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Academies of Fine Arts The People's Republic of China has dedicated substantial resources to its art academies in recognition of their important role in the training of the country's artists. Academies are one of the main avenues open to artists for making a living and, through their organization of exhibitions, also one of the main venues in which artists can show their works. Because faculty and students originate from different parts of the country and may later work in quite other places, a national network has developed of personal acquaintances working in the same field. In 1950, shortly after the founding of the new nation, the academies were placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture, which in turn was supervised by the State Council of the National Government. Within each academy, a Party committee oversees the general operation of the institution. After 1957, as part of a decentralization program, the academy in Beijing was put under the supervision of, and funded by, the Beijing municipality; provincial academies were placed under the aegis of their provincial governments. The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), called the National Beiping Art Collegebefore November 1949, and headed since 1946 by the advocate of European academic painting *Xu Beihong until his death in 1953, took the lead in introducing the socialist realist style in China. Visits by promlnent Russlan arnsts and theorlsts,1ike Alexander Gerasimov, and the courses given for faculty members by the Russian teacher Konstantin M. Maksimov (b.1913), between 1955 and 1957, made the Central Academy a bastion of the Soviet style. Mastery of the nineteenth-century Russian Chistiakov's system of fine drawing, with its emphasis on rendering volume, became the basis for creating art in all media. Artists trained at the Central Academy took the style of Beijing to their new postings, thus widening its influence. (Xu Kuang and Wu Qiangnian studied at the middle school attached to the academy, and Li Huanmin studied in the special course for art cadres; all three worked afterwards in Sichuan.) At the request of *Jiang Feng, a veteran of both *Lu Xun's woodblock movment and of *Yan'an, a print department was created at CAFA in 1953; it served as a prototype for other academies and has always had a distinguished faculty, including Li Hua, Wang Qi, Yan Han, Gu Yuan, and Xu Bing. The physical closeness of CAFA to the seat of government and the fact that many members of the faculty also hold high positions in the *Chinese Artists'Association and/or in the field of art publication has made it a dominant influence on the direction of Chinese art for most of the period covered by this exhibition. The leading figures at the National Art Academy in Hangzhou in the 1940s were advocates of European modernist styles. In 1950 the Hangzhou academy was reorganized, called the East China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and put under the supervision of CAFA. Woodblock printmakers, who were veterans of either *Yan'an (including the important art cadre *Jiang Feng) or the *All-China Association of Anti-Enemy Woodcutters (Zhao Yannian and Zhang Yangxi), occupied important positions on the Party committee and on the faculty, and woodblock creation held a respected position in the curriculum. The academy teaching program and bureaucratic organization were similiar to that of Beijing, emphasizing classical European composition and Russian drawing techniques. Betweeen 1952 and 1956 the academy published over eighty socialist realist articles, books, posters and cartoons.l Modernist European styles were no longer taught. From 1958, as part of a national movement toward decentralization, support and supervision of the academy in Hangzhou was assigned to the authorities of Zhejiang, and it was renamed Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA). At the time, there was a national campaign to emphasize native rather than foreign art traditions, and Pan Tianshou, a revered traditional-style painter, was made director of the academy. ZAFA became a leader in developing modern adaptations of traditional Chinese art antecedents. Printmakers on the faculty like Zhang Yangxi, Wu Jide and Zao Zongzao used sources as diverse as Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) relief carvings, traditional Chinese painting and nianhua (New Year's pictures) as inspiration to create new styles. ZAFA has recently been renamed and again is called the National Art Academy. The Southwest Academy of Fine Arts, well represented in this exhibition, was assigned to provincial supervision and renamed the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts (SAFA) in 1958; it is often called "the printmakers' academy" because of the number and excellence of the printmakers it has nurtured and their importance in its administration. Like CAFA and ZAFA, it has always had an outstanding print department. Many