Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76 (review)

It has been forty-six years since the Cultural Revolution (CR) erupted in China, but while the art of that period has made a lasting impression around the world, very little has been done to try to understand it. Art in Turmoil is among only a handful of volumes to give this art due consideration.

Part 1 of the volume, ‘Artists and the State,’ begins with Julia Andrews’s ‘The Art of the Cultural Revolution.’ Andrews breaks CR art down into an early phase characterized by its ephemeral and revolutionary nature, followed by a period of centralized control. From this overview, the volume narrows to Shelley Drake Hawks’s ‘Summoning Confucius: Inside Shi Lu’s Imagination,’ which examines how one of the PRC’s great painters was reduced to madness under Red Guard persecution but continued to use his art to fight a spiritual resistance and defend China’s cultural tradition.

Part 2, ‘Artists Remember: Two Memoirs,’ consists of Shengtian Zheng’s ‘Brushes Are Weapons: An Art School and Its Artists’ and Gu Xiong’s ‘When We Were Young: Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages.’ These autobiographical sketches provide unique insight into how artists coped with the CR. Zheng’s time was marked by an ongoing and ultimately failed effort to retain his right to paint, while Gu spent the balance of the CR period ‘learning from the peasants.’

In Part 3, ‘Meanings Then and Now,’ Britta Erickson’s ‘The Rent Collection Courtyard, Past and Present’ follows an iconic work of sculpture as it is gradually assembled, rises to fame in China, and finally recreated for a different audience in Paris. Ralph Croizier follows with ‘Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity.” In tracing the development of ‘peasant painting’ over the course of four decades, Croizier portrays the genre first as a barometer of political struggle and later as a measure of the globalized market economy. Paul Clark’s ‘Model Theatrical Works and the Remodelling of the Cultural Revolution’ contradicts much of the accepted wisdom on CR art, showing that the ‘Eight Model Operas’ were not so monolithic as is typically assumed. Clark’s study is complemented by Bai Di’s ‘Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women.’ Where Clark reveals cracks in the integrity of the model operas, Bai blows them wide open with her provocative challenge to view CR art as feminist. Finally, Richard King’s ‘Fantasies of Battle: Making the Militant Hero Prominent’ focuses on the theme of ‘battle-readiness’ through an analysis of a triptych of artworks created to support Jiang Qing’s political campaigns.

As a group these papers are quite diverse, but they do touch upon some overarching themes. Most prominent is the theme of struggle and resistance. For Hawks, Zheng, and Gu, this is portrayed as a struggle for survival in an environment where the art was used as a weapon, while Croizier and King examine how this policy was bureaucratically implemented. A second theme is the post-CR problem of how to remember the ‘ten lost years.’ Andrews stridently reminds the reader that this was a time of massive abuse. Hawks, Zheng, and Gu add their voices in looking back at the ‘bleak reality’ (in Gu’s words), but not without expressing hope that justice might prevail or that struggle might drive creativity. Bai adopts a more activist role for memory, asking that it be used to interrogate the present, and Erickson highlights how memory can be involved in the deconstruction of institutional meaning. A third central argument is that the CR is part of a continuity that began long before 1966 and continues even into the present. This is clearly demonstrated both in Andrews’s overview and Croizier’s case study, while Erickson notes the long afterlife of the Rent Collection Courtyard sculpture.

One of the few issues that I have with this volume is that it does not...