Art History - S2 week 10 - 16/09/2019

Contemporary art in China


Overview of Chinese history 1911-1949
www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/euro-hist/china-early-1900s/v/overview-of-chinese-history-1911-1949

This video was a good summary of the history of China as it was paced nicely and had visuals which helped explain the complications of the Kuomintang and the other party. It was also interesting to see that the China war had been going long before WW1 and kept going once it was finished. It was also interesting to see how their political roles worked in China compared to other nations. This was a very good video and helped me understand a bit more. I have used Khan Academy before as research material before and it was very helpful. I would be defiantly using them again for my essay now, as their video was very helpful in making me understand.    

The Cultural Revolution (1966-76)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqJ9IpWOYQA

This video is about the campaign launched by then-leader Mao Zedong to get rid of his rivals led to massive social, economic and political upheaval in China. It explains what happened and how it happens. Though I would have liked the video to be a bit longer and more in-depth as it was a bit rushed finding it hard to be able to take in all the information.

The Cultural Revolution (1966-76)

Chairman Mao Zedong set off a period of political and social chaos by trying to use the Chinese masses to reassert control over the Communist party

The aim was to weed out political enemies who wanted to push the country towards capitalism and away from socialism

The people were urged to destroy the “four olds” – old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture

Students took up the cause and attacked people for wearing “bourgeois” clothes and torn down “imperialist” signs.  

1800 people in Beijing died in August and September 1966 alone

The Cultural Revolution (1966-76)

The chaos spread to workers and historians describe the period as a virtual civil war

By 1968, Mao realized the revolution was out of his control and sent millions of urban youth to the countryside for “re-education”

The army was sent in to reassert control transforming China into a military dictatorship until 1971

A semblance of normality returned and the Revolution officially ended in 1976 with Chairman Mao’s death

It is estimated that between 500,000 and 2 million people died

Lasting effects of the Revolution on China

The rulers that took over after Mao’s death felt that the Revolution had been a huge mistake but couldn’t overtly condemn it

The army was responsible for the majority of the deaths from 1968-70

The “Gang of Four” were tried and punished for the violence and those who were unfairly purged or persecuted were rehabilitated

Paved the way for China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and its subsequent economic boom

Today’s rulers are obsessed with stability and political control

Propaganda Art of the Cultural Revolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Ep14tNj4U

The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WyvRPucbo0

Scar Art

In the three years after Mao’s death, the crimes of the Cultural Revolution became the subject of paintings heading up to the Reform Period

Gao Xiaohua’s Why? (1978) kicked off the movement

Political Pop

• The art movement Political Pop emerged in China in the 1980s, and combined western pop art with socialist realism to create art that questioned the political and social climate of a rapidly changing China
• Political Pop was partly a response to the rampant modernisation of the country, but also was a way of coming to terms with the Cultural Revolution.
• With pop’s banality and semi-ironic approach to capitalism, combined with propaganda images from the era of Chairman Mao, artists challenged the prevailing attitudes to art in China. 
• https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/political-pop

Huang Yan.   

Chinese landscape  -Tatoo.  (1994-9)  Colour Photographs of a performance.  Each: 50x61cm.

Artist: Huang Yan (Chinese, born 1966)

Date: 1999

Culture: China

Medium: Chromogenic print

Dimensions: Image: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)

Classification: Photographs

Credit Line: Lent by a private collection, New York

Rights and Reproduction: © Huang Yan

"n his 1999 photographic series Chinese Landscape Tattoo, Huang covers his torso and arms with traditional landscape scenes, presenting his “reincarnation” of literati-style painting. The composition, modeled in ink and colors on a white ground by Huang’s wife, the artist Zhang Tiemei (b. 1968), follows the natural form of Huang’s body. In the photos, the artist’s face is cropped away and Huang’s anonymous torso becomes an emblem of the Chinese everyman who cannot be separated from his cultural heritage, which, like his racial identity, is as indelible as a tattoo."

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/77588

"Huang Yan is a contemporary Chinese artist whose work combines painting, photography, and sculpture. In his series Chinese Shan-shui tattoo, Huang evokes traditional Chinese landscape painting with a contemporary twist by photographing faces, backs, and entire bodies tattooed with landscape motifs. “Landscape is an abode in which my mortal body can reside, landscape is my rejection of worldly wrangling, landscape is a release for my Buddhist ideas,” he has said. Born in Jilin, China in 1966, he graduated from the Changchun Normal Academy in 1987. After moving to Beijing, Huang began producing work critical to the Communist regime and Mao Zedong’s legacy. In the decades that followed, the artist gained the attention of Ai Weiwei and exhibited around the world. He continues to live and work in Beijing, China." 

http://www.artnet.com/artists/huang-yan-2/

"The work of Beijing-based artist Huang Yan reflects the inherent complexities of modern-day China, in which the traditions of the past confront the rapidly changing present. Combining the aesthetics and techniques of classical Chinese art with elements drawn from contemporary life, he simultaneously upholds a centuries-long artistic culture while fundamentally transforming it. Huang is best known for works in which scenes derived from the classical landscape tradition are executed on decidedly untraditional “canvases,” from human bodies, bones, and flowers to busts of Chairman Mao and communist-era uniforms.

In his best-known series, Chinese Landscapes, begun in 1999, Song Dynasty-style landscapes—executed by his wife, Zhang Tiemei, a classically-trained landscape painter—are painted on human bodies rather than paper scrolls and then photographed, with the resulting prints treated as the final artwork. Merging photography, painting, and performance, Chinese Landscapes make equal reference to the traditional landscapes of medieval China and to the adventurous performance art of the 1980s and ’90s.

Huang’s work has been exhibited extensively in China and abroad, including exhibitions at the Zhuqizhuan Art Museum in Shanghai, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. " 

https://www.artspace.com/artist/huang_yan

Xu Jiang.  

Artist: Xu Jiang (Chinese, born 1955)

Title: 豫园 (Yu yuan garden) 

Medium: oil on canvas

Size

60 x 73 cm. (23.6 x 28.7 in.)

"Xu Jiang graduated from the Oil Painting Department, China National Academy of Art in 1982 and later studied in Germany. He currently acts as President, Professor, and Doctoral Advisor of the China Academy of Art; Vice Chairman of the China Artists Association; Vice Chairman of the China Oil Painting Association; Chairman of the Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles; and Chairman of the Zhejiang Artists' Association. He is also an extensively published arts author.

Xu's works have been included in many exhibitions worldwide, including ART HK, Hong Kong (2012); the Zhejiang Art Museum, China (2010); The Constructed Dimension - 2010 Chinese Contemporary Art Invitational Exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, China (2010); Redemption of a Sunflower Garden: New Works of Xu Jiang at the Shanghai Art Museum, China (2009); Overlooking: Xu Jiang's Painting at the Guangdong Museum of Art, China (2007); the 10th Architecture Venice Biennale, Italy (2006); Pintura Contemporánea China (Contemporary Chinese Painting) at the MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Chile (2002); Landscapes of History in conjunction with a residency at the Bethanien Art Center, Germany (2001); and the Hamburg Kulturforum, Germany (1989)."
https://ocula.com/artists/xu-jiang/