additions to the faculty in the early 1950s were printmakers, veterans of the Communist Eighth Route Army or the *All China Association of Anti-Enemy Woodcutters, including Li Shaoyan, Niu Wen, Lin Jun and Feng Zhongtie. They brought with them such diverse styles as the detailed mode derived from Soviet art, the "peasant" style from *Yan'an and the "social protest" styles of the original *Lu Xun Creative Print Movement. They were joined in the early 1950s by, among others, a graduate of the CAFA special course for cadres, Li Huanmin and, later, by graduates from the CAFA middle school, Xu Kuang and Wu Qiangnian; the latter brought with them knowledge of recent developments in Soviet socialist realist art. In 1960 the print department was singled out for praise as a "progressive work unit" at the National Cultural Education Heroes Meeting, and Li Huanmin and Xu Kuang received prizes as progressive workers.2 Sichuan has many ethnic minorities (non-Han Chinese), and depictions of their ways of life have always been a major theme in art of the province; the academy also created a special department to train and encourage minority artists, including Ah Ge and Qi Jia Da Wa. The Hubei Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1965 by consolidating the art departments of various regional colleges and universities into a single institution. One year Iater (during the Cultural Revolution) it ceased operations. It was reopened in 1971, but as the art department of the Hubei College of Art. In 1978 it became the Hubei Institute of Art and, in 1985, became again the Hubei Academy of Art. The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, originally called the South China College of Artwas founded in 1953, in Wuhan, Hubei, by combining the art departments of different institutions in that city. In 1958, it was relocated to Guangzhou, with most of its former faculty, and called the Guangzhou College of Arts. In 1959 it received its present name; in the same year the eminent guohua painter Guan Shanyue became deputypresident. In 1958, the provinces were instructed by the national government to create and maintain academies of art; most have print departments. Art training institutes of other kinds are found in all Chinese cities. Shanghai, which had been a major art center before 1949, with academies and numerous art colleges, does not have an academy of fine arts now, although it has a number of institutions for training artists. It has continued, however, to influence the development of Chinese art, in part because of the concentration of art publishers in the area. 1Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China, 1949-1984 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,1998), p .40 2 Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics of the People's Republic of China, 1949 - 1979 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Univ. of California Press, 1994), p.267.
All-China Association of Anti-Enemy Woodcutters was formed in June 1938 in Wuhan, the temporary capital of the Guomindang (Nationalist) government after the Japanese invasion led to the abandonment of its capital, Nanjing. The association's purpose, under the supervision of the Communist writer *Guo Moruo, was to produce resistance propaganda, and it was a division of the Third Department of the Political Ministry, which had been created after the Second United Front Agreement (1937) agreed that Guomindang and Communist forces would coordinate efforts to fight the enemy. Most of the woodcutters had come from Shanghai, where they had participated in *Lu Xun's print movement, and created works in styles derived from social protest art of central Europe. Many were leftist in their politics and had been hiding from the Guomindang; they now emerged to join the association, thereby becoming "legal." When Wuhan also had to be abandoned, some artists moved on to *Chongqing and others to Guilin. Fearing the association would be used for Communist criticism of themselves, the Guomindang leaders dissolved it in 1940, but it was reconstituted by its members under the name Woodcut Research Society. As it happened, then and after the Anti-Japanese War, the artists did create powerful depictions of corruption and misery in Guomindang- controlled areas. In this exhibition, prints from the 1940s by Li Hua, Zhao Yannian and Zhang Yangxi are examples of the type. The artists Huang Xinbo,Lai Shaoqi,Wang Qi and Feng Zhongtie also participated in the association. After the Communists came to power in 1949, artists from the association held important positions in the newly reorganized art academies. Their knowledge of European techniques of depicting the human body was applied to the development of Chinese socialist realism, but the anguished portrayals of the working class, characteristic of their earlier work, disappeared, because both themes and style were not considered suitable for socialist art. There was a partial and brief revival of the expressionist