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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 4, Issue 2-3, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 2-3, 2017
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Cultural policy for a heroic age
By Richard KingAbstractIf the culture of the Cultural Revolution was as sectarian, monotonous, and predictable as leaders and critics since the late 1970s have claimed, how are we to explain the pervasiveness of the icons and images from that era in the contemporary arts? This article addresses the question by presenting the Cultural Revolution project, driven by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, of inventing a new socialist culture, portraying a heroic world in the arts as a model for the remoulding of the Chinese nation and its people.
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The transformation of Beijing opera: Jiang Qing, Yu Huiyong and yangbanxi
By Yawen LuddenAbstractCritics have described the Cultural Revolution as a musical famine, a time when only eight so-called ‘model operas’ (yangbanxi) were performed. In the current article, the author’s interviews with over a 100 persons active in yangbanxi during the Cultural Revolution lead her to a dramatically opposed view, namely that the Cultural Revolution was a period of vigorous musical activity at both the professional and the amateur level. True to its name, yangbanxi served as a model for a new style of socialist performing art designed to engage the masses. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, who envisioned this new form of Beijing opera, enjoyed a remarkably productive relationship with Yu Huiyong, the composer who brought that vision to fruition. Yangbanxi also inspired the creation of numerous derivative works and its innovative musical techniques reshaped the performing arts in China generally. As a central part of a movement to reform China’s iconic art form, Beijing opera, yangbanxi’s influence continues to the present day. A new generation of established Chinese composers and performers who grew up during the Cultural Revolution openly acknowledge the immense impact that yangbanxi has had on their musical development.
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Internationalizing Chairman Mao: Creation of the Mao cult in China Reconstructs and its reception in Latin America
By Xing ZhaoAbstractStarting from the early 1950s, the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration launched six kinds of official magazines such as China Reconstructs, People’s China and Peking Review. These publications circulated in large volume during the Cultural Revolution, and played a key role in spreading and perpetuating the Revolution and Maoism internationally. The radical revolutions and rebellions inspired by Mao’s doctrines occurred in multiple countries in Latin America for a long period of time. The phenomena provide case studies and proofs of Mao’s influence through propagandistic materials. This article attempts to delineate the three strategies that are encapsulated in the images in the periodicals. The strategies together create a fetish, in its nuance as a primitive religion or cult of religious superstition, of Maoism and the Maoist revolution. First, an ultimate goal or a possible future is rendered in the socialist realist painting and the staged photography. Second, by turning on a revolutionary mode where everything can be revolutionized, one automatizes the doctrine and creates countless paths through which the ideology can be implemented. Last but not least, international Maoism does not only aim for a result but also requires the consistency in the collective mobility in order to keep the doctrine vital. Here, the visual representation is more than resemblance to the present, but a creator of a futurist new reality if the Revolution perpetuates.
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Photography and the Cultural Revolution: A wider aperture, a longer exposure
More LessAbstractThe Cultural Revolution was not only a political attempt to restructure society in its entirety but a transformation of the world of Chinese visual representation. Photography was a major part of the image world of the Cultural Revolution, serving ideological aims and projecting a coercive revolutionary mode of social and political behaviour. This strict state control of photographic production and dissemination has led to photography, and other forms of visual expression in the Cultural Revolution, being viewed as an exceptional visual culture, framed and understood largely as a phenomenon of propaganda. This reductive view is reflected in the hitherto dominant image world of the Cultural Revolution which has sometimes calcified into a visual discourse of mass rallies and Mao iconography. This article considers the more recent emergence of other photographic records of the period – transgressive images, unofficial and private images, archival research projects – which offer alternative frameworks of mediating contested memories and understanding the history, complexity and consequences of the Cultural Revolution.
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Visualizing biopower, discipline and the female body in mid-twentieth century China
More LessAbstractThis article has two parts: the first discusses whether Foucault’s theories of ‘biopower’ and ‘discipline’ constitute an appropriate method for analysing art – specifically articulating the relationship between art, politics and power – in the context of Chinese Communism. The second section of the article uses these concepts to analyse a public discourse of visual imagery produced in the PRC from approximately the 1940s to the early 1980s that represent the female body. The visual culture artefacts considered in this framework include selected propaganda posters, mostly drawn from the collection of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center, and photographs by Li Zhensheng, reproduced in his book Red Colour News Soldier (Li 2003).
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Propaganda on shellac, vinyl and plastic: The politics of record production during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76)
More LessAbstractWhen the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Shanghai’s recording industry was nationalized and turned into a propaganda enterprise. For the next decades, the China Record Factory became China’s sole recording company. This article investigates the politics of record production and the development and organization of China’s recording industry. Censorship and control reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution; almost simultaneously the distribution of revolutionary sounds increased via a new record format: flexible plastic records. While revolutionary enthusiasm hit the factories, the goal of spreading the voice of Mao Zedong motivated record production until the late 1960s. Afterwards, however, the narrow record repertoire, ever-changing political slogans and campaigns resulted in a behaviour of avoiding risk that affected the entire industry and severely hampered record distribution and propaganda especially in the provinces.
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Labour and art during the Cultural Revolution: An analysis of the sculptural installation Wrath of the Serfs (1975)
More LessAbstractThe following article examines the process of creating the Wrath of the Serfs (1975), a large collective sculptural display completed by art workers from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Shenyang Lu Xun Arts Academy and workers from the Tibet Revolution Exhibition Hall. Placing art production in conversation with the idea of dianxing (typical), as developed in model operas during the Cultural Revolution, this article explores the sculptural tableaux and its interaction with developing roles of state art workers. I analyse the creation process of Wrath in order to understand the multivalent ways in which artists were both subjects and objects of gradually forming and shifting visual models of ideal workers in the PRC. By considering common revolutionary prescriptions, such as ‘plunging into the thick of life’ and ‘shifting one’s world-view’ in artists’ experience of this period, the article presents how individual art workers came to identify with the collective. To illuminate the complex ways in which art workers viewed themselves as both part of the collective creative group and as individuals making art, the article considers the complicated ways in which these two trajectories were interwoven. Further, the analysis delves into the nuanced formulation of agency, on the one hand, and ownership, on the other, while placing these two terms within the contemporary rhetorical context of individual sublimation to collective identity.
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Making a new world and a new people: Cold War, Maoist austere architecture and the ‘Rammed-earth Campaign’, 1966–76
By Zixian LiuAbstractAfter the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, Mao’s China replaced the Soviet way of urban planning with a new campaign of adopting Chinese vernacular architecture and decentralized Maoist urban planning. This article examines the neglected political intention of the Maoist architectural and urban planning project, the ‘Rammed-earth Campaign’. My study argues that socialist China aimed at shaping itself as a ‘Maoist austere aesthetics regime’ to manufacture a new socialist space and to cultivate a new socialist people who were able to both physically and mentally combat against ‘American imperialism’ and ‘Soviet revisionism’. This article reminds historians that without considering the cultural context of the socialist era, it is impossible to understand China’s urban planning and architecture in the late Mao era.
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