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Themes, Style, and the Historical Background
by Iris Wachs |
Art During The Cultural Revolution The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or, as it is usually called, the *Cultural Revolution, began in May 1966 when China entered a period known as "the ten lost years." As the name implies, the Cultural Revolution was aimed at the cultural establishment, and artists and art organizations were among the first to feel its impact. By June 1966 all art academies had ceased to function and, by January 1967, the *Chinese Artists' Association had been taken over by Red Guards. Almost all artists were sent to work on communes, where they performed manual labor, taught art creation to peasants and workers, and assisted them in the production of art. They had been assigned similiar tasks during the Great Leap Forward, but this time they were generally prohibited from creating art of their own.33 From 1966 to the early 1970s, most of the art, including works exhibited and/or popularized through reproduction in publications, was created by students and amateur artists from among the masses. The subjects were the revolution and their participation in it, as well as their esteem for their leader. The quantity of art they generated was considerable, most of it the product of collective anonymous creation. Much of such mass art, however, was transient, on billboard and blackboard, and has not survived. In addition, many works of art from the Cultural Revolution were destroyed, damaged, altered or removed from public view in the backlash that followed the fall of the Gang of Four. (34) For example, to be included in this exhibition, Song Enhou's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), had to undergo major restoration to repair the tears resulting from its having been folded and torn. Cultural Revolution slogans have been made illegible by the artists on Wang Qi's Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32), and Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat. 101), by Li Yingjin et al. Furthermore, a number of prints from the period were renamed afterwards. Peasants as Creators of Art A main objective of the Cultural Revolution, elimination of class differences, required that all sectors of society converge in interest and abilities. Therefore it was as important that the masses participate in cultural activity as that artists do manual labor. Mass cultural activities included participation in Chinese opera, drama, singing, and musical and poetic composition as well as creation of visual art. Peasants and workers were encouraged to record the process of their cultural awakenings, as in this statement, published in 1967, in which a young Moslem woman demonstrates a model attitude toward her membership in an amateur theatrical troupe:
One Slab of Stone, 1973 (cat.90), by Jiang Xianliu et al, is an example of a work created during the Cultural Revolution by a farmers' art creation group. It is far more sophisticated than peasant art produced during the Great Leap Forward and stylistically quite different. During the Great Leap Forward, peasants had taken the characteristics of popular prints-black outline, flat color, tipped-up ground, and exaggerated size to indicate an object's importance-and translated them into their wall murals and paintings. Water Reservoir, 1959 (cat. 6), well represents this style. Most Cultural Revolution art, however, was determined by the tastes of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who favored Western perspective, shading and proportion. Collaboration with rusticated professional artists helped the amateurs create works with these characteristics. In One Slab of Stone, the artists have preserved the stylized decorative quality of popular prints in the rendering of trees and flowers, giving the print a "folksy" character; but objects become smaller as they recede into the distance and are arranged to lie on lines of (Western) perspective converging somewhere on the invisible horizon. There is also some shading on clothing, particularly around the waistlines, to indicate volume. The themes of peasant art, however-their ordinary daily preoccupations and the socialist contribution to their lives-remain the same as during the Great Leap Forward. Amateur artists were also assisted by great numbers of printed how-to-do-it pamphlets and booklets prepared by professional artists, which showed the steps in drawing the human figure, the central subject of most socialist art. Such guides were, in fact, a continuation of an old Chinese tradition of printed art instruction manuals, but now the interest was in how to portray people at work rather than how to render traditional subjects such as bamboo and plum blossoms (fig. 7). Anonymous Art and Collective Creation Throughout the decade of the Cultural Revolution, because individualism was considered rightist and reactionary, much art was created by several individuals working together anonymously. Many prints in the exhibition, such as One Slab of Stone and Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat. 101), are unsigned, and the names of the artists who created them were located for this catalogue in post-Cultural Revolution publications of reproductions, where they are listed, or because their names are written somewhere on the print by an anonymous hand. Furthermore, it is quite probable that many signatures that do appear on exhibition works created during the Cultural Revolution were added by their creators only afterwards, as this was a common practice. Much art was the collective product of amateurs assisted by professionals. Of the four artists credited with producing Fighting Ba Mountain only one name can be located in Chinese dictionaries of artists&emdash;the others presumably were amateurs or students. Furthermore, if there was professional assistance, the expert often remains unidentified for instance, from among the six artists credited (in publications) with creating One Slab of Stone, all are farmers; the sophistication of the print suggests considerable professional assistance, but no professional is named. In addition, no prints identified as the work of professional woodblock printmakers, individually or collectively, and dating from between 1965 and l972, the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, appear at all among the reproductions (seen by this writer) of major retrospective collections published by fine art publishing houses in China after 1980.36 Yet by this date, art publishing houses again were able to publish collections chosen by the art establishment for their excellence and historical importance rather than for reasons relating only to the artists' origins. That they did not include prints made between 1965 and 1972 suggests that such prints do not exist, because professional artists were not permitted to create art during these years. Our exhibition also has no prints from this period, signed or unsigned, with the possible exception of Fu Lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat. 102.), which may have been produced in the late 1960s. The names of professional artists again appear as printmakers around 1972, most frequently on collective creations, because joining one's identity with that of others was politically correct. Senior artists worked with relative unknowns in group creation, as Huang Peimo did when he produced In Praise of the Red Flag, 1972 (cat. 23), as part of the series Lauding the Long Rainbow; Lai Shaoqi, a veteran artist, collaborated with artists in Anhui Province-where he had been sent-on the picture The New Image of Huaibei, 1975 (cat. 112); and some renowned professional artists collaborated with each other, as Xu Kuang and Ah Ge did for The Master, 1978 (cat. 95). Collective creation continued to be common until 1979, when new cultural policies were introduced.
Art Creation in the Early 1970s The year 1972 was preceded and followed by events that were to have great significance for the country and its artists. A more stable national environment followed the Ninth Party Congress (1969). The death of Lin Biao, the radical defense minister (who had given much impetus to the Cultural Revolution and the cult of Mao Zedong), in 1971, removed his influence, and a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere for artists ensued. Important exhibitions were planned to celehrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Yan'an Talks, in 1972, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the new Republic, in 1974. Furthermore,1971 and 1972 were also pivotal years in the development of China's international relationships: in 1971 China finally was admitted to the United Nations, and in 1972 President Richard Nixon visited the country. An influx of foreign diplomats was expected, and accommodations for them, suitably decorated, had to be prepared. The foreign ministry decided that traditional guohua paintings, including landscapes, should be among the works commissioned for the hotels and restaurants that would serve foreigners; Zhou Enlai, who had often shown a more liberal understanding of artists'problems than Jiang Qing, took an active part in advising the committee in charge of decoration. He did not consider it necessary for paintings intended for foreign viewers to have socialist content. On his advice, some professional painters and woodblock artists