Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
VISUAL ARTS
The founding of the new China in 1949 saw the individual artistic temperament subscripted
to the service of the state. According to the communist vision, man was now the governor
of his destiny and art was just another foot soldier. Chinese art consequently became art for
the masses and the socialist realist style emerged dominant, with all human activity in
paintings expressing the glory of the communist revolution.
Běijīng's first artists' village was by the Old Summer Palace. When that was demolished,
many began to move to Factory 798, a disused industrial complex built in the 1950s. The
former electronics factory was converted into studios and living spaces, then galleries, and
became known as the 798 Art District.
Traditional precepts of Chinese classical painting were sidelined and foreign artistic
techniques were imported wholesale. Washes on silk were replaced with oil on canvas
while a realist attention to detail supplanted China's traditional obsession with the mysteri-
ous and ineffable. Landscapes, in which people played a minor or incidental role, were re-
placed with harder-edged panoramas in which humans occupied a central, commanding po-
sition. The entire course of Chinese painting - which had evolved in glacial increments
over the centuries - was redirected virtually overnight.
China's best-known film-maker, Zhang Yimou, adapted
To Live
for the screen in 1994. It is his
masterpiece and confirmed Gong Li as China's greatest actress. But the movie remains
banned in China and angered the authorities so much that Zhang was prevented from mak-
ing another film for two years.
It was only with the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 that the shadow of the
Cultural Revolution - when Chinese aesthetics were conditioned by the threat of violence -
began its retreat. The individual artistic temperament was once again allowed more free-
dom to explore beyond propaganda. Painters such as Luo Zhongli employed the realist
techniques they learned in China's art academies to portray the harsh realities etched in the
faces of contemporary peasants. Others escaped the suffocating confines of socialist real-
ism to explore new horizons, experimenting with a variety of contemporary forms.
A voracious appetite for Western art put further distance between traditional Chinese
aesthetics and artistic endeavour. One group of artists, the Stars, found retrospective inspir-
ation in Picasso and German expressionism. The ephemeral group had a lasting impact on
