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An examination of the significance of Soviet Socialist Realist art and practice in the Asia Pacific region.

Alison Carroll Student Number: 196621690 ORCID Number: 0000-0001-8068-2694 Thesis Submission for Doctor of Philosophy degree October 2016

This thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the degree. School of Culture and Communication University of

Supervisors: Associate Professor Alison Inglis () Professor Anthony Milner (University of Melbourne and Australian National University)

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An examination of the significance of Soviet Socialist Realist art and practice in the Asia Pacific region.

Table of contents: 2 Abstract 4 Declaration 5 Acknowledgements 6 List of illustrations 7

Preface 20

Introduction: art historical practice and recent Asian art; some alternative ways of thinking. 22

1. Art and politics: Soviet Socialist and in the Asia Pacific region. 46

2. Policy and practice: The significance of the new policies and practices created in the in the direction for art in Asia. 70

1. Political leaders on art 70 2. Arts leaders on politics 77 3. The Soviet practice of art in Asia: organisation 80 4. The Soviet practice of art in Asia: ideological innovations 95 5. The transmission of information from West to East 103

3. The Art: The influence of Soviet on the art of the Asia Pacific region, 1917-1975. 113

1. in the Asia Pacific region 114 2. Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region 1. and : (a) Socialist in content 121 Russia and China: (b) Realist in style 131 2. 135 3. 140 4. Southeast Asia 141 (a) Malaya/ 141 (b) 143 (c) The 146

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5. 146 3. Soviet influence further explored 147 1. Other in the Asia Pacific region 147 2. The ideology of egalitarianism 152

4. The contemporary response: the 1970s to recent times. 155 1. China (and Vietnam and other Communist states) 159 2. Indonesia 170 3. The Philippines (and Thailand and South Korea) 182 4. Australia 192

5. The Local: The adoption and adaption of Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region. 202 1. Local history 203 2. Cultural attitudes 207 3. Local traditions 217

Conclusion 229

Bibliography 234

Appendix: The most significant exgternal outside influence on the art of the Asia Pacific region? 269 1. Internal Asian influences 269 2. External influences 1. The European Academy and its style 270 2. , Post-Impressionism, , , et al – the isms 274 3. The Latino influence 278 4. American 280 (a) The Philippines, Australia and South Vietnam – the non-Islamic acolytes 283 (b) Islamic , Malaysia – and Indonesia 289 (c) Japan and Korea 294

Index of Artists 298

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Abstract

The aim of this research has been to investigate the impact of Soviet Socialist Realist art and practice in the Asia Pacific region. It has resulted in a number of findings. The first is that Soviet innovation in the practice of art has influenced the organisation of visual art in the region to a degree not previously acknowledged. This Soviet arts organisational focus is analysed through a number of effective and enduring strategies, as well as through a number of ideological innovations. The thesis compares the implementation of these practices throughout the Asia Pacific region.

The second finding is that the Soviets, and, later, the Soviet-inspired Chinese, had significant impact on the art produced throughout the Asia Pacific region from the early years of the twentieth century until today, again previously unacknowledged across such a broad temporal and spatial span. The Soviet influence on art in China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia in the period after the late 1960s is argued to be of particular significance for the outcomes in those places and in more broadly. Comparisons of particular artworks are made, as well as a distinction been social realism, focused on the suffering of the disadvantaged, and Socialist Realism, a triumphant glorification of the ‘workers, farmers and soldiers’. An analysis of the local adaption of Soviet art in the outcomes in each place is given, deemed critical for the success of this ideology and style.

The question throughout this analysis is why, if this influence is so extensive and significant, has it not been acknowledged as part of ‘global’ art history? The ideological and geo-political struggle of the Cold War between Communism and capitalism, experienced over the century, is central. Soviet Socialist Realism was a target of Western art historians, and when the ideology and style was adopted further East, these positions extended there as well.

The thesis analyses the literal and metaphorical interweaving of image and text, as well as the interweaving of art and politics. It is what has been written about this art by people who wanted so much to come from it, and the way their words seep into the images themselves, that adds to the richness of the area.

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Declaration

This is to certify that:

1. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface.

2. due acknowledgment has been made in the text of all other material used.

3. the thesis is circa 100,000 words in length exclusive of tables, maps, bibliography and appendices.

Alison Carroll

17 October 2016

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Acknowledgements

Many people have been involved in the development of the ideas in this text, over a long period and in many places. I thank them for their generous and provocative discussions and insights. More recently a number of individuals have helped me with information, opinion, and critique: I thank them here:

Alisa Bunbury Susan Lowish Dadang Christanto Chips Mackinolty Ade Darmawan Jenny McGregor Peter Eckersall Peter McPhee Lucie Folan Deborah Mills David Forrest James Mollison Julia Fraser Roger Nelson Mary Ginsberg Ann Newmarch Charles Green Mark Nicholls Catherine Gough-Brady Ann Richter Salima Hashmi Claire Roberts Pat Hoffie Shen Jiawei Geoff Hogg Judith Staines Virginia Hooker Anthony White Andrea Hull Andrew Wootton Peter Inkel Henry Wootton Albina Legostaeva Yu Jin Seng Yue Li

I thank the University of Melbourne for enabling this period of deeper research. I particularly thank my supervisors Anthony Milner for his enthusiasm for art, and Alison Inglis for her enthusiasm for the crafted sentence.

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List of illustrations: Introduction and Chapter 1:

1.1. Aleksandr M. Gerasimov (1881-1963), Lenin on the Tribune, 1929, oil on canvas, 288 x 177. Coll: Historical Museum, .

1.2. Pablo Baens Santos (b.1943), Manifesto, 1985-7, oil on canvas, 159.6 x 256.3 cm. Coll: National Gallery Singapore.

1.3. S. Sudjojono (1913-86), Perusing a Poster, 1956, oil on canvas, 109 x 140 cm. Dr. Oei Hong Djien Collection, .

1.4. Aleksandr A. Deineka (1899-1969), Before Descent into the Mine, 1925, oil on canvas, 247 x 210 cm. Coll: The State , Moscow (photo: A. Wootton, 2015).

1.5. Dong Xiwen (1914-73), The Grand Ceremony of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, 1953-90, oil on canvas, 230 x 405 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, (photo: A. Carroll, 2014).

1.6. Art and ’ display case, Time & Memory; British Art of the First World War, Imperial War Museum, London 2014 (photo: A. Wootton).

1.7. Natalia S. Goncharova (1881-1962), Chinese Still Life, 1909, oil on canvas, 139.5 x 104 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Chapter 2:

2.1. Prime Ministerial Visit to China, 1973, masthead of the Whitlam Institute, , 2015 (see http://www.whitlam.org/gough_whitlam/china, accessed 10 October 2015).

2.2. Hendra Gunawan in Moscow (see http://archive.ivaa- online.org/khazanahs/detail/2476, accessed 2 January 2016).

2.3. W.A. Smith, A Tramwayman Talks on Russia, 1935. Melbourne: Tramways Union, 18.5 x 12.5 cm. Coll: Monash University Rare Books, Melbourne.

2.4. Selection of official art publications 1975-91, purchased in Hanoi by the author.

2.5. Various PKI booklets. Coll: Monash University Rare Books, Melbourne. Upper left: Kepada Partai, 1965, Jakarta, 21 x 13 cm; upper right: D.N. Aidit Kaum Tani Mengganjang Selan2 Desa, 1964, Jakarta, 21 x 14 cm; lower left: Untuk Demokrasi, Tanah, Produksi dan Irian Barat, 1962, 18 x 13.2 cm; lower right: D.N. Aidit Lenin dan Indonesia, 1960, Jakarta, 18 x 13 cm, and Marxisme: ilmu dan amalnja, 1962, Jakarta, 15 x 11 cm.

2.6. Cover, PKI 40 Tahun, 1920-1960, 1960. Jakarta: Institute of the History of the CPI, of the Agitations and Propaganda Department of the C.C. [central committee] C.P.I., 22.5 x 32 cm. Coll: Monash University Rare Books, Melbourne.

2.7. PKI 40 Tahun, 1920-1960: 13, 22.5 x 32 cm. Coll: Monash University Rare Books, Melbourne. Note the image of Lenin on the presidium.

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2.8. Nikolai S. Troshin (1897-1990) (graphic designer), ‘The giant and the builder,’ Cover of USSR in Construction (SSSR Na Stroike), 1932, no.1 English edition. Coll: National Library of Australia, Canberra.

2.9. Covers, , Melbourne University Labour Club, 1932, 1933, 1935. Upper left (28 x 22 cm) issue includes articles on ‘Women in the Soviet Union’ and ‘Soviet Songs’. Upper right cover (28 x 21.5 cm) is by Jack Maughan (1897-1980). Lower right edition (24.5 x 19 cm) encourages readership of USSR in Construction and John . Coll: Monash University Rare Books, Melbourne (photo: A. Carroll).

2.10. Boris V. Ioganson (1893-1973) and four brigade members, Lenin’s Speech at the IIIrd Congress of the KomSoMol, 1950, oil on canvas, 350 x 493 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (from Bown, 1998: 270).

2.11. Posters by V. and G. Sternberg brothers. The Poster Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1933, photograph on view, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2015 (photo: A. Wootton).

2.12. Permanent Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1936, photograph on view, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2015 (photo: A. Wootton).

2.13. FRONT, no. 1-2, 1942, Navy Issue,lithograph, 41.5 x 19 cm. Coll: British Museum.

2.14. FRONT, 1942, lithograph, 41.5 x 38 cm (2 pages). Coll: British Museum, London.

2.15. FRONT, 1944, no. 14 (Philippines special edition), lithograph, 41.5 x 19 cm.

2.16. Aleksandr M. Rodchenko (1891-1956), Workers Club, 1925 (reconstruction 2008). Made for Soviet Pavilion at International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, . Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton, 2015).