style associated with the movement during the history art campaigns of the early 1960s and it has been revived and reinterpreted since the end of the *Cultural Revolution, notably by Zhao Yannian. Cai Ruohong (Tsai Jo-Hung, a.k.a. Zhang Zaixue; b. 1910; Jiujiang, Jiangxi) Cai graduated from the Shanghai Art College, trained as an oil painter. In 1939 he travelled to *Yan'an, where he worked as a cartoonist and also as a teacher at the *Lu Xun Academy of Literaure and Arts. In 1949 he was made director of the Masses Pictorial Press and, afterwards, of its successor, People's Art Press; at the same time he was art editor for the newspaper People's Daily. His official positions have included standing member of the council and vice-chairman of the *Chinese Artists'Association. China Avant-Garde was an exhibition, organized by art critics and art historians, that opened February 5, 1989, at the China Art Gallery, Beijing. The Chinese public was amazed and not a little horrified at its encounter with the practice of modern and post-modern Western art that had found followers among Chinese artists, as well as the criticism of Chinese society implicit in many of the exhibits. One artist was taken into custody after having fired a pistol at her creation. The exhibition was closed down after a few days, and subsequent exhibitions were vetted by the art authorities, as they had been in the past. Works by both Fang Lijun and Xu Bing were displayed in the China Avant-Garde exhibit. Chinese Artists' Association (CAA) Originally called the Chinese Art Workers' Association, it was founded at the First All- China Congress of Literary and Art Workers, which opened in Beijing in July 1949, shortly before the founding of the People's Republic of China. It was reorganized and renamed the Chinese Artists' Association (CAA) at the Second Congress, in 1953. The leading art cadres of that time, *Zhou Yang and *Jiang Feng, directed that membership should be voluntary (but with admission standards), and for professionals (including non-Communists); it should work to raise standards, train young artists, set examples for all artists, organize exhibitions, bring art to the people, and publish art criticism. Meishu (Art) was founded in 1954 as the association's official journal. Regional branches of the association were formed from the mid-195Os onward. The association is under the supervision of the Federation of Literary and Art Workers, which is under the direct supervision of the Propaganda Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party. Chongqing, from late 1938, was the wartime capital, in Sichuan Province, of the Guomindang forces. The invading Japanese army had forced successive evacuations of the capital, from Nanjing to Wuhan in 1937 and, in 1938, further inland, to Chongqing. Many artists, who did not want to live in Japanese-occupied territory, gathered there. The branch of the *All-China Association of Anti-Enemy Woodcutters that arrived from Wuhan in 1938 and its successor, Woodcut Research Society, were major sources of war effort woodblock-print propaganda art. Since 1950, the city has been the seat of the provincial art academy. Cultural Revolution, or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Usually referred to as the Cultural Revolution, it commenced officially with a document issued by the Politburo in May 1966. Written by *Mao Zedong and called "May 16th Circular," it proclaimed: "Now we have to hold high the great banner of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution." Mao instructed the masses to "criticize bourgeoise reactionary thinking in the academic field, the media, publishing and the arts, and seize the power of leaders in the cultural arena. In order to achieve this, we must at the same time criticize the representatives of the bourgeoise who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, cultural circles, and all other areas. These people ... are a group of counter- revolutionary revisionists."3 The Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, whose members represented the most radical elements of the Party, was established during the same May meeting. *Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, was the group's leading force,though not its official director. Nominally under the aegis of the standing committee of the Politburo, in effect it dictated cultural policy directly to the whole nation.4 After the Cultural Revolution had been discredited, its leaders were given the epithet the "Gang of Four." On May 31, a "working party" from the Cultural Revolution Small Group took over the offices of the newspaper People's Daily, and the following day an editorial appeared entitled "Sweep Out All Cow Demons and Snake Spirits." It declared that China was entering a "violent storm with the force to sweep everything out of its way."5 Thus began a period called the "ten lost years," lamented by both official Chinese historians and scholars in the West. By June 1966, student activists