How can we make sense of the strange, dreamlike textures of modern Chinese life? This piece explores mythorealism—a concept coined by novelist Yan Lianke—as a lens for understanding the eerie, surreal, and liminal dimensions of contemporary Chinese auteur cinema.
This article was inspired by “La realtà liminale del “mitorealismo”: comprendere un cinema d’autore cinese che rompe i confini del reale” written by the author in Italian, and published published by sinosfere. You can find the original article here.
Mythorealism: Unveiling the Liminal World of Contemporary Chinese Auteur Cinema
Contemporary Chinese reality, according to novelist Yan Lianke, embodies an ‘unreal reality’—an existence that defies the conventional logic of cause and effect. In his essay Discovering Narrative (2011), Yan coins the term “mythorealism” (shenshizhuyi) to capture the paradoxical nature of China’s postsocialist condition. The nation is simultaneously ancient and modern, socialist and capitalist, with its rapid economic transformation having left a deep imprint on its cultural and social fabric. This liminal state of flux—neither entirely rooted in the past nor securely anchored in the present—provides fertile ground for the development of a new artistic paradigm. This piece makes the case for using mythorealism as a fresh lens on Chinese auteur cinema—offering a way to make sense of how these films capture the strange, often surreal texture of contemporary life in China.
Chinese Postsocialism and Liminality
China’s system, postsocialist for some, fully socialist for others, but undoubtedly shaped by the policies of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, is one of transition, growth and contradiction. The country remains nominally socialist yet has embraced market mechanisms, evolving into a global economic powerhouse. The tension between these two forces—socialist ideals and capitalist practices—creates a unique socio-political context marked by cultural and economic contradictions. Many non-Chinese observers describe this state as “postsocialism,” which, in the words of anthropologist James Ferguson, is “a historical condition in which socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics, yet it persists in altered forms.” But for Chinese Marxism, it is one of socialism that evolved to confront the new challenges of this era, and as such it requires to be taken seriously in the view it has of itself and its own development. Despite the many possible readings, for the first two decades of the 21st Century, China has seen the emergence of a unique reality, characterised here as inherently liminal.
In this environment, traditional Chinese cultural elements—once suppressed during the Maoist era—have resurged, blending with socialist ideals and what Baudrillard terms the hyperreality of capitalism. The result is a fluid reality that resists categorization, marked by a constant oscillation between past and present, between old revolutionary ideals, the individualistic aspirations of the market economy, and everything that arises in-between. The rapid transformation of China’s urban and rural landscapes, the stark wealth inequality and injustices parallel to a visible growth in the economic well-being of the people, the newfound interest for cultural roots, the pervasiveness of digitalization and the proliferation of new technologies—all contribute, due to the sheer pace of change in China, to a sense of unreality that Yan Lianke identifies as “mythoreality.” This, of course, in its visibility and invisibility, is also highly influenced by the shifting self and collective narratives that arise from these radical changes permeating everyday life at all levels.
The concept of “liminality,” as coined by anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, helps to describe this condition. Liminality refers to transitional states, suspended between two worlds, in which normal causal, perceptive, societal rules and structures disintegrate. This state of being “between” creates a space where the boundaries between reality and myth blur, where paradoxes and contradictions thrive. In the liminal space, creative potential is unleashed between chaos and uncertainty. It is the mythical space of Tricksters, the mystical space of rituals and creation, but also a space of disappearance and vanishing. Yan Lianke’s mythorealism narrates a liminal Chinese reality—a space where the impossible, the magical, and the absurd coexist with the everyday or, rather, are the everyday.
Mythorealism and the Weird: Liminality with Chinese Characteristics
Yan Lianke’s concept of mythorealism is a response to the limitations of traditional realism, particularly socialist realism, which sought to represent reality in a straightforward, linear manner. Mythorealism, by contrast, rejects these fixed logical structures and instead embraces a fragmented, mythological vision of reality. It acknowledges the strange, the bizarre, and the mystical elements of everyday life, elements that are often ignored or repressed in conventional realist depictions. There’s an inherent quality of unintelligibility and absurdity in the forces that shape the lives of individuals and collectives: market fluctuations, political campaigns, digital trends, the transnational Capitalist production system, these things and many others are felt in the everyday experience of reality and seem to sabotage its grounds. This has become an invasive, new normal in China, precisely because of the speed and intensity of change in the past decades, and it’s what allowed for the emergence of a mythorealist perception.
Mythorealism is not a fixed, defined literary or aesthetic movement but a mode of perception that can emerge in various artistic forms. It draws on elements of magical realism, but it differs in its approach. While magical realism often presents the fantastical as a hidden layer beneath the surface of everyday life, mythorealism suggests that the boundary between the real and the unreal is porous and fluid. It is an art of the “weird” and the “eerie,” as philosopher Mark Fisher describes—an art that challenges the viewer’s sense of reality by introducing elements that are simultaneously familiar and strange, thus compelling us to anxiously ask ourselves which are the causal forces and agents acting upon reality.