were called back from labor in the communes to produce the required work.37 Landscape Art During this period, guohua landscape painting, including art intended for the Chinese public, enjoyed a general revival among the art authorities because the status and style of landscape prints was related to the status of, and developments in, guohua landscape painting, we shall follow the critical reception of the latter. As noted above, in 1949 guohua landscape painting had been found wanting because it was created for an elite by an elite, neither the style nor the subject matter was deemed at that time to be of interest to the masses. In the late 1950s the movement to use Chinese art forms and the introduction of socialist content into landscapes (by portraying socialist construction) had led to the acceptance of some landscape art as having the correct political qualities. An anonymous reviewer explains, in 1972, how the depiction in landscape art of socialist achievements had come about: "Painters in the traditional style have gone to the countryside or factories to be re-educated ..... The excellent progress they have made both in their political thinking and in their experience of life has laid a certain ideological foundation for renovating our traditional art, and they are eager to reflect .... works with a new content-the mighty construction projects in industry and agriculture."38 It was also discovered that traditional Chinese landscape had the ability to symbolize the spiritual qualities of the masses. Critics had found this quality in the guohua landscape painting This Land So Rich In Beauty, created in 1959 by the venerable guohua landscape painters (Guan Shanyue and Fu Baoshi.) The words of the painting's title and the subject were taken from a famous poem called Snow, by Mao Zedong. Hung in a prominent position in the Great Hall of the People, the painting had been greatly acclaimed, no doubt as much because the author of the poem was the esteemed leader of the nation as for the excellence of the art.39 Commenting on it in 1960, the art critic Deng Wen remarked, "when people admire the sublimity of mountains, the breadth of the ocean, the enduring quality of the pine ... they are admiring the spiritual qualities of man which coincide with these characteristics of nature....This is even more apparent in our new landscapes, many of which embody the ideas and feelings of the labouring people....[A picture of mountains and forests] ... not only presents the grandeur of China's countryside, but expresses our people's aspiring spirit and boundless confidence."40 Thus a landscape, whether a guohua painting or a print, was now acceptable because it depicted noble mountains and forests-metaphors for the masses-and not only because it depicted the masses' conquest of nature in a socialist state. Western viewers tend to be disconcerted by these works, as they violate the Western notion of how a Chinese landscape should look. But analysis of them reveals the artists' amazing inventive powers in solving the problems posed by the type. In Huang Peimo's print A Distant Source and a Long Stream, 1973 (cat. 24), for example, industrial installations follow an S-shaped line that leads the eye into deep space, a device taken from Soviet socialist realism; at the same time, the multiple viewpoints of traditional Chinese painting permits us to look down on the ship while we look straight out to the farthest chimneys. Colors fade on far-off objects, in the classic Chinese landscape technique for indicating distance, and the use of overlapping mountains and texture strokes also give the print a "traditional" air. The industrial installations are of impressive size compared with the trees and sailboats nearby, but they are dwarfed by the grandeur of the mountains surrounding them. The red glow that tinges the most distant towers and hills complements the greenish-blue that is the landscape's dominant color, an allusion to the green-blue style of landscape popular in the Tang Dynasty (618906); the glowing empty spaces of blank white paper that surround the installations are a classic Chinese landscape technique harking back to the Song Dynasty (960-1278). The print has the quality of a dream materializing before our eyes. Its dramatic monumentality makes it an example of a landscape with the qualities of revolutionary romanticism, the style particularly recommended in Chinese aesthetic criticism since 1956. Revolutionary romanticism, an intensification of the basic socialist realist style, usually took idealized and heroic depictions of workers or peasants as its subjects. Here it is realized in a landscape that depicts both "the sublimity of mountains" and socialist construction. Furthermore, by using long-established landscape conventions, the picture fulfills Mao's dictum to make "the past serve the present." An even more sublime mountain setting envelops the hydroelectric dam in Feng Zhongtie's High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below, 1973 (cat.77). Feng uses the converging lines of Western perspective in the area depicting the dam, but overlapping silhouettes of mountains, valleys filled with luminous white, and ink tones which fade in the distance, are all devices for indicating spatial relationships taken from classical Chinese ink painting. The printmaking technique that Feng uses to achieve variation in ink tone, however, is quite different from the standard printmaker's technique for creating areas of more and less concentrated black. Lin Jun, for example, in his print At the Foot of the Miao Mountains, 1954 (cat. 84), varies the density of printed lines to achieve lighter or darker areas, using the European wood-engraving technique. Feng achieves nuance by using paler ink on parts of the block, and also by reinking and reprinting other areas where he wishes to achieve a rich black. The process may well have been invented by Feng, who had already, in 1962, begun to create nuanced ink tones.41 (Differences of tone achieved by varying the intensity of the ink's blackness and the number of times a section of the block is reprinted can be found in other prints from Sichuan in the exhibition, including Fighting the Ba Mountain, l976 [cat.101] by Hu Dingyu, et al and Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 [cat. 97]; the technique became popular in the province in the 1970s when its aesthetic potential was recognized). Other technical innovations used in High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below raise interesting guestions. In this print white highlights generated by blank paper outline the crests of rich, black-ink mountains. The traditional means to delineate the form of mountains in Chinese landscapes, however, had been to outline them with black lines&emdash;brush strokes in paintings or, in the case of prints, lines that resembled brush strokes. Feng Zhongtie had employed the traditional technique in his earlier works but, in 1963, began to shape mountains and ridges to resemble the ripples and curves of waves and to use white at the edges of the shapes in a way that recalls the reflection of sun on water; his mountains appear as if they are waves in an ocean, features without antecedent in Chinese landscape depiction.42 The stylistic innovation is so striking, so without precedent, and so resemble a description in a poem (known to every literate Chinese), by Mao Zedong and called "Lou Mountain Pass" (1935), that to this writer there is no other explanation but that lines from the poem inspired Feng's style. In his poem Mao describes a mountain range just climbed by the army (and located across the border from Sichuan in Guizhou Province), as "green mountains like oceans."43 Feng's mountains, modelled like waves in an ocean, are a visual realization of the simile, paying homage to the poem and its author. We have noted that printmakers were aware of, and influenced by, developments in contemporary guohua landscape painting. Stylistic innovations might flow in the other direction as well, and techniques developed by printmakers could be adopted by painters. In his guohua painting, dating from 1971 or 1972 and actually called Lou Mountain Pass, the artist Li Keran uses white to outline the mountain crests, shaping them like rippled and crested waves almost exactly as Feng Zhongtie does.44 There are no white outlines in Li's work from the 1960s, however, while they are already noticeable in Feng's work in 1963. Furthermore, the use of white lines against black is a printmaker's technique (negative carving), as Chang Tsong-zung observed to me when discussing High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below. Feng's prints were widely exhibited, and it is more than possible that Li had seen them. On this occassion it seems probable that a painter borrowed a method of rendering mountains invented by a printmaker. The "waves outlined in white" in Feng's mountain views were an ideal model for Li's own pictorial realization of the image from Mao's poem. Li Keran was famous for innovations of his own and known from the 1950s for introducing Western realism into traditional Chinese landscape painting. Because he lived and worked in Beijing, a center of the art establishment and also for the publishing industry, exhibitions of his work were widely reviewed, his paintings were frequently reproduced in art journals, and his art influenced other landscape artists, including