2.17. Aleksandr M. Rodchenko (1891-1956), Workers Club, 1925 (reconstruction 2008). Made for Soviet Pavilion at International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton, 2015).

2.18. To Ngoc Van (1906-54), On the way to night class, 1954, watercolour on paper, 50 x 35 cm. Coll: Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi.

2.19. Ivan A. Malyutin (1891/9-1932), To the Polish Front (author V.V. Mayakovsky), 1920, lithograph, 63 x 52 cm. Coll: Monash University Rare Books, Melbourne (photo: A. Carroll, 2015).

2.20. Iraklii M. Toidze (1902-85), The Motherland is Calling! 1941, sketch for poster, gouache, Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, (photo: A. Wootton, 2015). This photograph, taken on an angle to avoid the glass reflection (and, despite this, showing the success of the woman’s direct appeal to the audience), shows the combination of drawing and to make such an image.

2.21. Yu Yunjie (1917-92), Guangdong People’s Art Publishing House, 1954, Celebrating with great joy and enthusiasm the publication of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China, offset lithograph, print run: 140,000.

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2.22. Top: Huy Oanh (b. 1937) and Nguyen Thu (b. 1930), Uncle Ho is always amongst us, 1971, screen print, 60 x 84.3 cm; below: Lai Thanh, Ho Chi Minh; the heroes of the Revolution of the country, 1990, screen print, c. 60 x 95 cm; on view Musée Quai Branley, Paris, 1 August 2014 (photo: A. Wootton).

2.23. Nguyen Cong Do (b. 1930), Diligently manufacture and prepare for combat, 1973, gouache and pencil on paper, 55 x 75.5 cm. Coll: British Museum, London.

2.24. Vera I. Mukhina (1889-1953), Worker and Kolkhoz woman, 1936,model for USSR Pavilion for 1937 International Exposition, Paris, bronze, 163 x 112 x 116 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton).

2.25. Centre: Vera I. Mukhina (1889-1953), Worker and Kolkhoz woman, 1936,model for USSR Pavilion for 1937 International Exposition, Paris, bronze, 163 x 112 x 116 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton).

2.26. V. Mukhina The Factory Worker and Farm Girl in front of the Soviet Pavilion on the International Exhibition in Paris, 1937, photograph on view The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2015 (photo: A. Wootton).

2.27. The Monument to the People’s Heroes, 1952-8, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, showing frieze on left.

2.28. (a-d). Aleksandr A. Deineka (1899-1969), Day and Night under the Soviet Sky, 1938, mosaic, Mayakovsky Station, Moscow, 2015, (photos: A. Wootton).

2.29. Association of Draughting, Supervisory and Technical Employees’ banner in procession, 1982, Melbourne.

2.30. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934), Mao in Tibet, 1965, on view National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A. Carroll).

2.31. Vasili P. Efanov (1900-78) and six brigade members, including Konstantin M. Maksimov, A Meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1951, oil on canvas, 397 x 585 cm. Coll: The Russian Museum, St Petersburg (from Bown, 1998, 271).

2.32. translated or published by Lu Xun, on display Lu Xun Museum, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A.Carroll).

2.33. Soviet Graphic Art, cover designed by Lu Xun, on display Lu Xun Museum, Beijing, 2014, (photo: A.Carroll).

2.34. Selected Prints of Käthe Kollwitz, flyer for publication of Kollwitz’s works under Lu Xun’s imprint, on exhibition Lu Xun Museum, Beijing, 2014. (photo: A. Carroll).

2.35. Lai Kui Fang (b. 1936), Still Life, 1959, oil on canvas, 67.3 x 58.7 cm. Coll: the artist (photo: Yu Jin Seng).

2.36. Chips Mackinolty (b.1954) and Therese Ritchie (b.1961), Onwards to the next glorious 5 year plan (Green Ants 5th Birthday), 1995, screen print, 98.5 x 73 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

2.37. Chips Mackinolty (b.1954), Tribune Fair, Foley Park, Glebe, 1978, screen print, 73 x 40.2 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 9

2.38. Ann Newmarch (b.1945), Women Hold Up Half the Sky! 1978, screen print, 91 x 65 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Chapter 3:

3.1. Li Qun (1912-2012), Portrait of Lu Xun, 1933-5, woodcut, 15 x 12.5 cm.

3.2. Li Hua (1907-94), The Livelihood of the Distressed, c. 1944, woodcut, 30.8 x 22.5 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

3.3. Huang Xinbo (1916-80), Orphaned, 1943, woodcut, 21.3 x 16.8 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

3.4. Choo Keng Kwang (b. 1931), 5-1-3, 1954, woodcut, 29.4 x 39.3 cm. Coll: National Museum of Singapore.

3.5. Satish Gujral (b. 1925), Despair, 1954, oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm.

3.6. F. N. Souza (1924-2002), Untitled (Indian Family), (proposed titled After Work the Whole Day in the Fields We Have No Rice to Eat), 1947, oil on board, 119.7 x 117.2 cm.

3.7. Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-78), Orphans, c. 1952, linocut, approx 21 x 15 cm.

3.8. Zainul Abedin, (1914-76), Famine, 1943, reed pen and ink, 45 x 29 cm. Coll: British Museum, London.

3.9. Jiang Zhaohe (1904-86), Street Boy, 1937, brush and ink, 87.5 x 53.9 cm.

3.10. (1913-86), The Cough – Stone Dust, from The Miners, 1947, linocut, 14.8 x 20. 2 cm (image). Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

3.11. Kim Kwan-ho (1890-1959), Hong Kyung-sun, 1948, oil on cardboard, 70 x 30 cm.

3.12. Lenin addressing troops in Moscow, 1920, photograph.

3.13. Isaak I. Brodsky (1884-1939), Lenin at the Smolny, 1930, oil on canvas, 190 x 287 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton, 2015).

3.14. Vladimir A. Serov (1910-68), Peasant Partisans Meeting V.I. Lenin, 1950, oil on canvas, 60 x 58 cm.

3.15. Vasili P. Efanov (1900-78), An Unforgettable Meeting; Party and Government Leaders Meet Industrial Workers’ Wives at the Kremlin, 1936-7, oil on canvas, 270 x 391 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton, 2015).

3.16. Luo Gongliu (1916-2004), Making a Report on the Rectification in Yan’an, 1951, oil on canvas, 164 x 236 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing.

3.17. Xin Mang (b. 1916), Mao Zedong Writing Articles in Yan’an, 1951, oil on canvas, 212 x 182 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing (photo: A. Carroll, 2014).

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3.18. Mao Zedong at Yan’an, 1938, photograph on display National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A. Carroll).

3.19. Luo Gongliu (1916-2004), Mao Zedong at the Jinggang Mountain, 1961, oil on canvas, 150 x 220 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing.

3.20. Gao Quan (b. 1936), The CPC Branch Committee in a Company, oil on canvas, 198 x 188 cm. Coll: The Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, Beijing.

3.21. Lin Gang (b. 1925), Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception, 1950, preparatory drawing.

3.22. Lin Gang (b. 1925), Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception, 1950-1, ink on paper, 176.5 x 213.5 cm. Coll: Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

3.23. Artists discussing the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square with Liu Kaiqu, 1956 (photo: http://en.cafa.com.cn/sculpting-china-cafa-sculpture- retrospective-exhibition-highlights-representative-works-from1918-through- 2012.html, accessed 12 December, 2015). The Nanchang Uprising is behind the artists.

3.24. Zeng Zhushao (1908-2012), Burning opium in Humen, Monument to the People’s Heroes, 1955-8, marble, 180 x 495 cm. Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

3.25. 56 National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A.Carroll).

3.26. Chen Daqing (1936-77), The May 30th Movement, 1959, oil on canvas, 142 x 220 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing.

3.27. Wang Linyi (1908-97), May 30th Movement, Monument to the People’s Heroes, 1955- 8, marble, 180 x 400 cm. Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

3.28. Yin Rongshen (1930-2005), The Heshengqiao Battle, 1961, oil on canvas, 145 x 300 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing.

3.29. Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) and Guan Shanyue (1912-2000), This Land so Rich in Beauty, 1962, ink and brush on paper, 550 x 900 cm. Great Hall of the People, Beijing.

3.30. Shangdong Provincial Government, Agriculture and Forestry Department, The story of how Yu Qingshou developed and spread a new wheat variety, 1951, lithograph, Shandong People’s Publishing House.

3.31. Chen Kai ‘of the Tractor Factory’, Together the workers and peasants sing the song of the plentiful harvest, 1975, lithograph, Shanghai People’s Publishing House.

3.32. Dong Xiwen (1914-73), The Grand Ceremony of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, 1953-1990, (second version 1955, Gao Gang on right excised; poster, 53 x 77 cm. Landsberger Collection (see http://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-960.php, accessed 11 December 2015).

3.33. Liu Chunhua (b. 1944), Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan, 1968, colour lithograph, 76 cm wide, People's Arts Publishing House, Beijing. Coll: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

3.34. Konstantin M. Maksimov (1913-93), Study for ‘The Meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences’, 1950-1, oil on canvas, 21 x 35.5 cm (sold MacDougal Arts Ltd., 2015).

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3.35. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934), Academic Studies, 1957, charcoal on paper, on display at the National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A. Carroll).

3.36. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934), Capturing Jinzhou, 1959, preparatory drawings, charcoal on paper, on display at the National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photos: A. Carroll, 2014).

3.37. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934), Landscape, 1957, oil on canvas, on display at the National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A. Carroll).

3.38. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934), Capturing Jinzhou, 1959, detail (photo: A. Carroll, 2014).

3.39. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934), Capturing Jinzhou, 1959, oil on canvas, 150 x 220 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing.

