Tucked away next to the Eastern Art Paintings and Prints Study Room in the Ashmolean Museum, there’s a small display of posters, paintings, and objects from the Cultural Revolution — a time when the State determined cultural production, and art and politics were intertwined. The left hand wall, emblazoned with bright red hues, the visual and notional sign for Communism, is saturated with shiny, smiling faces. They are images of the masses — that is to say the Proletarian people-workers, peasants, soldiers, and revolutionary cadres — for the masses.
Typical of the Cultural Revolution, the art is cheerful, sweetened with candy colours and bold forms, easily readable, and heavily laced with Communist ideology. Perhaps paradigmatic of this popularist art form is the poster Long Live the Great People’s Republic of China (1974). Here a swelling crowd of gleeful faces is pressed up against the picture plane, a heroic image of the people. Three figures stand out amongst the crowd: a peasant, a worker and a soldier. The worker thrusts his flower-laden hand in the air, his gaze, like his companions, filled with reverence as he looks out into the distance and into a brighter future. Pinks, blues and yellows write a sense of cheerfulness on the image, whilst the abundance of flowers marks it with a sense of celebration. Behind the heroic three, an image of Tiananmen Square pierces the blue skyline, framed by the archaic red landscape from which the sea of people seem to emerge. These people are colourful and traditionally dressed, marking their minority identity. Here image and text combine: this is an image which seems to say ‘men, women, workers, peasants, soldiers, and minorities unite’, showing a people bound together by a sense of nationalism and revolutionary fervour.
In contrast to these sickly sweet posters, the end wall shows a different kind of visual language of the Revolution in the guohua (national paintings). Rooted in the ‘traditional’ styles of China’s national heritage, watery figures are scratched on to the surface of these ink paintings. Each one maps out China’s ancient landscape and yet is stamped with the spectral presence of modernity: an image of the people, an electrical pylon or some other kind of modern construction.
On the right hand side is a cabinet full of objects and memorabilia. Lying next to scattered boxes of matches there are four targets, each depicting one member of the gang of four as the bull’s-eye. Here joviality and politics mingle; as part of a children’s game these targets reveal the political potency of the period, with ideology permeating all areas of commodity and culture.
With all the beautiful ink figures, the bright colours, the cheerful faces, and the childish games, one forgets that this was a period defined by corruption and violence, political indoctrination and the manipulation of the masses. However it is precisely this denial, this masking of the violent reality of the Cultural Revolution, which reveals the sheer strength and authority of Mao’s regime.Â
‘Cultural Revolution: State Graphics in China in the 1960s and 1970s’ is on until 3rd July
