Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The booming real-estate market in China has not only pumped up a housing bubble during the past decade，but have reshaped Chinese people’s perceptions of living spaces. This study examines how a home space as a commodity is represented during the selling process and how the relationship between living spaces and individuals has been constructed in the Chinese housing market. The study adopts the intervisuality approach to analyze both the visual artefacts that have been used to represent a living space in the housing market and the local governmental restrictions on home purchase. The study reveals the re-enchantment and alienation of living spaces, which is accomplished through four types of representational practices. First, the relationships between living spaces and individuals have been continuously commercialized in the visual texts. Second, the natural and public resources in a city have been visually and verbally privatized as the auxiliary resources for high-end housing. Third, the imaginary lived space has been idealized and utopianized as other spaces. Fourth, the temporal discourse represented in the governmental policy texts has defined individuals’ accessible right to living spaces in the city they live in. Time has been used as both a spatial strategy by the local government to regulate the housing market and a spatial tactic by individuals to reclaim their rights. Thus the individuals who are subject to the spatial and temporal discourse have become a hetero-resident (Yike) of a city, which means that they are living outside the city rather than inside the city.