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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Visual Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1577425
Shanzhai pictorial anti-essentialism: Varejão's depictions of Brazilian Indigenous people
Provisionally accepted- University of Los Andes, Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
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This paper aims to demonstrate the conceptual and political value of understanding Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão's strategy of appropriating late 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century artworks about Brazilian indigenous peoples as shanzhai. Shanzhai, a term used by Byung Chul Han (2011), refers to creations that become more original than the original by intervening in, transforming, parodying, and updating artworks to address contemporary issues. This perspective contrasts with views of her work as anthropophagic or simulacrum. Moreover, I suggest that by understanding Invitation Figures I and II as shanzhai artistic interventions, Varejao’s artworks help us think about Brazilian indigeneity in a racially and ethnically anti-essentialist way. This is crucial because it is a fruitful way to undermine historical imaginaries that have shaped the future of a subcontinent by solidifying subaltern social roles. Moreover, I propose that these artworks show how memory and imagination about the other and about oneself are constructed: as a sedimentation of traces that are endlessly updated, modified, cut out, undone, forgotten, and reassembled with the logic of the present and the burden of experiences that impregnate the senses, language, and narratives. And in this reconstruction of history, forgeries, copies, and shanzhai artifacts are as powerful as official documents.
Keywords: cultural appropriation, ethnic and racial anti-essentialism, Varejão, shanzhai, Authenticity
Received: 15 Feb 2025; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Balán. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Laura Balán, University of Los Andes, Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
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