Weekend Reading – Art in the Cultural Revolution
Posted: July 17th, 2010 | No Comments »A new and very interesting collection of essays whose title speaks for itself: Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution,1966-1976, edited by Richard King. Who’d be an artist in the midst of a Cultural Revolution Maoist style – dangerous waters indeed! As usual blurb below.
“The passage of time and passion, as well as the availability of new materials, bring a new focus to work on the Cultural Revolution. Memoirs of participants put a human face on the decade-long movement. The personal experiences and new documents in Art in Turmoil combine with exquisite scholarship to deepen our understanding of the artistic life of Maoist China.” — Richard Kraus, author of The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture
- Revisits the visual and performing arts of the Cultural Revolution period — the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet.
- Examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age.
- With over 60 colour and black-and-white illustrations.
Richard King is Director of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives and Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Victoria.
Share this:
Leave a Reply