About

Lily Hope Chumley is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her academic work focuses on analyzing media and technology within its cultural, social, and global contexts, contributing to the understanding of media studies and communication practices. She has authored and contributed to publications exploring Chinese aesthetics, design, and cultural work, including the book 'Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China' published by Princeton University Press. Her research also encompasses topics related to Chinese design, risk and wealth management in China, and contemporary Chinese art, reflecting a broad interest in cultural and aesthetic transformations within Chinese society.

Research topics

• Business
• Macroeconomics
• Mathematics
• Financial system
• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Currency under Value, Currency in Debt

  Public Culture · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Monetary economics
  • Financial system
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• Biographical construction and intertextual being

  2019-03-21 · 1 citations

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  This chapter shows how diffuse, dividual, entwined, and embedded the most prototypically Western individuals already are, by examining how they are constructed in and through fictive relationships. It focuses on the genres of contemporary American and English ‘literary’ or ‘true’ biography, as defined by self-proclaimed ‘literary’ or ‘true’ biographers. The chapter examines the intertextual methods of biographical research and the epistemology that underlies it, using books and periodicals on twentieth-century biographical method, criticism, and theory: books with titles like Biography as High Adventure, Life into Art, and Reassembling the Dust. According to biographers, biographical construction is the process of converting all the material into the skin-bound, autonomous, agentive, bourgeois Western subjects that appear in finished biographies. Many biographers speak of being taken over, controlled, or possessed by the subject, particularly in the phase of writing where they feel that they are “living” through the subject.

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• Qualia and Ontology: Language, Semiotics and Materiality

  2017-01-01 · 2 citations

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• After Creativity: Asian Creative Industries, Classes, and Ideologies

  2017-01-01

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• Qualia and Ontology: Language, Semiotics, and Materiality; an Introduction

  Signs and Society · 2017-01-01 · 104 citations

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  Abstract Qualia—sensory experiences of abstract qualities such as heat, texture, color, sound, stink, hardness, and so on—focus attention on prototypically “material” entities. But how is the ontological category of materiality constituted by conventional qualities, or qualisigns ? For instance, how does the sound made by knuckles knocking on a table come to be an exemplary experience of, and a conventional sign for, “materiality”? What ontologies might undermine the seeming naturalness of this category, and to what effect? This issue contributes to the growing literature on semiotic approaches to materiality by arguing that attention to qualia , as sensorial and somatic experiences mediated by cultural qualisigns of value (Munn 1986), offers a useful analytic approach to the dialectics of matter (substrate, affordance) and nonmatter (idea, concept, category). The articles in this issue describe how modes of being and becoming are represented in and organized by discourses on qualia and demonstrate the crucial role of qualia and qualisigns in “ontological politics” (Mol 1999).

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• Seeing Strange: Chinese Aesthetics in a Foreign World

  Anthropological Quarterly · 2016-04-03 · 4 citations

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  This article contributes to a theory of commensuration by examining the discursive production of incommensurability between objects, aesthetics, and practices, and by extension, “cultures” and “civilizations.” Everyday objects—such as camping tables and cloth shoes—are often taken as emblems for distinctions between China and the West. This incommensurability is reproduced through a series of semiotic processes described here: first, an historical shift in the vocabulary for everyday things, in which marked foreignness is replaced by marked Chineseness, and reflections on that history in contemporary film; second, traditionalist performances of resistance to (and repugnance for) Western aesthetics, accompanied by a tendency to deploy markedly Chinese objects as emblems of cultural allegiance; and third, an artist’s lecture on the perplexity of negotiating this incommensurability in art practice. This boundary leaves out—or produces as excess—all those things that are designed, made, bought, and used in China, but which are not regarded as Chinese. I argue that this cryptocategory of the unChinese implicitly frames the work of Chinese artists and designers still called upon to produce a Chinese modern.

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• Thirty Years of Reform

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2016-06-21

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  This chapter begins with an oral history of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, describing how the school changed over the course of <italic>gaigekaifang</italic> . <italic>Gaigekaifang</italic> is often referred to in English as “reform” ( <italic>gaige</italic> ), putting the stress on the structural adjustments that fomented change, while <italic>kaifang</italic> roughly means “opening up.” This institutional history is given a broader social context through interpretations of three art exhibitions commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of reform and opening up in 2008. These exhibitions offer perspectives on the legacies of socialism and the novelties of reform that are variously aligned with or critical of official state narratives, showing how contemporary Chinese dreamworlds contest with one another.

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• 6. Aesthetic Community

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2016-09-29

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• Art Test Fever

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2016-06-21

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  This chapter examines the art test preparation classes that are widely blamed for overproducing the wrong kinds of subjects, with neither creativity nor style, making students who are “blind” and “aimless” ( <italic>mangmu</italic> , <italic>mangran</italic> ). It describes the expansion and standardization of the art test system over the thirty years of reform as a result of tensions between families, profit-motivated test prep industries, and public institutions, showing the limits of education policies and ideologies of creativity in the complex social world of postsocialist China. The chapter also describes the fundamental tension between the values reproduced in the examination system—skills of memorization and reproduction, habitus of diligence and obedience—and the values of the family and its exchange networks, which emphasize personal ties and social graces.

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• Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China

  2016-06-21 · 12 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation.Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China

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Frequent coauthors

• Deng Pingxing

  1 shared

• Nicholas Harkness

  1 shared

• Teri Silvio

  1 shared