had mobilized, shortly to be joined by most of their classmates; by the end of the month all schools were closed. Called Red Guards, the students were instructed to attack and destroy the "Four Olds"&emdash;old ideas, old culture (including "reactionary" artifacts), old customs, and old habits&emdash;and to demolish the country's organizational structures. Many of these students were sons and daughters of Party bureaucrats, who later were to become, along with their families (including these same students), the ultimate targets of the Cultural Revolution. In these early stages, however, the students saw themselves as fervent patriots following their leader, and they set about their assignments with energy.6 For many, the ultimate experience of their lives was to be present at one of the eight Red Guard mass rallies held from August to December 1966 in Tiananmen Square, where they were greeted by Mao Zedong himself. Free train transportation was provided so that students could come from all over the country to attend. The students caused great havoc and destruction to both persons and property. Work places also were disrupted when workers joined the students. In 1968, army, under the leadership of the then minister of defense, Lin Biao, was called in to bring order to the country; by 1969, the first over. During the rest of the Cultural Revolution, the transformation of Chinese society envisioned by Mao was controlled from Beijing, and the visual arts were modelled according to ideals promulgated by Jiang Qing. The institutions formerly in charge of art, including the *academies of fine arts, the *Chinese Artists' Association and its branches, and most art publications, ceased to function for a number of years. Almost all artists had been sent to the countryside by the end of 1968. Unlike the *Great Leap Forward, when one of the objectives was to have artists assist in increasing production and another was to bring about a more truthful depiction of peasants and workers by having artists share their lives, this time the primary objective of rusticating artists, who fell into the categories of elitist and reactionary, was to erase finally all class distinctions between intellectual and manual workers by having each do the other's work. Intellectuals were to become one with laborers by laboring, and peasants and workers would become intellectuals by writing philosphy and creating art in its various forms. Artists were not permitted to create art of their own. The Cultural Revolution drew its strength from the personal support granted to it by Mao Zedong and, as a corollary, promoted what was later called the Cult of Personality. The cult was given impetus by the defense minister, Lin Biao, who in 1964 (before the Cultural Revolution commenced), had created the booklet Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, called "the little red book," made up of short excerpts from Mao's Collected Works, and ordered mass printings circulated to soldiers in the People's Liberation Army. Lin Biao died in a plane crash under strange circumstances in 1971, but the cult was perpetuated by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. After the Cultural Revoution had ended, personality cults were denounced as the antithesis of Party policy, but during this ten-year period there was pervasive adulation of Mao as the fountainhead of all good things that had been achieved by the Revolution. Mao Zedong died in September 1976. Six weeks later, in October, the Gang of Four were arrested, and the Cultural Revolution came to an end. The whereabouts and activities of most artists during this period are not documented in Chinese biographical dictionaries. Clearly, the majority of artists and the art establishment, like the rest of the nation, prefer to look to the future rather than to recall a painful past. Their reasons were spelled out at the Third Congress of the *Chinese Artists' Association, held in November 1979, the first to take place after the Cultural Revolution's policies had been terminated. *Jiang Feng, chairman of the Chinese Artists' Association and recently reinstated by the Party after a long period of expulsion, argued: "Only if we unite can we flourish in a true and comprehensive manner....Lin Biao and 'the Gang of Four' brought about ten years of destruction, which caused disunity amongst people and created chaos....My idea is to look forward to the future Let everybody unite together and make a contribution to our country."7 A major effort was made to rehabilitate artists who had been attacked and ostracized during the decade. For some it was too late. 3 Galikowski, Art and Politics, pp.139-140 n.6, cites Wang Nianyi, 1949-1989 nian de Zhongguo-- dadongluande niandai (China, 1949-1989-Years of Great Turbulence) (Zhengzbou: Henan People's Press,1988), pp.13-14. 4 Roderick MacFarquar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The People's Republic, Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution. 1966-1982. vol. 15, The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge,1991), pp.133-135. 5 "Sweep Out All Cow Demons and Snake Spirits," editorial in Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), 1 June 1966), p.1. 6 Andrews, Painters and Politics pp. 316-342 gives a description of student activity in Beijing. 7 Galikowski, Art and Politics , p.178.