printmakers. For instance, the shadows of mountains seen in water, adopted from Western art and unknown to classical Chinese painting, appear extensively in Li's guohua landscapes by the late 1960s (although not in Loushan Pass). The high incidence of such shadows in both landscape prints and paintings by other artists that begins in the early l970s is probably largely due to awareness of Li's use of them. In China an artist's prestige is a powerful reason for other artists to adopt his artistic methods. Shadows on water are evident in Feng's High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below and Huang's A Distant Source and a Long Stream, as well as other landscape prints that we will discuss below all dating from the 1970s or later&emdash;and have been thoroughly domesticated, although they do not appear in landscapes by Feng Zhongtie and, scarcely, in other printmakers, before the early 1970s. (Curiously, shadows on people and cast by people had been much used by printmakers already in the 1930s, but shadows cast by mountains on water became common in Chinese art only much later.) Shadows appear also in the collaborative work by Li Yitai et al Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat.101), whose monumental size echoes its monumental theme, and which is another example of revolutionary romanticism in a landscape print. (Monumentality, itself a form of romanticism, is a feature of much Cultural Revolution art, figurative as well as landscape.) Fighting the Ba Mountain utilizes much the same synthesis of Chinese and Western techniques for depicting landscapes as High Canyoas Above, Smooth Lake Below. Completed construction, which occupies the medium and far distance in the print, is bathed in light, as are the constructions in A Distant Source and a Long Stream and High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below; the Chinese viewer would understand that, in all these prints, the rising sun, symbol of socialism and of Mao Zedong, is the source of the illumination. Human beings, scarcely visible in High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below and A Distant Source and a Long Stream, which date from the early 1970s are, however, very much in evidence in Fighting the Ba Mountain, created several years later, when there was renewed emphasis on the masses as the moving force in the construction of their new world. The notion of struggle, implicit in the title and abounding in the printed word during the Cultural Revolution, is dramatized by the figures: silhouetted on the ridge above, busy in the valley below and prominent in the foreground, the masses are everywhere at work. Shadows also play an interesting role, as we shall see, in The New Image of Huaibei, 1975 (cat. 112), by Lai Shaoqi et al. The print alludes to traditional landscape painting by emulating the narrow, vertical format of the Chinese hanging scroll. The mix of Chinese and Western techniques, however, is quite different from that in the prints discussed above. The ground plane, tilted up so that we look down steeply to the foreground but also straight ahead to a spur of hills in the distance, is a Chinese convention. The topography of this landscape, however a continuous plain is Western. The word for landscape in Chinese, shanshui, literally means mountains and water; in a classical Chinese landscape, our view ends at the mountains or, on occasion, at a forest, but in this print the plane continues beyond the hills. Furthermore, the composition is organized by Western linear perspective, deliberately emphasized by the march of the tree lines toward a distant convergence point. "Reading" the print, we realize that the shadows cast by the trees lining the fields clearly indicate that the sun is rising in the east, and it is a socialist sun that radiates brightness on everything. The signs of human activity&emdash;commune members harvesting yellow grain and white cotton, and smoke rising from industrial structures&emdash;instruct us that the effort of the masses in the commune system brings self-sufficiency. Bright greens, together with strong red accents, dominate the print. Green in China traditionally has symbolized life, just as red has symbolized happiness, warmth, vitality, and male virility. The fact that red is also the color symbolic of Communism was a felicitous synthesis for the Party of symbolic associations. Furthermore, green and red together are a Chinese metaphor for the universe, and this is one of the meanings the Chinese viewer would find in The New Image of Huaibei: the commune has everything. Green, green-blues and blue-greens abound in both guohua landscape paintings and landscape prints made during the l970s. Ellen Laing quotes a review that appeared in 1972, in which the painting Canal of Happiness, by Hou Dechang, is praised because "beyond the [canal] is a vast expanse of verdant fields spreading far beyond the horizon....The luxuriant verdure has swept away the gloomy and desolate atmosphere ... in the old landscape paintings.'"45 The review could just as well have been of The New Image of Huaibei, which partakes of the period themes both in subject and coloration (though not in composition). A guohua painting called A Great Wall of Green Forests, done in 1972 by Guan Shanyue (one of the painters of This Land So Rich in Beauty, made for the Great Hall of the People, discussed above), may have amplified the popularity of greenish colors in landscapes. The painting received numerous laudatory reviews.46 The artist's narration of how he came to choose his subject and how he arrived at technical solutions for the effects he wanted to convey was also published: "After Liberation, Chairman Mao called on us to carry out afforestation throughout the country....I raised my political consciousness and made up my mind to take this afforestation as the theme of a traditional-style painting....To convey the idea that this forest belt is by no means tranquil and the class struggle is still acute, I painted in some mi]itiamen."47 Guan then adds some observations on his technique: "To suggest the luxuriant green of these trees, I used malachite. Since this traditional pigment is opaque and refractory, I applied it in layers as in oil-painting to create an effect of depth" (p. 120).
It is not surprising to find that both the theme and coloration of A Great Wall of Green Forests abound in period prints. The art authorities indicated to artists what themes, style, and even color, were currently desirable, and if a painting was created by a great artist whose work enjoyed political approval, and who cited the Party's Chairman as the inspiration for his subject, it surely would become a model work. The mountains in Huang Peimo's A Distant Source and a Long Stream, discussed above, are colored malachite blue-green; and Chao Mei's Defense of the Northern Border, 1978 (cat. 19), uses shades of malachite to give atmospheric color to the forest and also takes as its subject the theme of militia on patrol among trees, still topical in 1978. Even Song Enhou was influenced by the period fashion for malachite blue-green in landscapes. A welder and worker-artist, Song's characteristic work deals with industrial subjects; for example, The Eagle Attracts the Big Sky, 1981 (cat. 106), with its huge, soaring crane. It seems, however, that everyone was doing landscapes. In Untitled, dating from around 1972 (cat. 104), Song depicts a group of People's Liberation Army soldiers. who have arrived to view mountains and water in a landscape overlayed with malachite blue. Again we realize that they&emdash;and we&emdash;are looking toward the east, from where the sun is rising, the latter as much identified with Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution as the "little red book" (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong) that the soldiers are holding. The direction from which the light comes is made clear by the shadows. Symbolically, sun and book tinge the water red. Mao's thoughts inspire the soldiers as they contemplate a landscape because, as in the quotation cited above, "when people admire the sublimity of mountains ... they are admiring the spiritual qualities of man....