Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...southeast China, when the world she would inherit changed forever. It was 30 years ago this month - December, 1978 - when China's leadership decided the time had come for their country to open up its economy and to embrace something akin to capitalism. The monumental shift - China under Mao Zedong had been a centrally planned economic disaster - reflected the growing, behind-the-scenes influence of a man few in the West had then heard of: Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. China, the ruling Communist Party decreed back then, "required great growth in the productive forces." And Deng was smart enough...
...Mao 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...
...connections are striking. You can't look at the black, red and white poster Resolutely Adhere to Execute the July 3rd and July 23rd Proclamations (artist unknown) without wondering if contemporary painter Wang Guangyi would add a Rolex or Coca-Cola logo to it. Zeng Fanzhi's 2005 Chairman Mao with Us looks similar to many of the show's large-scale paintings in which the Great Helmsman marches through fields with peasants (Chairman Mao Inspects the Guangdong Countryside by Chen Yanning) or waves benignly in his bathrobe (Strive Forward in Wind and Tides, by Tang Xiaohe, which commemorates...