Abstract
This dissertation examines trade painters in China, with particular focus on the precarious work and life conditions. The community of trade painters works on project-based commissions and lives in contrast to the creative class’s glorified image. The research question of this study is: based on the case of the Chinese trade painters, what are the causes and consequences of precarious creative labour? Based on the causes and consequences of Chinese trade painters, what are the implications for the literature on precarious labour? Using the case of trade painters in China, this study empirically examines the cause and patterns of precarious creative labour. Research methods of this study include participatory observation, semi-structured interviews and archival research.This study aims to fill this gap by investigating precarious creative labour through the lens of immaterial labour. This study critiques that studies on precarious creative labour fail to discuss the nature of creative work, which underscores the social relationship between production and the consumer market in precarious work. Main findings of this dissertation shed lights on the social relationship from the following perspectives.
First, this study first identified precarious patterns of trade painters as wage insecurity, social insurance lack of legal protection. Precarious pattern also results in an eroded boundary between work and leisure life for trade painters in China. Second, this dissertation shows that creative production is organised around an informal employment relationship maintained by creative labour through social networks, which decreases the bargaining power of trade painter vis-à-vis the middlemen.
Third, this dissertation then examines how creative labour organises production by maintaining communication with the consumer market through social networks. The informal employment relationship with middlemen is not the only factor which render the trade painter powerless in the process. A systematic weakening of trade painters ’ bargaining power comes from the consumer market. Trade painters have to compete each other over Gao, or the image of painted readymade, to win their bid of reproducing a popular piece of work selected by middlemen. Otherwise they fail to secure the informal employment relationship with middlemen. Fourth, this dissertation examines the making of subjectivity through the production of social labour. In the process of producing popular painted readymade, the production of subjectivity also takes place. Under the rationality of “becoming authentic artists”, practicing sketching becomes the
technology of power in the making of subjectivity while also pointing out the possibility of labour resistance.
This dissertation illuminates research on precarious creative labour by providing the following two contributions. Empirically, the case of trade painters in China enriches the literature on precarious creative labour. Creative labour has not been examined among current researches on precarious labour in China. Theoretically, this study further develops the literature of precarious creative labour. Studying creative labour is helpful in that the nature of customised production calls for investigation into the relationship between production and the consumer market in precarious work. Understanding precarious labour in the creative industry requires adequate attention to norms not usually recognised as work, such as social relationships, and how those relationships affect the organisation of labour and labour subjectivity. In this sense, Lazzarato’s conceptualisation of immaterial labour helps in understanding work as a constituent of social life.
| Date of Award | 28 Apr 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Jun WANG (Supervisor) |