Mythorealism portrays the everyday world as a site of transformation, where the boundaries of the real are constantly being stretched and redefined. This mode of representation rejects a simple search for truth and instead embraces ambiguity and contradiction. The aim is not merely to depict reality as it is but to probe a deeper, more complex truth—one that cannot be captured by traditional realist methods, nor by extremely experimental ones that detach themselves from everyday life. In this sense, Yan Lianke’s theorization of it is but a systematisation of a more widely felt perception of the Real, shared by artists and novelists alike, whether knowledgeable or not of Yan Lianke’s work.
Mythorealism in Chinese Cinema: Exploring the Liminal and the Eerie
Understanding the presence of mythorealism in Chinese cinema requires us to first consider the nature of cinema itself. Cinema, as an art form, is uniquely positioned to manipulate our sense of reality. As Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky argued, cinema is the art of time: “The strength of cinema lies precisely in its ability to capture time in its concrete and inseparable connection with the very substance of the reality that surrounds us every day.” Cinema can manipulate both time and space, creating a sense of realism or, alternatively, disrupting the usual flow of causality to explore new realms of perception.
Through editing, cinematography, and sound, filmmakers can create, in moving space and time, a reality that feels both familiar and alien, leading the viewer into a perceptive mode where the distinctions between the real and the unreal become blurred. This is the core of mythorealism in cinema: a fusion of the real and the imagined, the possible and the impossible, the rational and the irrational.
Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) provides a compelling example of mythorealism in Chinese cinema. In this film, the appearance of strange, almost surreal events—such as a UFO briefly flying across the sky or a monument taking off like a rocket—does not cause the characters to react with astonishment or curiosity. These events intrude on the narrative without compromising the film’s documentary-style realism. This juxtaposition of the mundane and the extraordinary creates a sense of the surreal embedded within the everyday. The characters’ indifference to these bizarre occurrences highlights the coexistence of the real and the unreal in contemporary China, a reality where the strange has become part of the ordinary.
Similarly, Zhao Liang’s Behemoth (2015) employs the documentary format to expose the environmental and human toll of industrial development in Inner Mongolia. The film employs a mythopoetic narrative, invoking imagery reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy, to explore the monstrous forces driving China’s rapid industrialisation. The film’s surreal depictions of landscapes and human suffering reveal an “invisible truth” behind the mythic narrative of progress—a truth that is as horrific as it is unreal.
In Xin Yukun’s Wrath of Silence (2017), a starkly realist account of a father’s search for his missing son in China’s mining regions is punctuated by moments of eerie surrealism. The ghostly presence of the missing child, whose death is a tragic result of class and economic injustice, highlights the mythorealistic tension between the visible and the invisible. The film’s conclusion, in which a mountain collapses in a moment of violent revelation, underscores the trauma and injustice that cannot be fully captured by realist cinema alone.
Further very relevant examples can be found in Kaili Blues (2015, Bi Gan), Crosscurrent (2016, dir. Yang Chao), Suburban Birds (2018, dir. Qiu Sheng), Spring Tide (Yang Lina 杨荔钠).
Reading China’s Shifting Realities through Cinematic Mythorealism
Mythorealism offers a new way of understanding contemporary Chinese cinema and—by extension—perceptions of the Chinese everyday, one that transcends traditional realist approaches while remaining deeply grounded in the lived experiences of individuals. By embracing the liminal, the weird, and the uncanny, mythorealism opens up new possibilities for representing the complexity and contradictions of contemporary China. It invites filmmakers and audiences to reconsider the boundaries of reality and to engage with the strange, the impossible, and the deeply transformative aspects of Chinese reality.
As Chinese cinema evolves, recognising mythorealism as both an aesthetic and perceptual mode may prove essential to uncovering the hidden truths behind China’s extraordinary transformations—and to understanding cinema’s role as a lasting witness both elucidating and documenting these shifts. Offering fresh ways to explore the nation’s liminal reality and the tensions between the real and the unreal in the explosive development of these first decades of the 21st Century, Mythorealism uncovers the unspeakable logics of Anthropocene and Capitalocene in the Chinese context. In a world where the old certainties of socialism have been eroded and the promises of a world where economics and markets form an almost religious telos of reality and keep eroding the individual and the cultural, mythorealism provides a fitting framework for understanding the complex, contradictory, and constantly shifting nature of contemporary China, and maybe it can tell us something of ourselves as well. We might consider extending its application beyond literature, treating mythorealism as an aesthetic of possibility: a critical engagement with the unknown, the absurd, and the often invisible textures of everyday life in an increasingly contradictory world.
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This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science.
The cover image 异步 (Async) was shot and edited by the author, Nicolò Brescia, in 2024.
