93 SPECIAL COLLECTION To Bind and To Bound: Commensuration Across Boundaries Seeing Strange: Chinese Aesthetics in a Foreign World Lily Chumley, New York University ABSTRACT This article contributes to a theory of commensuration by examining the discursive production of incommensurability between objects, aes- thetics, and practices, and by extension, “cultures” and “civilizations.” Everyday objects—such as camping tables and cloth shoes—are often taken as emblems for distinctions between China and the West. This in- commensurability is reproduced through a series of semiotic processes described here: first, an historical shift in the vocabulary for everyday things, in which marked foreignness is replaced by marked Chineseness, and reflections on that history in contemporary film; second, traditionalist performances of resistance to (and repugnance for) Western aesthet- ics, accompanied by a tendency to deploy markedly Chinese objects as emblems of cultural allegiance; and third, an artist’s lecture on the perplexity of negotiating this incommensurability in art practice. This boundary leaves out—or produces as excess—all those things that are designed, made, bought, and used in China, but which are not regarded as Chinese. I argue that this cryptocategory of the unChinese implic- itly frames the work of Chinese artists and designers still called upon to produce a Chinese modern. [Keywords: China, art, aesthetics, objects, incommensurability, markedness, double bind] Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 1, p. 93-122, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2016 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved.