A Gray Area From a Red Revolution

If history is indeed the great teacher — if, as I once read in a fortune cookie, “The past is the book of the future” — then what are we to make of “Art and China’s Revolution,” an exhibition centered on Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the Cult of Mao, and the artistic legacy of Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, that opens tomorrow at the Asia Society Museum?Few shows have inspired in me such mixed feelings. On the one hand, “Art and China’s Revolution,” which focuses on images, objects, and artworks sanctioned or suppressed by Mao during the three decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, is, with few exceptions, practically without aesthetic merit; ultimately, it is much more interesting as social history, propaganda, artifact, and the clash of traditions and artistic styles — some embraced, some forced — than as a gathering of artworks. Yet the show is educational and welcome: The first of its kind — and impossible to have been mounted in China — it offers another level of historical and artistic perspective to a horrific period that the Chinese ministries of culture and propaganda, respectively, would like to continue to control, spin, put a happy face on, forget, censor, and erase. (This is the show from which the Chinese Ministry of Culture suddenly pulled its promised 100 key works last January — museum objects that, in storage and without public access, had already been officially censored, and that have since been replaced by private lenders.)“Art and China’s Revolution,” co-organized by Asia Society Museum director Melissa Chiu and guest-curator Zheng Shengtian, also attempts to give context to much of the celebrated Mao-fixated Contemporary Chinese art that is inundating the West — some of which is included in the exhibit. But this is more than a gray area, because here context verges on justification if not actual propaganda. On the other hand (and this hand is the enormous red elephant in the room), the very fact of the exhibition — which perpetuates the myth of the lovable, murderous dictator whose methods continue to be spun with an official party line as “1/3 wrong but 2/3 right” — is morally questionable.The first rooms of “Art and China’s Revolution” are devoted to the history, politics, and Cult of Mao. One gallery is filled with enforced communist Mao-faced propaganda and archival material — buttons, statues, busts, armbands, posters, LP records, dolls, dishes, documentary photographs, and Mao’s Little Red Books — that establishes the Cult of Mao emphatically. The next gallery is filled wall-to-wall with large socialist realist-style paintings of an idealized Mao, elevated to the scale of Western history painting, some of which toured China during the Cultural Revolution. They depict Mao smiling, worshiped, and adored, leading the devoted; Mao inspecting villages; Mao emerging vigorous and triumphant after swimming the Yangtze River; Mao, like Jesus, walking on clouds.Yet these large, lame illustrative paintings, executed in an appropriated and enforced socialist realist style borrowed from Soviet Russia, never quite work. They fail even by Social Realist standards. Made by confused Chinese artists under duress, and in a style foreign to them, the compositions, as well as the seas of buoyant, smiling, mask-like faces — all born of oppression and fear — are telling as records of subjugation, but dead as artworks.Another area of the show is devoted to the work of banned, degenerate “black artists” — artists whose styles are tied too much to traditional Chinese “black” brush painting, and thus are not bright, happy, and “red” enough for Mao; or artists whose styles, influenced by European Modernist painting, were too bourgeois and anti-nationalistic. Other parts of the exhibition include the formative works of celebrated Contemporary Chinese artists such as Xu Bing, Luo Zhongli, and Wang Jianwei, as well as artworks that were made to justify the destruction of the “four olds” — the old ideas, cultures, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes. A small final section, “The Long March Project” (2002-present), documents a continuing multi-artist work that retraces the nearly 6,000-mile retreat of China’s Red Army from Kuomintang forces (under Chiang Kai-shek) between 1934 and 1936.According to the show’s curators, many of China’s Contemporary artists are ambivalent about Mao, whose image, as well as his shining accomplishments, have been branded into their consciousness, and into their parents’ consciousness, since birth. They have mixed feelings — equal parts “criticism and nostalgia” — concerning the dictator. True, Mao brainwashed and terrorized the Chinese: He did his best to wipe the individual from the Chinese conception of self, replacing it with the Cult of Mao.And yet something about Contemporary Chinese artists’ convenient self-deception rings false — especially when their work is selling for record prices at Western auction houses. It also rings somewhat false in this Mao-fixated show, where the exhibition guide is red and yellow; and where, in the Asia Society’s gift shop, you can buy Mao tchotchkes (red, Mao-faced books, bags, posters, and alarm clocks).In the West, we are not ambivalent about Mao. Mao, with his Red Army and Red Guard, in his campaigns of guerrilla warfare, suppression, destruction, counterrevolution, and plans such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), wreaked terror, torture, famine, and death on, by conservative estimates (no one was officially keeping count), tens of millions of people during his tenure as leader of the People’s Republic of China. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in their biography “Mao” (Knopf), put Mao responsible for “well over 70 million deaths,” more than Hitler’s and Stalin’s tolls combined. Clearly, in the West, Mao is a charged and loaded subject and symbol.Yet greeting visitors at “Art and China’s Revolution” is “New Mao” (2003), a grouping of three larger-than-life stainless-steel figurines of Mao, each with his arm raised and standing on a pedestal. Created by Chinese artist Qu Guangci (b. 1969), the figures are bland, illustrative likenesses, shining, highly polished, cookie-cutter sculptures, à la Jeff Koons, that were inspired by officially sanctioned Cult-of-Mao statues — a “New Mao” that, like the old Mao, has no aesthetic merit. And out on Park Avenue, beginning Sunday, a 10-foot-high steel Mao jacket sculpture, created by Sui Jianguo (b. 1956), will greet passersby through mid-November. To put it in context, Mr. Zheng informed me that when the sculpture was first shown in China, the Chinese criticized it, not for its subject but for being too plump, too bourgeois — for putting a fat face on Mao and China.Yet imagine another scenario: Imagine that a group of Contemporary German artists who have ambivalent feelings about Hitler — “criticism and nostalgia” — began producing a slew of swastika- and Hitler-faced artworks. Imagine a New York museum, in the spirit of “contextualizing” those works, mounting a show of Nazi propaganda. Now imagine that, under the name of “Contemporary” art, polished, gleaming, silver statues of Hitler greeted viewers at the start of the exhibition, a 10-foot-high steel sculpture of an SS uniform graced Park Avenue, and that copies of “Mein Kampf” and swastika- and Hitler-covered tchotchkes and bags were sold in the museum’s gift shop. People, and rightly so, would take notice and speak up.No matter how Contemporary Chinese artists and the Asia Society spin Mao and the Cultural Revolution, something continues to be horribly wrong with this picture. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese art and tradition were literally burned to the ground. Chinese artists’ adoption and appropriation of Western Postmodernism during the last decade feels as forced and false as the socialist realist works that were forced upon them under Mao. “Art and China’s Revolution” illustrates that the propaganda is still alive and going strong: Mao is still strangling Chinese art.September 5 through January 11 (725 Park Ave. at 70th Street, 212-288-6400).

A Gray Area From a Red Revolution

A Gray Area From a Red Revolution

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