On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, things are beginning to look red here in Beijing, deep red, like a profuse wound. On the Beijing streets, some of the visual celebratory feast residents drank in last year during the Olympics is being recreated in billboards, television galas, parades, mass performances and wide-ranging worship for spectacle, but the festivities this year are tinted with more eulogizing, more solemnity, more red. In a commemorative fine art exhibition at the National Art Museum of China (closed on Sept 14) red not only prevailed in the literal sense, its ideological presence was overpowering. In this exhibition that sprawled out over the entirety of the NAMOC’s exhibition halls, co-sponsors Cultural Ministry of China and NAMOC pulled sixty years of revolutionary masterpieces out of storage from all of Beijing’s major collections, including the Military Museum and the former Revolutionary Museum (soon to reopen as the Museum of Chinese History). It was a mind-blowing show, by scale and quality alone. Also, by their omissions, curators highlighted what isn’t included in the sanctioned visual lexicon that is “fine art” in China today. This became especially apparent when viewers started to wonder on what floor the “contemporary” were being hidden.

Divided into three main sections, oil painting, traditional painting, and propaganda posters with comics and animation, “masterpieces” of recent art history, were in every room.

Heading directly to oil paintings, I was intercepted by the captivating magnificence of Chen Yifei’s Seizing the Presidential Palace, (1977), a work that could inspire anyone to make revolution. More familiar as Chen’s work was his Looking at History From My Space (1979), also by Chen Yifei. Perhaps the most iconic painting in contemporary art history was Father (1981) by Luo Zhongli, displayed adjacent to My Space. This work was much more three-dimensional than ever imagined, through a painting technique the “dirt” on the ‘father’s’ eyebrows and on his turban look as if they might literally crumble off the canvas onto the floor.
Next door, two of Chen Danqing’s Tibetan Series paintings dating to 1982 were exhibited, which seemed to fit into a long and ongoing tradition of representing minorities as dark-skinned and almost monstrous. Another work brought out from the coffers and representing the ’85 New Wave was Meng Luding and Zhang Qun’s New Era––The Enlightenment of Adam and Eve. Painted in a surrealist style, this work is often interpreted as a metaphor for the “enlightenment” of their generation in the 80s. Works from the movement known as “Scar Art” (伤痕艺术) which reflected on the Cultural Revolution without quite abandoning its language, were represented with the provocative Why (1978) by Gao Xiaohua, in which a wounded Red Guard stares out from his perch on the pavement moping with a gun next to his pensive comrade. A smoking “intellectual” sitting in the shadows clearly questions beyond “why violence” and hints at the broader cultural backdrop in which the artist was raised.
Another work exemplifying Scar Art is Snowy Day in 1968 (1979) by Chen Conglin is equally ominous. The similar Mandarin pronunciation of “snow” and “blood” becomes an important double entendre in interpreting the scene, which is the conclusion of a battle between two opposing factions of Red Guards, based on the artist’s personal experience witnessing similar events.

In this same room that our curators nodded to the absurdity of reality, they likewise offered one of the most shockingly absurd canvases in the propagandist tradition of realism ever created––and it was completed in 2004. Any way you interpret it, the work is “legendary.” It took ten years to paint, it is six meters long, it features more than 200 photo-realistically rendered individual and miniature portraits, and even the title is extensive: Nanjing––Christian Era, One Thousand Nine Hundred Forty-five, September Ninth, Nine o’clock, the artist’s name is Chen Jian.

In Nanjing, viewers can indulge themselves as front-row witnesses to the Japanese surrender to Chiang Kai-shek, whose solemn and glorified likeness seems like an anomaly in the exhibition at all. “Niu Bi…” heaved one teenage viewer as he drank in the canvas. But such hyper-realism, the perfect clarity with which every face, every wrinkle in every uniform has been rendered not only looks fake, the business that it created was painful to look at. Looking now at the painting online, it is clear that digital reproductions don’t distress viewers with the same queasy abnormality (at least in this writer’s case), but the “photoshopped” quality of the composition does come across. [See an enormous image here, click on the image after it loads.] In one reviewer’s eyes the canvas is a “precious gift to consecrate the memory of the Chinese people’s victory over the Japanese on its 60th anniversary.”

Wandering through the “propaganda poster, comics and animation” portion of the show, the meaning of “propaganda” took on a modern flavor. Amidst some stellar examples of “teaching through images” from the 1950s, 60s and 70s were some posters from the 80s and 90s urging us to save water, be considerate of nature and appreciate books. There were comics from the birth of Chinese comics in the Republican era up and of course, the classic Monkey King film animation by the Shanghai Art Production Studios played on a screen to crowds of children and adults alike.

A tip of the hat to “contemporary art” was represented by a smallish Zhang Xiaogang “family portrait” (from a private collection), but dominating the space directly across from it was an oddly alluring canvas from Wang Xindong, where a country girl dressed in thick winter wear of bright red, coyly holds a basket. The dreamy young girl leans against a snowy rock, and stares directly at viewers with a look faintly reminiscent of pornography––one girlfriend literally dragged her transfixed man away from the canvas in a huff. His jaw was dragging. Across the room this “beauty” was contrasted with the jagged lines and coarse brush strokes a Xinjiang painter who rendered a scene of topless belly dancers behind a row of ethnic musicians.

The show lasted a brief two weeks, at the time of posting the complete works were available online here. If that doesn’t quench your thirst for “red” themes, “National Historical Themes in the Fine Arts” will be up at NAMOC from Sept 23 to Oct 10.

[…] Sinopop has a good review here of the latest NAMOC show highlighting 60 years of propaganda art. […]

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AMM Sweet article. -AF….