The Making of Ethnic Yunnan on the National Mall

This article looks at Yunnan’s theatrical, overly professionalized minority folksong and dance performances at the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. Yunnan’s presentation presents an opportunity to explore the way a provincial government culturally and spatially imagines its governed administrative territory through ethnic performing arts on a global stage. The article argues that Yunnan’s image crafting is not only structured by the politics of international artistic exchange. It can also be viewed as a global extension of the Yunnan provincial government’s provincial identity project and economic development scheme back home. Its strategy, described as “the artifying of politics” by one of Yunnan’s cultural officials, reveals how ethnic performing arts are programmed to aestheticize Yunnan as a place and economic–cultural brand in this context, and, thus, how the Yunnan government manages both the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics in order to carry out its economic agenda by way of aesthetic experience.