Seven
The Transition to "Artistic Democracy" 1976-1979

The deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong left China and the Chinese art world in a state of uncertainty. The succession struggle had begun several years before, with radicals around Jiang Qing, including Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hong-wen, and Zhang Chunqiao, seeking to succeed Mao Zedong. Zhou Enlai was attacked by the radicals in the Anti-Confucius campaign of 1974. His ally Deng Xiaoping came under fire in 1975. Deng delivered the eulogy at Zhou Enlai's funeral in January 1976, and when Beijing residents held a demonstration in April at Tiananmen to commemorate Zhou, Deng Xiaoping was purged from government.^[1]

Hua Guofeng was promoted to the premiership and to the succession in the wake of the Tiananmen demonstration. He had first come to Mao's attention for his favorable assessment of the Great Leap Forward in 1959; in 1975 he was promoted to the powerful post of minister of public security.^[2] His primary accomplishment as premier was the arrest of Jiang Qing and her allies. For the next two years, the Maoist Hua Guofeng and the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping jockeyed for power. China's artists, meanwhile, began testing the limits of the new administration's cultural controls.

Many people looked first to the past, not to the future, as they sought to undo the injustices of earlier years. When Meishu resumed publication in March 1976, the art leader Gao Jingde felt compelled to deny rumors that the cases against black painters would be reversed. That such ideas were circulating indicates open dissatisfaction with recent art policies. Gao further criticized the "power holders within the party who take the capitalist road"—Cultural Revolution jargon probably aimed at Deng Xiaoping. Gao affirmed the verdict that black paintings were subversive, and castigated artists who continued secretly to paint black paintings on the assumption that they might be exhibited in the future.

In what was to be his swan song as a national administrator, Gao summarized the accomplishments of his office between 1972 and 1976: four national exhibitions; the Huxian Peasant Painting Exhibition; the Shanghai, Yangquan, Lüda Workers' Painting Exhibition; and a myriad of local art exhibitions.^[3] There is no question that the number of national exhibitions during the last few years of the Cultural Revolution was high and that large numbers of artists were at work. The new standards were thoroughly implemented throughout China, an administrative feat possible only under a government that brooked no dissent. The first few issues of Meishu following its hiatus were devoted to documenting the Cultural Revolution's success by reproducing works from the previous years' exhibitions and to criticizing Deng Xiaoping's threat to the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution emphasis on amateur art continued with a bimonthly instructional feature in Meishu about artistic techniques. Drawings by talented young academy graduates and Red Guard artists, including Zhou Sicong, were reproduced.^[4] A feature on how to make woodcuts was prepared by one of the Sichuan printmakers, Song Kejun.^[5]

Cultural Revolution Art Without the Gang of Four

One step taken to regularize government in the late Cultural Revolution period was the reconstitution of the Ministry of Culture in 1975, although the staff was dominated by Jiang Qing's appointees. Gao Jingde and one of his assistants were assigned to the Art Office of the Arts Bureau within the new ministry. Another of his assistants stayed on the staff of the Chinese National Art Gallery, with exhibition plans being implemented as before.^[6] The official arts administration thus remained highly centralized.

Gao Jingde's supervisor, Wang Mantian, killed herself after the Gang of Four was arrested on October 6, 1976, and Gao was soon removed from his post. Zhang Yongsheng, the Hangzhou art student who became a prominent provincial administrator and director of the Zhejiang academy, was arrested. The annual national art exhibition, originally planned to open in October, was canceled.

Nevertheless, the headless art system continued to follow Cultural Revolution administrative procedures for the next several years. All but the highest Cultural Revolution administrators remained in their jobs. Official exhibitions on political themes were held at least annually, juried according to the standards established by Wang Mantian and Gao Jingde. One of the most important bore the unwieldy title "National Art Exhibition to Ardently Celebrate Comrade Hua Guofeng's Appointment as Central Party Chairman and Chair-

man of the Central Military Committee and Ardently Celebrate the Great Victory of Smashing the 'Gang of Four's' Plot to Usurp the Party and Take Power"; it opened in Beijing on February 18, 1977^[7] In a procedure Gao Jingde's group had reinstituted, local exhibitions were held all over China in preparation for the national showing. Another significant official exhibition was the Art Exhibition to Celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the People's Liberation Army, which opened on August 1, 1977, in Beijing.^[8] According to the catalogue preface, the exhibition expressed the artists' love for Chairman Hua Guofeng and hatred of the Gang of Four. Annual exhibitions were held in most cities on October 1, China's national day.

The artists and art administration responded to the rapidly shifting political situation not with conceptual or stylistic innovations but with iconographic changes. During the first years after the Cultural Revolution, portraits of Chairman Mao and Red Guard heroes were partially replaced by images of Hua Guofeng, Zhou Enlai, and other political leaders. By January 1977, for example, He Kongde and Gao Hong had prepared an oil portrait of Hua Guofeng greeting the crowd at Tiananmen Square.^[9] Their oil portrait of Zhou Enlai at a construction site, Our Good Premier , was published soon after.^[10] Portraits of Zhou, which the premier had discouraged during his lifetime, were ubiquitous by the first anniversary of his death.

The most famous painting theme of the era was With You in Charge, I Am at Ease , which recorded the moment at which the dying Mao passed his mantle to Hua Guofeng. The uniformity of style and iconography is a testimony to the radically restricted state of painting at the close of the Cultural Revolution. The image may have first appeared in the February 1977 national exhibition, but dozens of versions were exhibited in 1977 and 1978. The best-known interpretation was by the military painter Peng Bin and the CAFA professor Jin Shangyi (fig. 131).^[11] Other examples include a collaborative work from Xi'an by the Maksimov student Zhan Beixin, who was primarily a landscapist, the guohua painter Liu Wenxi, and two other artists.^[12] In most examples, the composition depicts a deferential Hua Guofeng receiving Mao's mandate in his book-filled sitting room.

One rejected version of the composition is an interesting testament to the official standards of the period (fig. 132.).^[13] The Shanghai artists Han Xin and Wei Jingshan executed their painting collaboratively, as was the practice in 1978. Wei Jingshan, a 1964 graduate of the Shanghai Art School, had joined the Municipal Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio in 1965. During the Cultural Revolution his institute was merged with the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting. Wei worked at the enlarged institution in 1978 when this painting was commissioned for the October exhibition. Han Xin, only eleven years old when the Cultural Revolution closed China's schools, was a self-taught artist. He had painted in youth palaces as a teenager and had improved his technique

Image not available

Figure 131
Peng Bin and Jin Shangyi, With You in
Charge, I Am at Ease, 1977, oil on
canvas, 226 cm × 270 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

by seeking advice from older professional artists. Declared a black painter in 1974 for his overly avant-garde artistic interests, particularly his enthusiasm for impressionism, he was assigned to work at a munitions plant in Anhui. He refused to accept the punitive position, however, and remained unemployed, living on his parents' meager funds and ration coupons for the next several years. Later befriended by several official artists in the painting institute, he was hired on a temporary basis by the institute from late 1976 to late 1978 to assist older artists with specific projects.

