Aestheticizing Public Space ─ Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities

The book can be seen as a photo collage of past and present street visuals in East Asian cities. It does not only present a purely historical rendition of street visuals in East Asia, which tends to repeat the cliches on the discourse of East Asianness or generalized as an outcome of East-West cultural interactions amidst the backdrop of globalization. This book goes beyond a documentation of the material existence, form or style, per se, of these visuals and tries to understand the domestic, regional, and global nexus of the selected East Asian cities through their street visuals. The discussions on street visual culture are mainly framed by four themes, namely, “carnival,” “publicness,” “aura,” and “creative city.” This book attempts to unfold the complex positions of these visuals in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions. It does so by providing definitions of what a graffiti producer or spectator is as well as by addressing what kind of public space visuals are engendered in East Asia and how graffiti in East Asia reflect the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic relationship among human bodies, visual modernity, social or moral norms, styles, and historical experiences/narratives. On a broader level, this book aims to shed light on how aesthetics and politics are mobilized in different contested spaces and media forms, in which the producer and the spectator change and exchange their identities.