The Return of Repressed Subjectivity in China: Feng Jizhong and Wang Shu

Abstract In the Chinese architectural field, subjectivity has been repressed first by political ideology in the Mao era and later by commodification under market conditions. By analyzing two architectural projects – Feng Jizhong’s Garden of the Square Pagoda and Wang Shu’s Xiangshan Campus, this paper examines how subjectivity has been repressed and returned. It draws on two complementary approaches toward subjectivity: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on bodily experience and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power. Whereas the garden presented a subtle critique of the ideological and political repression of individual creativity, Xiangshan Campus protested the hegemony of instrumental reason in contemporary architectural production. By using productive power to articulate sensuous experience, the two architects endeavored to forge a resistant subjectivity, that challenges current tendencies to disarticulate mind and body, subjects and objects, emotion and rationality, architecture and lifeworld.