China's other cultural revolution: history and Chinese art

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Charles Ruas, Richard Vine

Chen Yifei defines his position in Looking at History from My Space (1979) by portraying the artist in his studio viewing a canvas that shows a monumental parade of history. Unlike Fantin-Latour depicting his studio filled with contemporary artistic and literary luminaries, Chen creates a bold and sobering statement of historical dislocation. He places himself outside the flow of events; yet as the observer, he remains inseparable from it.

As if to define where the officially sanctioned artist finds himself at present, Zhou Changjiang created a mixed-medium installation, Family Tree (1997), with photographs going back several generations. Most families burned their photographs to expunge the past and protect themselves during the Cultural Revolution. But now, this type of visual family history, whether fact or fiction, is very popular both in China and abroad -- in China for nostalgic reasons, and abroad for its implications of historical exoticism. The subjects start in silk robes, then move to Western attire, then military uniforms, Maoist blue workers' dress and, finally, present-day outfits of sneakers and sportswear.

The exhibition's fourth part, "Transformation of Tradition, 1980 to the Present," covers the post-Cultural Revolution period. It is extremely, interesting as an example of what happens when a government turns the public against its own artistic heritage. The Chinese people learned to loathe and fear traditional Chinese forms. For over 10 years -- longer in the outer provinces -- custom was something that could cost you your life. In part, this alienation fuels the present craze for international culture. Within Chinese society, them is a widespread refusal to explain, or assess responsibility for, the Cultural Revolution. Mao is still the transcendent symbol of the Party.

But the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution also taught the people only too well the vacuousness of Socialist Realist works, especially afterwards when they had to adjust to a market economy dependent on commercial exchange with the external world. This section shows the government-sanctioned re-creation of a cultural norm from ground zero, with officials suddenly promoting the very "traditional" or "eternal" Chinese style they had formerly condemned. Suddenly ink painting was sanctioned for its "Chineseness" but shorn of its historical and ideological context, its roots in the ideal of the Chinese literati, those elite masters of calligraphy and painting with their high Confucian moral and intellectual standards, and their sense of history.

Amazingly enough, the post-1980 innovations in ink and watercolor paintings all hark back to Part I of this exhibition, to the experimentation of the Shanghai School which began in the last century and lasted through World War II. The neo-traditional ink-on-paper works expand venerable Chinese practices to include some acknowledgment of Western art. The scale of these works is large, because official policy destines them for public places. Today, no conference room in China is without a recently executed monumental landscape, flower and bird painting, or other traditional motif. (Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Lin, who is not included in this show, is a contemporary artist working in the traditional style and teaching painting at the Academy of Chinese Painting in Beijing. Her brushwork is strong, almost brut; she paints thick, coarse branches and Large blown-up blossoms.)