Lena Scheen – författare

With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from made in China to created in China. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and soft power, creativity has become part of the new China Dream. Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake goods challenge notions of the original and the authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China's fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku, and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents, and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, examine what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of creativity.

This book draws on a wide range of methods-including approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, and urban sociology-to analyse the transformation of Shanghai through rapid growth and widespread urban renewal. Lena Scheen explores the literary imaginings of the city, its past, present, and future, in order to understand the effects of that urban transformation on both the psychological state of Shanghai's citizens and their perception of the spaces they inhabit.

China is urbanizing at an unprecedented speed. Filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers all try to come to terms with the changes of their city. How is the Chinese city-as-spectacle, visualised and thus imagined and reimagined, if not contested, in art and popular culture? What are the possible escape routes from a completely commodified citysca

Explores the literary imaginings of Shanghai, its past, present, and future, in order to understand the effects of that urban transformation on both the psychological state of Shanghai's citizens and their perception of the spaces they inhabit.