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Paper short abstract

How do digital mediation reshapes performance, becoming, and belonging for young women? Based on a year-long ethnography of art museums and the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu in urban China, this paper explores the hybrid online-offline aspirational self-making and the underlying fractures.

Paper long abstract

In China, the rise of art museums coincides with the proliferation of lifestyle-sharing platforms like Xiaohongshu (RED). For young, urban women navigating new regimes of cultural distinction and middle-class aspiration, museum-going has evolved into a digitally mediated project of self-curation.

Drawing on a year-long ethnography, I conceptualise the museum visit as a rehearsal of the self, where visitors engage in performative acts of staging and photography to transform embodied experiences into visual narratives of an 'extra-ordinary' self.

This performance is only completed through aspirational labour- the post-visit curation of photos and captions. Central to this is fenweigan (氛围感, sense of atmosphere), which I frame as a digitally mediated affect and a form of aesthetic capital. Through fenweigan, visitors translate messy, often confusing encounters into a flattened, ‘at-ease’ visual grammar. This aesthetic labour manages the dissonance between the uncertainty felt in physical space and the desire for belonging in digital space.

However, a fracture emerges as the 'platform gaze' disciplines this creativity into a homogenised language. A tension exists between the desire for an ‘authentic’ self and the necessity of conforming to standardised aesthetics for algorithmic visibility. This reveals a capitalist logic where personal aspiration is flattened into quantifiable, collective performance that is highly gendered and classed.

Ultimately, becoming ourselves in the digital age is a hybrid loop of performance and mediation. By foregrounding fenweigan as an ethnographic concept, this paper contributes to debates on aspiration, platformed subjectivity, and the gendered aesthetics of middle-class becoming in contemporary China.