The bookstore Libraire Avant-Garde launched in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, has become increasingly popular among young people because it provides a fresh aesthetic experience as an academic, cultural and artistic salon.

Aesthetics has increasingly permeated every dimension of social production and life. At present, Chinese aesthetics is undergoing profound transformation in the context of an advancing market economy, particularly under the influence of the internet which has brought influential changes to Chinese societal and cultural sectors.

Profound transformations

“A new phenomenon of let ‘a hundred schools of thought contend’ in the field of aesthetics will possibly emerge,” said Wang Jie, a professor from the College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang University. The new paradigm of contemporary Chinese aesthetics is that aesthetics has been highly merged with the market economy, as a result of which, the aesthetic activities and experience economy have gradually become one of the pillars of the social economy.

To better adjust to newly emerging social and cultural phenomena, today’s aesthetic theory needs to be revised, which is currently extending beyond the Kantian aesthetics defined by self-governance that appears to involve “a rational crackdown on appetites and emotions” and the romanticist view that emphasizes intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, Wang said. Since the New Period, China has explored a path of social modernization that is distinctive from that of Europe, which has injected great vigor into the country’s literary creation and artistic styles—the theoretical interpretation and generalization of such unique scholarly phenomena, have fostered the transition of aesthetic paradigms, Wang added.

Liu Guangxu, a professor from the College of Humanities and Communications at Shanghai Normal University, noted that contemporary Chinese aesthetics is transforming in three major dimensions. First, as translation studies thrives, Chinese research on Western aesthetics continues to deepen, bringing Chinese aesthetics into alignment with world aesthetics at large. Based on this, a comparative study of Chinese and Western aesthetics should be established to offer a clearer, more insightful analysis of China’s own national aesthetics. In addition, the fact that aesthetic experiences and social life are on a continuum of variation means that aesthetic research needs to adapt to new changes, which also means that fresh aesthetic notions should keep emerging as a result of new phenomena, Liu said.

Aesthetic industry

Liu continued to say that as aesthetic standards play a bigger role in contemporary cultural and industrial production, and aesthetic sense and artistic quality become crucial way of adding value to commodities, cultural creativity, product design, and aesthetic manifestation are gradually industrialized—in other words, the discipline is merging with the traditional manufacturing industry. Meanwhile, new sectors of social production exclusively intended for aesthetic value—the aesthetic industry—have emerged, Liu said.

In analyzing the aesthetic industry, Zou Qichang from the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, said that in regards to ontology of aesthetics, the aesthetic industry can be defined as the viable approach and instrument to gain mastery of the fundamental issues of aesthetics: The aesthetics should be defined. The core of the aesthetic industry is not “industry” but “aesthetics,” and the term itself is conceived on the basis of more precisely capturing the genuine nature and essence of aesthetics—that is to say—its noumenon, Zou said.

Disciplinary development

In regard to his suggestions for the studies on aesthetics, Zou added that the aesthetic industry should be facilitated from disciplinary perspectives. In terms of the knowledge structure, aesthetics should include the aesthetic industry (market) as a branch within its disciplinary system apart from its basic and pragmatic theories. Zou also proposed bolstering the establishment of a set of standardized metrics and indices for evaluating the performance of the aesthetic industry. Intellectual and emotionally engaged, the aesthetic industry aims to direct and generate relevant economic and industrial activities, however, as Zou pointed out, the due role of aesthetic industry in leading correlated sectors has not been fully utilized, and the lack of a complete system of evaluation indicators and assessment criteria is also one of the impediments, which, on the contrary, highlights the importance of further advancing the aesthetic industry, he added.

Wang stressed the necessity of conducting studies on the artistic forms grounded in new media and the internet, which offers a technological basis for aesthetics. The study of aesthetic governance and systems is also needed for systematic research on those changes that are taking place in the arena of aesthetics, said Wang, which, as he perceived, is conducive to seeking the internal connectivity between aesthetic forms and the utopian impulse.