Artistic Practice during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976): Actors, Media, Institutions

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The designation “art of the Cultural Revolution” is mostly used to denominate the visual material produced during the Red Guard movement (1966–1968) and the officially sanctioned art of the 1970s. This project aims at drawing a more differentiated picture of art produced in the decade between 1966 and 1976 by taking into account the works made by formerly renowned artists now evicted from their positions and by young artists working outside the framework of state-controlled system, since these are likewise products of the specific political conditions of the period. The onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 brought about the dissolution of the academic and artistic institutions of socialist China established in the 1950s: Teaching was suspended, associations disbanded, and publications discontinued, and would be only partly resumed in the early 1970s. Established artists who were victimized, rebellious students, as well as workers and peasants who received training as amateur artists had to come to terms with this constantly evolving situation, and they had to adapt their artistic practices accordingly. The project will explore how different actors responded to the structural conditions of the Cultural Revolution period and how these conditions shaped their artistic practices. While political directives and censorship formed a tight and highly uniform matrix for art production, artists developed aesthetic criteria that matched the political directives or ran counter to them. I will describe how they carved out spaces for artistic creation; how different artistic circles interconnected in mentoring relations, common projects, institutional connections, and political conflict; and how artistic practice was organized, channelled and distributed in schools, exhibitions, and publications. The ultimate aim of the project is to write a multi-layered and methodologically rich history of the arts of the Cultural Revolution that trace continuities and disruptions with artistic production and organisation in the years before and after those ten years and that encompasses the radical, the official, and the suppressed as partaking in the same social and political circumstances.