Great Leap Forward (GLF) A movement begun by *Mao Zedong in March 1958, it followed the successful completion of China's first Five-Year Plan, in 1957. The goal was accelerated production, with steel and agriculture targeted for concentrated effort. Backyard steel-furnaces blossomed everywhere. The GLF was predicated on the belief that mass mobilization rather than bureaucratic planning was the most effective way to improve the economy's performance. "More, Faster, Better and More Economical" was the period motto. Most agricultural holdings, which had been merged into collectives between 1953 and 1957, were now converted into communes. In collectives, land and equipment had been shared, but benefits were allocated to individuals according to their labor contribution and other factors. Communes were a "higher level" of socialization: income was distributed on a per capita basis, and many functions, such as cooking and child care, which had remained private activites in collectives, were now organized by the commune; all private production was eliminated. Typically comprising 5,000 families, communes were larger aggregates than collectives; they overlapped the area of surrounding countryside that the towns had served and encompassed the same population. Communes now took over most of the functions of towns. It was believed that the changeover to the large scale of communes would boost crop yields. High production targets were set in every area according to the expected increases. Artists, like other producers, were expected to increase their output of art, but at the same time they had to increase the amount of manual labor they performed. Students and teachers of art, who were already spending part of their time working on farms and in physical toil. Sharing the lives of laboring people was also to be a process of reeducation: knowledge gained from the experience would make their art more truthful in depicting the masses. Simultaneously, the masses would join the ranks of intellectuals by participating with them in cultural activities. Unity of revolutionary purpose would result when class distinctions between intellectual and manual workers diminished because both were able to do the same work. Rusticated artists instructed the peasants in art creation. Peasant paintings of large-scale wall murals, created with the assistance of rusticated artists, in a style recalling the black outline and bright colors of folk prints, appeared for the first time in China, a concrete expression of the contemporary slogan, "Every home a poem, Every household a painting." Amateurs from among the peasants, workers and soldiers were encouraged to create in all cultural fields, including poetry and music as well as the visual arts. Political and economic decentralization,one of the general objectives of the GLF, had an effect on the art produced. It was during this period (1958) that the major *academies of fine art were removed from the jurisdiction of the *Central Academy of Fine Arts and placed under the supervision of their native provinces. Decentralization thus encouraged the development of regional art styles. The tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, in 1959, occurred during the GLF. As testimony to the accomplishments of the new state, construction of a group of monumental edifices, called the Ten Great Buildings, was begun in Beijing. Professional artists were called back from farms and commissioned to decorate them, and art works celebrating revolutionary history were commissioned in great numbers. Difficult international relationships developed for China during the GLF. Tensions grew with the Soviet Union, and Taiwan was forming a discomfiting alliance with the United States as well as nations to China's south and east. In response, artists were encouraged to use native art forms as an expression of patriotic nationalism. Mobilization of the masses failed to achieve the targets set. Much of the peasants' time was taken from tending the fields and devoted to art, backyard steel production and other projects; poor weather conditions compounded organizational problems, resulting in very poor crop yields. Moreover, the steel produced by farmers was not of a usable quality. GLF policies were revaluated by the Party in 1960, 1961 and 1962. Various leaders oversaw the drafting of a series of new policy papers. In the document usually referred to as the "Sixty Articles on Higher Education," the Party now directed cultural institutions to encourage professionalism rather than amateurism; reduction in extramural work activities of artists and students followed.8 8 Roderick MacFarquar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The People's Republic, Part 1: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949-1965 . vol .14, The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge),1987, p. 323
