 t is very easy for Westerners to breeze through the Asia Society’s Art and China’s Revolution and diagnose it as “just propaganda” and therefore as without merit and unworthy of their gaze. Should I confess to some of those feelings during my first viewing? But there are gems to be found, even in conventional terms. Moreover, one has to consider new China’s monumental goals: to create revolutionary art that would convey the new Communist spirit, inspire the masses and supersede traditional art. China’s vast talent pool was called to this task.
Mao quoted Lenin: “art should be a cog in the wheel of revolution”. Chinese art should celebrate its heroes, workers, peasants and soldiers. Soon after Mao’s triumph in 1949, the Chinese Communist Propaganda Department embraced the style of then big brother Soviet Union and its socialist realist-style oil painting. It was not only to convey the brilliant Communist victory but also condemn the evils of the old society.
 Mao sought to restore his formerly unquestioned authority after the disasters of his Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine that claimed at least 30 million lives between 1958 and 1961. By 1966, unable to overcome the many Party leaders who opposed him, Mao made a desperate effort to regain control by initiating The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He hoped to mobilize the youth of China as Red Guards to overthrow the bureaucrats who supposedly were frustrating the revolution. He also tried to use art as a weapon in the struggle.
The opening section of Art and China’s Revolution is not easy viewing. It has supersized canvases of a giant, smiling Mao towering over adoring workers, peasants and soldiers. These bright, red and shining, socialist realist paintings portray high drama. They make Mao look like a larger than life deity, adored by the masses, forever vigorous, and wise-- the proverbial charismatic leader. These oil paintings were reproduced as posters, published in multi-million copy editions available to every Chinese.
The Party Propaganda Department had struggled to find the appropriate formula for what this new art should look like, and its representatives supervised each canvas of the newly-minted revolutionary art. Daily inspection and correction insured that each picture conveyed the current Party line.
 For example, we see a powerful group of woodblock propaganda posters that delivers new China’s message. Outstanding is Wang Huaiqing’s Celebrate the Establishment of the Red Guards Congress of Colleges and Universities in the Capital. Illustrating a new generation of leadership in the Cultural Revolution, athletic Red Guards raise their arms and clasp their hands under an apparitional Mao head that radiates red power. These handsomely muscular, ideal teens - a worker, a soldier and a woman- promise to change all that is wrong with China under the guidance of Mao’s revolutionary fervor. These teens are to replace the old generation of revisionists. Wang’s print delivers the new generation’s potent message, and his artistic style was drawn from the beginnings of Chinese Communist art- woodblock propaganda prints produced in Shanghai in the 1930s. At that time, encouraged by the famous writer Lu Xun, many patriotic, Communist artists produced black and white woodcuts to urge the Chinese people to fight the Japanese invaders. Those artists were inspired by the bold black lines of the German expressionists of that period, especially Communist Kathe Kollwitz.
Other punchy prints in the exhibition show the squashing of Soviet revisionists, who had become China’s enemies by the late 1950’s. In a more benign image Wang’s grandfather teaches reading to his granddaughter. Another print by Jiang Tiefeng features heroism inspired by Mao’s Little Red Book. These show stoppers are illustrative statements of the Party line.
 The exhibition allows a brief relief from its heightened political consciousness with some so-called black paintings, work that had been condemned as revisionist in special exhibitions of artistic targets slated for elimination. A painting of a skull by young Han Xin was attacked because it had no revolutionary content but was self indulgent, art for art’s sake. Han was only 19 at that time and secretly very proud to be the youngest painter in the exhibition.
Other ink paintings in traditional style were deemed unacceptable because of content such as orchids, which were denounced as scholar’s flowers. Although Li Keran’s 1964 Sunset on the Pass looked highly patriotic as the Red Army carries red flags along the steep mountain paths and a patriotic red light floods the mountain sides, the fact that Li painted it in the traditional brushed ink style made it unacceptable. Thus, even master painter Li was not saved from reeducation and years of farm work.