Image not available

Figure 132
Han Xin and Wei Jingshan, With You in
Charge, I Am at Ease, 1978, oil on
canvas.

The two painters submitted their draft of With You in Charge, I Am at Ease to the Art Creation Office of the Municipal Revolutionary Committee for approval. After permission to proceed had been granted, they decided (prematurely, as it turned out) that a new age of realism had dawned with the fall of the Gang of Four. Unlike famous versions of With You in Charge in which the dying Chairman Mao glows with health and Hua Guofeng looks like an eager student, the final Han-Wei version based its image of Mao on the last published photograph of the octogenarian leader. The result is a gleeful, somewhat shifty-looking Hua Guofeng holding the hand of a helpless Mao Zedong. This version of the succession, in which Mao is supposed to have scribbled the words of his blessing on a scrap of paper, notably fails to boost the new chairman's credibility. Intentionally or not, it is a parody of socialist realist standards. The painting was completed on schedule and installed in the municipal exhibition, but the night before the opening the local art administration removed it. Idealization, not realism, remained the critical standard for portraits of political leaders.

The August 1977 Art Exhibition to Celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the People's Liberation Army displayed over five hundred works,^[14] including many history paintings depicting events from the lives of Mao Zedong, Zhu De, and Zhou Enlai, images of living officials Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying, and Deng Xiaoping, and pictures of official heroes Lu Xun and Norman Bethune. The black painter Han Xin, still trying to clear his name, collaborated with another Shanghai Painting Institute artist, Liu Yaozhen, in depicting Hua Guofeng as a soldier (fig. 133). Painted earlier than figure 132, this bureaucratically successful work, which was widely reproduced, depicts a healthy and benevolent Hua Guofeng. Most paintings in the exhibition were closely modeled on works of the 1960s or 1970s. Oil paintings and guohua paintings alike were characterized by the strong illumination and exaggerated postures typical of the Cultural Revolution period. Many works depict single heroic figures. Other pictures reverted to the grand Soviet style of history painting popularized between 1959 and 1964. Typical of Shanghai painters, however, are the muted earth tones and touches of realism found in the Liu-Han painting. Particular attention was paid to Hua's wrinkled jacket and frazzled leggings. Shanghai artists in fact became known for this innovation in the official genre—a new photographic realism.

Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan painted the most striking history painting of the post-Cultural Revolution era, The Taking of the Presidential Palace (plate 11), an enormous work commissioned by the Military Museum on the recommendation of He Kongde.^[15] It depicts the fall of the Nanjing Presidential Palace to PLA soldiers, an event signified by the raising of the Communist flag. The two artists had studied Soviet art at the Shanghai Art School in the early 1960s, where they learned the bold brush techniques taught by Yu Yunjie and

Image not available

Figure 133
Liu Yaozhen and Han Xin, Hua Guofeng
at Yangqu, 1977, oil on canvas, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

other Soviet-influenced professors. In 1975, though, the Shanghai Painting Institute, where they worked, acquired an encyclopedia of world art that opened their eyes to the works of Delacroix and other European history painters. On this basis they developed a new and highly refined realistic style easily distinguishable from the bold, rough brushwork of most Chinese artists trained in the 1950s. While the dramatic lighting, postures, and perspective of The Taking of the Presidential Palace are in keeping with Cultural Revolution standards, the relatively somber colors are not; the extremely detailed rendering of stone and fabric, moreover, though derivative of European and Soviet art, is unprecedented in Chinese oil painting. The power of this huge painting to impress its viewers did not escape the notice of the many young artists who studied it. Completed in 1977, it was the first and most influential exploration of photographic realism, a style that was to characterize much of the art of the 1980s.

The critics Gao Minglu and Zhou Yan have labeled the years from 1976 to 1978 the post-Cultural Revolution (hou wenge ) period, adopting a construction Chinese writers use for postimpressionism, postmodernism, and other schools of art closely related to what came before.^[16] Their thesis is that

the art of the period is a continuation of the "icon-making movement" of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than basing art on the values of ordinary people, most artists simply replaced old deities with new ones. Stylistic features of the Cultural Revolution, such as "complete, many, and big," "red, smooth, and luminous," and "centralized," still prevailed. One commonly saw criticism of the Gang of Four in cartoon form, but even it took the same forms, styles, and images used ten years earlier to attack Liu Shaoqi. A third, slightly less important trend identified by Gao and Zhou was the painting of revolutionary martyrs. The official exhibitions of the period support their assessment.

Quasi-official Exhibitions

With the exception of the tightly controlled capital, local arts administrators began experimenting with new themes and procedures for exhibited art in 1977.^[17] The most important conceptual change was that, although art remained quite conservative, the artist was now viewed as an individual rather than as a cog in the bureaucratic machine. Furthermore, these activities did not directly involve either the Cultural Revolution art administration or the reemerging Chinese Artists Association.

Events in Shanghai were particularly lively.^[18] Many Western-style painters in Shanghai worked in the postimpressionist and Fauvist styles taught before liberation at the Shanghai Art Academy. The lack of a local art school after 1949 yielded a largely unregulated transmission of this style to young amateur artists via private lessons and youth palace art classes; this trend continued during the late years of the Cultural Revolution, with the styles of Liu Haisu and Yan Wenliang dominating the unofficial Shanghai art scene. So strong was this mode of painting, which reflected conservative landscape and still-life styles of early-twentieth-century Europe, that it in fact became an underground regional style (see fig. 32). It was not a dissident style, however, for most artists who practiced it did not openly reject official standards. They were, by temperament or training, simply incapable of painting the narrowly conceived official art.^[19]

Qu Shunfa, an administrator of the Xuhui District Cultural Palace and himself a watercolorist, decided in late 1976 that official standards should be broadened under the new regime.^[20] Explaining to the municipal authorities that the watercolor medium had been sorely neglected by the Gang of Four, he requested permission to hold a small watercolor show. What he did not make explicit was that watercolors had failed to gain support simply because few artists could use them to paint political themes. The exhibition he organized is

believed by participants to be the first public showing of apolitical paintings in Shanghai after the fall of the Gang of Four.