Guo Moruo (1892-1978; b. Leshan, Sichuan, to a Hakke family) Poet, writer, critic and Communist revolutionary, Guo was active in left wing circles in Shanghai in the 1930s. After the Japanese invasion, in 1937, he ran the Central Publicity Bureau of the Third Department of the Political Ministry for the Guomindang (Nationalist) government and organized the Union of Artists and Writers to produce resistance propaganda, initially in Hankou and, later, in *Chongqing. He was removed from his position by the Guomindang government in an anti- Communist drive of the early 1940s but became an influential official in the cultural world after 1949. Jiang Feng (1910-1982; b. Shanghai; original name, Zhou Xi) A woodblock artist who participated in 1931, in Shanghai, in the founding of *Lu Xun's Creative Print Movement, Jiang was jailed several times in the 1930s as a Communist activist. In 1938 he went to *Yantan, where he worked as a printmaker and then as a teacher and party cadre. Between 1949 and 1957 he held dominant positions in the *Chinese Artists' Association and the *Central Academy of Fine Arts. In the early 1950s he introduced into the academies the Yan'an conception of art education, which required students to learn Marxist and *Mao Zedong Thought and to devote considerable amounts of their time to working with peasants, workers and soldiers. Jiang also introduced the Russian system of art education, which stressed drawing from life and from plaster casts of sculpture, and acquiring the technical facility needed to paint with oils and watercolors; he also initiated the institution, adopted from Russia, of middle schools attached to major art academies. Because of his dedication to printmaking, the medium was granted independent departmental status within academies. His preference for Western modes of representation led to his being criticized in 1957 for being, among other things, a Rightist. He was honored, in 1979, after the Cultural Revolution had ended, with the presidency of the Chinese Artists' Association, although he had not held an official position since 1957. Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek; 1887-1975) A member of Sun Zhongshan's (Sun Yat-sen) Guomindang (National People's Party) from 1918, he became leader of the party a few years after Sun's death in 1925. His capital was Nanjing, from where he fought, intermittently, both the Communist forces and the Japanese. In 1931 his own army forced him to join the Communists in fighting the Japanese invasion of the Northeast. The attempt at a United Front, in 1937, had only partial success. When the anti-Japanese war ended, in 1945, unrestrained civil war broke out between the two forces; it ended with the declaration of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, and the withdrawal of the Guomindang army to the island of Taiwan. Jiang Qing (1914-1992; b. Shandong) The third wife of *Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing had a special interest in the performing arts and in their reform according to the revolutionary principles she developed. She was one of the initiators of the *Cultural Revolution and a member of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, which determined practically all cultural activity for a decade, from 1966 to 1976. Lu Xun (1881-1936; b. Shaoxing, Zhejiang; original name, Zhou Shuren) Founder and patron of the Creative Print Movement, Lu was the leading writer, critic, intellectual and revolutionary of the first half of the Republican Period (1912-1949). He studied medicine in Japan but decided that writing was the most effective way to influence China's destiny. Lu was a proponent of the the vernacular as a literary vehicle; he also translated European literature so it could serve as a source for the creation of a new Chinese style and translated Marxist literature to make its idealogical content available in Chinese. He advocated the adaptation of European printmaking styles as a source of renewal for the ancient Chinese woodblock tradition, and the use of woodblock prints for propaganda purposes. Lu never joined the Communist Party, but his sympathy with left wing causes-he founded the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930- forced him to spend the last years of his life hiding from the Guomindang in the Japanese Concession in Shanghai. Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts Located in *Yan'an, the headquarters of the Red Army from 1937, and named after the writer and patron of the Creative Print Movement, the academy was founded October 1, 1938, to teach cadres the basic techniques of literature, art, music and drama, and how to use them as vehicles for propaganda. Printmaking was the dominant medium for the visual arts, as material for painting was difficult to procure. Courses lasted from three to six months, and the program required both students and teachers o spend much of their time working alongside the peasants. With the Shanbei Public school, it was one of the main institutions, until 1949, for educating cadres. After *Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yan'an Forum (1942), the adoption and adaptation of peasant art forms was mandated. In concert with the creation of the Yan'an visual arts, poets and dramatists, like Ai Qing and Li Ji, (whose works inspired prints by Yan Han in this exhibition), began to use popular forms of poetry and drama for their creations. The efficacy of the visual arts and performing groups in spreading the Communist messages to a largely illiterate audience cannot be overestimated. Graduates of "Luyi," as the academy was called, were sent out to villages to act as administrators or assigned to army cultural groups in the field, living and working in arduous conditions. After 1949 many became leaders of the Chinese art establishment, including Yan Han, Wang Qi, Gu Yuan, Niu Wen and Lin Jun, who are represented in this exhibition. Others, like Li Shaoyan, were educated and/or taught at the Lu Xun Academy in Shenyang and North China University, institutions modelled on Luyi. *Zhou Yang, the first dean of the academy, was one of the most influential interpreters of Mao Zedong's thoughts on cultural matters then and after the founding of the People's Republic of China; during the Cultural Revoution, however, he was removed from all official positions. Mao Zedong (Mao Tze-tung; 1893-1976; b. Xiangtan, Hunan) Born into a Hunanese peasant family, Mao was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, in 1921. Chairman of a Chinese soviet established in Jiangxi, he was forced by the superior numbers of the Guomindang (Nationalist) army to evacuate the province and lead his army on the Long March, which ended in Shaanxi in 1935. Contrary to the Russian advice to work for an uprising of the urban proletariat in order to bring about a Communist revolution, Mao advocated use of armed force to gain and hold base areas&emdash;i.e., areas of consolidated Communist control- from which the Party's influence could be extended by mobilization of the local peasantry. As chairman of the Communist Party, he declared the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. He remained China's supreme leader until his death, in September 1976. Open-Door Policy First initiated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Central Committee, in December 1978, the Open Door Policy (also called the Policy of Reform and Opening Out) sought liberalization in order to accomplish the "four modernizations," in agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology.9 Western industrial nations were to be considered suitable sources from which China could procure the new technologies. Chinese students soon were going abroad to study, and Westerners, including tourists, students, and industrialists seeking to invest, began coming to China in large numbers. The Open-Door Policy has led to great changes in Chinese life and, certainly, to dramatic innovations in the art of the nation. 9 MacFarquar and Fairbank, The People's Republic Part 2 , pp.351ff.; 377 ff.
People's Liberation Army (PLA) Formed in 1927 and originally called the Red Army, it came into being as the armed branch of scattered, newly created Chinese soviets in Southern China. Because the aim was to make the army different from either that of the Guomindang (Nationalist) or of the warlords, egalitarianism was stressed, and soldiers and officers received equal salaries and provisions. They also received political training in methods of mobilizing the peasants. In Maoist ideology, the army is one of a trilogy, along with workers and peasants, that makes up the masses. Under attack by superior Guomindang forces, the army, led by *Mao Zedong and composed of some 100,000 men, made the long trek from the Jiangxi-Fujian border westward and then northward across hostile terrain until it arrived in the fall of 1935 in the poor and mountainous northern province of Shaanxi with some 7,000 survivors. There it joined a small Chinese soviet to form a base area. In the fall of 1937, after the Second United Front Agreement with the Guomindang, it was renamed the Eighth Route Army of the United Front. With the victory over Japan in 1945, the bitter struggle for dominance between the Communist and Guomindang forces was renewed, and the army was renamed again (along with the Communist New Fourth Army based in the Taihang Mountains) the People's Liberation Army. Veterans of the Long March were heroes of the Communist revolution, and the struggles of the army and its leaders were continual subjects of printmaking. Mao Zedong placed a high value on the propaganda effectiveness of cultural vehicles and considered culture necessary to a soldier's training: "An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy." l0 Even before the *Yan'an days, the army had cultural troupes for both the performing and the visual arts. Almost all of the older generation of printmakers in this exhibition served in such army groups, including Yan Han, Gu Yuan, Lai Shaoqi, Chao Mei, Li Shaoyan, Niu Wen, Li Huanmin, Huang Xinbo, and Lin Jun. The PLA maintains facilities for soldiers to learn to be artists. and art creation studios in which to create art. It also mounts exhibitions of artists from its ranks. The careers of second-generation printmakers like Chao Mei and Fu Lin began in the army. 10 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong). Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1966), p.303.