3.40. Le Thanh Duc (1925-2004), Hanoi, Night of Liberation, 1954, gouache on paper, 50 x 79 cm. Coll: Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi.

3.41. Top: Vu Giang Huong (1930-2011), Troops marching through Truong Son mountains, 1974, colour on silk, 53 x 75 cm; below: Nguyen Quang Tho (1929-2001), The plan of the battle has been mapped out, 1972, colour on silk, 41 x 60 cm. Coll: Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, from Art Works; Vietnam Fine Arts Museum’s Collection, 2000: 152.

3.42. Tsuguharu Fujita (1886-1968), Last stand at Attu, 1943, oil on canvas, 193.5 x 259.5 cm.

3.43. Ryozo Suzuki (1898-1996), Evacuation of the wounded and hardworking Relief Unit, 1943, oil on canvas, 192 x 254.7 cm. Coll: National Museum of , .

3.44. Kayo Yamaguchi (1899-1984), Ground crew in action at seaplane base, 1943, colour on paper, four-fold screen, 204.5 x 451.4 cm. Coll: National Museum of Modern, Tokyo.

3.45. Lim Yew Kuan (b. 1928), Searching, 1954, oil on canvas, 63 x 77.5 cm. Coll: National Heritage Board, Singapore.

3.46. Lim Yew Kuan (b. 1928), The Night Arrest, 1954, oil on canvas, 104 x 130 cm. Coll: National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia.

3.47. Lee Boon Wang (b.1934), Road Workers, 1955, oil on canvas, 96.5 x 82.5 cm. Coll: National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia.

3.48. Chua Mia Tee (b. 1931), Epic poem of Malaya, 1955, oil on canvas, 112 x 153 cm. Coll: National Heritage Board, Singapore.

3.49. Chua Mia Tee (b. 1931), National language class, 1959, oil on canvas, 112 x 153 cm. Coll: National Heritage Board, Singapore, gift of Equator Art Society.

3.50. Hendra Gunawan (1918-83), Hello Hello , 1945, oil on canvas, 210 x 300 cm. Private Collection.

3.51. S. Sudjojono (1913-86), Guerrilla Guards, 1949/68, oil on canvas, 174 x 194 cm.

3.52. Harijadi Sumodidjojo (1919-97), At Malioboro, 1949, oil on canvas, 180 x 200 cm. Presidential Palace, Jakarta.

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3.53. Henk Ngantung (1921-91), and Edhi Sunarso (1932-2016), Welcome Monument (Monumen Selamat Datung), 1960, bronze, figures 6 metres high. Jalan Thamrin, Jakarta.

3.54. Henk Ngantung (1921-91), Tim Pematung Keluarga Are, and Edhi Sunarso (1932-2016), West Irian Liberation Monument (Monumen Pembebasan Irian Barat), inaugurated 1963, bronze, Jakarta.

3.55. Matvei G. Manizer (1891-1966) and Otto M. Manizer (b.1929), Hero (or Farmer) Statue (Patung Pahlawan or Patung Pak Tani), inaugurated 1963, bronze, 300 cm high, Jakarta.

3.56. Diosdado Lorenzo (1906-83), Massacre and Rape in Ermita, 1947, oil on canvas, c. 150 x 120 cm. Coll: National Museum of the Philippines, .

3.57. Demetrio Diego (1909-88), Capas, 1948, oil on canvas, 86.5 x 117.8 cm. Coll: National Museum of the Philippines, Manila.

3.58. Jack Maughan (1897-1980), cover, Masses, 1932, linocut, 28.2 x 21.2 cm. Publisher: Workers Art Club, Melbourne. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

3.59. Althouse and Gieger, Sydney, The Australian Railways Union, Build Socialism, 1944 (see Stephen and Reeves, 1984: pl. 29).

3.60. Left: Qian Juntao (1906-98), Ten Years of the Shenshi Telegraphic Dispatch Agency, c. 1930. Right: Qian Juntao (1906-98), October, 1933, Shanghai, 18.5 x 13.3 cm. Coll: Lu Xun Museum, Beijing (photo: A. Carroll, 2014).

3.61. Aleksandr A. Deineka (1899-1969), Defence of Petrograd, 1964, replica of 1928 painting, oil on canvas, 210 x 238. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton, 2015).

3.62. Tang Yihe (1905-44), Trumpet Call, 1940, oil, 33 x 61 cm, also called Bugle of 7 July. Coll: National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

Chapter 4:

4.1 Vitaly A. Komar (b. 1943) and Aleksandr D. Melamid (b. 1945), Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live (from the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series), 1981-2, oil on canvas, 183x 148 cm.

4.2. Yu Zhenli (b. 1946), We must grasp revolution and increase production, increase work, increase preparation for struggle, to do an even better job, 1976, offset lithograph, 2 x 77 x 106 cm, China Fine Arts Publishing House. Landsberger Collection (leading image Landsberger website, http://www.iisg.nl/landsberger/, accessed 2 January 2016).

4.3. Nanjing airforce troop Red Eagles, The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought, 1969, offset lithography, 77 x 107 cm. Shanghai People’s Fine Art Publishing House. Landsberger Collection (leading image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution, accessed 2 January 2016).

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4.4. Sailing on the Sea Depends on the Helmsman, 1967, offset lithograph, 53 x 77 cm, People’s Fine Art Publishing House.

4.5. Take Brushes as Arms, photograph, 1966 (from Gao, 2011, fig. 1.26).

4.6. Aleksandr M.Gerasimov (1881-1963), J.V. Stalin and K.K. Voroshilov at the Kremlin, 1938, oil on canvas, 296 x 386 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo: A. Wootton).

4.7. Weng Naiqiang (b. 1936), Sea of Red, 1966. Coll: The Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) at Birmingham City University.

4.8. Vasili P. Efanov (1900-78) and four other brigade members including Konstantin M. Maksimov, Leading People of Moscow in the Kremlin, 1949, oil on canvas, 400 x 625 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (from Bown, 1998: 269).

4.9. Ye Yushan (b. 1935) and team of sculptors from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing, Rent Collection Courtyard (detail and photo of original display), 1965, clay, 114 life-size figures.

4.10. Text on verso: Peasants' fine art creations in East China county. Tsao Hsiu-wen, a woman commune member in Chinshan County near Shanghai, creating a painting in praise of the rural barefoot doctors, 1977, photograph. Landsberger Collection.

4.11. Li Zhenhua (Huxian County), The brigade's ducks, 1973, 53x77 cm. China Fine Arts Publishing House. Landsberger Collection.

4.12. Tatiana N. Yablonskaya (1917-2005), Corn, 1949, oil on canvas, 201 × 370 cm. Coll: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

4.13. Beijing street posters, 1966 (see http://pastdaily.com/china-cultural-revolution-sept-1966, accessed 12 December 2015).

4.14. Beijing street posters, 1967. The poster reads at right: ‘we have to be good soldiers for Mao Zedong, we have to listen to his words, we have to follow his instructions and read his books’(see http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-cowshed-ji- xianlin-20160128-story.html accessed 12 December, 2015).

4.15. Aleksandr M. Rodchenko (1891-1956), “Lengiz. Books on all the branches of knowledge,” advertising poster for the Leningrad Department of Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 1924, gouaches and cut paper on photographic paper, mounted on cardboard, 63 x 88cm. ©The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

4.16. Tianjin People’s Fine Art Publishing House, The 3 July and 24 July proclamations are Chairman Mao's great strategic plans! Unite with forces that can be united with to strike surely, accurately and relentlessly at the handful of class enemies, 1968, offset lithograph, 105.5 x 75.5 cm. Coll: Chinese Propaganda Poster Collection, Shanghai.

4.17. Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, Painting studio, 1994 (photo: A. Carroll).

4.18. Wang Guangyi (b. 1957), (left) Great Criticism - Canon, 1992, oil on canvas, 148 x 119 cm.

4.19. Wang Guangyi (b. 1957), (right) Great Criticism – Coca Cola, 1993, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.

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4.20. Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), Big Family No.2, 1994, oil on canvas, 142.8 x 182.3 cm.

4.21. Zhang Huan (b. 1965), 12 Square Metres, 1994, performance of one hour, with fish oil and honey, Dashancun Village, Beijing.

4.22. Xu Bing (b. 1955), A Case Study of Transference, 1993-4, performance at Han Mo Arts Centre, Beijing, 22 January, 1994, 500 x 500 cm.

4.23. Minh Phuong, Bringing down the B52s, 1972, gouache, on view Musée Quai Branly, Paris,1 August 2014 (photo: A. Wootton).

4.24. Upper left: Anon, The brave battery for victory, 200 planes down, 1965, silkscreen; right: Minh Tri, 4000 US planes, 1972, gouache; lower left: Anon, Congratulations to soldiers and people of the North for 1000 American planes down, stencil (showing Mme Nguyen Thi Kim Lai and William Robinson, shot down 1965); right: Anon, Soldiers and people of the North down 4000 US planes, 1972, stencil, on view Musée Quai Branley, Paris, 1 August 2014 (photo: A. Wootton).

4.25. Farmer, Soldier, Worker, statue, The Museum of History of the Lao People’s Army, Vientiane.

4.26. Celebration of the 35th founding Anniversary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, 1990, from ‘Determined to Advance Integrated Restructuring’ in , 2, 1990: 11 (bilingual quarterly, published in Vientiane).

4.27. Chong Yongman (1938-99), Evening glow over Kangson, 1973, oil on canvas, 116 x 193.5 cm.

4.28. Mansudae Studio, Kim Hung II (b. 1965), Work team contest, 2009, glass tessera tile, 350 x 570 cm. Coll: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

4.29. Dadang Christanto (b. 1957), For Those Who Have Been Lost, 1993/2015, Performance, Sydney: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2015 (photo: Zan Wimberley).

