When last year Rizzoli published The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, the catalogue of the Saatchi collection of contemporary Chinese art, Jed Perl called it ‘the most hateful art book published in my lifetime’. Perl, art critic for The New Republic, labeled the Chinese work overblown, meretricious, ‘political pornography’, and hinted that its giddy embrace by Western collectors and institutions—his piece appeared shortly after Cai Guo-Qiang’s retrospective at the Guggenheim closed—dovetailed too conveniently with the current Chinese government’s international self-promotion. A few months later the New Criterion’s James Panero concurred in harsher terms, writing that the market success enjoyed by Chinese art star Zhang Huan, recently the subject of a two-venue show at PaceWildenstein, ‘supported the soft power strategy of an oppressive state’. More tellingly perhaps, he saw China’s imitation vangardism as symptomatic of the decline of serious (Western) art.
It is against this kind of critical opprobrium outside the artworld and the bigger buzz within it that the Asia Society’s ‘Art and China’s Revolution’ marks a timely effort to understand the sources of contemporary Chinese art. Spanning thirty years from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the exhibition includes oil-paintings, sculptures, ink paintings, drawings, woodblock prints, posters, everyday objects and photographs, and charts the adoption of socialist realism in the early fifties, the replacement of ink painting by oil painting, the development of an iconography of revolutionary heroes, and the growth of the cult of Mao. Also covered is the Cultural Revolution (1966-c.69/76) the violent period of widespread social and economic chaos orchestrated by Mao in order to deflect criticism of his disastrous Great Leap Forward and the resulting power struggle within the communist