[A picture of mountains] ... not only presents the grandeur of China's countryside, but expresses our people's aspiring spirit and boundless confidence."48 The scholar sitting on an outcrop of rock contemplating mountains, with a winding path descending to a valley below, was a recurring subject of traditional landscape painting; our soldiers, however, have arrived by sturdy mechanized vehicles and are a new class of nature lovers. Our essay has devoted proportionally more attention to landscape prints than they, or the paintings to which they were related, received during the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Reviews praising guohua landscapes, a measure in China of official approval of an art form, were published only between 1972 and 1974. Jiang Qing is said to have had a strong dislike for guohua painting, especially landscape painting, considering it elitist and bourgeoise. She is also said to have disliked Zhou Enlai, whose authority had led to the commissioning of guoLua painting as decoration for facilities to be used by foreigners. (Numerous stories were related after the fall of the Gang of Four about her attitudes on these matters.49) By 1974 Zhou Enlai was already seriously ill and scarcely active in the cultural world. Jiang Qing, now the preeminent arbiter of national taste, therefore ordered removed most of the guohua paintings that had been commissioned by the foreign ministry, disparaging them, it is said, as the "Hotel School" of painting. They were collected and some seven-hundred displayed in a special exhibition of "Black Painting" held in February 1974; regional Black Painting exhibitions were held around the country, and reviews of guohua painting soon disappeared from the press.50 Landscape prints with socialist content, however, seem to have escaped the general censure now meted out to guohua landscape paintings and continued to appear throughout the Cultural Revolution, probably because no one considered prints an elite art, and also because they carried the correct political messages to the masses. Some bear evidence that they won this public's approval. Exhibited in China unframed and without cover, as was the custom of the time with prints, Huang Peimo's A Distant Source and a Long Stream, 1973 (cat. 24), was evidently touched many times. This may shock us at first, with our notions of art as something precious, whose elevated status requires careful protection to keep the viewer at bay. But these prints were made for the people and displayed in towns and villages in locations little resembling museums or galleries. If one imagines peasants approaching the picture, amazed at the dream-like reality it portrays, and then touching the paper to see if such an image could really lie upon its surface, one realizes that it fascinated and pleased the audience for which it was intended. Industrial Construction as the Subject of Prints Industrial landscapes could be created without the "landscape," that is, without natural scenery. Huang Peimo turned to the building of the Great Yangzi Bridge for inspiration for his industrial landscape In Praise of the Red Flag, 1972 (cat. 23). Chinese engineers finished the bridge by 1974, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. The massive achievement was celebrated in all media, including a considerable number of paintings and prints. Huang's work is one from a group creation called Lauding the Long Rainbow (1972-1974) produced by artists from Nanjing, the site of the bridge. The subject of Huang's picture is an early stage of the bridge's construction: a truncated pyramid of scaffolding (seen from a low viewpoint, in the Soviet manner), already capped by three red flags, rises up from the base. The source of illumination is indicated by light and shadow: in the east a red sun is rising and has illuminated the flags and the side facing east. But the part of the structure, not facing east and not yet completed, is still in shadow, like the workers hurrying to their jobs, who are darkened silhouettes. Only hastening the work of socialist construction&emdash;the bridge's completion&emdash;will bring on full daylight. (The same contrast between completed work bathed in light, while work in progress is performed by active, darkened and silhouetted figures can be seen in Fighting the Ba Mountain, [cat. 101].) The picture abounds with accurate realistic detail, testimony to the artist's careful study of his subject and probably also to the critical participation of workers from the project. Artists were required to submit their industrial "likenesses" to the workers for examination to assure technical accuracy. Industrial projects were a favorite of worker-artists who, not unnaturally, portrayed what they knew best, their own work environments. The "Shanghai, Yangquan, Luda Workers' Exhibition," a collection of art created in various media by workers from the three cities, was held in Beijing in 1974 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the People's Republic of China. Luda, in Liaoning Province, is a city with refineries and shipbuilding installation; of the twenty-four pictures by Luda workers illustrated in a published selection from the exhibition, thirteen contain images of ships and, of these thirteen, six are of the ship called Daqing.51 Daqing was the first great oil field discovered in China, and construction of the ship named in its honor was a major accomplishment for the Luda shipyard. The ship's launching was thus a double celebration and publicized in all media. Joining worker-artists in spirit, the veteran printmaker Wang Qi created an image of the ship that communicates not only its massive size and the worker activity that brought it to completion, but also the celebratory nature of the launching. It is, however, the composition of Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32), that is particularly interesting. The sense of the ship's majesty is generated by use of a formula found in some Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) and Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) landscape paintings.52 In such compositions, which use the Chinese multiple point of view, the spectator stands slightly above and looks down on a low spit of land while at the same time looking across a level body of water and then up to a looming mountain on the other side, precisely the view we are given in Launching Celebration. In classical landscapes, foreground trees often frame the mountain just as, in this print, cranes frame the vessel. The term "industrial landscape" here becomes singularly appropriate. Depictions of the Masses and Their Leaders in Prints By far the most numerous subjects of art works from the Cultural Revolution are the masses&emdash;peasants, workers, soldiers&emdash;and their leaders. Some of the techniques used for their depiction are found in much socialist realist art and were not new to the Cultural Revolution; but in works of this period, the basic style is exaggerated and reduced to a few simplified formulas. Revolutionary romanticism, the intensification of the basic socialist realist style, was the approved mode and, although it had been popular since 1956, the degree of intensification that now appeared had no precedent in earlier works. Applied to figure depiction, the term "revolutionary romanticism" implied images of the masses and their heroes brought to the highest level of idealism and also created according to new formulas developed by Jiang Qing in the 1960s. Most Cultural Revolution figurative art is recognizable as a product of the period, and we shall point out its characteristics as we discuss individual prints. Mass movements portrayed The most idealistic and romantic aspect of the Cultural Revolution, the ideological basis promoted by Mao Zedong and his allies, was the belief that mass mobilization could sweep all obstacles before it and bring about total revolution. We have noted that, when mass mobilization was tried during the Great Leap Forward, art from that period often depicted groups of people bursting with energy and joy as they welcomed the changes taking place. (For instance, in prints such as The People's Commune Is Good, [cat. 11] and The Commune's Club [cat. 10], both from the late 1950s or early 1960s). During the Cultural Revolution, however, crowd scenes (those in which figures are far more numerous than group scenes) became a popular subject of prints. In such crowd scenes the emphasis is on the mass character of the movement, on the participation of the multitudes of the Chinese nation united in a like-minded effort to promote revolutionary aims. In prints such as Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108), undated but from the early 1970s; Fu Lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat. 102), also undated but probably from the late 1960s or early 1970s; Song Enho's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105); and Wang Qi's Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32), the crowd's uniformity of mission and the vastness of its numbers are suggested by filling up large areas with scarcely differentiated, overlapping faces, reduplicated like symbolic ciphers. In many crowd scenes, however, the artist also takes care to make large images of a particular peasant, worker, and soldier stand out, as in Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation is Like a Swelling Tide and Fu Lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood. Peasants, workers, and soldiers are the constituents of the masses, and the particularization of their representatives in a trio not only clarifies who the masses are but also reinforces the symbolism by reduplicating it. The Influence of Jiang Qing's "Model Operas" Between 1961 and 1965 Jiang Qing had developed a group of "model operas" (afterwards augmented to "eight performance pieces," which included a piano concerto), with the objective of eliminating any lingering feudal and bourgeoise elements from this art form that was so very popular with the masses. The principles that were codified for the reform of the operas were than applied to all the visual arts, including prints, and the necessity of observing the principles was repeatedly emphasized in newspapers and journals.53 Clarity of message was one of the criteria for evaluating excellence in an opera. Language, which clarified a character's attitudes in a performance, could perform the same function in the title of a print; writing anywhere on the picture acted as a kind of gloss on the content, further obviating ambiguity, as in Cai Dian's undated The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108) and