4.30. Semsar Siahaan (1952-2005), , Identity with Mother and Child, 1987, oil on canvas, 145 x 295 cm.

4.31. Dede Eri Supria (b. 1956), Labyrinth, 1987-8, oil on canvas, 210 x 230 cm.

4.32. Heri Dono (b. 1960), Fermentation of Minds, 1993, school desks, fibre glass heads, tape recorders, electronic motors, wood, blackboard, video projection, area: 9.2 x 7.8 metres approx. Installed in various international venues, including Festival, 1994.

4.33. Art Collective, Ruangrupa (est. 2000), 2012, (see: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/new-ru/4412156, accessed 6 March 2016).

4.34. Awakening Generation ’66, , Jakarta, 2005 (photo: A.Carroll).

4.35. Eko Nugroho (b. 1977), It's All About Destiny, Isn't It?, 2006, 18 metres x 12 metres. Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

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4.36. Taring Padi (est. 1998), , 2009, series of woodcuts to “promote debate, question and advocate on election-related issues”, images pasted “on walls in towns all over Indonesia” (see http://taringpadi.com/en/ accessed 8 August 2015). Right: street posters.

4.37. Gembel Art Collective (est. 2003), Dili, 2009, showing large woodcut of local scene, including patterning, writing, political intention (see: https://sites.google.com/site/culturekitchenartcollective/2009---dili-collaboration- with-gembel-and-bayu-widodo, accessed 10 December 2015).

4.38. Heri Dono (b. 1960), Political Buffoonery, 1998-9, mixed media, 330 x 440 x 142 cm.

4.39. Ruangrupa, (est. 2000), 2012, The Kuda: The Untold Story of Indonesian Underground Music in the 70s, poster commissioned for APT7, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

4.40. Edgar Fernandez (b. 1955), Pintang Hindi Tapos ng Kasalukuyan (Unfinished Painting of the Present),1990-3, oil on canvas, 10 panels, 150 x 120 each. Coll: Singapore Art Museum.

4.41. Leonilo Doloricon (b.1957), Hacienda, 1989, rubber cut, c. 75 x 50 cm.

4.42. Leonilo Doloricon (b.1957), Class Struggle, 1990, rubber cut, c. 75 x 50 cm.

4.43. Leonilo Doloricon (b.1957), Continuing Revolution, 1998, rubber cut, 57 x 82 cm.

4.44. Sanggawa (est. 1995), Manila, The Second Coming, 1994, oil on canvas, 207 x 619 cm. Coll: Singapore Art Museum.

4.45. Brenda Fajardo (b.1940), Babae et Bayan (Women and Country) from Cards of Life – Women’s Series, 1993, pen and ink with gold leaf on paper, 52.7 x 120 cm each.

4.46. Lazaro Soriano (b.1943), Jak En Poy (Sticks and Stones), 1987, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm: Coll: Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila.

4.47. Nunelucio Alvarado (b.1950), Duta Indi Bala (Land not Bullets), (central panel), 1992, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 11 panels, 270 x 1500 cm (overall).

4.48. Santiago Bose (1949-2002), Payson at Rebolusyon (Passion and Revolution), 1989, installation, 136 x 324 x 54 cm. First shown Havana Biennale 1989.

4.49. Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan (b. 1962 and 1965), Be-longing: In-Transit, 2006, personal effects, scaled model of a house, Sambaguita scent (photo: artists and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane).

4.50. Oh Yoon (1946-86), Four kinds of body system, 1985, woodcut, 37 x 50 cm.

4.51. National Art Association Centre Workers Group, Posters of student Kang Kyung-Dae, protest march, 1991, Seoul.

4.52. Our People's Art Institute (Kyore Misul Yon'guso), The Kabo Peasants War, 1989, canvas banner, 260 x 700 cm, one of thirty made as part of the National Liberation Movement, (see http://koreanstudies.com/minjungart/, accessed 12 December 2015).

4.53. Ann Newmarch (b.1945), Sunrise, 1975, screen print, 50 x 64 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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4.54. Chips Mackinolty (b. 1954), For the man who said life was not meant to be easy – make life impossible, 1976, screenprint, 76 x 54 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

4.55. Geoff Hogg (b. 1950), Builders Labourers Mural, Hawthorn, Melbourne, 1977, coordinated by Geoff Hogg, with project workers including Noel Hewitt, Jill Fryer, and Harry Newicke. Artist, lower right, gives scale of the work.

4.56. Geoff Hogg (b. 1950), with Mark Witherspoon and Alan Morgan, Victorian Trades Hall Banner, 1980-3, canvas, 600 x 600 cm.

4.57. Students painting a mural along the driveway wall with Merilyn Fairskye (b.1950), 1981.

4.58. Chips Mackinolty (b. 1954), Earthworks Poster Collective (1971-80), Second Triennial May Day Palace Revolution Ball, 1977, screenprint, 74 x 49 cm.

4.59. Chips Mackinolty (b.1954), United in struggle, 2012, screen print, 250 x 130 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

4.60. All-Russian Exhibition Centre (VVTs), previously the Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR (VDNKh). Pavilion of the Peoples of the USSR seen through the Triumphal Arch. Above this are a tractor driver and female collective farm worker holding sheaf of grain, Moscow, 2015 (photo: A.Wootton).

Chapter 5:

5.1. École des Beaux Arts, Hanoi, Sculpture studio, 1990 (photo: A.Carroll).

5.2. Literati painting exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2014, (photo: A. Carroll).

5.3. Patriotism, Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue, Beijing Spirit, subway posters, Beijing, 2014 (photos: A. Carroll).

5.4. Woodcut forum group, 1931, Shanghai; Kakechi Uchiyama second from right; Lu Xun third from right. Lu Xun Museum, Beijing (photo: A. Carroll, 2014).

5.5. National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014, (photo: A. Carroll). Dong Xiwen’s painting on white wall.

5.6. Dong Xiwen (1914-73), The Grand Ceremony of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, 1967, poster of third version, Liu Shaoji fourth from left is replaced.

5.7. Dong Xiwen (1914-73), with additions by artists from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, The Grand Ceremony of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, 1990, poster of eighth version, Gao Gang and Liu Shaoji are reintegrated (see http://chineseposters.net/artists/dongxiwen.php., accessed 5 June 2014).

5.8. a) Shen Jiawei (b. 1948), Standing Guard for our Great Motherland, 1974, oil on canvas, 189 x 158 cm. Private Collection.

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b) Shen Jiawei with his painting and the author, Sydney, 2013 (photo: Catherine Gough- Brady). c) Shen Jiawei (b. 1948), Standing Guard for our Great Motherland, 1974, details of faces of the two guards before and after fleshing out and heightening the colour (from Shen Jiawei; From Mao to Now 1961-2010, 2010: 39).

5.9. Victory of Justice, 1940, series of woodcuts, on view National Museum of China, Beijing, 2014 (photo: A. Carroll).

5.10. Ye Qianyu (1907-95), The Liberation of Beiping, 1959, guohua painting, 197 x 130 cm. Coll: National Museum of China, Beijing, (photo: A. Carroll, 2014).

5.11. Gu Yuan (1919-96), Regional Government, 1943, woodcut, 13.5 x 10 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

5.12. Wo Zha (1905-74), Five Grains for Abundant Harvest; Six Animals for Prosperity, 1942, hand-coloured woodcut, 30 x 20 cm. Coll: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

5.13. The Importance of Education, posters, Hohhot Park, Inner , 2014 (photo: A. Carroll).

5.14. Ye Qianyu (1907-95), Drawing, 1930-38, pen and ink on paper, c. 30 x 20 cm. Coll: British Museum, London (photo: Mary Ginsberg).

5.15. Anonymous, Dong Ho, Various subjects, 2000s, woodcuts, c. 20 x 30 cm each. Coll: Oriental Museum, Moscow, 2015 (photo: Albina Legostaeva).

5.16. Left to right: Nguyen The Hai, Developing pigs and new varieties of rice, 1970, lithograph; (upper) Ba Tuong Produce and Industry, 1978, lithograph (edition of 200); (lower) Minh Phuong, Raising Pigs becomes an essential production, 1973, lithograph (edition of 200); Nguyen Si Tot (b. 1922), Developing buffalo and beef production, 1972; My Trinh, Developing the Production of Milk, 1977, lithograph; on view Musée Quai Branly, Paris, 1 August 2014 (photo: A. Wootton).

5.17. Damian Domingo (1796-1834), Holy Family c. 1830, watercolour on copper, 46.5 x 34.5 cm. Private collection.

5.18. Anon, Retablo with San Nicolas de Tolentino (with Finding of True Cross), eighteenth- nineteenth century, wood and gilding, c. 450 cm high. Coll: S. Agustin Church, Manila (photo: A.Carroll, 2008).

5.19. Life-size wooden and dressed figures of the Road to Calvary, in procession, Holy Week, Philippines, 2011 (see: https://philippineobservers.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/a- passion-play-on-the-street/#more-147, accessed 12 November, 2015).

5.20. The merchant Maitrakanyaka greeted by nymphs, from The Avadanas or Heroic Deeds, ninth century, stone, 62 cm high. Borobudur, Central .

5.21. Ambrose Dyson (1876-1913),The Special Creation, The Bulletin 1901,parodying Governor-General Lord Hopetoun's vice-regal pretensions (“They would end by making him feel that either had been specially created to occupy the position of Governor- General of Australia, or that the position of Governor-General of Australia had been specially created to be occupied by him.” AUSTRALIAN: “Great Scott! has it come to this?”). 18

Appendix App.1. Ravi Varma (1848-1906), Sri Krishna as Envoy (in his role as an Envoy of Pandavas to the Kaurava Court), 1906, oil on canvas, 213.5 x 152.5 cm. Coll: Sri Jayachama Rajendra Art Gallery, Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore.

