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  • Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China by Denise Y. Ho
  • Sigrid Schmalzer
Denise Y. Ho. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 308 pp. $99.99 (cloth), $29.99 (paper).

The field of People's Republic of China (PRC) studies could not ask for a finer contribution than this sharp analysis of political power, subtle exploration of lived experience, and beautifully wrought portrait of Mao-era material culture. Through six case studies, Denise Ho illuminates the role of objects—"a gray brick building, a begging gourd, a dissected frog, the scars on a worker's body, a luxurious fur coat, a Song dynasty vase"—in making revolutionary ideology "material and thereby intelligible" to the masses (260, 16). The result is a fresh and compelling perspective that demonstrates the inseparability of political and material culture and significantly enriches the growing literature on the history of propaganda in the PRC.

Each chapter of this captivating book focuses on a single site of cultural production, all located in Shanghai. "Making a Revolutionary Monument" examines the dilemmas museum workers faced in memorializing the First Party Congress, as their Marxist-historicist commitment to accuracy came into conflict with the growing need to exaggerate the role of Mao and denigrate his more historically significant rivals. In "Exhibiting New China," Ho explores the nooks and crannies of the reconstructed shanty town in Fangua Lane, a "living exhibition" where visitors—domestic and international—internalized the stark differences between oppressive past and revolutionary present. Chapter 3, "Curating Belief," analyzes a temporary exhibition from 1963-1964, "Love Science and Eliminate Superstition," within the larger history of science dissemination (科普 kepu) and antisuperstition campaigns: ironically, material evidence took a more muted role here, outweighed by narratives that encouraged faith in science.

Chapter 4, "Cultivating Consciousness," offers an invaluable account of the mid-1960s Socialist Education movement through the "class education exhibitions" arranged in Shanghai and throughout the nation: in these vivid displays, "past wounds freshened into new hate, and class enemies paced, awake" (154). In the following chapter, "The Cultural Revolution's Object Lessons," Red Guards draw on such "class education" to curate their own exhibitions of materials confiscated from ransacked houses: they had learned, and were now teaching others, to "see class in things and therefore crimes in things" (210). The final chapter, "Antiquity in Revolution," brings us back to the trials of cultural workers, this time at the Shanghai Museum, whose curators sought politically unimpeachable justifications for the preservation of wenwu (文物 cultural relics)—as in Mao's powerful 1938 dictum, "We are Marxist historicists; we must not mutilate history" (237).

Through these six cases run some of the most enduring but elusive questions in PRC studies—most fundamentally, how the CCP managed the contradictory needs of "a state in power" and a "revolutionary movement." Ho finds both "modes" at play in Mao-era exhibitionary culture. The first was a stabilizing force, providing historical and political [End Page E-21] legitimacy for the PRC state; the second threatened that hard-won stability but formed an ideologically necessary component of the "continuous revolution" Mao espoused. Some of Ho's most fascinating insights appear as she demonstrates the interplay between these two modes, by tracing, for example, the format and content of the Red Guards' big-character posters back to the explanatory panels of state-organized class education exhibitions.

"To curate revolution was to make revolution material" (13). Yet this apparently straightforward objective posed thorny problems for cultural workers, at once Marxist materialists dedicated to "seeking truth from facts" and also committed state propagandists. Beyond the awkward question of how to paint a truthful picture of history that sufficiently glorified Mao lay a more profound tension. On the one side lay the demand for historical and scientific accuracy; on the other stood the need to create compelling propaganda capable of instilling revolutionary passion among the people. Cultural workers turned time and again to Mao's essay "On Practice" for guidance on how to shepherd audiences on the road from "perceptual" to "rational" understanding. But the relationship between evidence and argument proved slippery: ironically, the exhibits most explicitly "scientific" relied...

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