ABSTRACT
China is widely ridiculed as one of the primary producers of global ‘knock-offs’ of all imaginable forms and functions. Historically, it has fed Western global capitalist demands, but more recently the consumptive hunger of its own swelling middle class. This is not just a question about ‘knock-off’ Prada handbags, pirated copies of Hollywood blockbuster movies, chart-topping music CDs, or AAA computer games; China’s copycat culture now includes all forms of cultural production from art, industrial design, to architecture. This chapter charts what is culturally at stake for China in continuing to perpetuate this ‘knock-off’ culture, charting a series of multi-faceted case studies across art, architecture, and design, where the ineffective cross-cultural understanding of linguistics has resulted in dramatic shifts in meaning as ideas move from one culture to another. Through the Western Enlightenment, to postmodernism, critical theory, and the post-critical, this chapter explores what critical functioning Chinese knock-off practices play when applied as critiques of affirmation- and status-driven assemblage practices today. As the global subjugator of cultural knowledge, China continues to produce Sino-Frankenstein assemblages that look aesthetically Western and familiar on the outside, but are beginning to operate as functionally Chinese on the inside and perhaps generating, through assemblage-based ‘knock-off’ practices, a new form of originality, a yuán gǎo (original copy).