App.2. Naojiro Harada (1863-99), Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon, 1890, 272 x 181 cm. Coll: National , Tokyo.

App.3. Liu Haisu (1896-1994), Girl in a fox fur, 1919, oil on canvas, 60 x 45.5 cm. Coll: Liu Haisu Museum, Shanghai.

App.4. Tetsugoro Yorozu (1885-1927), Nude Beauty, 1912, oil on canvas, Coll: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

App.5. Seiki Kuroda (1866-1924), Maiko, 1893, oil on canvas, 80.5 x 65.4 cm. Coll: National Museum, Tokyo.

App.6. (1895-1985), Carlos Francisco (1912-69) and Galo Ocampo (1913-85), Interaction, 1935, oil on canvas, 256.5 x 270.5 cm. Private Collection.

App.7. Capitol Theater, Manila, 1935, with Rising Philippines mural (now destroyed), and left to right: Carlos V. Francisco, Severino Fabie, Galo B. Ocampo, Victorio C. Edades, and architect Juan F. Nakpil.

App.8. Carlos Francisco (1912-69), Sinigang, 1959, oil on canvas, 135 x 90 cm. Coll: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Manila.

App.9. José Joya (1931-95), Granadean Arabesque, 1958, oil on canvas, 118 x 305 cm. Coll: Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila.

App.10. Sydney Ball (b. 1933), Great Falls, 1975-6, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on cotton, 273 x 585 cm. Coll: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

App.11. Ismail Gulgee (1926-2007), Dunya Gali, 1973, mixed media, 68.6 x 68.8 cm (sold Christies, 2014).

App.12. Syed Ahmad Jamal (1929-2011), Sirih Pinang, 1986, acrylic, 119 x 119 cm. (Cover of Kemalaysiaan Senilukis Malaysia: Soal Identiti (The Malaysianness of Malaysian Art: The Question of Identity), National Art Gallery of Malaysia, 1991).

App.13. Ahmad Sadali (1924-87), Holes on Scribbled Surface, 1968, oil on canvas (sold Sotheby’s, 2002).

App.14. Ha Chong-hyun (b. 1935), Conjunction 75-1, 1975, oil on hemp cloth, 170 x 245 cm. Coll: Leeum Museum, Seoul.

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Preface

The most obvious and more precise failing of this thesis is that most of the texts in Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese, and to a degree in , Hindi, Bengali, Korean, Tagalog, Khmer, Indonesian and Japanese, have not been used in the original language. I acknowledge the issue, but nevertheless give four reasons for moving forward. First, art history as evidenced here is a new and imprecise methodology in Asia: texts on art and in archives are relatively rare, and often incomplete or inaccessible due to this different background and the misfortunes of war and political upheaval during the century. Even in Russia, archives are inaccessible as curator Albina Legostaeva, Curator at the Oriental Museum in Moscow, informed me, following my question about Asian students studying there. In other words, lack of fluency in these languages is not the only hindrance to access. Second, a general awareness of the issue for non-Asian language speakers has meant many important original texts are increasingly becoming available through translation (viz. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents of 2010, or Jennifer Lindsay’s translations of Gunawan Mohamad’s writings in Tempo). Third, the value of the thesis is its cross-cultural scope, including cultures of many and varied languages impossible to access with equal fluency. Last, and most importantly, the primary ‘documents’ of this thesis are in reality the works of art themselves, that communicate beyond verbal language. My access to original works of art and usually in context - in studios in Pakistan, temples in Korea, presidential palaces in Indonesia, museum storage in Japan, universities in Bengal, dealer galleries in Australia, or the streets of China - has provided me with the greatest primary resource material for this thesis, I believe, that is possible. My working life in Asian art across some thirty years, across wide geography and across engagement with often hard-to-access original visual imagery has given the many arguments of this thesis whatever credibility can be claimed. I am an Australian, nominally part of ‘the Pacific region’, aware of a different stance to many in Asia, but I argue for inclusion of Australian art here on the basis of geography and history, as well as culture, cognisant that Australian culture bears many qualities more similar to those of Japan than Japan does to, say, . The inclusion of Australia, while strange to some, I would like to think is as natural as including, indeed, India and Japan under the one umbrella.

I am also aware that the topic of this thesis is wider than most, but I plead in favour of its breadth, and without wanting to make any comparison of value, of course, refer to Jared Diamond who concludes his ‘short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’ by saying that his topic makes:

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… brevity and simplification inevitable. Yet the compression brings a compensating benefit: long-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies.1

My topic encompasses a time period of only 100 years, but the ‘comparison of regions’ is central to its argument. I hope the benefits of my study counterweights the necessity of various omissions and simplifications in its explication.

Note on the text: Where possible, birth and death dates of artists (only) are included. Japanese family names are underlined to clarify the particular sequence in each usage.

The terms ‘Soviet’ and Russian’ are employed variously in this text. Officially the politically entity, the USSR, existed from 1922 to 1991, and this period certainly is the central focus of this thesis. However, ‘Russia’ the place also is a character in this tale, with a long cultural history before hand, continuing on today. Usage of terms is linked to the nuances of these distinctions. A similar situation occurs with the usage of USA and America, and the PRC and China.

1 Diamond, Jared (1997) 1998. Guns, Germs and Steel; A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. London: Vintage: 408. 21

Introduction: Western art historical practice and recent Asian art; some alternative ways of thinking.

It was just 8.40 when a thundering wave of cheers announced the entrance of the presidium, with Lenin – great Lenin – among them. A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, bald and bulging. Little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin; clean-shaven now but already beginning to bristle with the well-known beard of his past and future. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader – a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies – but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analysing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.1

So wrote John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World in 1919, clearly impressed by the ideology of socialism articulated by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (see fig. 1.1). This thesis follows in Reed’s footsteps in acknowledging the impact of this man’s thinking on cultural practice over the last 100 years. It will be argued that this thinking and its outcomes are among the most important external cultural influences on the art of the Asia Pacific region. The audaciousness of Lenin’s thought, putting the ideas of Karl Marx into practice, and including the arts as a central pillar of this endeavour, will be shown to have changed not only China’s visual art in a way all other outside practices have only palely mirrored, but also transformed art activity in the Russo-Chinese acolytes of Indo-China, and, mid-century, Malaya/Singapore, and, less discussed, activity particularly in the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia. In all cases Leninist thought either aligned with local political needs or cultural sympathy to make art that, as will be argued, is among the most significant made in the region over this period. There has been little discussion of the impact on Asian art of the art practices associated with Lenin’s thought, most particularly Socialist Realism - only more recently coming into view of Chinese scholars, as will be discussed below. This thesis is the first study to analyse the impact of Leninist thought and its artistic expression across this wider Asia Pacific region.

***

1 Reed, (1919) 1977: 128. Lenin’s specific comments on the visual arts are discussed on page 48, note.11. 22

In 1925, poet wrote: I want the pen to equal the gun, to be listed with iron in industry. And the Polit Bureau’s agenda: Item One, To be Stalin’s report on ‘The Output of Poetry’.2

The main Asian political leader who recognised and applied the ’ thinking about art was Mao Zedong, followed closely by Ho Chi Minh, though others from Lee Kuan Yew to , and to , recognised that art in the form supported by this thinking could be powerful, and therefore, to them, problematic. The style of art that emerged supported by the political leaders first in Russia and later, from the 1930s, in China and the other Asian Communist countries gained the name Socialist Realism. There are certain ideological qualities of this style that were desired by these politicians with which the artists complied, but the latter gradually evolved their own visual attributes to meet with official approval as well as their own artistic standards and the approbation of their audiences. In these Communist states this ideology and style supported the status quo. In non-Communist states the ideology and style were used to critique the status quo.

In 1934 articulated his idea of the role of literature in his speech at The First All- Union Congress of Soviet Writers:

The proletarian state must educate thousands of first-class ‘craftsmen of culture’, ‘engineers of the soul’. This is necessary in order to restore to the whole mass of the working people the right to develop their intelligence, talents and faculties – a right of which they have been deprived everywhere else in the world. This aim, which is a fully practicable one, imposes on us writers the need of strict responsibility for our work and our social behaviour. This places us not only in the position, traditional to realist literature, of ‘judges of the world and men’, ‘critics of life’, but gives us the right to participate directly in the construction of a new life, in the process of ‘changing the

2 See Chen, (1944) 1945: 74. Other translations of this poem, Back Home, vary the tone (“I want/the pen to be on a par/with the bayonet;/and Stalin/ to deliver his Politbureau/reports/about verse in the making/as he would about pig iron/and the smelting of steel.” See https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1925/back-home.htm, accessed 6 August 2015), but the Chen version is reproduced here as a reflection of the young Chinese’ response to Mayakovsky’s sentiment. 23

world’. The possession of this right should impress every writer with a sense of his duty and responsibility for all literature … 3

Including ‘art’ with ‘literature’, it can be said that art and artists had a moral role to be involved in the development of the community; the community had a right to be part of the cultural sphere, a position that was recognised as new and unique. The Socialist Realist art form that came from such thinking was précised by Gorky and Stalin in 1932-4 as “an art that is national in form, and socialist in content”,4 interpreted by leading artist Aleksandr Gerasimov (1881- 1963) who painted Reed’s verbal image of Lenin, as “realist in form, socialist in content”.5

