Curated Nostalgia: The Loss and Recreation of the Recent Past in China

This paper uses the case of Wenheyou, a retro-themed restaurant in Changsha, to examine how the recent built environment is heritagised and junkified in contemporary China. Wenheyou’s deliberate celebration of the dilapidated streetscapes, dirt, and mundane everyday life of the 1980s and 1990s has been widely discussed as a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Situating Wenheyou within Changsha’s broader processes of urban redevelopment and heritage reconstruction, the paper argues that recreated “trash” in Wenheyou operates alongside recreated heritage in the city, stabilising, rather than challenging, the boundary between what can and cannot be preserved. Drawing on scholarship on material culture and trash studies, the paper argues that, in the context of rapid urbanisation following the reform and opening up of the 1980s, the designation of “shantytowns” or “old and dilapidated neighbourhoods” emerged in parallel with the recognition of recent heritage in official listings. These two processes are produced through the same urbanisation mechanism that granted the government the spatial power to determine how the past is materially inscribed onto the cityscape.