation for the future—through the education system. Courses in art have been part of the compulsory education curriculum in China since the 1980s, but the subject is often given insufficient class time compared to those featured in college entrance exams, such as math or Chinese.
In order to boost the importance of art education, a number of provinces, including Jiangsu, Hunan, and Yunnan, have made plans to include art in their high school entrance exams. In addition, with the recent education reforms clamping down on after-school tutoring in academic subjects, extracurricular lessons in the arts have become more popular.
It remains unclear whether standardized testing and formal teaching can help the next generation develop their tastes, however. Educators Li Jian and Xiong Eryong, both from Beijing Normal University, seem to think it’s insufficient. In their 2020 book Shaping Education Reform in China, they point out that “the teaching of art knowledge and skills in aesthetic education should be oriented to help students develop their interest in art, improve their aesthetic ability, and have preliminary artistic creation ability, rather than simply learning knowledge and skills.”
In courses claiming to teach “creativity,” problems exist as well. On social platform Xiaohongshu (RED), a blogger called Liu
Chang, who studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now teaches art to children, reveals that extracurricular art classes in China often teach students to replicate identical forms: For example, in a class on creating mushroom-themed art, Liu says, most students will draw a stereotypical button mushroom with a smiley face, while “advanced” students will end up producing a more complex assortment of mushrooms with almost the same composition, only varying in colors. “If [students’] minds have been locked up since an early age,” Liu says, “it’s very painful to try to open them up later.”
As Li and Xiong write in their book, aesthetic ability is “the ability to feel life,” and it seems a consensus among the designers and art teachers that TWOC spoke with that the key to good aesthetic education is the releasing of the mind and soul. “Instead of training students to do certain things,” Luo Sen says, “the most important task should be to help students truly understand themselves in a free and relaxed state, and give them room to be inspired.”
But the anonymous fashion designer feels rather pessimistic: “It will be quite difficult to improve [aesthetic education] because, after all, [at school] students are discouraged from exploring their individuality; if any change is to happen, it might start with breaking the conformity.”