Yan'an Forum

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From 1949 to 1976 all aspects of life in China, from steel-making to the kindergarten curriculum, from military strategy to woodblock printing, were dominated by Mao Zedong (1893-1976).

In 1942 at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature (Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui), he laid out his cultural policy, insisting that art should serve politics and the masses, conveying the positive aspects of life under the rule of the Communist Party of China.

Proletarian art and literature are part of the entire cause of the proletarian revolution, in the words of Lenin, “cogs and screws in the whole machine”.’1

Certain art forms were promoted under these conditions. The relatively new woodblock movement, inspired by political artists such as Kaethe Kollwitz (1867-1945) and by new Soviet illustration, was acceptable because it arose from the anti-Fascist struggle and Communist movement. New Year prints (nianhua), traditional woodblock posters, were particularly acceptable because they were a peasant and proletarian art form, although traditional themes of deities and beautiful women had to be replaced with smoking factory chimneys and tractors conveying bumper harvests.

Woodblock artists continued to follow the heavily political Soviet and East European woodcut movement and also borrowed from Chinese traditional forms such as the papercut. Throughout this period, virtually the only cultural figure to enjoy fairly constant acclaim was Lu Xun (1881-1936) whose stories remained on school syllabi and whose cultural activities, supporting the movement for ‘plain speech’ and, indeed, introducing political woodblock art from Eastern Europe and the Soviet union, were also applauded. Support for Lu Xun meant, by implication, support for woodblock artists, as long as they remembered the correct political line.

China’s artists were subjected to further strictures and attacks during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, the Socialist Education Movement of 1963 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The ten years of the Cultural Revolution, when artists were accused of exhibiting ‘old feudal dregs or bourgeois junk which should have been consigned to the rubbish heap of history’ or depicting politically incorrect subjects such as ‘lemons, cherries, dead fish, girls with flowers, lohans conquering tigers and similar trash’2 was a terrible time for artists in all media. Yet even during the Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun, who had fortunately died some 30 years earlier, was still upheld as an exemplar of the correct line in cultural politics. Throughout the period the woodblock style, sometimes echoing the solid lines of a peasant papercut, sometimes with strong socialist realist overtones, was constantly used in magazine publishing, in cartoon strips, book illustration and poster art, much of which is reflected in the British Library’s collections.

The death of Mao on 9 September 1976 was followed less than a month later by the ‘smashing of the Gang of Four’ Mao’s third wife, Jiang Qing, and her colleagues Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao.

During Mao’s last years, they had led the political criticism of contemporary Chinese culture, launching vicious attacks on artists such as Wo Zha (1905-1974), who, despite having risen to prominence in Ya’an where he pioneered the use of the New Year print style in his woodblocks, was labelled a ‘traitor’. Pan Tianshou (1897-1971) China’s leading bird and flower painter, head of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (now renamed Zhongguo Meishu Xueyuan, Chine National Academy of Fine Arts), was ‘a reactionary painter’ and ‘secret agent’ and even long-dead artists like Qi Baishi (1863-1957) were branded ‘revisionist’.3

The ‘reversal of verdicts’ which followed the re-emergence of Deng Xiaoping as supreme political leader and pragmatic economist, meant a tremendous expansion of the economy, particularly at first in the rural areas. Suddenly, peasants felt a real sense of control and freedom in their economic activities.

[edit] Rehabilitation of Artists

Reacting to the removal of the Gang of Four, many artists were rehabilitated and others began to explore the avant-garde. Some official stimulus was offered when the first exhibition of ‘non-political’ art, Romanian painting of the 19th and 20th centuries, was held in Beijing in 1977, and this was almost immediately followed by a Kollwitz exhibition. In response to the ‘reversal of verdicts’, similar themes were expressed in both art and literature, beginning with ‘wound’ literature and ‘scarred’ art, reflecting the wounds and losses of the Cultural Revolution and the sense of betrayal in the survivors.4

However, it soon became apparent that the authorities were not prepared to allow the same freedoms in the cultural sphere as they had in economic development. Young artists in Beijing formed the ‘Stars’ group and in 1970 exhibited their work, ranging from Photo-realism to Expressionism and Cubism, in Beihai Park. The authorities soon closed down the immensely popular exhibition and, that same winter, a controversy raged over nude figures included in mural paintings by Yuan Yunsheng at Beijing airport (which were first screened off and then whitewashed over).5 Most of the ‘Stars’ group, Yuan Yungsheng and many other artists, left China for life in exile abroad.6 Similar attacks were made in the literary world: the play What If I Really Were? which satirised corrupt Communist party officials, was banned after the attack on it by Hu Yaobang in early 1980 and in 1981, the film script, Bitter Love (Ku Lian) by Bai Hua was also banned for ‘negating the value of socialism and maliciously caricaturing Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong’s thoughts.’7

By 1985, arts journals in China reflected the wide variety in the ‘search for new ways’ in art. In many aspects the debate reflected a dichotomy that had been discussed since the beginning of the Republican period (1911) and which had its roots in political movements of the late 19th century. Just as political reformers of the ‘Self-strengthening Movement’ sought to modernise China by looking back to Confucius, to fuse ancient Chinese philosophy with modern Western technology, using ‘Eastern ethics and Western science’, 8 so, for example, architects and designers sought to create buildings using foreign materials such as concrete and steel but which preserved traditional Chinese forms.

Immediately after the Cultural Revolution in which Mao had turned his back on foreign experts and foreign forms as well as lambasting the emptiness of flower and bird paintings, younger artists embraced the most progressive, usually foreign-inspired, forms they could find and pushed the bounds of permissiveness with mocking and satirical sculptures and paintings.9 Others, still sensitive to the dangers of foreign-ness, used (Western) oil paints and sometimes (Western) woodcuts, to depict peasant figures or traditional rural scenes with hyper-real fidelity.10 The early post-Cultural Revolution exodus of young artists seeking greater freedom in the West had slowed but the events of 1989 provoked some into protest and during 1990-91, further official political pressure was put upon creative artists accused of ‘total Westernisation’ and bourgeois liberalism’.11 From 1992 such attacks diminished and the official attitude to artists has been more relaxed.