The invitations to the event were hand-stamped with a big seal by the cultural palace staff, for no funds were available for printing. Qu recruited several young artists to visit the homes of well-known artists to request new works for the exhibition. Their inclusion in the show would, it was hoped, legitimate the exhibition's artistic goals; for the organizers' motives were not to oppose official art, but to broaden it. Further, they wanted to ensure that their exhibition would not be dismissed as an incompetent amateur effort. Some official artists declined, afraid to take such a chance in an unsettled period. Guan Liang, however, who normally painted on Chinese paper, executed a flower painting on watercolor paper for the exhibition. The Shanghai Painting Institute artists Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan also submitted works. In addition, paintings by previously unknown young artists were shown for the first time. All works were selected by the artists, with minimal interference from the authorities. One young artist, for example, remembers being asked to change the name of his painting in deference to an old artist whose work bore the same title.^[21] The exhibition of landscapes and still lifes opened in December and was met with great interest from the artistic community. When no protests were heard from higher authorities, the pace of such activity increased.

Most such exhibitions were held at cultural palaces or the exhibition halls of public parks rather than in the Municipal Art Gallery. They were thus quasi-official: although they were initiated by the artists themselves and not directed or publicized by the official arts administration, they were allowed the use of government-owned facilities and had the tacit approval of the local authorities. A larger exhibition including both guohua and Western-style landscapes and still lifes took place in the spring of 1977 at the Luwan District Cultural Palace. Several paintings by Liu Haisu, who lived in the district, were shown. Inclusion of this outspoken artist, a target of both the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution, confirmed the renewed elevation of art over politics. One of the organizers had studied at the Zhejiang Academy of Art and invited professors from the academy to exhibit. The show drew spectators from Hangzhou as well as Shanghai. Shen Jiawei, who still lived in Heilongjiang, recalls going to see the exhibition while on a home visit in Zhejiang.^[22]

Kong Boji, a professor at the Shanghai Drama Academy, organized several such shows as well. The "Twelve-Man Painting Exhibition," held at the Huangpu District Youth Palace in late 1978 or early 1979, is mentioned by Chinese writers as a particularly important event. As is typical of the best-known quasi-official exhibitions, some of the organizers were low-level Communist party officials. These shows did not oppose the party; instead they

sought, at least in part, to influence party policy from within. Similar exhibitions were held all over China, including Xi'an and other cities.^[23]

The first such exhibition in Beijing coincided with the lunar new year in early 1979. A group of oil painters calling themselves the Spring Tide (Chun-chao ) asked Jiang Feng, who had recently reemerged from obscurity, to write the preface for their exhibition flyer. The artists were typical of participants in such quasi-official exhibitions: they ranged from amateur painters, to serious but relatively apolitical official artists, to Communist party members. According to Chen Yingde, New Spring exhibitors included Zhan Jianjun, Jin Shangyi, Lin Gang, Chang Youming, Wu Guanzhong, Liu Bingjiang, Cao Dali, Yan Zhenduo, and Zhong Ming.^[24] The group reconvened in October, showing many of the nude studies they had been making to rid themselves of Cultural Revolution conventions. Jiang Feng's preface to the first show expressed particular approval of the independence demonstrated by their uncensored exhibition. He predicted that such painting clubs would allow creativity to flourish, would promote variety of artistic styles and subjects, would encourage mutual study, competition, and improvement among artists, would create more opportunities for art to be seen and evaluated by the masses, would be financially self-supporting, and would solve the problem of China's lack of places, such as shops and hotels, to buy oil paintings.^[25] At about the same time, Jiang Feng wrote a fervent article in praise of Zhou Enlai's recently printed speech of 1961.^[26] The sincerity of his conclusion, that China needed artistic democracy, would soon be tested by the emergence of truly dissident art.

The Reemergence of Jiang Feng: The Art Academies and the Chinese Artists Association

In the fall of 1977, the May Seventh College of Arts, established four years earlier by Jiang Qing, was abolished. A temporary administrative team composed of Zhu Dan, Bai Yan, Gu Yuan, Zhang Qiren, Luo Gongliu, Sheng Yang, and Ai Zhongxin set about reconstituting the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Over the next two years, 126 faculty members condemned during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated, as were 44 teachers who had been condemned as rightists in 1957.^[27]

The first actions taken to release the art world from Jiang Qing's grip resembled steps backward in time. Leftist works from the 1960s that had been unjustifiably criticized by the Red Guard were published in 1977 issues of Meishu . A famous 1960 portrait of Mao by Li Qi, who had been ridiculed ten years earlier for dancing with Liu Shaoqi's wife,^[28] was reprinted, as was Wang Shikuo's Bloody Clothes (fig. 74). Prints of the same era by such artists as Li

Huanmin and Huang Yongyu and woodcuts of the Yan'an period fill the pages of the art journal.^[29]

In 1979, the Ministry of Culture restored Jiang Feng's party membership and named him director of the CAFA. After twenty-one years in disgrace, he responded with great enthusiasm to his new responsibilities. He was further named a special advisor to the Ministry of Culture and a member of the Political Consultative Council. In November, he was elected chairman of the newly reconstituted Chinese Artists Association. Jiang Feng exercised great power in decisions about the art world, even though many of his later opinions proved controversial. To the end of his life he displayed the conflicting loyalties that made his career so unpredictable. In spite of all he had suffered, he retained a profound belief in the ideals of the Communist party.^[30] At the same time, he had deep sympathy for young people, in whom he recognized idealism and talent, as well as for people who had endured political subjugation. Most of the students and faculty who had been declared rightists for defending him in 1957 were brought back to the academy as professors in 1980. The bureaucratic difficulties of obtaining residential transfers for those who had been exiled to Heilongjiang or Qinghai were enormous, but Jiang persisted. Nevertheless, when Deng Xiaoping restricted free expression in 1980, Jiang Feng spoke publicly for the party line. The conflict between Communist bureaucracy and Communist ideals was the great tragedy of Jiang Feng's life. He died suddenly in 1982, in the midst of a heated debate at a party meeting.

The restored administrative staff of the academy grew rather crowded as former officials from before and after the Anti-Rightist campaign all returned to their jobs. Wu Zuoren, who had replaced Jiang Feng as director of CAFA in 1958, was named honorary director, and Liu Kaiqu, Zhu Dan, Gu Yuan, Luo Gongliu, Ai Zhongxin, and Zhang Qiren came on as vice-directors. Chen Pei, who had replaced Jiang Feng as party secretary, regained that post; Jiang Feng's protégé Hong Bo was named vice-secretary. The middle school also reopened in 1979.

One of the most important events for the academic art establishment was the reinstitution of the college entrance examination system in 1978. Two thousand applications for the CAFA graduate program poured in from all over the nation. Fifty-four artists were admitted as graduate students, fifty-five as undergraduates, and twenty more in a two-year teacher training program.^[31] Major art colleges in other cities began to admit students at about the same time.

