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Apolitical Art, Private Experience, and Alternative Subjectivity in China’S Cultural Revolution

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Apolitical Art, Private Experience, and Alternative Subjectivity in China’S Cultural Revolution China Perspectives 2014/4 | 2014 Remembering the Mao Era Apolitical Art, Private Experience, and Alternative Subjectivity in China’s Cultural Revolution Aihe Wang Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/6577 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.6577 ISSN: 1996-4617 Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine Printed version Date of publication: 25 November 2014 Number of pages: 27-36 ISSN: 2070-3449 Electronic reference Aihe Wang, « Apolitical Art, Private Experience, and Alternative Subjectivity in China’s Cultural Revolution », China Perspectives [Online], 2014/4 | 2014, Online since 01 January 2017, connection on 28 October 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/6577 ; DOI : 10.4000/ chinaperspectives.6577 © All rights reserved Special feature China perspectives Apolitical Art, Private Experience, and Alternative Subjectivity in China’s Cultural Revolution AIHE WANG ABSTRACT: For a revolution over “culture,” remarkably little has been said about the Cultural Revolution culture itself, and even less about the apolitical, private art produced underground. This article explores this apolitical, private art, arguing that it was a “rebellion of the heart” against the state’s ruthless destruction of the private sphere. Mao’s Party-state drastically fragmented families, moulding socialist subjects through “revolution deep down into the soul.” Paintings of (broken) homes and interiors, flowers, and moonlight ar - ticulate lived experiences of the revolution while silently reinventing a private refuge for the body and soul to subsist beyond state control. Defying orthodox revolutionary mass culture, this apolitical art articulated private experience and created a private inner world for a new form of modern subjectivity, while generating community and human solidarity against relentless class struggle and alienation. KEYWORDS: Apolitical and private art, Cultural Revolution, modern self, subjectivity, underground culture. ajor histories of the Cultural Revolution have been preoccupied with sation and emotions using subject matter with no overt political content – politics within the Party-state and the resulting violence and destruc - landscapes, trees and flowers, water and moonlight, still lifes and interiors, Mtion. Bestselling memoirs tell victim stories, reinforcing the master houses and streets, portraits of friends, families, and self. Small and informal in narrative. For a revolution named for “culture,” remarkably little has been said effect, Wuming paintings were produced and circulated outside the official art about Cultural Revolution culture itself, and what little scholarship there is fo - apparatus, in private time after work. In a conscious revolt against official art cuses again on political propaganda and its political dissent. The private, non- doctrines, the artists embraced the twin enemies of official art: literati aes - political art produced underground remains little known. Apart from a scarcity thetics and Western modernism. The artists thus created a form of Chinese of records, such art simply does not fit the master narratives of the Cultural modernist art. Modernism is a vastly used and contested concept. I engage Revolution. This article explores apolitical art and its different role in politics: this concept to highlight three specific aspects of Wuming art as part of global not as its servant or as dissent, but as its critical and aesthetic alternative. artistic Modernism. Modernist art began in Europe by repudiating the function The case for this exploration is the Wuming (No Name) Painting Group of art as narrative, illustration, or teaching, moving from representation to active in Beijing 1973-1981. All of the painters during the group’s active agency. Continuing this artistic movement in Mao’s China, Wuming artists re - years were workers or urban youths sent down to become farm labourers. pudiated the official doctrine of art serving politics, thus also moving from rep - Excluded from formal academic training, they learned painting by self-teach - resentation to action and agency. Secondly, Wuming ’s modernist art is a ing. A few core members of Wuming started painting together as early as critique of Chinese revolutionary modernity, corresponding to the global mod - 1962, while a circle of twelve younger painters joined them in 1973. The ernisms that have thrived as a critical response to the arrival of modernity. community, now with a clear group identity, met regularly to paint, read, lis - Thirdly, by turning from representation towards subjective experience – unique ten to music, and discuss literature and