Word: art
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...cultural terms, Chinese revolutionary zeal is often remembered more for what it destroyed - temples, monuments, reputations, lives - than for what it created. But "Art and China's Revolution," an exhibition at the Asia Society in New York City until Jan. 11, presents a fascinating look at an artistic development that came into being between the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 and its economic liberalization in 1978 - namely, the new visual aesthetic of socialist realism with Chinese characteristics...
...Zedong saw it, art was to be accessible to the masses and not the exclusive province of an intellectual élite. Painting and sculpture, as well as fiction, music, theater and ballet, were to reflect new common values, not individual ideas or feelings. The products of this "art for politics' sake" were mostly optimistic in spirit and patriotic in purpose...
...Though they were produced in murderous times, the works at the Asia Society are almost uniformly cheery, following the dictum of Jiang Qing, Mao's fourth wife and ultimate cultural arbiter, that art be "red, bright and shining." In other words: propaganda. Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu and co-curator Zheng Shengtian argue in the show's excellent catalog, however, that, didactic or not, socialist art represented a "significant cultural movement in China" - one that produced some "truly great art," especially paintings, and that such works "continue to influence Chinese visual culture." The contemporary installation artist Xu Bing, whose...
...Aside from a group of identical stainless-steel sculptures of Mao, created by Qu Guangci in 2003, the exhibition displays no contemporary works, nor does it attempt to explain the link between the paintings and posters on view and the current Chinese art scene that draws so much from them. The label accompanying Chen Yifei's 1972 painting of a single sentry in a monumental landscape, Eulogy of the Yellow River, fails to note that Chen became one of China's most commercially successful artists before his 2005 death...
...waves benignly in his bathrobe (Strive Forward in Wind and Tides, by Tang Xiaohe, which commemorates the aging leader's famous 1966 swim in the Yangtze River). And all the happy, smiling faces - of peasants, soldiers and political leaders - are reminiscent of the toothy smiles of the current art sensation Yue Minjun...