Art and China's Revolution
September 5, 2008 through January 11, 2009
Asia Society presents Art and China's Revolution, a groundbreaking exhibition that considers the artistic achievement and legacy of one of the most tumultuous and catastrophic periods in recent Chinese history: the three decades following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
The exhibition brings together large-scale oil paintings, ink paintings, sculptures, drawings and artist sketchbooks, woodblock prints, posters, and objects from everyday life, many never before shown in the United States. It is the first exhibition to examine in-depth the powerful and complicated effects of Mao Zedong's revolutionary ideals on artists and art production in China.
"Art and China's Revolution chronicles the formation of a new visual culture in China, considering the direct impact of politics on art making in this era," says Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu, a leading authority on Chinese contemporary art and co-curator of the exhibition.
"Chinese contemporary art today cannot be properly contextualized without understanding the influence of Mao's revolution both on the artists who lived during this period as well as on successive generations."
Exhibition co-curator Zheng Shengtian, who was an artist and teacher of the Zhejiang Academy Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) during this time, shares his recollections of the period in a catalogue essay.
Zheng belongs to the generation of artists who grew up during the 1950s. Critical of the Red Guards for their violence and destruction of cultural artifacts in 1966, he was imprisoned in a detention center on campus called a "cowshed." "I was detained with other established artists and teachers, where we were made to participate in self-criticism sessions and our ability to paint was restricted.
Even though this is a period many would prefer to forget, it is nevertheless one that produced a visual culture that continues to permeate contemporary Chinese art."
Art and China's Revolution is organized into six sections that explore themes important to artistic production and document the history and politics of this period. One section addresses artists who went against the prevailing style. These artists—including Pan Tianshou, Lin Fengmian, Zhao Yannian, Li Keran, and Shi Lu—were sometimes persecuted and called "black artists."
Other sections include works by a younger generation of artists that reflect personal accounts of their experiences, including leading contemporary artists such as Xu Bing, Chen Danqing, and Zhang Hongtu, who attribute many of their artistic influences to their years spent in the countryside as part of their "reeducation."
A full-color, 260-page book has been published by Yale University Press to coincide with the exhibition. It includes essays by leading political and social historians, art historians, interviews with and recollections by artists, and translations of primary documents from the period. ..."