To Rebel is justified
Three months after the official launch of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, one million youths gathered at Tiananmen Square to attend Mao’s first meeting with Red Guards. The Red Guards were a mass movement of civilians, initially radical high school and university students. Their manifesto stated that they wanted to turn the old world [...]
Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages
After two years of violent clashes among Red Guard factions and disrupted classes in schools and universities across the country, students were sent to the countryside for “reeducation.” Many of their teachers and those who had fallen on the wrong side of politics had been sent to labor camps during the previous decade. It is [...]
Never Forget Class Struggle
Age and class determined how a person was treated during the Cultural Revolution. Well-respected, older artists such as Lin Fengmian, Li Keran, Pan Tianshou, and Shi Lu, whose ink paintings had been widely revered before the Cultural Revolution, found their work not just out of fashion but scorned as examples of bourgeois decadence. These older [...]
Asia Society and NYC Parks Department Partner to Present Large-Scale Mao Suit Jacket Sculpture on Park Avenue Median
Contact: Elaine Merguerian at 212-327-9271
Asia Society and NYC Parks Department Partner to Present Large-Scale Mao Suit Jacket Sculpture on Park Avenue Median
On view September 7 through mid-November at Park Ave and 70th Street
Coinciding with the exhibition Art and China’s Revolution, Asia Society and the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation present a 10-foot high Mao [...]
Long March Project
The Long March Project, a contemporary art collective based in Beijing, began in 2002 with the formulation of “Long March Project—A Walking Visual Display.” This was the Long March Project’s first endeavor and was conceived by artist, curator, and Long March Project Founder Lu Jie along with artist Qiu Zhijie. It aimed to retrace the [...]
Archive: Art, History, and Politics
This section of the exhibition is devoted to an historical account of China from 1949, when the Communist Party assumed power and established The Peoples Republic of China, to 1979, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The printed materials, objects from everyday life, and other ephemera attempt to document the political and [...]
Archive: Mao as Icon
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By some estimates, 2.2 billion portraits of Chairman Mao were produced during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s portrait was printed on the cover of the Little Red Book and was displayed in factories and at significant sites such as Tiananmen Square. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded, Mao’s image [...]
Archive: Model Performances
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During the 1960s and 1970s, artists sought to create works that fulfilled Mao’s dictum that art should serve the people. This occurred not only in the visual arts, but also in the performing arts with the creation of new operas and ballets that told stories of heroic [...]
Archive: Politics and the Everyday
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This section offers a few examples of the massive number of products that translated the ideology of the Cultural Revolution into everyday life. Household items made during this period were often decorated with revolutionary iconography, and Mao quotations and revolutionary slogans could be found on the most [...]
Archive: Printed Matter
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“We do not favor overstressing the importance of literature and art, but neither do we favor underestimating their importance. Literature and art are subordinate to politics, but in their turn exert a great influence on politics”
—Mao Zedong, 1942, Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art
After the Communist Revolution [...]