Xinchao (New Wave) is the name given to a group of artists active in the mid-1980s, whose styles often had little in common but who were searching for new approaches to creating art, particularly those associated with the West. After the introduction of the *Open-Door Policy, in 1978, Chinese artists became aware of art movements elsewhere in the world and began to explore their potential for expression of personal artistic concerns. Xu Bing and Fang Lijun, who exhibited in the *China Avant Garde exhibition, in 1988, are considered NewWave artists. Xingxing (Stars) was one of the first groups of artists who banded together for mutual support after the *Open-Door Policy, initiated in 1979, made non-official art organizations possible. They explored forms of artistic expression outside the parameters of socialist art. At first denied official exhibition space, they were later permitted to show their works in Beijing's Beihai Park in 1979, and in the China Art Gallery in 198O, after which they disbanded. The work was not of universally high quality, but the exhibitions attracted many visitors because of their sheer novelty. Ma Desheng was one of the organizers of the exhibitions. Xu Beihong (1895-1953; b.Yixing, Jiangsu) was a painter and teacher of both Western and Chinese painting; he studied classical academic Western drawing and oil painting in France and Germany. He considered traditional Chinese art to be moribund and advocated the importation of nineteenth century European academic art in order to create a new, combined Chinese-European style. Since socialist realism owed its origins to the same academic tradition, Xu Beihong is sometimes called the first Chinese socialist realist painter. He shared with the Soviet socialist realists an intense dislike of modernists like Cezanne and Matisse. He was director of the National Beiping Arts College and, after 1949, of its successor, the *Central Academy of Fine Arts. He also became, in 1949, the first president of the All-China Art Workers' Association, forerunner of the *Chinese Artists' Association. Yan'an was the headquarters of the Communist forces' base area in Shaanxi, of the poorest provinces in China, from January 1937 until 1947. Its administration became a prototype for that of the People's Republic of China when the latter was founded on October 1, 1949: there were separate organizations for the Communist Party and for the military command, with the Party the ascendant agent. Art cadres worked together with soldiers alongside the peasants and used their talents in propaganda to educate the latter to the Communist agenda, which included equality of the sexes, literacy, improved hygiene, husbandry, redistribution of land, and revolution. Zhou Enlai (1898-1976; b. Shaoxing, Zhejiang) was one of the early leaders of the Red Army (*om 1928) and remained a close associate of *Mao Zedong after the Long March ended, in 1935, in Shaanxi. In 1938, during the period of the Second United Front resistance to the Japanese invasion he was sent to *Chongqing to act as the Communist liaison to the Guomindang. He was afterwards premier of the People's Republic of China and a member of the Politburo for forty-eight years, until his death. Himself a poet, he had a lifelong interest in cultural affairs and often acted as an intermediary between artists and extreme anti-intellectual elements in the Party. He incurred the enmity of *Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong and leader of the so-called Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution. His historical contribution to his country's cause was recorded by many artists in prints after the Gang of Four were discredited, in 1977. Zhou Yang (1908-1989) First dean of the *Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts, Zhou became deputy director of the Propaganda Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and, shortly afterwards, vice-Minister for Cultural Affairs. Through much of his career he was considered the spokesman for Mao Zedong on cultural matters. In particular, he advocated use of China's own cultural tradition as the basis of new art forms for the new society, although in the early 1950s he, along with the rest of the art establishment, also advised artists to learn from Soviet socialist realism. |