Another group of charming, small landscape paintings shown in the exhibition was created using vastly different post- impressionist technique by a group of painters who called themselves No Name. They met secretly during the Cultural Revolution and used small canvases that could be easily hidden. These artists were independent souls who dodged the Party line.
 Three large oil paintings from the 1970s show major Cultural Revolution narrative themes. Shen Jiawei’s Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, 1974, expressed the great anxiety and unqualified determination to face down Soviet revisionists at the frozen northern border. The painting was highly praised and reproduced countless times. Shen presents the soldiers braving the cold at a perilous height, standing firmly on the watch tower, monitoring river boats and enemy positions far below.
Another deeply patriotic composition is Eulogy of the Yellow River, 1972, by Chen Yifei. His solitary soldier’s pride in the Yellow River, called the birthplace of Chinese civilization, is an emotional work. It precisely depicts the solitary soldier in the foreground. The great river’s diagonal course is dramatic and is reinforced by a flock of birds in flight. The rugged, rock-faced cliffs are softened by a pale blue mist.
A third prototypical work of this period is Sun Jinbo’s The New Songs of Ah Xi, 1972. Beautiful, young women in colorful costumes are planting rice with joy. Despite standing in mud up to their ankles to plant seedlings in backbreaking work throughout the day, they smile like movie stars. These happy, productive peasants are members of one of the 56 minority groups in China. The women shown in this Party-approved Hollywood-type formula belong to a hill tribe who have abandoned their nomadic life and settled into the sedentary Chinese agricultural cycle. Many minority Chinese are under-privileged compared to the dominant Han race, but they are often stereotyped as singing and dancing, a masterful job of Chinese propaganda.
 The pencil sketches of Xu Bing and Chen Danqing and the ink diary of Luo Zhongli are the most engaging part of the show. All three artists were in their teens during the Cultural Revolution and sent to the countryside to live with the peasants. They made sketches of both people and places. Each piece has an immediacy, honesty and intimacy that trumps propaganda. Zhang Hongtu’s 13 small oil portraits also share their quality of realism.
A display of Mao buttons, Cultural Revolution decorated plates and cosmetic boxes offers an amusing touch in a room that also shows a photograph of a crowd surrounding the a circle of ashes- formerly adornments, antiques, and books representing the “4 olds” that were burned. Other photos by Liu Heung Shing reveal men bent over, wearing signs around their necks, accused of being counter- revolutionaries and in the process of being struggled against. Such sessions commonly led to the collapse, impairment or death of the victim. These photos document the humiliation and degradation to which many former elites were subjected.
The final section of the exhibition is a display of the Long March Project that was conceived by Lu Jie and others in order to connect current artists with the Long March that Mao and the Communist army took between 1934-1936 from southeastern Jiangxi province to northwestern Shaanxi to escape  Nationalist troops who sought to exterminate them. The project is designed to enable today’s young urbanites to follow the revolutionary trail through countryside and mountains barely touched by modernization and to connect them with local folk and largely forgotten history. The group made drawings and printed images that included singing and dancing and other performances in each place. Huge in concept and projected for some years to come, it is an on-going project that will cover 8,000 miles.
This stimulating and informative exhibition has an excellent catalogue by the co- curators, Melissa Chu and Zheng Shengtian, and other contributors. China herself would not put on such an exhibition at home. Indeed, at the last minute the Chinese government failed to honor its promised loan of materials from China. It is unclear why. Was the leadership embarrassed about materials that recall the Cultural Revolution at a time when it is seeking to project a post-Olympics superpower image? China has a long tradition of new rulers rewriting the history of the previous dynasty that they have overthrown.
The exhibition allows the viewer to weigh the success of art that was strictly subject to ideology, revolutionary art that was created to “serve the people”.
 Joan Lebold Cohen, author of “The New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986,” has been writing about contemporary Chinese art for more than 35 years.
Related Links:
Asia Society New York：Art and China's Revolution
|