numerous other prints from the period. A formula developed for the operas, called the "three prominences," was intended to clarify meaning still further by allocating a specific location for every character on the stage or in a design. According to the formula, when several characters are depicted together, subsidiary characters yield prominence to positive characters (that is, those without political orientation yield to those with commitment to the revolution), positive characters yield to heroes and heroines, and the latter yield to the leading hero or heroine, who is usually found at the meeting point of two diagonals, typically the apex of a triangle.54 In group scenes the most important character often appears close to the center, while less important characters stand close to him or her, forming a block to one side in a kind of optical wedge that thrusts the eye back to the central character. The heroes, brought forward to the picture plane, appear monumental because of the large area they occupy in relation to the total area of the picture. As noted in the discussion on landscape art, emphasis on monumentality was a characteristic of the Cultural Revolution variety of revolutionary romanticism. Furthermore, the figures not only appear monumental, but the size of the prints in which they appear are also monumental for the medium. The source of light in figure depiction The principles of stage lighting developed by Jiang Qing for the model operas (adopted from Western theater presentation&emdash;such lighting had no precedent in Chinese opera) also were translated into the other visual arts. Figures in Cultural Revolution prints are bathed in light that appears to come from above, like a spotlight, a phenomenon particularly noticeable in prints created with color, such as some of those discussed above&emdash;Song Enho's Socialism Is Good (cat. 105); Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108); and Fu lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat. 102)&emdash;as well as Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit, 1976 (cat. 109). For the Chinese viewer, the flood of light that illuminates everything is understood to have its source in socialism and in the thought of Mao Zedong. The way the faces and bodies are shaded makes the spotlight quality of the lighting also recognizable in most black and white prints of the period. The figures in Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, 1974 (cat. 92) and Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94); and Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87) (the last done after the Cultural Revolution had ended but still in the period style), all stand under light coming from above. Even when they are outside and in daylight, the central characters are picked out by a spotlight in prints such as Xu Kuang's Epic of the Grasslands, 1975 (cat.93), and Lin Jun's Rely on Our Hands for the Hard Struggle, 1976 (cat. 85). Model figures In addition to those discussed above, certain characteristics are repeated in virtually all figure depictions. Faces (and usually clothes and bodies) are outlined, rounded and fleshed out; everyone smiles except when they have a determined look, in which case thick eyebrows are drawn together to emphasize resolution. One can see the latter in Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored (cat. 92), and Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit (cat. 109), among others. The knitted eyebrows recall the exaggerated facial expressions typical of Peking opera and are another example of how the model operas influenced other arts. Stage conventions also determined that a single figure always faces outward toward the viewer; in a group depiction the main characters look outward (or occasionally face each other in profile), while the subsidiary characters watch them attentively. In Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, Xu Kuang demonstrates how an outstanding artist succeeded in preserving plausibility, while still observing the requirement of an outward-facing posture for his main character. The artist gives the narrator an expression that conveys intense recollection of moments long-past in order to explain why she looks away from her audience. In Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 (cat. 97), a child's pointing finger explains why a young female soldier looks toward the picture plane. Whether male or female, workers and peasants have well-developed musculature and are never depicted as dirty or in tattered clothing. The process that led him to idealize his portraits of workers is described by the artist Zhao Zhitian. He relates how he first painted the workers in the Daqing oil fields with naturalistic detail. When the workers saw how he handled their images, however, they said, "Don't make us look like scarecrows. Make our clothes and faces cleaner."55 Zhao then recalls how the hero of one of the model operas, The Red Lantern, is presented to the audience with only a few bloodstains, although he has been brutally tortured: "[The play's designers] emphasized his lofty spirit and his courage." Accordingly, grime on the workers' faces and clothes is scarcely visible in Zhao's finished painting (p. 106). When it was published, Zhao's explanation enlightened other artists about the correct way to proceed. A similiar logic lay behind the creation of Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. lOS), in which only two of Song Enhou's oil-refinery workers show some smudging on their faces, a fact hardly noticeable because of their radiant smiles. The ultimate origin of idealized portraits of the masses was, of course, the Yan'an Talks, in which Mao insisted that only the "bright" side of the masses' lives should be portrayed. Reprints of the Yan'an Talks were frequent, and references to them appeared constantly in art reviews throughout the Cultural Revolution. In particular, the quotation which states that the masses should be portrayed "on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, ... nearer the ideal" is printed typically in bold type."56 Color The color red, emblematic of the Communist Party and already much used in the Great Leap Forward, now either dominates colored pictures&emdash;with hot yellow and orange as auxiliaries&emdash;or provides the dominating accent, frequently against a foil of blue. During the Cultural Revolution, however, Jiang Qing and her allies constantly asserted that "Mao Zedong Thought" (as Mao's writings were called), was the only correct interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. For the Chinese viewer, red thus represented Mao himself as the embodiment of Communist ideology and accomplishments. The slogan "Chairman Mao is the reddest reddest sun in our hearts" was repeated constantly and was the title of editorials as well as pictures in all media. Even in black and white prints, the color red plays a role. Many objects&emdash;such as the flags and banners that carry Cultural Revolution slogans in Wang Qi's Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32); the Red Guard arm bands in Xu Kuang's Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94); the edition of Mao Zedong's works held by the soldier in Zhang Huaijinag's Pillar, 1981 (cat. 59), and the little red book held by many hands in Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored and his Cordial Love&emdash;are specifically associated with Mao and were immediately "felt" to be "red" by Chinese viewers. Faces in art of the period, particularly those of heroes and Party leaders, are often colored a ruddy hue. This is another feature adapted from opera, in which convention signifies that an actor's face painted red denotes a character who is just, loyal, vital and has a warrior's courage. Less common in our prints than in paintings&emdash;because many woodblock artists work only in black and white&emdash;the ruddy hue does appear on faces in Song Enhou's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), and Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission, 1977 (cat. 110). A ruddy glow sometimes is implied even in black and white prints by the way the cheeks are highlighted and shaded, a technique used in Xu Kuang's Cordial Love (cat. 94) and Epic of the Grasslands (cat. 93); and Lin Jun's Rely on Our Hands for the Hard Struggle, 1976 (cat.85), among others. After the Cultural Revolution had ended, in 1976, artists named the style, retroactively, hong, guang, liang (red, bright, and glowing). Professionals apply color like amateur artists do When color is used, it is applied to figures in patches with ragged outlines or in rough strokes, both crudely reminiscent of the brushwork of traditional painting; furthermore, it has little modulation or nuance, recalling its flat character in traditional nianhua. Such ragged and rough qualities abounded in the art of the "Shanghai, Yangquan, Luda Workers' Exhibition," where it has been explained as the result of untrained artists trying to utilize techniques that were beyond their abilities.57 Colored prints from the period created by experienced artists, however, have the same characteristics. The patchy way in which coloring is applied in the work of (by now) mature and practiced artists&emdash;such as in the worker-artist Song Enhou's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), and in the soldier-artist Fu lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat.102), undated but probably from the early 1970s&emdash;as well as in the work of academically trained artists&emdash;such as in Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108) and in Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit, 1976 (cat. 109)&emdash;is probably meant to demonstrate that these artists identify with the masses, even in matters of artistic style. Just as artists from the masses sought to refine their art and emulate professional styles, so experts reciprocated by reproducing the manner of amateurs; thus, even artistic style achieved political correctness by demonstrating the convergence of classes.