As will be discussed, from the 1930s onward, Western eyes have seen Socialist Realism as cold and robotic. This was the opposite of the desires of its founders, who were very aware of the importance of its emotional possibilities. Political acolyte of Stalin, , stressed that artists “must be able to show our heroes, must be able to catch a glance at our tomorrow”, adding “, a new type of Romanticism, a revolutionary Romanticism cannot be alien” to Soviet culture.6 This understanding had been articulated from the early days of the Revolution. , Russian Commissar of Education, wrote a number of important texts in 1920 (Theses on Art Policy, Basic Policy in the Field of Art, and Revolution and Art), advocating that the new art must critically learn from the past, promote communism and broaden access to all art institutions for the masses, saying “if revolution can give art its soul, then art can give revolution its mouthpiece” and that this “revolution, with its vast ideological and emotional content, requires a more or less realistic, self-evident expression saturated with ideas and feelings.”7 And even before Lunacharsky, N.G. Chernyshevski, in 1853 in Life and Aesthetics, had advocated that art “should impart general significance to the artist’s image of a particular aspect of reality”.8

Like many such mantras there is more emotive meaning in the sound of the phrase than logic in its actuality. The intent is conveyed, more clearly described in Gorky’s speech, but the

3 Reproduced in Daniels, 1984, vol.1: 247. 4 This is frequently quoted and debated as to whether Gorky or Stalin was the ‘originator’. Jack Chen in 1944 (1945): 63, attributes the words to Stalin. Bown, 1998: 140ff gives a detailed account of the discussion. 5 Quoted in Bown, 1998: 141. Gerasimov had written this in Iskusstvo, 1939, 4: 150. 6 The words come from his speech at the 1934 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, see Zhdanov, 1950: 14-6. The full quotation on romanticism is: To be an engineer of the human soul is to stand four-square on real life. And this in turn, means a break with old-style romanticism, with the romanticism which depicted a non-existent life and non-existent heroes, drawing the reader away from the contradictions and shackles of life into an unrealisable and utopian world. Romanticism is not alien to our literature, a literature standing firmly on a materialist basis, but ours is a romanticism of a new type, a revolutionary romanticism. Because Zhdanov was discussing writing he uses ‘literature’ but it can be seen as a broader comment. Bowlt also reproduces this text, 1976: 293. He notes that this quality distinguishes Soviet art from, in his example, American Socialist Realism (291). 7 Anatoly Lunacharsky Revolution and Art, 1920, reproduced in Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 332, 333. See also Bowlt’s texts of the Russian avant-garde of 1976: 182-5. 8 See Klingender, (1943), 1975: 18. 24 practice is open to a wide variety of interpretation. The Russians from the beginning understood the usefulness of this position. The Resolution of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party “On the Policy of the Party in the Field of Literature” proclaimed on 1 July 1925 (and again including ‘visual art’ with ‘literature’) “ … as the class war in general has not ended, neither has it ended on the literary front. In a class society there is not, nor can there be, neutral art”, but they were open to what form it might take.9 More precise but less memorable are the three key words behind the slogan: ideinost, or socialist content, narodnost, or national – or local – roots, and partiinost, or the character of the political party.10

The permeation of these three ideas in the art of the Asia Pacific region is as central to this thesis as the actual visual influence of the art produced at first in Russia. An art created in the Philippines in the 1980s, such as Pablo Baens Santos’ (b. 1943) Manifesto of 1985-7 (fig. 1.2) that depicted an unequal social order, and was political in the intention of using art to effect change to this order, only came about because the Russians had taken this step sixty years previously.11 The subject matter of Socialist Realism throughout the century in both Russia and the East is based on the ‘people’, or as the Soviets would say the proletariat, eventually depicting their triumph, and it was politically driven. The Russian format of taking local narratives to inspire the people (the worker-farmer-soldier groups) to work towards a communal utopia was refined elsewhere but it remains an underlying ethos of this art.

Chen Kuan-hsing, in 1998 writing about decolonisation in Asia, articulated the important role of Marxism in Asia because it offered an ‘imaginary discursive opinion’ outside capitalism from which to critique the region’s internal logistics.12 It was not only its content but also the concept of an alternative view that was important. In the context of this thesis, Marx did set the foundations of a general view that art is made and responded to according to its social context: “Art objects are not isolated phenomena, but are mutually dependent with other cultural activity of predominantly social, political, moral, religious, or scientific character”.13 However, it would be agreed today that even the adherents of the alternative formalist camp of ‘art for art’s sake’ are working within such a framework. Marxism as a term is rarely used in relation to Asian art, and, if used at all, it is applied, like many such Western concepts, variously. By 2010 Chen Kuan-hsing, in Asia as Method, could write that, in Asia, the term has

9 See Daniels, 1984, vol.1: 179, 180 10 This thesis is not debating Soviet terminology or history but it is relevant to add, in view of words about the importance of Lenin’s vision, that literal ‘nationalism’ was an anathema to him. He wrote for example in 1913: “The slogan of national culture is a bourgeois…fraud. Our slogan is: the international culture of democracy and of the world working-class movement” (see Lenin, (1967) 1975: 77). Like much of his thinking by the 1930s the codification of his words had taken on a different practical hue. John Berger summarises Isaac Deutscher’s ‘ideological isolationism’ with Stalin proclaiming (see Berger, 1969: 158). 11 This is discussed further in Chapter 5. The links to Communist ideology were clear for some in the Philippines at this time, though the mood of the time carried this further than specific references. 12 Chen Kuan-hsing, 1998: 6. 13 See Baxandall and Morawski, 1973: 8. 25 seeped into consciousness and is called on in times of uncertainty. It has been internalised and localised14 and in the process lost its initial clarity. The argument for the importance of Leninist thinking for art of the Asia Pacific region is that he put Marx’s general ideas into practice in Russia, and they were used throughout this vast area.

Scholars like Igor Golomshtock recognised Russian Socialist Realism in its heyday ‘not as a style but as a creative method’.15 His words point to the equal importance for the Asia Pacific region of the Soviet-created new infrastructure that supported this new art, and how the Russian ideas became the foundation for the way ‘art’ is organised in this region ever since. Arts Ministries were formed, State support for artists instigated, training programs were made open to all, amateur artists were encouraged as equals, museums were opened for the public, travelling exhibitions instituted, congresses for arts people held, regional activities were promoted, and poster-making supported, public art commissions became common, and brigade or group artworks encouraged. (This is discussed in depth in Chapter 2.)

One quality that varied considerably was the interpretation of that central word ‘realism’. In Asia this word is extremely fluid. Aware of this, the leading Indonesian artist of the mid- twentieth century, Sudjojono (1913-86), used the term “real-realism” for his own work (see fig. 1.3).16 Kwok Kian Chow has written eloquently about ‘realism’ in Asia noting Ananda Coomaraswamy in his The Transformation of Nature in Art of 1934, saying “art in Asia was never about verisimilitude”.17 The word, in art parlance today, even in Asia, has taken on the general European understanding of, as Kwok articulates, “representational, figurative, or mimetic art”.18 Yet, even within this, the ‘realist’ style accepted by the Soviets took many forms. The graphic artist Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) worked for the Soviet regime through his life, under the rubric of ‘Socialist Realism’, but apart from some instances in Japan, his stylised, abstracted work was not emulated in Asia. Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) was one of the most creative Soviet painters but again the refined graphic quality of his work (fig. 1.4) was not that which widely attracted followers in the East. Rather, it was a full-fledged, detailed, oil-paint-derived brushy expressive realism initially of the Western European Academy retranslated through Russian oil painters from Ilya Y. Repin (1844-1930) to Gerasimov that was taken over particularly in China, and then on to sites as varied as Singapore and Manila. The oil painters responded to Zhdanov’s instruction for romantic heroic content, on a large scale, with history paintings in the mode originally of the Western

14 Chen Kuan-hsing, 2010: 70. 15 Golomshtock, 1993: 16. 16 Sudjojono proposed ‘real-realism’ as “a way of indicating a style which combines realism as a form with ‘real’ content, producing art which is intelligible to ordinary people” writes Els Bogaerts in ‘Whither Indonesian Culture?’, see Bogaerts, 2012: 239. 17 See Kwok, 2009: 45. 18 See Kwok, 2010: 10-5, writing the introduction to the catalogue for Realism in Asian Art exhibition, held in Singapore and Korea. He used Tsutomu Mizusawa’s ‘three realisms’ in of ‘mimetic realism, avant-garde realism and live realism’ as the starting point. 26

Academy, eschewing the gritty and often industrial scenes of Rodchenko and Deineka. The Vietnamese are an exception to this, taking on the ideology but not all of the visual attributes of Socialist Realism. The Indonesians, Filipinos and Australians also adopted and adapted the ideology later in the century, making it their own. Indeed, the doyen of Filipino art history of this period, Alice G. Guillermo, writes “Realism in Philippine social realism is not a stylistic term: instead, it is a shared point of view which seeks to expose or to lay bare the true conditions of Philippines society…”19

This analysis of such a century of change, clashing traditions, and myriad creations excludes the work being made in Asia that was not overtly influenced by the outside world: folk art, textiles, ceramics and metalware all continued to be made according to local practice, as were Asian religious imagery and the ‘scholar art’ of many cultures - all of which at times were taken up by artists in the mainstream to give substance to their own work. From the belief systems of Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or the Dreaming, to the specific modes of literati painting, printing or mimi-figure carving, these practices remain central to art in the Asia Pacific region and run synchronously autonomously or intertwined with ideas coming from outside.

The social order in all Asian countries prior to 1917 was based on a social and political elite ruling over large populations of workers. Most ‘fine art’ practice emulated the culture of this ruling class, using both elite local forms (such as Chinese literati, Mughal atelier or Thai temple mural painting modes) as well as introduced European Academic models in this endeavour. Changing this was one of the Soviets’ great achievements. Even in principle this is of note but the practice was equally important. This art created in the East based on Russian models is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the first focusing on imagery made during the period of the USSR’s ascendency, and the second the art made in the years afterwards, from the 1970s to today.

The other chapters of this thesis discuss attendant issues. Chapter 5 analyses the impact of local culture of the Asia Pacific region on art influenced by Russia, which either mitigated against, or emphasized, certain of its qualities. In the context of the question of quantifying or qualifying ‘significant outside influence’ on art of the region, the Appendix compares a number of other contenders in this mix: first, Western , second, the European styles termed here the ‘isms’ (of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism), third, the Latino impact (from Latin-America), and, fourth, post-war American abstraction.

