Lost in Translation: A Critique of Copyright and the Aesthetics of Re-production in China

Abstract

Widely derided for its materialistic culture of ‘‘cheap knock-offs,’’ the growing Chinese middle class has struggled to wean itself from the re-production and status-based consumption of counterfeit goods and Western aesthetics. From the Chinese re-production of canonical icons of Western modernity, to the more recent copying of the aesthetics of contemporary architecture abroad, the legality of copying has centered on the visual like-ness of a copy to its original. However, this preoccupation with visual aesthetics has suppressed more productive questions about the critical cultural functioning of copying in better understanding what a copy says about its copier and Chinese national identity.