Portraits of Leaders The handling of the image of a great leader was a delicate matter. The artist Liu Junhua recorded how, in 1968, he went about painting his famous icon of Mao Zedong called Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan. He recalls that when he began the large work, he had already painted many poster images of his leader, whose image was dear to him. "Never once have I become tired of looking at Chairman Mao's picture....Since childhood I have liked to draw pictures of him. I collected many photographs of him, looked at these every day and learned how to do a good picture of him. The more I paint, the more I feel Chairman Mao is dear to me."58 His preparation for the painting included studying historical materials and Mao's writings and poems, as well as visiting Anyuan and talking to the workers there. After beginning the painting, Hua sought opinions from workers, soldiers, peasants, and his comrades, and frequently made changes according to their criticisms (pp. 5 and 6). Reworking a picture to comply with criticisms by members of the masses was a standard element of creation during this period. We may safely assume that the three artists who made prints in our exhibition depicting Mao Zedong and dating from the Cultural Revolution went through a process of creation much the same as Liu Junhua's. All would have known Mao's writing as well as the history of the Communist struggle for revolution. They would have studied many photographs of Mao and observed the way other artists had depicted him, noting the qualities that had been commended by reviewers. (As noted above, in both Song Enhou's Socialism ls Good (cat. 105) and Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission (cat. 110), the artists have adopted the period style and given Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai the requisite ruddy skin hue.) Artists chose different aspects of the Chairman's public personality to dramatize different messages. In Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), Song Enhou, an artist of worker origins, places Mao among workers at a refinery and depicts him wearing a hardhat, as they do, to signify his identification with them. Mao is at the forefront of the revolution and is portrayed, literally, to the fore, up close to the picture plane. The solidity of the delineation of the foreground group is in sharp contrast to the masses, the banners, and the faint, grey industrial installations that rise, like visions, out of the mist in the background. Bathed in white light, the Chairman raises his arm and, although it is not clear whom he is addressing, the message is clear: the Party, led by its chairman, has mobilized the masses to bring industry to the nation. The new society is materializing before their&emdash;and our&emdash;eyes. Xu Kuang's Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94), portrays the Chairman as mentor to the nation's youth, an idea basic to the Cultural Revolution. The title, Cordial Love which in Chinese implies instruction from a loving parent, occurred frequently on period art. To give the message of the print universality, Xu Kuang eliminates all background detail: Mao's meeting with student Red Guards could be taking place anywhere in China, with any of China's youth. The idea of Mao's personal concern for his listeners' well-being is conveyed by the sense of intimacy that results from the students sitting in such close proximity to him (although the white area surrounding Mao accents his uniqueness). We, the viewers, share in the group's intimacy because the figures are so close to the picture plane that we feel almost as if we are coparticipants. The centrality of Mao Zedong Thought to revolutionary purpose is conveyed by the little red book prominently displayed, and by the act of recording Mao's cordial instructions with pen and paper. We may note, also, that Xu Kuang is a consummate technician and in this print, with so important a subject at its center, the faces are all executed smoothly, and folds in the garments have little of the jagged quality found in the art of worker-artists or professionals copying the worker-artist style. The theme of Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission, 1977 (cat. 110), is quite different from either of the foregoing works. Here Mao is the commander who supports his officers in the field. By taking its location as Yan'an, a popular setting in Cultural Revolution art, the print points up how veteran was Zhou Enlai's participation in the long struggle that led to the revolution's triumph. The incident depicted (Zhou's departure for Chongqing, where he will be envoy of the Eighth Route Army to the Guomindang headquarters) took place in the l930s, when the base area was first being consolidated. The design focuses on Zhou Enlai by placing him at the center of a group and near the center of the picture area, slightly forward from Mao Zedong who, we understand, wishes him well in his venture. Because only Zhou is without a hat, we see and identify his well-known face immediately. The print was executed after the fall of Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, when such emphasis on Zhou Enlai's importance to the revolution ~sas possible. Stylistically also, Cha Shiming steps back from the Jiang Qing era in art: the main figures are farther from the picture plane than the group of onlookers and take up a smaller part of the picture area. But remnants of the ~'model opera style" remain. although it is clearly nighttime, the figures are as if spotlighted, and their skin has a ruddy hue. Symbolic representations of Mao Zedong Even when his likeness is not portrayed, Mao Zedong is represented symbolically in the majority of prints from the Cultural Revolution period and its immediate aftermath. For example, the little red book, or some other compilation of Mao's writings, appears in Cai Dian's undated The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat.108); Fu lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood, no date but probably early 1970s (cat. 102); Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit, 1976 (cat. 109); Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87); Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, 1974 (cat. 92), and Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94); Song Enhou's Untitled, circa 1972 (cat.104); and Zhang Huaijiang's Pillar, 1981 (cat.59). Banners with slogans particularly associated with Mao Zedong appear in crowd scenes such as those in Wang Qi's Launching Celebration. 1976 (cat.32), and Li Yingjin et al's Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat.101), among others. Brilliant light and the rising sun, as we have noted, symbolize the Chairman, as did Yan'an, the city that was headquarters for the struggle that brought about the revolution. Yan'an as a setting for figurative art Because Yan'an had been the location for so many historical developments, the wide range of associations that accrued to the city could be used to convey a variety of political messages. Yan'an, used as a backdrop to Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission, 1977 (cat. 110), recalls the long-standing and loyal nature of Zhou Enlai's cooperation with Mao Zedong. In Lin Jun's Rely on Our Hands for the Hard Struggle, 1976 (cat.85), the soldier-cobblers and soldier-builders are located in Yan'an to remind us that the struggle for self-sufficiency began there and provided a model for the country's current needs. This theme became increasingly important during the Cultural Revolution because, during this period, China was taking her place on the world stage, and self-sufficiency is a measure of a nation's strength. Lu Xun as the Marxist who rejects bureaucratic deviation from the true path *Lu Xun continues to be a favorite subject for printmakers even today.59 A complex man, Lu's life and opinions leant themselves to different interpretations in different times and circumstances. As part of his efforts to introduce Western ideas and aesthetics into China, he had translated important Soviet aesthetic treatises as well as a considerable amount of Soviet literature. He had also organized an exhibition of Soviet prints, so that Chinese printmakers could use them as inspiration for their own creations. Of special importance, Lu had founded, in l930, the League of Left-Wing Writers, whose membership included many Communists. He could thus be held up as a model of the pure Marxist. But Lu had had a bitter conflict with the Party bureaucrat *Zhou Yang, with whom he had been working, because the latter dissolved the League without consulting Lu and created an alternative organization. When Zhou later became one of the first high level bureaucratic targets