ART AND IDEOLOGY IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

IntroductionFollowing the communist revolution in 1949, along with the drive for

economic development and social revolution in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), there was active official patronage of the arts, but also control over content. Lenin viewed art as an important component of the “gears and wheels of the revolution” and this attitude was certainly embraced by the Chinese Communist Party. While this expression sounds crudely mechanistic in China today, it does express the ideological and didactic function of art during the era of Mao Zedong’s rule in China from 1949 to 1976.

Ideology was in important aspect of the arts and Mao pointed out that “new China” should produce an art that is “socialist in content and Chinese in style.” The rich cultural legacy of traditional China, and how this would be adapted in Communist China was more than a passing political interest. The twin themes of Chinese style and socialist content were an important issue for the Chinese Communists even before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In 1942, at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature, Mao stated that the Party wanted to “take over all the fine things in our literary and artistic heritage, critically assimilate whatever is beneficial, and use them as examples when we create works. . . . Therefore, we must on no account reject the legacies of the ancients . . . or refuse to learn from them, even though they are the works of the feudal or bourgeois classes.” However, “uncritical transplantation or copying from the ancients . . . is the most sterile and harmful dogmatism in literature and art.” Artists and writers must therefore “ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind.”

Soviet Style “Socialist Realism” of the Early 1950s

Art during the first three decades of the PRC was not only heavily political in content, but also very un-Chinese in style. Painting closely followed the Soviet style of socialist realism and used Western oils instead of the traditional Chinese brush and ink. Themes included international socialist solidarity, industrialization, and land reform that focused attention on the revolutionary transformation underway in China. The Soviet inspiration is evident in paintings that depict Communist Party leaders, the mechanization of agriculture and industrialization.

The Founding of the Nation, Dong Xiwen ,oil, 1953

The Furnaces Flames are Really Red, Gao Quan, oil, 1964

The revolution-ary war and the figure of Mao Zedong were also common sources of inspiration. The direct political content was made more ap-parent by the focus on heroic themes and the emphasis on depicting the implementation of Party policies.

Sculpture, using Soviet socialist realism style became common. The surge of construction of public spaces (like the enlargement of Tiananmen Square flanked by the Great Hall of the People and the Revolutionary History Museum) created a demand for massive public sculptures of “people’s heroes” and massive statues of Chair Mao were placed in front of most public buildings. Not since the arrival of Buddhism a millennium and a half earlier had Chinese sculpture been so directly affected by foreign examples, although now the style mimicked Soviet style and was charged with political symbolism.

Mao statue

Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification in Yan’an, Luo Gongliu, oil, 1951

Folk Arts and Popular Tradition

However, even at the height of Soviet influence certain native art styles, especially those with a popular flavor, remained in favor. Woodblock prints, used for patriotic and social protest art in the 1930s and common during the Yan’an period (1936-1949), remained popular too. After 1949, themes of suffering, oppression, and imperialist invasion were replaced with the political change and socialist construction. The emotional power of art depicting the common people’s rebellion against the tyranny of the old society common in pre-1949 art gave way to rather banal political propaganda depicting the collectivization of agriculture and industrial construction. Traditional Spring Festival art (nianhua) is an example of folk art that was mass produced but now depicted the abundance of socialism. Papercuts were praised as folk art and most remained quite traditional in style and subject matter, but also depicted new political themes.

Youth, Xin Bo, woodblock, 1961

The Army and the People are One, Hang Guangzhou, traditional Chinese painting, 1973

Traditional Papercut

The Survival and Revival of Chinese Traditional-Style Painting

Although folk art and Russian socialist realism prevailed from the 1950 to 1960s, the great tradition of Chinese paintings did not entirely disappear. For several years its survival was mainly represented by a handful of famous established painters. By far the most famous, and most lionized by the new regime, was the 90 year old master Qi Baishi. The high praise showered upon him was partly justified by calling him a “people’s painter” because of his fairly humble social origins (he had once worked as a carpenter) but his paintings, mostly of small life and mostly done in the Chinese brush and ink style so highly esteemed by literati painters remained entirely traditional. The other traditional master who received much acclaim and continued to paint completely apolitical traditional scenes was the landscape artist Huang Binhong. His landscape painting showed no sign of the political transformation of China.

