Underground Culture And Modernist Art In The Cultural Revolution

Abstract

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, socialist realism remained the artistic orthodox and western modernism was strictly forbidden. This seems to be the least likely of all times when “transcontinental interactions” were possible. How did modernist Chinese art grow in such a context? What is its relationship to the Cultural Revolution on the one hand and to Western modernism on the other? Recent discussion of culture during the Cultural Revolution has largely focused on questions of how much art was produced, whether its content was modern, and whether its forms were hybrid or indigenous. This paper presents a case study of an underground cultural group—Wuming—and its subversive experiments with Western forms of modernist art. But rather than focusing on stylistic hybridity, the paper details this art’s position in its living social context, its relationship to power and ideology in its time, and the historical conditions of its production. The case shall illustrate how western art forms were transformed into resources for forging alternative subjectivities and a semi-public space in an age of tight political control.