philosophy, producing several thou - individual sensations, emotions, and perception – Wuming art developed an sand oil paintings and holding three major underground or unofficial art alternative modern identity and subjectivity for both painter and viewer, for - exhibitions (1974, 1979, 1981). These paintings provide visual memories of mulating a self-conscious and self-reflective individual subjectivity. an ultra-political era, telling an unknown story of the subjective experiences Scholars have attributed the rise of private art to post-1989 China as part of that revolution and the silent change brought by private artistic activities. of a de-politicising of society in the 1990s. Geremie Barmé sees 1989 as Biographies of the artists tell of the state’s shattering of family and invasion the turning point towards the “graying of Chinese culture.” (1) Hou Hanru of privacy even to the innermost thought and emotion. Visual evidence – finds in the 1990s a new wave of artists abandoning ideology-centric art paintings preserved as visual diaries – documents the artists’ personal expe - and seeking self-expression. (2) Only recently have scholars begun to notice rience during the Mao era, demonstrating the existence of visions of moder - nity and forms of subjectivity other than the state’s socialist subject. 1. See Geremie Barmé, “The graying of Chinese culture” in his In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture , New York, Columbia University Press, 1999, pp. 99-144. Contrasting with dissident art (e.g. the Stars group of 1979) and with the 2. Hou Hanru, “Towards an ‘Un-unoffical Art’: De-ideologicalisation of China’s Contemporary Art in political pop that thrived after it, this underground art articulates private sen - the 1990s,” Third Text , Vol. 10, No. 34, 1996, pp. 37-52. N o. 2014/4 • china perspectives peer-reviewed article 27 Special feature the private art of the Mao era. In 2007, Gao Minglu identified Wuming ’s political content and avoided public political commentary, pursuing the pri - “art for art’s sake” approach as belonging to an alternative undercurrent, vate and rejecting the official doctrine that “art serves politics.” But this what he calls an “aesthetic modernism” that has been marginalised through - very rejection of the political in such a politicised context was itself a po - out China’s twentieth century, during which mainstream “social modernism” litical action, giving apolitical art a political subtext. Ultimately, this art was has been dominant. (3) And in 2010, Wu Hung observed that such private a rebellion against the state’s ruthless destruction of the private sphere, and apolitical art was in fact the majority of what surfaced in 1979, yet has against its invasion of family and engineering of the soul. Countering the been omitted from the history of art altogether. (4) The Wuming painting unprecedented social conformity and atomisation of the individual, these group provides a key case for further exploring this private art and refining private paintings celebrated a free spirit and articulated private sensations our understanding of its engagement with revolutionary modernity and in - and inner experience. They constructed a shelter, a refuge, in which an in - ternational modernism. A major retrospective exhibition of the group toured dividual could evade the scrutiny of the state to reflect on his/her emotional in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in 2006-2007 with a companion book and moral experiences and to attend to his/her body and soul in secrecy. in Chinese. (5) Another exhibition on the Wuming , Stars , and Caocao groups Such private art thus gave rise to a new sense of modern subjectivity, as - was held in New York (2011) and Hong Kong (2013). (6) More far-ranging serting perspectives, emotions, sensations, and experience that were actu - exhibitions (e.g. Art and Revolution , New York, 2009) and publications have ally lived and felt. Depicting flowers and moonlight, it silently created a started to include Wuming as the beginning of contemporary Chinese art. (7) modern self, fundamentally undermining the state programming of socialist And the short documentary film No Name Painting Association (2013) has subjects. been shown in 30 film festivals and has won eight awards. (8) The rediscovery of this private art belongs to what can be called a new Mourning the shattered home approach to the Mao era based largely on memory and subjective experi - ence. As demonstrated in the present issue, these new forms of memory Wuming art responded directly to the state’s drastic elimination of the are often autonomous endeavours carried out by individuals or groups who private home and invasion of the private sphere, articulating emotional and chose to focus on the everyday and “ordinary people” instead of grand nar - subjective experiences resilient to that process. Many Wuming painters
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