of the Cultural Revolution to lose his position, Lu Xun became, posthumously, a symbol of the brave hero, the true Marxist who resists bureaucratic deviationists. In Li Yitai's print Marxism is the Most Lucid and Lively Philosphy, 1974 (cat. 72), the portrait of Marx on the book facing the writer emphasizes the pure Marxist origins of Lu Xun's thought. The artist also manages an allusion to Luts patronage of the central European social protest style by adding, on the wall behind the writer, a schematic rendering of a print from Kaethe Kollwitz's series called The Peasants' War&emdash;a symbol of mass revolt. In keeping with his message, Li chooses a Soviet print style for his portait. (This print is currently featured on the Internet with the unpolitical title Lu Xun.) Feminism and Political Campaigns Feminism had been a motif of art since Yan'an days, when elevating the status of females had already been a main Party objective. Because it was of special interest to Jiang Qing, however, feminism received particular emphasis throughout the Cultural Revolution. Like all propaganda campaigns, the feminist campaign was announced by slogans in all media, and its interpretation was made clear at political meetings, at which attendance was obligatory for peasant, worker, soldier and artist. From the decade of the Cultural Revoution, there is scarcely a print with figurative subjects that does not feature females. They are shown in the most responsible of jobs, in Li Huasheng's Ten-Thousand Mile Voyage, 1975 (cat. 99), and as fearless defenders of the country, in Xu Kuang's Epic of the Grasslands, 1975 (cat. 93); as political leaders, in Xu Kuang's Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94) and Cai Dian's undated The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108); as educated, in Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87); and as happy participants in the movement to rusticate city youth to the communes, in Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 (cat. 97). From interviews with the artist Li Huasheng, Jerome Silbergeld gives us a glimpse of how the genesis of a particular print, Ten-Thousand Mile Voyage 1975 (cat. 99), was influenced by the feminist campaign: "One of the leaders at a political meeting [Li] attended happened to say, 'Now women can even operate a ship,'and some of the other leaders ... suggested that artists should create more female figures in their work."60 Li then set about creating the print Ten-Thousand Mile Voyage. He used his wife as a model, but his superiors at the Yangzi Shipping Company found her insulficiently sturdy and complained that "workers, peasants, and soldiers should appear more robust" (p. 48). Li according]y reworked the image. In his analysis of the work, Silbergeld notes how the meticulous detail (done to socialist realist standards) lends an air of reality to the print. He then comments on its symbolism: "Metaphorically, the 'ten thousand mi]e voyaget of the title refers to the progressive course of Chinese socialism; the female navigator with her binoculars represents farsighted leadership; and the radiant sun&emdash;rising, of course&emdash;indicates the bright light of Chairman Mao's ideological wisdom" (p. 48). We might add that the robust characterization of the female ship commander also suggests the strength and health of the nation's people. The technique by which the artist depicts passengers through a transparent window pane also has political significance. A clever technical innovation, it is Li's way of expressing commitment to the Cultural Revolution campaign to advance scientific innovation, not so easily demonstrated in art.61 (The "scene beyond a window" also appears in Qijia Dawa's The Gratefulness of the Liberated Serfs, 1975 [cat. 100] and seems to have been one of the answers by artists, at least in Sichuan, to the period requirement.) Accustomed to "reading" a print for its messages, the Chinese viewer would have taken note of all of these meanings. Peasants and Ethnic Minorities as the Subjects of Prints China's peasantry is perhaps the most frequent subject of Cultural Revolution prints. (Many of the peasants portrayed are females, enabling the artist also to promote feminism.) Artists lived in close proximity with peasants for years because, by 1968, almost all had been sent to communes to have their ideological perceptions reformed through manual labor. Although the unfamiliar conditions and laborious work in the communes were very difficult for them (including the fact that most were not permitted to create art), many rusticated artists related in later reminiscences that they also developed strong attachments to the places to which they were sent and the people with whom they lived, and did indeed gain insight into the lives of those who grew their food.62 The purpose of manual labor during the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate class differences, but the experience of living with the peasantry for an extended period also affected the art of professionals. Portraits of the peasantry from the l 970s and 1980s, when these artists could again create art, have a strong sense of presence, grounded in the kind of detail that comes from close personal knowledge. Depictions of clothing, artifacts, and the physical structures found in villages are done with empathy, accuracy, and respect. The peasants from Sichuan's ethnic minorities had been the particular subjects of a number of artists from that province even before the Cultural Revolution. The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts also had a special department for training artists from the minorities who, quite naturally, specialized in portraying their own people. Sichuan printmakers created outstanding depictions of these distinctive ethnic peasant milieus. Xu Kuang's representation of the clothing of a group of Yizu people in Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, 1974 (cat. 92), is full of rich, accurate detail; his mastery of technique makes the clothing appear to have a solidity that invites our hands to reach out and touch it. The staged effects of the print detract, perhaps, from a Western viewer's empathy with the participants in a way that the same artist's collaborative work with Ah Ge, The Master, 1978 (cat.95), does not. Shown with his pick, a Tibetan peasant stares out at us, proud to pose for friends, tool in hand. Something of the theatrical still resides in the light pouring down from above, but the picture nevertheless has the character of an intimate portrait. For a Chinese viewer at the time, the clarity and nature of the message in Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored may have made it an even more interesting picture. On the wall behind the speaker is a slogan admonishing the people to fight Lin Biao and Confucius. Like Confucius, Lin Biao was already dead, therefore the intended struggle, well understood by the print's viewers, was against the ideas for which, according to the Party, these men stood. The picture's message is that, since such ideas had brought people into serfdom, any attempt to revive them must be resisted. There is no background in The Master or in Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87). Both prints follow the classical Chinese format that places a figure against a blank ground: our attention is thus concentrated on the subject, without distractions. In The People Are Changed, the Tibetan ethnic origins of man and child are evident from details of their hair styles, their adornments, and the clothing of the man&emdash;shirt opened and fur-lined garment dropped from the shoulder. The child's easy relationship with her male elder is clear. The man's blindness and the girl's literacy suggest that the young (female) generation is enabling its elders to "see" a new way of life. Both this print and The Master bring the subjects almost up to the picture plane, increasing our sense of intimacy with them. In Li Huanmin's print, however, the girl's absorption in reading her boolc and the man's blindness make them unaware of our presence, thus removing all barriers to our approach. Both Ah Ge and Qijia Dawa come from peasant minority ethnic groups and excel in conveying the ethnic particularities of their peoples. In the Tibetan artist Qijia Dawa's print The Gratefulness of the Liberated Serfs, 1975 (cat. 100), a ceremony is about to take place, and rich, realistic detail lays out before our eyes the objects which will play a part. The title specifies the reason for the ceremony: the peasants are about to pay homage to *Mao Zedong (represented by the stacked books) and to Communism (symbolized by the scythes as well as the red banners beyond the window) for freeing them from serfdom. The picture does not aim at a photographic quality, however. Specific and typical objects have been chosen (and arranged by the artist as in a stage setting) to represent a culture. The clothing is perfect in detail; the steaming urn has the distinctive shape used for making Tibetan buttered tea; the low, wooden, combination table-with-drawers is a Tibetan household fixture; and the farm tools and scythes are all Tibetan varieties. Thermos jugs, recently introduced in large numbers throughout China, tell us that modern improvements in living conditions are shared by Tibetan peasants with the Han Chinese majority. The panda decoration on the thermos indicates that this