The Chinese art that emerged in the late 1970s was chiefly of two kinds: styles that had survived the Cultural Revolution and those that had been created by it. While young Cultural Revolution artists notorious for Jiang Qing's interest in them, such as Liu Chunhua and Shen Jiawei, did not win admission to art schools, most of the students who were accepted, like Tang Muli, had

learned to paint during the Cultural Revolution. Others, such as Sun Jingbo and Ge Pengren, had studied art at CAFA before 1966 but had spent the first decade of their artistic careers making Cultural Revolution propaganda. The painting of the Cultural Revolution was a narrowly defined product of the Communist art academies, and the academic art of the post-1976 era inherited this impoverished legacy. Some, though not all, older professors failed to regain their interest in teaching after the abuse they suffered at the hands of Red Guard students. Younger faculty, those trained in the 1950s, had painted so many red-hued portraits of Chairman Mao that they had no personal style to which to return. Newly admitted students had come to maturity as painters in the Cultural Revolution style. Yet the art academies continued to dominate the world of official art, and the struggles of individuals within the academy to throw off the legacy of the Cultural Revolution became those of Chinese art as a whole.

Most of those who entered art school in the late 1970s brought much richer experiences to their art than had the relatively sheltered students of the 1950s, for the Cultural Revolution involved them intimately in politics, war, and manual labor, not to mention other equally fundamental human experiences. Tang Muli, Sun Jingbo, and Ge Pengren were accepted by CAFA as graduate students in its oil painting program. Weng Rulan, Guang Jun, and Han Xin tested into the gohua , printmaking, and mural painting specialties. The deaths and retirements of many old teachers meant that many of these young artists were retained as instructors after graduation. The independence they had developed during the Cultural Revolution gave them a less compliant attitude toward authority than that of the generation educated in the 1950s.

One of the most important unofficial art groups in Beijing in the period immediately following the Cultural Revolution emerged in 1980. Many of its members were oil painting graduate students at CAFA or CAAC, and its core members had, like Sun Jingbo, graduated from the CAFA middle school before the Cultural Revolution. All had been through the Red Guard experience and subsequent farm labor. They chose a group name that makes their self-identification explicit: Tongdairen , usually translated as the Contemporaries but literally meaning Men of the Same Generation; with this name, then, they asserted the uniqueness of their position in the history of modern China. While the artists' works sometimes look rather like American paintings of the noble savages that were imagined to inhabit the Western frontier, the step backward from socialist realism was important. One group member, Chen Danqing, a self-taught Shanghai painter who had labored in Tibet, began working in a new photographic style that portrays China's people as the artists saw them, not as the government may have wished them to look.^[32]

A preparatory group for the reestablishment of the Chinese Artists Association was founded in August 1978 under Cai Ruohong's direction. In March

1979, the twenty-third directors' meeting of the CAA was held in Beijing, attended by thirty-six people, including vice-directors, standing directors, the secretary of the secretariat, the preparatory group, some responsible people from local CAA branches, responsible people from the People's Liberation Army, and several old cadres, such as Jiang Feng and Pang Xunqin. The meeting retracted a resolution passed at the standing directors' meeting of December 12, 1957, that labeled Jiang Feng and others rightists. It further rehabilitated all officers who had been declared capitalist roaders, counterrevolutionary revisionists, and black painters by the Gang of Four. These included the late CAA chairmen Xu Beihong and Qi Baishi; vice-chairmen Cai Ruohong, Liu Kaiqu, Ye Qianyu, and Wu Zuoren; the late artists Pan Tianshou and Fu Baoshi; and secretary of the secretariat Hua Junwu.^[33] In November, Jiang Feng was elected chairman of the CAA, and an all-inclusive, if unwieldy, board of directors was named (see appendix 3). The new charter contained no references to stylistic requirements, whether to those of the national tradition or to socialist realism, although it did state that artists should follow Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought and maintain the socialist direction.^[34] The Hundred Flowers should bloom; art should serve the people.

Innovation

As older artists strove to reestablish the art bureaucracy, they found themselves weighed down by the burden of the past. Zhou Yang issued a public apology for his role in the Anti-Rightist campaign. Although the suffering that all had shared at the hands of the Red Guard tempered old animosities, conflicts between Jiang Feng, Cai Ruohong, and Hua Junwu were almost inevitable. When the political shackles were removed from the art world, no innovations sprang forth. As though permanently molded by the pressure of the past, exhibitions overflowed with works painted twenty years before, or ones that looked as though they might have been.

If this backward-looking trend was obvious in official art, it was even clearer in private painting. Even the most talented guohua artists of Beijing and Shanghai failed to produce major work. A few older artists, most notably Li Keran and Cheng Shifa, had continued to develop during the Cultural Revolution. Most of those who survived that tormented decade, however, stagnated, an unsurprising result of the dreadful psychological pressure under which they had lived. When they picked up their brushes again, many simply repeated successful compositions of the 1950s and 1960s. Publications of the early 1980s were devoted to retrospectives aimed at rehabilitating the reputations of guohua artists who had been condemned during the Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, three important trends appeared in the works of young and middle-aged artists in 1979. Each was developed in reaction to past standards; each was related to foreign art, but was used for particularly Chinese ends; and each marked the beginning of a movement that would sweep the nation in the 1980s. The three trends were an Art Deco-inspired figure painting style of largely ornamental intent; a new sympathetic realism identified with "Scar" literature, which lamented the personal tragedies of the Cultural Revolution; and the politically engaged modernism of the Stars. The artists in the first group, the most conservative, were middle-aged academically trained painters; those in the second group were mainly rusticated youth who had become professional artists; and those in the third were nonprofessionals, including former Red Guard, who challenged the art world from outside its territory. The fullest development of each of these trends occurred in the 1980s, but we will briefly describe their origins.

The most important early exemplar of the decorative school of painting was Yuan Yunsheng. Early in 1979, the Ministry of Light Industry commissioned a group of artists to execute interior decorations for the new Beijing airport. The project was under the general direction of Zhang Ding, director of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. He enlisted forty-odd artists from seventeen cities to collaborate on the project, which was to take the form of painted or ceramic murals. The thematic sources of the decorations were varied, ranging from literary texts to minority festivals. Although the artists came from all over China, most of them had some connection with CAAC. The project was considered sufficiently important that its opening ceremonies were attended by Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, and Gu Mu, as well as by officials of the Ministries of Light Industry and Culture.

It is likely that Yuan Yunsheng became involved in the project through the recommendation of his brother Yuan Yunpu, a professor at CAAC. Yuan Yunsheng had studied with Dong Xiwen in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had been declared a rightist student, and, upon graduation, had been assigned to a job in distant Jilin province. Yuan's airport murals were the first major project he had undertaken since his 1962 graduation picture, Memories of a Waterside Village , a work that was criticized during the political movements preceding the Cultural Revolution, stolen, and eventually lost. The linear style he developed for the airport project is related to Dong Xiwen's preliberation Kazak Herdswoman (fig. 34). It was thus linked to ancient Chinese mural decorations, to painting in the "national tradition," to the academy styles of the 1950s, and to what modern Western art Yuan had seen as a student in Beijing and in exile in Jilin province.^[35]

His mural, Water Splashing Festival (fig. 134), is typical of the new apo-litical painting for interior design. Here, compositional beauty is the primary pictorial motivation.^[36] Linear patterns dominate the surface. Human figures

Image not available

Figure 134
Yuan Yunsheng, Water Splashing Festi-
val, 1979, acrylic on canvas mural,
Beijing International Airport.

are elongated and distorted for aesthetic purposes, political themes replaced by a celebration of humankind and the natural world. This style of painting should probably be traced to the Art Deco movement of the 1930s,^[37] but after its suppression in China for many decades, this innocuous decorative modernism assumed new meaning. For artists and critics trained in socialist realist styles and subjects, work such as Yuan's was most notable for its avoidance of explicit political subject matter and its distortion of the human form. Although traces of Soviet socialist realism may be found in the well-muscled forms of Yuan's figures, the work is an open rejection of those values and of the standards of the Cultural Revolution. An issue that later embroiled the artist in controversy was his substitution, on the far righthand wall, of nude women bathing for the clothed figures that had been approved when his draft was submitted to the arts authorities. Whether the artist meant it or not, his nudes constituted a "formalist" or "rightist" challenge to Cultural Revolution politi-

cal standards. Thematically, of course, such images were justified, for the subject of the mural was a bathing festival in which everyone did remove their clothing. By the following year, however, some party authorities had concluded that the mural was obscene, and the part with the naked women was boarded over.^[38]

Most artists believe that even Mao understood the aesthetic value of the nude human form, and those who would ban nudes are considered leftist extremists. As we saw in chapter 5, Culture Ministry officials banned the drawing of nude models in the academy shortly before the Cultural Revolution.^[39] According to senior art administrators, Mao overturned this decision. Meishu fenglei quoted him as saying, "Male and female and old and young nude models are the necessary basic training for painting and sculpture. Not having them won't do. Feudal thought, the banning of [this practice], is inappropriate. Even if some bad things happen, that's not important. For the study of art, don't worry about small sacrifices."^[40] Perhaps he later changed his mind, for the nude remained banned until 1977. In the late 1970s, Mao's approval, qualified as it was, was raised as justification for reviving the practice. In such a context, CAFA administrators could portray opponents of the nude as being more leftist than Mao, a political stance reserved for Jiang Qing and her allies. Depicting the nude, even in a provocative manner, is thus considered a politically healthy activity in most academic circles.

A number of Yuan Yunsheng's contemporaries, including some who claim to have invented the style, worked in a similar brightly colored linear fashion on thick Chinese paper. Among the most notable were Ding Shaoguang, a 1962 graduate of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. Ding claims to have acquired his taste for decorative figure painting from the CAAC teacher Zhang Guangyu, who worked before liberation as a book designer and illustrator. He attributes the interest in Modigliani that is particularly evident in his work to Pang Xunqin, who continued to teach at CAAC after being declared a rightist.^[41] Another influential artist of this school was Jiang Tiefeng, a 1964 graduate of Huang Yongyu's printmaking studio at CAFA who was similarly interested in book design and illustration. By 1979, Ding, Jiang, and a small group of academically trained artists who had worked in Yunnan since the 1960s were recognized as a regional school. They specialized in local themes executed in this decorative style. Jiang Tiefeng, like Yuan Yunsheng, claims to have been profoundly influenced by the mural paintings of Dunhuang and Yonglegong.^[42] In 1980, the group executed a large painting for the Yunnan Room of the Great Hall of the People. Two key figures in the Yunnan school soon left for California, Ding Shaoguang in 1980, and Jiang Tiefeng in 1983. Yuan Yunsheng moved from Beijing to New York in 1982. Their linear figurative style was adopted all over China for decoration of interior spaces, especially hotels and banks.

Image not available

Figure 135
Gao Xiaohua, Why?, 1979, oil on
canvas.

The second movement of the late 1970s may be labeled "new realism,"^[43] its most famous proponents being students who entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1977.^[44] Sichuan had seen some of the worst violence of the Cultural Revolution, with hundreds of citizens reportedly killed in clashes between Red Guards and the People's Liberation Army.^[45] Like all artists of their generation, these students had seen the ideals with which they had been indoctrinated as children smashed by the political turmoil of their adolescence; they had also, like most of their contemporaries, learned to paint in the socialist realist style of the late Cultural Revolution. Some were also influenced by the photographic realism of Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan. What was new, therefore, was less their style than their imagery: they depicted not the glories of socialism but the human cost of the Cultural Revolution. Cheng Conglin's X Day X Month, 1968 , for example, depicts the carnage following a Red Guard battle.^[46] We reproduce Gao Xiaohua's Why ? of 1979 (fig. 135). In this work two young men, one wearing an armband inscribed "Rebel Faction," guard a street corner

against attack. One mans a machine gun, the other, his head bandaged, clutches a rifle. Two comrades may be seen, one idling away the time playing solitaire; another, wounded and covered in a Red Guard banner, lies on the sidewalk near a storm sewer. The boys look exhausted, but they obviously intend to fight on. And for what purpose?

Gao Xiaohua, the son of a high-ranking military officer, had worked beside his father in a labor camp in 1970. He was later able to gain a position in the PLA himself, where he became a staff artist. He participated in the 1972 national exhibition, and later became a military photographer. Such experience may have facilitated his shockingly realistic rendering of the machine gun in Why ?, a piece of equipment most artists would not have had the leisure to photograph or study so carefully. Admitted to art school in 1977, he began work on this painting in the summer of 1978.

