Onstage: Exhibiting Intangible Cultural Heritage in China

ABSTRACT: The intangible cultural heritage (ICH) concept has been operational in China for almost 20 years. One integral part of China’s ICH landscape is a range of exhibition spaces and museums that specialise in the display, performance, and transmission of ICH. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at different exhibition sites, this paper provides insights into what these exhibition spaces look like, how they function, how ICH is exhibited within them, and what exhibitions mean to different heritage actors. The article shows how ICH exhibitions have themselves become a sociocultural phenomenon, bringing together a variety of actors who experiment with different forms of display and types of exhibitions in an ad hoc, spontaneous, and unregulated way. The paper also contributes to the broader discussion on ICH as a political intervention that transforms the cultural practices and expressions it normatively sets out to safeguard. KEYWORDS: China, UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage (ICH), exhibition, safeguarding.