particular Tibetan group is domiciled in Sichuan. We glimpse red banners through the windows and understand that the ceremony, complete with awarding of prizes, is about to commmence. The main figures, who have prepared the instruments for the ceremony, are women, indicating that females are contributing to a political event. From a slightly elevated viewpoint, we gain a sense of intimacy with the proceedings as if we are peeking in. The picture has none of the bombastic qualities of much Cultural Revolution art and treats its subjects with a sense of gentle empathy. The artist, nevertheless, manages to communicate a number of different but complementary political messages. The title of Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 (cat. 97), makes the message immediately clear. The Yizu are Ah Ge's own people, and she depicts their clothing with particular accuracy. A sense of the village ambiance is conveyed through background detail: the Yizu dwell in the uplands of Sichuan, and the mountainous location, with its orchard agriculture, is glimpsed in the background. One feels the rusticity of the setting in the rough-hewn timber of the fence and the unpaved ground on which everyone stands. The difference between city and country is pointed up by the contrast between the child's homemade string bag and the city girl's satchel. The picture can be said to carry the ultimate message of the Cultural Revolution: city and country shall come together and become one. Art After the End of the Cultural Revolution Wu Qiangnian's Tears Fall Along Changan Road, Bidding Parewell to the Premier, 1978 (cat. 89), is a fitting print with which to close this review of art of the Cultural Revolution. Looking directly at us, as if to make sure that their message goes straight to our hearts, mourners show their agony and sorrow at the death of their revered, long-time leader, *Zhou Enlai. All of the Chinese nation&emdash;old and young, city dweller and peasant, worker and soldier are represented. Above the heads of the crowd, isolated, the nation's flag flies, signifying the lost leader's service to, and identification with, his country. In the mist, dimly, we can also see the Monument to the Martyrs of the Revolution in Tiananmen Square, where mourners had placed wreaths in Zhou's memory. Because of *Jiang Qing's dislike of him, Zhou Enlai had not been given a large, state funeral; nevertheless, the people had learned of the route his bier would follow, and crowds had gathered to express their respects and sorrow. Created after the fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the print portrays agonized facial expressions of mourners who grieve over the loss of a hero and&emdash;we understand&emdash;over their own lost ten years. Beyond the Open Door Almost all prints from 1945 until 1979 were created as vehicles of propaganda. Because propaganda art requires clarity of meaning and relevance to topics of the day, the messages of the prints we have reviewed were quite clear to their Chinese viewers at the time they were created. It is hoped that this essay has provided information on the historical context that will make the prints accessible to the exhibition viewer as well. Continuous changes of theme (according to the latest campaigns) and continuous development of regional, personal and period styles occurred throughout the years we have covered, but changes did not occur in every direction or at random. The state directed all art policy before 1979, placing limits beyond which artists could not go. In particular, an artist could not choose a theme or work in a style from personal inclination unless those choices coincided with the Party's propaganda directives. The situation is quite different today. Beyond the open door, China is complex and constantly changing. Artists work in diverse media on subjects that they fancy and in styles of their own choosing. The nature of their concerns and means to their expression are particular to each artist and are as varied as the nature of the artists themselves. They are aware of art practices in the rest of the world, and many think of themselves as Chinese members of the international community of artists. Prints in our exhibition produced after 1979 have only two things in common: they were all created through the medium of woodblock printing, and the impulse for their creation has come from each artist's personal preoccupations. Clarity is no longer a criterion of an art work's excellence. On the contrary, richness of allusion in these later works challenges the viewer to penetrate beyond the surface of their images to uncover ulterior meaning(s). Knowldge of the art that preceded recent works may give us a framework of reference from which to begin to understand them, but there is no single key that will open up the prints to definitive examination. The human form, for instance, continues to be a major subject of artists, such as Huang Huaxiang, who delineates a friend without idealization in Natural Position, 1991 (cat. 48) but we cannot be sure that there is any "meaning" to the print beyond the act of recording a personal acquaintanceship. Nor can we define why, in Ma Desheng's Sea, 1980 (cat. 42), the human form is reduced to abstraction. Zhang Minjie's prints, 1993 amd 1995 (cat. 45 and 46) suggest China's multitudes with scarcely differentiated multiples of the human form, but we are puzzled about the purpose of their activity. Fang Lijun's 96 - 16, 1996, (cat. 47), creates a human image whose meaning is assertively beyond exact definition. In fact, we could scarcely elucidate the meanings of any of these art works completely and with precision because the personal and private always have a hidden layer at which we may guess but to which we are not privy. Artists continue to turn to China's earlier art for inspiration, but now these antecedents are more likely to be used for expressive potential than for political allusion. Liu Haiming's prints The Winds in the Mountains, 1990 (cat. 49), Cactus, 1992 (cat. 50), and Mountains, 1994 (cat.51) adopt the dynamic lines of traditional papercut designs from his native Shanxi Province to create prints expressing intense emotions, but the allusion is to private events in the artist's life about which we cannot know and not to Yan'an and the Communist Party. Continuity in the roles of China's women from the past to the present is the subject of Wu Jide's Floating Years, 1994 (cat. 73); the artist superimposes images from traditional nianhua prints on his images of modern women to make his point, but these nianhua snippets would not be intelligible to a peasant. Ciphers for languange appear in the works of both Xu Bing, 1996 (cat. 44) and Chen Haiyan, 1987 (cat. 74 and 75), but each artist manipulates the characters for writing Chinese to serve a different symbolic meaning. Lyrical images are conjured up in Huang Peimo's Spring Wind and Water in Jiangnan, 1980 (cat. 25); Wang Qi's Ancient Wall with Old Liana, 1988 (cat. 34); Yan Han's Illustration for Ai Qing's Poem "Reefs" 1981 (cat. 39); and Chao Mei's Love in the Snow, 1994 (cat. 21). In the thousand-year-old art tradition to which they are related, however, their beauty is meant to stir in us awareness of other layers of meaning. Wang Qi's Ancient Wall with Old Liana recalls the time-honored image of an ancient pine tree that has persevered through the harshest winters. In traditional Chinese painting such an image was understood to be a kind of self-portrait, symbolizing the artist's spiritual survival through the vicissitudes of life, which were often known to the viewer of the image. One has only to read Wang's biography to realize that he has participated in a torrent of tumultuous events during his lifetime, some of which intruded on his role as artist; yet he always returned to creating art after any interruption. Indeed, all of the veterans of the Creative Print Movement have seen amazing years come and go and, if historical situations caused a hiatus in art creation, they resumed it as soon as new circumstances made it possible. Yan Han's Illustration for Ai Qing's Poem "Reefs" has much the same underlying concept as Ancient Wall with Old Liana&emdash;perseverance of the spirit through all adversity&emdash;and uses lyrical, delicate images to convey the idea; in the long-established Chinese practice, he directs us to poetry for a gloss on his meaning. Chao Mei's Love in the Snow is a master printmaker's "portrait" of new times. The poem called Snow by Mao Zedong is probably the best known of the Chairman's poems and, as we have observed, was the subject of a famous painting familiar to every Chinese artist. The poem refers to the vastness of China's mountains and rivers and to earlier powerful rulers, ending with the declaration that now is the time for heroes.64 It is hard to believe that any Chinese artist could use the word "snow" in the title of his work, or make it the subject of a print, without calling up associations with Mao's poem and a famous artistic treatment of it. The subject of this print, however, is two birds making love in a soft, snowy retreat. Times have changed and romance, a private, purely personal interest, has become a proper subject for artists in the China we glimpse beyond the open door. In Chinese tradition such thoughts are to be shared silently by those who discover them. and readers of this essay are invited to seek them out for themselves. |