His work, like that of Cheng Conglin and their classmate Luo Zhongli, challenged the status quo because it was the wrong kind of realism. Never before had artists been permitted to express their criticism of any aspect of the Communist experience in paint. The history of Gao's painting exemplifies the uncertain standards of the period. He wrote in 1979 that his draft had already passed through three "historical periods" in the eight months since its inception. When the draft was completed in September 1978, people told him that by revealing the "black side" of things he had entered "forbidden territory." In the next period, the Tiananmen demonstration to commemorate Zhou Enlai was given a positive reevaluation, and the literature, drama, and film worlds began revealing the evils of the Gang of Four. Thus, for a time, the work was fashionable. Finally, in 1979, with the country now concentrating on the Four Modernizations, artistic subject matter was expected to switch to modern and positive themes. Gao lamented that art could no longer depict tragedies or reveal the dark side of things and that his painting was already out of date. He concluded by asking why this flower, thorns and all, should not bloom along with the others?^[47]

Gao Xiaohua's painting is closely related to "Scar" literature, so named after a short story about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The most influential example of this art appeared not on the canvases of Sichuan painters, but in lianhuanhua form, the visual art most closely tied to literature. Three young painters, Chen Yiming, Liu Yulian, and Li Bing, who had spent most of the Cultural Revolution with Shen Jiawei on the military farms of Heilong-jiang, emerged as the most influential artists in this genre. In 1979 they submitted a set of illustrations and an adaptation of the short story "Maple" to Lianhuanhuabao (Serial Pictures Gazette), which, like all periodicals at that time, was state run. The story's narrator, a young high school teacher, describes the tragic deaths of two of his students, the young lovers Lu Danfeng (whose given name means Crimson Maple; fig. 136) and Li Honggang, as a

Image not available

Figure 136
Chen Yiming, Liu Yulian, and Li Bing,
"Maple," lianhuanhua, 1979, after a
short story by Zheng Yi, published in
Lianhuanhuabao.

result of battles between contending Red Guard factions. Despite their passion, the two broke ties when their political groups split. After a decisive and particularly bloody clash, Danfeng threw herself from the roof of a building rather than surrender to Honggang's victorious troops. The story closes with Hong-gang's arrest for her murder and his public execution. Red maple leaves appear throughout the story as tragic images of Danfeng and her fate.^[48]

The artists wrote that they characterized the hero and heroine as typical children of the time, diligent students who knew little of worldly matters. Dan-feng and Honggang were typical as well in that they threw themselves totally into Mao's Red Guard movement, even at the cost of their lives. The artists strove for complete historical accuracy, hoping only that their pictures would not suffer the same fate as Dong Xiwen's Founding of the Nation . Cultural Revolution slogans and benevolent-looking posters of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing served as backgrounds to the figures.^[49] In the changing climate of late 1979, these images of the now-out-of-favor leaders were considered too neutral, and this issue of Lianhuanhuabao was banned. The journal editors ignored the order prohibiting sale, however, and apparently got away with their disobedience. The controversy caused sales to skyrocket, making the paintings among the best-known of the post-Cultural Revolution period.

A third example of the new realism from the Sichuan academy, Father by Luo Zhongli, became notorious in 1980 largely for its ambiguity (fig. 137).^[50] This enormous rendering of an old peasant, which is almost z.5 meters high, is clearly influenced by the style of the American photo-realist Chuck Close. The juxtaposition of such a postmodern mode of painting with standard Communist subject matter is a bit perplexing to the Western viewer. Few Chinese observers, however, would have been aware of the stylistic source; to them, the work most closely resembled the enormous portraits of Chairman Mao that ornamented every public space in the nation. Replacing the ageless Chairman Mao with a weather-beaten man who has suffered from his work was more than a bit mischievous, however. While Luo's challenge to the status quo was encouraged by the administrators of his school, it was opposed by the print-maker Li Shaoyan, who suggested that Luo add a ballpoint pen behind the peasant's ear; then the viewer would know that the subject was a progressive contemporary peasant, not an oppressed preliberation one. Such critical dialogue is evidence that the Yan'an veterans who continued to regulate art either failed to understand the younger generation's challenge to their legacy or sought to waylay them by pretending to miss the point.

The most notorious artistic event of 1979 was the "Stars" (Xingxing ) exhibition, the title of which was probably a naughty reference to a 1930 article by Mao Zedong that was often quoted during the Cultural Revolution: "A tiny spark [xingxing zhi huo ] can set the steppes ablaze."^[51] Open calls for "artistic democracy" filled the press, leading to the proliferation of quasi-official exhibi-

Image not available

Figure 137
Luo Zhongli, Father, 1980, oil on can-
vas, 240 cm × 165 cm, Chinese National
Art Gallery.

tions and such experiments as the publication of "Maple" in a state-run periodical. On September 27, 1979, during a preparatory display for the Fifth National Art Exhibition, planned to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the People's Republic, an unprecedented incident occurred.^[52] A group of young amateur artists hung their work on the fence and in the garden outside the Chinese National Art Gallery. Because the spot happened to be near a major bus stop, the pictures immediately drew huge crowds of spectators. The backgrounds of the organizers were somewhat different from those of artists associated with the quasi-official exhibitions; although most were children of party officials or high-ranking intellectuals, few were academy-trained or official artists. The participating artists, moreover, seem to have had different motivations: they did not gain official sanction, but instead openly defied both the art establishment and the government. While much of the exhibited art was naive, the event was politically and conceptually quite sophisticated. Wang Keping, one of the organizers, recalls that the point of staging the event at the National Gallery during an important exhibition was to show that artists

could emerge both from within the academy and from outside it. Possibly inspired by Moscow's dissident "bulldozer exhibition" of five years before, the demolition of which had been reported in the official translations of foreign news reports available to cadres, these artists presented themselves as dissidents. They did not seek to expand the boundaries of the official art world from within; rather, their intention was to invade from without. This effort attracted the attention of the art world, the masses, and the police.

According to Wang Keping, Jiang Feng was sympathetic to the group and gave permission to store their paintings in a lounge inside the National Gallery at night. After they set up their work on the second day, thirty policemen arrived to arrest them for the illegal posting of bills. When the artists explained that the Chinese constitution guaranteed artistic freedom, the police departed. On the third day, the artists arrived to find their spot occupied by five hundred policemen^[53] and a sign prohibiting exhibitions. They tried to regroup at the nearby CAFA middle school but found it full of policemen as well. When they attempted to remove their paintings from the National Gallery, they were prevented from doing so by still more policemen. The swelling crowd began arguing with the police, who finally withdrew. Before long, a crowd of hoodlums arrived to harass the artists. One of the artists believes that the hoodlums were temporarily released from jail for this very purpose. A CAA official finally persuaded the police to remove the hoodlums from the scene.^[54]

With the exhibition closed down, the artists posted a notice on Democracy Wall that if the police did not apologize for infringing their rights they would hold a protest march on October 1, their intent presumably being to mar the national day celebrations. No apology arrived, and on the appointed day a group of about seven hundred people set forth from Democracy Wall toward the municipal government buildings. Police blocked them from marching across Tiananmen Square but allowed them to continue by another route. Wang Keping recalls that most of the demonstrators disappeared when the police came. The artists finally reached the offices of the Municipal Party Committee, where Ma Desheng delivered a lecture from the steps. Huang Rui and Xu Wenli negotiated with bureaucrats inside, but no conclusion was reached. The matter remained unresolved until November, when the group was allowed to mount an exhibition at Beihai Park.

