On Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Chinese Body as Surplus

A performance artist gets media attention when he bites into the forearm of a fetus. The middle-class protagonist of a horror film sees ghosts through the transplanted cornea of an impoverished donor. A cirrhotic liver, preserved in polymer, glistens on a table in a shopping mall. When representations of the medically commodified body appear in art or public culture, we often dismiss them as sensationalistic, as works that exploit "shock" value for various forms of profit. But a closer investigation of the contexts of such representations helps expose the enduring legacy of postcolonialism for embodied hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, class, and ability in contemporary life. This essay introduces the idea of biopolitical aesthetics and argues for a more nuanced attention to the figure of the medically commodified body in contemporary Chinese and transnational literature, art, and popular culture.