19 Guillermo, 1987: 50. 27

A thesis on Socialist Realism raises eyebrows not only in the West but also in Asia. The thesis starts, in Chapter 1, with the issue of why this might be so. The whole is an argument for this ‘style’ or ideology to take its appropriate place in any discussion about art in the Asia Pacific region, and hence art in the world today.

***

Throughout this thesis runs the tension between East and West discussed particularly over the last 100 years but clearly articulated for Western minds by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 100 years before that.20 The topic itself, which measures the impact of a (quasi-) Western ideology and practice on Asia, only plays into this tension. It is the nature of the ideology and practice of the topic that has led to its neglect, rather than the idea of its possibility. The nature of the Russian impact in Asia is more complex than most East-West dialogues, based on invitation and ideological interest in China’s case and political and financial support for Vietnam, as much as more usual hegemonic desires. As will be discussed, Russia’s own identity as a Western power is of issue here. However, this thesis, based in Western art history practice, must be aware of this tension increasingly analysed in Asia through a growing number of texts about post-colonial situations and cultural power flows. The ‘East’ fought back at first within the terms of the binary and within the terms the ‘West’ has cemented - with Edward Said the leading light - and then, more recently, by putting forward alternative ways of thinking. Of use to this thesis are a number of Chinese and Japanese texts articulating various cultural perspectives along these new avenues, branching off from domination of Indian/Bengali critique previously laid down with such fervour.

The conference Piracy, Art History and the Indian Ocean held at the University of Sydney in 2012 was based on a number of questions including “Can non-Euro-American narratives compete against those already in place? Do they need to?”21 One answer to the question, not so much of need but rather to usefulness, is the energy that comes from this East West ‘competition’.22 Homi Bhabha has described the energy of the borderlands, of the creative possibilities of cultures crunching up against each other, articulated by Chen Kuan-hsing’s concept of “historical antagonisms as motors of struggle”.23 A specific example is Hou Hanru’s

20 The discussion of Hegel’s importance is well explored. A very relevant comment here however is his phrase about the progress particularly of reason, that “Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning” from his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1821) 1837, included in his Lectures, assembled by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1975: 197. 21 Piracy, Art History and the Indian Ocean, 2012. 22Trinh T. Minh-Ha discusses the advantages of this in her ‘No Master Territories; Cotton and Iron’ of 1991, when she says “because without the margin, there is no centre, no heart”, and then “To use marginality as a starting point rather than an ending point is also to cross beyond it towards other affirmations and negations. There cannot be any grand totalizing integration without massive suppression, which is a way of recirculating the effects of domination.” (See When the Moon Waxes: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge: 16-9). 23 Chen Kuan-hsing, 1998: 9. Chen quotes Edward Said’s words on imperialism’s gift of identity as only or mainly white, black, Western or Oriental (1998: 24). Lenin would have recognised this and still seen the energy possible in the dialectic. 28 exhortation towards recognising entropy, or an energised disorder, as a forceful variant in Chinese art. An art curator, Hou cites the work of Chen Zhen (1955-2000), Gu Wenda (b. 1955) and others as providing a chaotic version of a world otherwise based on Western rationalism.24 This thesis is driven by the energy of these ‘historical antagonisms’ which criss-cross its path politically, culturally and academically, though these too are at times difficult to individualise. Political antagonism has its shining star in the Cold War which so dominates the response to Socialist Realism, a situation discussed further in Chapter 1. Broad cultural antagonisms are more diverse, and can range from the idea of an elite, professionalised art practice under assault from the idea of an art practised by all, to the notion of individual choice in conflict with communal or relational pressure. More specific antagonisms come, as the Piracy conference question indicates, to the East-West binary generally and specifically, in art historical, academic terms to alternatives to the way the ‘art’ of this world is articulated. The Cold War dispute has been under way for sixty years and the broader cultural issues have been mused on variously over the same period. In this context the recent energy evident particularly among Chinese-speaking discussants is exhilarating.25 This thesis endeavours to put this locally-focused (Chinese) energy into context and to extend it to a wider field.

***

One central aspect of this thesis is asking why Socialist Realism has been so often omitted from art history, particularly art history in Asia. One answer is the issues of the Cold War which are discussed in Chapter 1. Another is the Western-centric nature of art history. This began to be debated seriously in the late 1990s, in the West, and it is notable that even writers like James Elkins in Is Art History Global? in 2007, writing about the ‘globe’ and bringing in examples of non-Western art history (from seventh century India to Imperial Chinese), still can state that those “texts are not recognisable as art history”,26 that is, obviously, Western art history. Terry Smith in ‘The State of Art History: Contemporary Art’ published in The Art Bulletin in 2010, addresses ‘global art’ but not global responses. While his focus is an analysis of (Western) art historical distinctions between the modern and the contemporary, he is alert to the issue of terminology facing this thesis:

24 Hou, 1994: 249-50. 25 Among those whose discussions have been useful are Sun Ge and her ‘How does Asia mean?’ of 2007 and Wang Hui’s article ‘The Politics of imaging Asia’ of 2003 reprinted in various anthologies, and extended in 2011 into a book, both analysing with gusto the colonial and post-colonial histories of cultural hegemony in East Asia. Émilie Frenkiel in China Perspectives 2012: 4, reviewing Wang’s book, describes his “determined struggle for discursive equality and for the right to criticise Western theories on an equal footing with Western theoreticians” (see http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/6057, accessed 31 July 2015). 26 Elkins, 2007: 20. Aware of the complexity of this positioning, he does add that when art historical terms are non-Western “the work can appear to lose its conceptual, cultural and disciplinary foundation” (60). I am grateful to Charles Green for directing me to Elkins’ work. 29

Discerning what is distinct and what is shared in these shifts from the modern to the contemporary (or, in some case, the reverse) in different parts of the world is, I submit, the greatest challenge facing those who would write histories of recent and current art. The diversity of these changes guarantees that there will be no single story (and thus no style change in art as such) but rather many parallel, contingent and identifiably specific histories.27

Art history as it is practised today, increasingly through the world, was codified in the West. The collection and analysis of archival data, of dates and titles and documentation (artist, artist’s dates, title, date of work, medium, size, collection, are the accepted codification), the agreed chronological sequence of styles (, , ), the inevitability of traditions challenged, change and development, and the acceptance of specialist terms to describe characteristics of visualisation (like three-dimensions, perspective, and chiaroscuro) are all a foreign mode in Asia, with less meaning than many other cultural practices. The ‘realism’ implied by the Soviets was so loose a term that it could usefully be applied to a wide variety of Asian art practices, from East Asian literati landscapes suddenly including the technology of the modern age to Filipino images of a miraculous Madonna surrounded by the detritus of an industrial state.28

Lu Xun puts his light but serious touch on Western cultural terminology in China in the first decades of the century, describing in a short essay The Tablet in 1928 (about writers but equally applicable to artists):

A fearful thing about Chinese writers today is that they keep introducing new terms without defining those terms. And everyone interprets them as he pleases. To write a good deal about yourself is expressionism. To write about others is realism. To write poems on a girl’s leg is romanticism. To ban poems on a girl’s leg is . While – A head drops down from the sky,/An ox on the head stands high,/Oh my!/ At sea green thunderbolts fly!... / is … and so on. And so disputes begin.29

The point has been frequently made that there was no word for ‘art’ in many Asian cultures – visual practice was part of more complex cultural activity. Very relevant here is the discussion clarified by Kwok Kian Chow in 2009 on the traditional aesthetic understandings in both India and China of the reality that “abstraction and figuration should not be treated as binaries, and,

27 Smith, 2010: 374. 28 See fig. 3.44, of Japanese war planes, and fig. 4.40. 29 Lu Xun, ‘The Tablet’ first published 10 April 1928; see Lu Xun: Selected Works, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing vol.3 (1959) 1980: 29. 30 in fact, that the distinction is not a very meaningful one in much Asian art”.30 He points to two issues: first, the inefficacy of codified distinctions; and, second, that these particular binaries of Western art history are inappropriate in traditional thinking in these two major cultural centres. Kwok discusses Coomaraswamy’s 1934 book and Gao Minglu’s 2009 work on Yi Pai theory being similar in their ideas: that what in Chinese is called wuxing (formlessness) and yi (idea) embraces both sensibility and intelligence in one work as not oppositional or separate but qualities equally and essentially contained in each art piece. It is this relational experience that Coomaraswamy and Gao see as the basis of Asian art.31

The increasing awareness of the imposition of European, Hegelian mathematically measured, ‘logical’ thinking as culturally specific is useful in addressing ‘art history’ of Asia, understanding different ideas of how people in Asia have recorded and interpreted their own visual arts. Asian scholars today are searching for locally cogent equivalents, frequently using Western stylistic descriptors like , the most elastic of terms, in myriad ways. Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses the enmeshed nature of religious power in the face of the Western ‘translation of godly time into the time of secular labour’ and the importance of the ‘pre- political peasant’ as part of his argument against the dominance of Western ‘rational-secular discipline’.32 Chen Kuan-hsing in his Asia as Method text seeks a new system of ‘knowledge production’ in Asia, continuing Chakrabarty’s argument against the universalisation of European knowledge (particularly its historicisation) systems.33 Chakrabarty looks to ‘Asia’ to do this, and Chen’s ‘outcome’ is the practice of intra-Asia linkages.34 The problem is that both positions are too sketchily articulated as ‘methods’ (ironically) to be totally convincing – perhaps further imagined case studies would be of aid. In Chen’s introduction he puts forward a new possibility of ‘Asia as method’ being “an imaginary anchoring point that can allow societies in Asia to become one another’s reference points, so that understanding of the self can be transformed”.35 Would it be possible to think of this thesis topic (albeit with its current hermetic silos of literature, as discussed below) along these lines? Certainly cross-regional speculation and reference points would be welcome, but they would, for this thesis at least,

