Background Matters

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This wide-ranging intellectual and media history traces China's emergence as a modern state in which boundaries blur between art and design, education and psychological conditioning. Tracking the parallel development of set design and social engineering from the 1920s to the 1960s, Background Matters examines the concept of huanjing (environment), a neologism introduced at the turn of the twentieth century that evoked heated intellectual debate and inspired frenzied aesthetic experimentation. Weihong Bao explores how the question of the mind consolidates the idea and art of environment by advancing a new theoretical notion of set design: as both an aesthetic organization across film, theater, radio, and television and as social experimentation in worldmaking in distinct geopolitical and transnational contexts. Inventive and breathless in scope, this book radically rethinks environment not as an external object "out there" but as the nexus of mind, medium, and society.