Abstract
This article explores the relationship between cultural governance, material deployment, and spatial configuration, and points out that there are multiple tensions such as surplus, fixation, and waste. The author first traces the inspiration of cultural materialism, material culture studies, and new materialism, and then cites the perspectives of recent infrastructure studies, connects cultural governance with social materiality and spatiality, and proposes the concept of the infrastructuring of cultural governance. The infrastructuring of cultural governance intervenes in the living landscape and shapes cultural life. Secondly, this article focuses on the cultural governance of local performances, and puts forward the following issues: the overlay infrastructure with government decrees and beautification paintings as examples; the cultural infrastructure with exclusive or reincarnated art venues as examples; pseudo-infrastructure symbols with landmarks, entrance images, and public art as examples; and cultural landscapes with local art festivals and land art festivals as examples. However, the infrastructuring of cultural governance is not a solid system, but an unfinished/incomplete infrastructure, full of tensions between surplus and fixation. Surplus highlights that culture is based on surplus and goes beyond; fixation highlights the inertia, order and anchoring effect of culture. Between surplus and fixation, there are wastes with multiple positive and negative meanings such as squandering, depletion, suspension, blankness, and futility. There is not only the consumption of surplus or the stagnation of fixation, but also the possibility of inducing risks or new vitality. Furthermore, culture always implies substitution. As a result, cultural governance and its infrastructuring are constantly disturbed by the surplus end attributed to experimental art, the fixation end condensed into ways of life, and all kinds of wastes shuttles through them, and open up local potentials.