Home Issues Past Issues MCS 2010 Issue 3 Special Issue on “Art and Politics in Today’s China and Taiwan”
Special Issue on “Art and Politics in Today’s China and Taiwan”
Chinese art today, 2010, has taken off in many new directions. During the 1960’s and 1970’s artists created an artistic vocabulary that “served the needs of the new society.” The “new society” stipulated that party-approved representation of reality, not self-expression, was the goal of art. As identified by Julia Andrews (Post-Mao Dreaming, Chinese Contemporary Art, Smith College Museum of Art, 2009) by the late 1970’s many older artists were rehabilitated and practiced new techniques of painting that might incorporate western modes. They developed their own styles and forms of expression, rejecting Maoist dictates. An iconoclastic movement evolved, independent groups organized their own exhibits, mixed media techniques appeared, and pure abstraction was featured as subject matter. By the 80’s and 90’s new personal styles were solidified under a social and political transition period. Ink and oil painters as well as those experimenting with non-traditional materials, whether sculptural or painterly, installation or performance art began to flourish. Other artists replaced Maoist iconography with new, archaeologically inspired subjects, attractive because of the taboo attached to old art during the Cultural Revolution. Still others use oils on canvas to paint classical Chinese landscapes.