Visualizing the amateur: Aesthetics of the ordinary and politics of recognition in documentaries on Chinese non-specialist writers

This study explores the portrayal of amateur, non-specialist writers from grassroots contexts in contemporary China through documentary films of the 2010s, focusing on Yu Xiuhua, Chen Nianxi and Fan Yusu. The analysis centres on how these films construct an aesthetics of the ordinary, framing their subjects’ everyday lives as both authentic and marketable, oscillating between validation and fetishization. By underscoring the tension between privacy and the demand for authenticity, these films make non-specialist authors’ everyday a key feature of their public recognition. The analysis carried out in this essay reveals a politics of recognition where it is amateur workers’ ordinary background that makes them extraordinary in the eyes of viewers from other backgrounds. Ultimately, the article interrogates whether such representations empower marginalised voices or reduce them to commodified symbols of grassroots authenticity.