The postsocialist contemporary joins a growing body of scholarship debating the definition and nature of contemporary art. It comes to these debates from a historicist perspective, taking as its point of departure one particular art programme, initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. First implemented in Hungary, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) expanded to another eighteen ex-socialist countries throughout the 1990s. Its mission was to build a western ‘open society’ by means of art. This book discusses how network managers and artists participated in the construction of this new social order by studying the programme’s rise, evolution, impact and broader ideological and political consequences. Rather than recounting a history, its engages critically with ‘contemporary art’ as the aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.

This book engages with the historical paradigm of 'contemporary art' by examining a programme initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros in the 1990s. The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art played a leading role in popularising the norms and conventions of 'contemporary art' throughout the region.

Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's 'long 1990s', the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

The Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was dissolving, Communist China was well on its way down the capitalist path. Artists, seeing it all first-hand, responded with a revolution of their own. What form this revolution took emerges in this volume.

Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.

This book examines Chinese culture under the age of market reforms. Beginning in the early 1990s and on into the new century, fields such as literature and film have been fundamentally transformed by the forces of the market as China is integrated ever more closely into the world economic system. As a result, the formerly unified revolutionary culture has been changed into a pluralized state that reflects the diversity of individual experience in the reform era. New autonomous forms of culture that have arisen include avant-garde as well as commercial literature, and independent film as well as a new entertainment cinema. Chinese people find their experiences of postsocialist modernity reflected in all kinds of new cultural forms as well as critical debates that often question the direction of Chinese society in the midst of comprehensive and rapid change.