RECONTEXTUALIZING TRANSIT ART : Cultural Narratives and Visual Governance across Beijing's Subway Network

Source abstract

Abstract Public art in metro systems is increasingly used to narrate urban identity and manage ‘publicness’, yet research still tends to read works at the station scale, leaving network‐wide coordination and repeatable visual mechanisms underspecified. Drawing on the curated corpus of the 2024 Beijing Subway Art Exhibition, which recontextualized 145 murals from across the system in a municipal planning venue, this article examines how cultural narration is made operable under conditions of mobility. Using recontextualized visual corpus analysis—close visual reading, comparative coding of narrative registers, visual style and material technique—and documentary corroboration using publicly available programme texts, the study identifies three recurring narrative registers (national‐developmental, local‐memory, everyday) and four visual strategies that translate these narratives into transit readability (directional composition, symbolic saturation, spatial framing, material affect). Together, the strategies make meaning reachable in brief glances, stabilize recognition through repetition, and calibrate atmosphere through surface, depth and light. The article theorizes this habitual seeing‐in‐motion as infrastructural spectatorship and shows how curatorial recontextualization makes network‐scale visual governance legible while keeping selection effects in view.