This event, linked with the Democracy Wall movement, was one of the few examples of dissident art in the first three decades of the PRC.^[55] The organization and timing of the exhibition reveal a remarkable sensitivity to political currents and a marvelous sense of humor. Wang Keping commented that their ragtag demonstration drew so much attention from the foreign media that journalists all but neglected to report an important national day speech.^[56] None of the artists was arrested, and the group became internationally famous.^[57] Although less polished than his later work, Wang Keping's

Image not available

Figure 138
Wang Keping, Idol, 1979, wooden sculpture.

Idol , which seems to combine an image of the late Mao with that of a corpulent Buddhist deity of late-Tang or Song-dynasty style, typifies the strongly political tone of the group's activity (fig. 138).

Events of this sort came to an end by 1981 with renewed political pressure on the arts. Nevertheless, the "new wave" or "avant-garde" movements of the late 1980s look to the Stars as models. The most important features of these successor groups are their rejection of official art, be it traditional guohua or Soviet socialist realism, and their enthusiasm for Western modernism or post-modernism. Although these groups initially proved less successful than the

Stars at attracting foreign attention, many individuals have found collectors and supporters abroad. In China, more to the point, they have often stirred up as much controversy as the Stars did a decade earlier.^[58]

Conclusion

Jiang Feng's idealistic but slightly horrifying exhortation that the art that people will accept is the art they are accustomed to seeing has been partly validated by the experiences of the Chinese art world.^[59] Much has been written about the resilience of the Chinese artistic tradition, a point of view that is supported by the modest reappearance of guohua landscape paintings in the studios of artists born after the liberation. As Chu-tsing Li, an important champion of modern guohua in the West since the 1950s, observed in 1979, "Because many artists were trained in ... a literati background they cannot easily forget the tradition's valuable aspects, such as its spiritual aspect, its aesthetic excellence, its rich meaning and its profound expression."^[60] As Li implies, the Western observer must keep in mind that there is some truth to even the most nationalistic cultural formulations, and that much of contemporary Chinese culture is indeed unique. Nevertheless, it is rare in any society for an artist to work in a world entirely of his or her own making, free from the pressures of social, political, and economic circumstances. In the People's Republic of China, such an isolated artistic life is virtually impossible owing to the far-reaching social, economic, and political policies of the official sector; the Communist remolding of Chinese art has thus had every opportunity to gain the upper hand.

Perry Link has described a system of bureaucratic control under which Chinese writers labored after 1949.^[61] The primary question to be asked about the postliberation Chinese art world was similarly bureaucratic: what mattered was not what the artists might be inclined to paint, but instead who would determine which artworks might be exhibited. Most artists hoped that their contributions to Chinese art would be recognized. Such aspirations led many to a certain degree of cooperation with the authorities; as a result, bureaucratic factors became ever more important as determinants of artistic production. Indeed, by the early 1980s most artists simply assumed that one's career was naturally determined by the art bureaucracy. Complaints might arise, but they generally focused on individual bureaucrats who had failed to recognize the value of a certain artist's work, not on the system of control itself.

There may be superficial parallels between this system and the American art market, particularly in terms of their rewards. Fame and material comfort come from critical recognition in both societies. As in China, the attention of

an influential American critic, curator, or art dealer has been known to turn an unknown painter into a star. The primary difference is, of course, on the negative side. Artists in the West have not in recent times been subject to criminal punishment for producing critically unacceptable works or for criticizing the work of other artists.^[62] An artist who, voluntarily or involuntarily, has failed to attract positive critical attention can still lead a productive artistic life. In China, however, with a system based on centralized social engineering, styles and techniques flourished, declined, or died strictly on the basis of administrative decisions and procedures.

Our survey of the Chinese art world between 1949 and 1979 has attempted to describe some of the ways in which the art bureaucracy sponsored and controlled art. By rewarding and punishing artists, the Communist art education system and art bureaucracy systematically and effectively altered the very nature of Chinese painting. Traditional painting, with its rigorous technical requirements, was by 1979 practiced by only a handful of old painters. It had been eradicated as a living artistic tradition, replaced by the new ways of using Chinese media developed in the academies and local CAA branches of the 1950s and 1960s. Modernism, dimmed by the Japanese invasion of the late 1930s, was extinguished by Communism. Since 1949, realistic oil painting has been fully integrated into the Chinese art world, an attainment that the Westernizers of the early twentieth century would probably have thought impossible. They might have been equally surprised to find the Chinese art world enthusiastically preserving, practicing, and developing styles of painting defunct in the West for almost a century.

Not unexpectedly, efficiency of bureaucratic control and artistic creativity appear to have been inversely related in China between 1949 and 1979. The most aesthetically pleasing art reproduced in this book was made during periods of greatest bureaucratic irregularity, in particular the Hundred Flowers period (1956-1957) and the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward (1960-1962). By contrast, the official art of the Cultural Revolution appears, in the simplicity of its bureaucratic support, not as an aberration, but as the logical, if cold-blooded, development of efficient, state-sponsored Maoist art.

We have looked, in the course of our examination of the Chinese art bureaucracy, at the careers of artists from three generations. The oldest generation is defined, quite broadly, as men and women who were professional artists, administrators, or revolutionaries before 1949. Despite the disparities in age and experience within this group, its members shared an important common experience: all were required to adapt their preliberation inclinations and ideals to the new discipline imposed by the Communist party. The second generation is similarly defined in terms of education and experience rather than by strictly chronological age. It comprises artists who were educated during the 1950s, at the height of China's new national pride and progress, a period of

extreme standardization and self-confidence. The third generation of artists has childhood memories of the three-year famine of 1959-1961. Some received their artistic education in the 1960s, but they are best characterized as the Red Guard generation.^[63]

The artists we have looked at, Communist and non-Communist alike, have sought to contribute to Chinese culture, society, and politics through their art. Many of the artists in the first generation were idealistic Communists who followed the twists and turns of party policy with faith unshaken. Most of those we know today as artists , however, eventually missed one of the turns and were forced to stumble along on their own paths. Shi Lu is the most notable example of the artistic personality overcoming the party bureaucrat persona, a victory possibly provoked by party criticism but made all the more tragic by its association with his mental illness. The talented Yan Han, whose woodcuts had adapted to every movement, from new year's pictures to Soviet socialist realism, did not begin developing an individual style until the early 1960s, after the party had rejected him in the Anti-Rightist campaign. His focus on illustrating literary works, a specialty for which artists received extra pay, may have been determined by a drastic reduction of his salary after he was declared a rightist. In any event, it was during this period that he began exploring new and more expressive carving techniques.^[64] Unfortunately, he did not really free himself from external control on his art until his old age, during the early and mid-1980s, when he turned to a semiabstract manner reminiscent of Matisse's late paper cuts. By the end of the 1980s, he had turned to abstract expressionist ink painting. This phase of his career came to a premature halt with a heart attack he suffered in the early hours of June 4, 1989.^[65]

Non-Communist guohua painters suffered from different constraints. Fu Baoshi, as an art teacher, was permitted to paint, and as a result his art developed quickly and consistently during the early postliberation years. With his national recognition at the end of the 1950s, however, political interference became evident in some of his work. He died from the complications of high blood pressure in 1965, and so did not live long into this phase of his career, but it appears that he was quite sensitive to political rewards and pressures.

