Kathleen M. Ryor, 'Transformations'
In: Chinese Art at the Crossroads: between past and future, between East and West / edited by Wu Hung. Published by New Media Arts, Wanchai, Hong Kong in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts, London, 2001, pp. 21-31.
Art During the Cultural Revolution
Even in the early years of the People’s Republic, when the party was focused on establishing political control and economic rebuilding, cultural control was tight. Mao, as cultural arbiter, restructured the past to fit his ideological agenda. Throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party had conducted various campaigns against its perceived or actual enemies.[4] The most widespread and damaging of these was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Early in 1966, Mao Zedong, his wife Jiang Qing and other allies of Mao began attacking their internal opponents and especially castigated those who administered the cultural and propaganda fields. By that summer Mao had mobilized China’s youth in a great campaign of protest against party administrators. The personality cult of Mao was the centerpiece of this campaign, promoted relentlessly for the first five years. During the Cultural Revolution, only narrowly circumscribed forms of artistic expression were allowed. The smallest mistake in the rendering of an image could mean severe punishment for the artist.
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Although the cult of Mao was at the heart of the Cultural Revolution, visual arts during this period were largely dictated by the Chairman’s wife, Jiang Qing. The model operas supported by Jiang Qing presented conceptual dogmas, which also became standard in the visual arts. On the basis of her “three prominences” (stress positive characters, stress the heroic in them, stress the most central of main characters), the protagonists were always in the center of the action, flooded with light from the sun or from hidden sources.[5] Themes included the victories of the Cultural Revolution; heroic acts of workers, peasants and soldiers; and successes in industry and agriculture. The promotion of agricultural workers is widespread in posters of the period.[6] The smiling worker-heroes are often women, performing jobs traditionally associated with men.
Jiang Qing was particularly interested in promoting the woman hero in the performing arts, as for example in such official ballets as the Red Detachment of Women. Pave a New Road with a Tractor, 1974, is an example of this emergent subcategory of images extolling women as exemplary members of an agrarian socialist state. In this woodcut poster, gender boundaries are consciously blurred and the bodies of female and male workers become generalized and gender neutral.[7] Nonetheless, the women’s smiling ruddy face and large size in the front of the picture plane creates a positive healthy image of the revolutionary peasant. This poster also addresses another obligatory theme, that of scientific innovation under the revolutionary government.[8] The title further underlines the visual message, which is of peasant farmers embracing new, improved machinery in the workplace.
Like propaganda posters and the revolutionary operas, films produced during the late 1960s and the early 1970s propagated the official values of the Cultural Revolution. Film, identified as a nationwide mass cultural medium, drew its inspiration from the Chinese operatic tradition transformed by Jiang Qing into the model revolution propaganda vehicle.[9]
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There was no room for entertainment in the cinema, which was tightly controlled by Jiang Qing and the Cultural Revolution Small Group. As a former movie actress, Jiang Qing was convinced of film’s power as a medium for purveying what she and her cohorts judged to be negative and positive influences on audiences.
In 1970, after a four-year shutdown, film studios presented a crop of new movies, film versions of the “revolutionary model performances” sanctioned by Jiang Qing.
In 1974, although still bearing the heavy imprint of the model operas in their stylization of plot, character and film technique, new releases began to develop distinct characteristics of their own. Insistent rhetoricism and heightened but depersonalized emotion were the new norms.[10]
The poster for A Collection of Model Revolutionary Military Films depicts a trio of determined and robust figures, two male and one female, looking purposefully off into the distance. Their facial expressions are intense but generalized. The artist has highlighted the healthy complexions of all three figures. They are arranged against a dreamy pastel landscape backdrop enlivened by circular insets showing scenes from the various films. Although these vignettes come from different movies, they repeat the formulaic body types, emotions, and theatrical gestures characteristic of all officially sanctioned art of the period.
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Contemporary Engagement with the Recent Past
Zhang Yizhi’s son, Zhang Bin, lived with his family above the movie theater for which his father painted posters. His paintings respond directly to the visual conventions of the movie posters of this period, but also play with the contemporary versions of mass media models of women.
Like his father’s poster designs, Zhang Bin’s compositions feature a single large heroic figure, but the women are placed in more elaborate and abstract spaces. The surrounding vignettes in both Deep in the Gully, 1995, and Pearl Shoal, 1997, are now taken from Western fashion magazines. The superimposition of a woman in red, borrowed from Jiang Quing’s revolutionary ballets, with repetitive images of fashion models, exposes the artificiality of both types of ideal women. Furthermore, the correlation of the heroic with ideal beauty heightens the contrast between revolutionary conformity and the superficiality of post-Mao materialism. Just as the revolutionary heroine was disconnected from lived experience and thus unattainable, so is the ideal of the Western fashion model a fictional creature.
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The most dramatic changes in China after the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping are the result of economic development and increasing openness to foreign countries. Using Western painting techniques, or borrowing from Cultural Revolutionary imagery, many contemporary artists critique the impact of economic reforms and the growing dominance of capitalist economy and foreign influences. A few painters look further back, beyond Cultural Revolution art and the officially sanctioned Social Realism of the post-1949 period, to traditional Chinese painting and culture. Lui Yan appropriates traditional media, format and imagery in order to reveal the complicated constructions of China’s past and the realities of modern China. Within hanging scrolls on paper, Lui paints scenes in watercolour and ink of contemporary youth culture. In Frivolous Youth, 1998, and The Modern Age, 1998, writhing columns of young people dressed in contemporary Euro-American fashions are interwoven with figures from Chinese opera and with Chinese and Western cultural emblems.
In Frivolous Youth, rock stars and a traditional Chinese opera star bind together different historical conceptions of leisure and decadence. The exaggerated gestures and facial expressions of the young men and women seem to ridicule their mindless devotion to rock music and contemporary fashion. The inclusion of a female impersonator from traditional opera and a hanging scroll of seal script calligraphy suggests a double comparison with the past. Calligraphy and opera were the established leisure pursuits prior to World War II, just as rock music, dancing, and karaoke bars form today’s world of entertainment in China. The evident self-indulgence of the contemporary figures may seem decadent when compared with the supposedly finer, artistic practices of traditional China. Yet these same traditional practices were labeled decadent by the socialists beginning in 1950. This layered commentary is also evident in The Modern Age, even though the traditional arts are less evident. In addition to the electric guitars and a red New York Yankees cap, there are putti flying in the upper portion of the scroll, one of whom is wearing a traditional Chinese vest and carrying an opium pipe. Lui Yan may be commenting on the impossibility of comparing the present to the past in either favourable or unfavourable terms.
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[4] Julia F. Andrews, “The Victory of Socialist Realism: Oil Painting and Guohua,” in A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China, eds. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, (New York: Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 1998), p. 232.
[5] Stefan Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization (Amsterdam: The Pepin Press, 1995), p. 40.
[6] Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 72.
[7] Landsberger, p. 44.
[8] Ibid., p. 77.
[9] Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 125.
[10] Ibid., p. 128.