Ma Zhensheng, Standing Firm on Production Work Post

Photograph: collection of Yao Zhonghua, Courtesy of Asia Society and Museum

Given the billions of Chairman Mao souvenirs on sale in today’s capitalist China, the Great Helmsman is as popular as ever. Indeed, unlike the general abhorrence clinging to other 20th-century dictators such as Stalin or Hitler, the roly-poly face of this Chinese autocrat remains a highly collectible icon—despite the fact that, between his rise to power in 1949 and his death in 1976, his policies caused the death of more than 50 million people from either starvation or political retribution. Similarly, the revolutionary posters, woodcuts, paintings and statues created under the state-controlled art-production agencies under Mao’s rule maintain their charm for Western audiences: Andy Warhol was inspired by such works, and many collectors continue to appreciate them as examples of high kitsch and Asian Pop Art.

“Art and China’s Revolution” is the first show of its kind, and it tries hard to balance aesthetics with political history. As a timeline delineating a chronology of Chinese art helpfully shows, Soviet-influenced Socialist Realism replaced China’s traditional ink-and-brush-style painting virtually overnight. Posters and canvases were used to spread the word of party policies. Teapots, matchbooks, vases and statuettes were emblazoned with Mao’s face.

After a brief look at the 1950s, the exhibition devotes most of its limited space to the Cultural Revolution, the period from 1966 to 1976 when the Red Guards led attacks on intellectuals and independent-minded artists, and the ruling Gang of Four (the leftist faction of the Communist party led by Mao’s last wife, Jiang Qing, along with her associates Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen) zealously enforced political and cultural orthodoxy. Through considerable effort, the Asia Society has secured key works from this time, mainly from the artists themselves and from private collections. My favorite is Tang Xiaohe’s Strive Forward in Wind and Tides (1971), which features Mao in a bathrobe on a barge surrounded by very happy people. It was painted on the occasion of Mao’s historic dip in the Yangtze River to prove that, at age 73, he was still a vigorous leader. Another coup for the museum is the inclusion of a section of the Rent Collection Courtyard, a sculptural ensemble depicting the arrogance of an evil landlord and the suffering of his tenants, which was originally created at the Sichuan Academy in 1965. (The work here is a 1974 reproduction, but an even more contemporary appropriation of this piece was seen recently at the Cai Guo Qiang retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.)

Shen Jiawei, Standing Guard for our Great Motherland

One would think that the artists who lived through this era would have nothing but negative feelings about the Cultural Revolution. Zheng Shengtian, who cocurated the show with Asia Society museum director Melissa Chiu, was imprisoned for criticizing aesthetic policies as a teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. Yet, the exhibit maintains that, for some artists, being sent out in the countryside with millions of others for “reeducation” was a formative experience. Xu Bing, now an internationally renowned conceptual artist, looks back on this time with nostalgia. A videotaped interview with Liu Chunhua, whose 1969 painting, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, has been reproduced two billion times, captures the excitement and pride that artists, swept up in revolutionary zeal, felt about contributing to the cause.

There are innumerable contemporary artists in China who have been influenced by the art of the Cultural Revolution (mostly to ironic effect), a subject worthy of its own show. Here, the Asia Society only includes Qu Guangci’s New Mao (2003), an installation of larger-than-life stainless-steel renditions of the Chairman. Another gallery provides documentation of the “Long March Project,” which launched a series of public artworks along Mao’s historic route in 2002. These examples aren’t enough to convey the enduring legacy of the Cultural Revolution on China’s creative imagination or the troubling way that most people shy away from discussing their personal experience of that era.

In today’s China, it’s easy to find a contemporary artist appropriating revolutionary icons, but it’s nearly impossible to find works from the Cultural Revolution on display at state-run museums. They’ve all been put into storage, hidden away as evidence of an extremely dark time. For this alone, the Asia Society is to be applauded for beginning a long-overdue discussion about a critical juncture in the development of 20th-century Chinese culture.