| Summary: | <p>This thesis explores the experiential intersections of frontiers and urban imaginaries in twenty-first-century Chinese cultural production, from the realms of contemporary literature and art through to online subcultural communities. It delineates a creatively potent view of the frontier that it terms the “generative frontier”, a liminal zone between the edges of known and unknown space, which constitutes a psychologically healing encounter for the adventurers who traverse it. Throughout, it seeks to advance a cultural turn in contemporary frontier studies, a burgeoning sub-field which is now reframing frontiers as sites of encounter. It situates the generative frontier as a curative turn in urban aesthetics which has emerged in response to mainland China’s post-90s urbanisation programme, as well as to the country’s “psy-boom” (<i>xinli re</i>) psychotherapeutic turn in the early 2000s, offering a new vision of spatial edges shaped by urban modernity. It demonstrates how cultural producers are now engaging with the generative frontier to move away from longstanding binary narratives of violent urban dystopias and rural utopias. Instead, the case studies discussed here reveal an alternative artistic strategy of conceptualising the individual psyche’s relationship to environments in the throes of rapid change, experimenting with the generative frontier to facilitate highly psychological depictions of space-making and becoming.</p>
<p>The thesis begins by establishing its scope of enquiry, drawing on Can Xue’s 2008 novel Frontier (<i>Bianjiang</i>) and works by a selection of visual artists (including Zhang Xiaotao and Zhong Biao) by way of example. The first chapter then looks at the relationship between spatial liminality and selfhood in Guo Xiaolu’s 2003 novel <i>Village of Stone</i> (<i>Wo xinzhong de shitou zhen</i>) and her 2006 film <i>How Is Your Fish Today?</i> (<i>Jintian de yu zenmeyang?</i>). The second chapter concentrates on the work of digital photomontage artist Yang Yongliang and filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s celebrated 2006 <i>Still Life</i> (<i>Sanxia haoren</i>) to explore how urban ruins and the “post-shanshui image” intersect in China today. The third chapter turns towards a more amateur dimension of Chinese ruin representation, looking primarily at visual material produced by practitioners of the “urban exploration” (<i>chengshi tanxian</i>) subculture, who advance a vision of the urban ruin as a site of pleasure and a space for ego formation. Finally, the fourth chapter discusses how director Bi Gan treats narratives of sickness and journeying towards health in his 2015 film <i>Kaili Blues</i> (<i>Lu bian ye can</i>). Throughout, this thesis frames the generative frontier as a zone of healing, revealing a new curative approach to the themes of Chinese urban modernity and psychological distress.</p>
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