Qi Baishi, Butterfly, ca. 1950

Huang Binhong, Landscape at Madangshan ca. 1940s

Equally famous, and equally celebrated, was the Paris educated Xu Beihong, considered by many the foremost oil painter of Communist China before his premature death in 1953. Xu was famous for his western realist style as well as works using Chinese brush. He was one of the most successful 20th century Chinese painters who blended Chinese and Western techniques.

Despite the dominance of Soviet style oil painting, in the 1950s there was renewed interest in traditional Chinese artistic forms, especially painting, and the government gave much more patronage and praise to painting in the traditional style. Of course, artists were officially encouraged to put socialist content into the old style. The policy was that Chinese-style painting should portray the new socialist realities, in practice the majority of the paintings by serious artists in the 1950s were very traditional in content as well as style and painters continued to work in a style more traditional than modern (using ink instead of oils) and portraying rather apolitical subjects.

Xu Beihong Portrait of Jiang Biwei ca. 1924

Xu Beihong Four Horses, 1940

The Thousand Crimson Hills, Li Keran, traditional Chinese ink, 1963

The most important and most praised painters of China by the mid-1950s were all working very much within the native Chinese tradition. However, the didactic function of art was never abandoned and even classical material that could illustrate political lessons was in great demand.

Socialist Art of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) With the repudiation of intellectual critics of the regime during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the ideological zeal unleashed in the Great Leap Forward the following year, the mid-1950s revival of classical art forms was countered by skillful paintings done in the traditional style but depicting imposing scenes of contemporary socialist construction. Nature was no longer the refuge for the solitary scholar; it was now taken on by a Promethean socialist man building dams, reclaiming wasteland, and building modern industrial structures.

Fighting in Northern Shaanxi, Shi Lu, traditional Chinese ink, 1959

Meishan Reservoir, He Tianjian, traditional Chinese ink, 1959

The Renaissance of Traditional Arts in the Early 1960s

The spirit of the Great Leap did not last. As economic disasters piled up and the national morale sagged, a revived interest and respect for the traditional art occurred in the early 1960s. It was nowhere more apparent than in painting where once again political content was abandoned. The art was justified in terms of patriotism, uplifting the socialist spirit and other platitudes, but the most striking aspect of most of this art is the extent to which it is traditional and apolitical. Similarly the handicraft and folk arts of traditional China flourished in this more tolerant atmosphere. Political content did not, of course, completely disappear from the art of the early 1960s, although it was often very subtle.

New City in the Mountain, Qian Songyan, 1960

Art and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

As the economy recovered from mistakes of the Great Leap Forward and the Party recovered its shaken

self-confidence, the lenience towards apolitical art began to disappear. Warnings were sounded as early as 1963, and in the summer of 1964 a major campaign was launched to revolutionize art. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, wielded control over art and took an active role in directly applying the “Thought of Mao Zedong” to art. The Cultural Revolution policies of Jiang Qing and the other members of the “Gang of Four” completely dominated art, imbuing it with an unprecedented political saturation previously approached only at the peak of the Great Leap Forward. This meant the general abandonment of the more sophisticated traditional techniques and “revisionist” Soviet influences were even more suspect than traditional “feudal” influences. The earlier infatuation with Soviet inspired oils was abandoned after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960 and was replaced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) with a unique Chinese genre of revolutionary art known as “revolutionary romanticism” or “socialist idealism.”

Art for art’s sake was condemned and only art that idealized the workers, peasants, and the military was sanctioned.

Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, People’s Liberation Army Political Department, 1971

It was characterized by “red” in both color and content. This was especially clear in the People’s Liberation Army art work which was held up as a model for all artists. The subject matter generally consisted of heroic scenes from the revolutionary past and more typically paintings of Mao Zedong as a young revolutionary striding purposefully across the hills to organize workers or peasants, or immortalizing Mao as the revolutionary savior of China. At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, most art was mass produced poster art vowing to liberate Taiwan, defend the sacred motherland against Soviet invasion, or support the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people fighting against American imperialism.

Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, Liu Chunhua, oil, 1967

Joint Defense by the People and the Army—An Iron Bastion, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1969

Some folk art was produced but it generally portrayed clear revolutionary themes and was devoid of depictions of folk customs and religion as in the original peasant art.

The art of the Cultural Revolution was largely self-explanatory and intended to make an unmistakable political point in the most obvious way so that illiterate peasants could immediately grasp the message. Ideological Art reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution and since the late 1970s China has been finding it way back to more traditional styles, unique styles of modern art with Chinese characteristics, and modern western-style art.

Liu Jinlan, One Child is Good, papercut ca. 1978

Carry Out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1973