Becoming Ethnic in China: A ‘Good Story’ Told in Painting and Dialect

Offering a sweeping historical view leading up to the present, Hera Chan and Alvin Li consider the development of ‘ethnic minority painting’ in the People’s Republic of China. On the backdrop of political projects of ethnic classification, a fraught relation emerges between the fetishisation of ethnic minorities in the work of (mostly Han) artists and the development of a unified national identity.