The guohua painter Li Keran is one of the great successes of the contemporary Chinese art world. This judgment is based both on the quality of his work and on the shape of his painting career as a whole, one that could not be taken for granted in the China of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He painted continuously throughout his life, interrupted only during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. He managed to bring into existence a new style that satisfied both his own artistic aims and those of the Chinese system, while largely protecting his art from the vagaries of politics. Moreover, his art developed steadily in a direction he himself chose. These characteristics are, in a society where art is free, fundamental to artistic self-definition. For Li Keran to create

such art in China, however, one can only assume that beneath his mild and unassuming exterior he was a man of truly extraordinary artistic commitment and self-confidence. One does not see the false starts one finds in the work of Shi Lu, the dutiful sacrifice of art to the requirements of propaganda that characterizes much of Yan Han's output, or the excessive sensitivity to the praise of political leaders from which Fu Baoshi suffered briefly in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, Li Keran's accomplishment was an extremely fragile one, possible only because he was sheltered from harm at critical moments of his career. As a result, he was rewarded for aspects of his art that harmonized with party policy and, except for the early years of the Cultural Revolution, rarely punished for those that might not.^[66]

An evaluation of the long-term effects of bureaucratic policies of the first three decades of the People's Republic is premature, for their influence will continue to be felt for decades. In particular, the experiments and attainments of the 1980s still await systematic study. A print by Wu Fan, originally intended as a criticism of the Cultural Revolution, may sum up the mood of many artists of his generation in the 1980s (plate 12). Plum blossoms, an age-old Chinese symbol of spiritual resilience, have been crushed by the tires of a jeep. An attack on heavy-handed cultural policies, especially on brutality directed against intellectuals, the work lends itself to broader interpretations. Might it not represent the destruction of all that was subtle, delicate, and traditional in Chinese art by the machine of modernity? Even in its style, the quiet work is filled with tension. Executed in the water-based shuiyin technique promoted by nationalists of the late 1950s, it adopts a modern, photographic point of view.

Unfortunately, the second generation of artists in the People's Republic has adopted a legacy with precedents in the distant past. Wai-kam Ho characterized the imperial painting academy of the Song period in terms that may be recognized in the official ateliers established under Mao: "The inclination to dogmatism, the tendency towards institutionalization, the encouragement of over-specialization, and the temptation to be isolated and wrapped up in a theoretical cocoon of an intoxicated narcissism—these were some of the negative aspects of the Academy."^[67]

The 1980s, the period in which the second generation came to power, was marked by bureaucratic continuity. During that decade, almost every major art academy except the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts appointed Soviet-trained artists to key administrative positions. As a result, graduates of the CAFA class of 1953 and their contemporaries may, at the tithe of this writing, be found in important positions all over China. The Maksimov pupil Jin Shangyi, for example, is director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His classmate Ren Mengzhang is vice-director and chief administrator of the Shen-yang Lu Xun Academy of Art. The Soviet-educated oil painters Xiao Feng and

Guo Shaogang direct the Zhejiang and Guangzhou academies, respectively. A sculptor trained in the Soviet manner, Ye Yushan, heads the Sichuan academy. Furthermore, department chairmen at most academies have usually been, since the mid-1980s, CAFA-trained or products of their own institutions. While we would not venture to predict an individual art administrator's behavior on the basis of his or her educational background, the new generation of administrators was trained by the art bureaucracy we have described, operates within its nets of personal relations, and, in most instances, accepts its norms.

As for the Chinese Artists Association, the only national vice-chair young enough to have been educated after 1949 was Zhou Sicong, a CAFA-trained guohua painter. Director of the CAA secretariat (shujichu shuji ) between the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign of 1982-1983 and the 1989 Tiananmen massacre was Ge Weimo, a 1953 CAFA graduate; editor-in-chief of Meishu in the same period was the Soviet-educated theorist Shao Dazhen, a professor at CAFA.

Branches of the CAA have retained unique local characteristics, but their personnel hail from the party bureaucracy or art academy system we have described. In many local branches, leaders have risen through the ranks with the help of a powerful bureaucratic patron. Li Huanmin in Sichuan is one such example; the influence of his revolutionary patriarch, Li Shaoyan, remains strong. In regions where the patriarch has died, as in Xi'an, Shi Lu's iconoclastic fiefdom was overturned by an influx of art academy graduates, who took over the local branch. The Shanghai CAA branch was run by Shen Roujian, a woodcut artist of the New Fourth Army, throughout the 1980s. The Shanghai Chinese Painting Institute was, during this decade, directed by the guobua painter Cheng Shifa, who rose through the ranks of the local art bureaucracy, first in the publishing industry and later in the painting institute. A few members of the Red Guard generation emerged during the late 1980s in important administrative roles. Upon Cui Zifan's retirement, the Beijing Institute of Painting somewhat surprisingly chose as his successor Liu Chunhua, who, you will recall, was trained at the Lu Xun academy's middle school and CAAC. The Chinese art world, to reiterate, is dominated by the art academy system and its standards.

We conclude our study with the year 1979, the thirtieth anniversary of the PRC, for reasons other than arithmetic orderliness. Deng Xiaoping's opening to the West introduced factors that profoundly changed the Chinese art world in the 1980s. The precedent set by the Stars in 1979 for unofficial dissident art produced more artists who operate largely outside the official structures. Even more important has been China's involvement with the international art market. Few artists today look to the party as their only patron; instead, many seek the attention of collectors in Tokyo, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Paris, New

York, or Los Angeles. Even some official artists find national exhibitions uninteresting; their goal is to exhibit abroad. One Soviet-trained oil painter confessed in 1990 that he had recently turned down an important museum history painting commission. He recalled that things were different in the old days, when artists would paint for prestige alone, excited by the simple joy of using high-quality imported materials. Official galleries, vying with the international market, which can offer artists more than political platitudes, have difficulty collecting new work. The party bureaucracy has lost its role as the sole external arbiter to which an artist might respond, and art is gradually becoming more diverse. Nevertheless, the Chinese art world remains different and separate from that of the West. Some of the unique characteristics it retains have to do with its ancient legacy, some are the result of China's particular experiences in the twentieth century, and many simply reflect the bureaucratic habits established between 1949 and 1979.