30 Kwok, 2009: 45: Gao Minglu, 2009. Yi Pai: A Synthetic Theory Against Representation. Guangxi Normal University Press. 31 Kwok, 2009: 45. 32 Chakrabarty, (2000) 2008: 13-6, 76, 89, 237. A review of previous, mostly Euro-American discussions of distinctions between ‘Asian’ (or non-European) and European thought and cultural action is beyond this thesis. A number are mentioned elsewhere in this text for particular points, but ones not otherwise cited include Wilhelm Halbfass’s discussion of India and Europe, of 1988, J.J. Clarke’s Oriental Enlightenment (to extend the Hegelian atmosphere), of 1997, Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch and Anja Eisenbeiss’ edition The Power of things and the flow of cultural transformations: art and culture between Europe and Asia, of 2010 and Julie F. Codell’s Transculturation in British Art, 1770-1930, of 2012 which focuses on the term ‘transculturation’ as a “travelling concept” about ‘time, space, place, culture, nation and globalisation’ (1-2) with the object rather than the concept or methodology central. An early relevant discussion is O.W. Wolters’ view ((1982) 1999: 48-9) in Southeast Asia of “a broadly based commonality of outlook encouraged by a wide spread circulation of Indian books … [which] could provide possibilities for identifying a common cultural herniate” in that region . 33 Chen Kuan-hsing, 2010, see for example Chapter 5: 211-55, but his whole book is leading to this. Chakrabarty (2000) 2008: 236-7 especially. 34 Again, this is Chen’s over-riding argument, but he articulates it succinctly on page 255. It is of note that three years earlier Chen had been the co-editor of The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007), where a number of important texts written by Asian scholars are reproduced, but there is not, however, an alternative academic methodology put forward. 35 Chen Kuan-hsing, 2010: xv. 31 always need a counter-reference of ‘the other’, which indeed could be Russia, Europe or whoever else. Further, are the sight lines of art history so strongly ingrained that descriptors of style and language are impossible to re-evaluate within a different methodology?

A further alternate position is put forward by Pankaj Mishra in his 2012 text From the Ruins of Empire, relevant for ideas explored in Chapter 5 on the issue of the ‘local’ and communalism that sets Asia apart from Europe, and his methodology of advocating for a different way of thinking by focusing on individual figures, particularly Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Liang Qichao, but also bringing to life poets like Iqbal and Tagore.36 It is an approach allied to Nora A. Taylor’s argument for her personalised, ‘ethnographic’, interview-based approach to Vietnamese art history.37

A different proposition is offered by Keith Moxey’s 2013 Visual Time text, putting forward alternative ideas about time rather than a universalist one: heterochronic and the anachronic ideas of time, or time as multiple and asynchronic.38 The issue for a study such as this (that uses a Western methodology of, indeed, synchronic time) about non-Western cultures is that Moxey does not put forward useful, temporal alternatives. They do exist, for example in the auspicious times of , or the cyclical dynasty-based timing of China,39 or the relational time of Indigenous Australia. Despite his critique of universalist Western timing, Moxey’s text is marred for this study by there being no in-depth discussion of non-European examples or scholars. Equally, specialist Asian scholars have discussed the ideas behind varying concepts of time and space but without creating an alternative, accepted ‘history’ practice.40

Also seeking for ‘Asian’ alternatives, Wang Hui sees “the kingly way” with its linking tributary system of respect as relevant,41 while Inaga Shigemi refines the idea of ‘framelessness’ or fusing between literature and visual art and between nature and art in Japan as part of oriental aesthetics.42 Wu Hung has written about the liqi systems applied to ancient Chinese art, where natural classification of objects is based on their use in ritual, that is, within the context of wider culture. This contrasts with the first ‘external’ expert Stephen W. Bushell’s classification

36 The book is wide ranging. Some areas are less convincing, for example, his discussion of spiritualism or ‘otherworldliness’ as part of an Asian reality, belying the spirituality of all cultures, as well as his desire to argue for an (unconvincing) Pan-Asian identity that brings his work back to earlier texts by writers from the Subcontinent, conflating vastly divergent Middle Eastern and Far Eastern thinkers in a battle against the old enemy of (and to) the West. 37 Taylor, 2011: 478. See discussion Chapter 5. An example of Taylor’s point is given during a discussion in Tokyo in 2014 when Bangkok academic Prapon Kumjim described his information-gathering as based on trusting a number of personal tales, not just one, and not through “delving through the entire historical archive” (see ‘Discussion’, Cultural Rebellion in Asia, 1960-1989; Art Studies 01, Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre, 2015:108). 38 Elkins, 2007 (b), 41-71 discusses David Summer’s Real Spaces: World Art History of 2004 as the first attempt to analyse world art without relying on chronology as a central ordering principle. 39 See Guo Hui, 2014: 6 ff for remarks on the combination of dynastic and linear time in twentieth century Chinese art. 40 An example is Michael F. Marra’s ‘A Few Afterthoughts on Places, Cuts, and Promises’, of 2011, which includes discussions of the circularity of time (17), the idea of ‘cut-continuance’, like breathing (18), and so on. 41 Wang Hui, (2003) 2011: 92, 97ff. 42 Inaga, 2011: 38 ff. 32 by ‘separated and artificial’ media.43 Zhang Yanyuan’s Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties, written in the ninth century, while including “masterpieces, important artists, and forms of art”44 assessed art based on Confucian values such as filial piety.45

However, though myriad artists use many non-Western ideas today and in the past, to date accepted and utilised alternative methodologies of art history have not evolved.46 This thesis discusses local transformations of Socialist Realism (in Chapter 5), but it does so within the oppositional ideology of Western art history (Socialist Realism compared with the local), and extends this discussion to the art of Socialist Realism in comparison with et al. in the Appendix. If Coomaraswamy’s and Gao’s arguments about inappropriate construction of oppositional dialectics were taken to their conclusion there would perhaps be no discussion at all.

In the analysis of the art discussed in this thesis, the received European concepts (in either Socialist Realist ideology or the methodology of Western art history practice) were adopted and adapted. Omura Seigai was the first in Asia to use a Western systematic approach to art, in his case the art of China, in the 1890s,47 with his championing traditional ink styles. Teng Gu followed, similarly starting from education in Japan and then on to gain a PhD from University in the 1930s to study the ‘source’ of art in China.48 Coomaraswamy was a leader in developing an analysis of the art of southern Asia. Certainly the practice of art history under this umbrella began and has continued. However, the scarcity of art history teaching in art schools and university departments in Asia to this day speaks to the difficulty of acceptance that this discipline has encountered.49 Added to this, for the topic studied here, the practice of Socialist Realism, scorned for the most part in the West, and alternative to many local long- held ideas of art being an elite practice by scholars, has never been accepted as a focus of interest in Asia - until very recent scholarship in China.

43 See Elkins, 2007 (b): 60. Wu Hung writes about this in Monumentality in Early Chinese Architecture, 1995 (Stanford: Stanford University Press) in the section ‘The Concept of “Liqi”’ (18-24). Wu discusses the Three Ritual Canons compiled at the end of the Bronze Age, of San li-Li ji, Yi li or Ceremonies and Rites, and Zhou li, or Rites of Zhou (19). Objects used for ritual purposes are of greater significance than those for daily use. Bushell’s work divided Chinese objects into twelve branches, based on media. 44 Guo Hui, 2014: 1. 45 See Elkins, 2007 (b): 63. 46 There is a rueful comment by Hayashi Michio during a Japan Foundation forum on ‘rebellion’ in Asian art practices of the 1960s- 1980s, held in Tokyo in October 2014. Hayashi says “what really amazes me is that we [two Koreans, a Singaporean, a Filipino, a Chinese and a number of Japanese] are all discussing this in English, we all got degrees studying in universities, we all use the same referential points – postcolonial theory such as Homi Bhabha’s etc. -, and we are literally sharing… the same set of concepts and theoretical prepositions.” Hayashi adds this can be oppressive but it also allows a certain degree of “translatability”; see Hayashi Michio, 2015, in ‘Discussion’ in Cultural Rebellion in Asia; Art Studies 01, Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre: 81. 47 Krischer, 2011: 267. 48 Guo Hui, 2011: 165-82. 49 See Carroll, 2008 (a): 33 ff, for discussion of the curriculum established in art schools in Asia. An indicative survey of this reality is Jennifer Lindsay in Cultural Organisation in Southeast Asia, 1994, Sydney: Australia Council, surveying art teaching in seven relevant countries and only including ‘art history’ being taught at two institutions: the University of the Philippines and the College of Fine Arts, Ho Chi Minh City. 33

Further, as is argued here in Chapter 5 (notwithstanding the elite nature of traditional ‘fine art’), is the importance of the relational, or communal quality of many Asian cultures, particularly until recent times. The artwork has been part of a larger cultural whole. In this context, individual art historical analysis, often provided in an adversarial, competitive argument, is alien, often weakly applied, with loose use of terms (especially already slippery stylistic descriptors like ‘realism’), and with a small range of ‘facts’ repeated in each written tract. Allied with this is the wide-spread valuing of ‘face’ and the effort for artists and artworks not to be publically critiqued in case of loss of ‘face’.50 It means that re-evaluating (negatively) the work of accepted ‘masters’ is avoided, a situation aided by the elevated importance of the commercial market because of weak public infrastructure. For the rest of the world there is the issue of different often complex languages. Further, this period still has personal scars for many in Asia. Despite arguments here for its art, in China and Indonesia the personal toll of the and the Communist purges on families makes this period a time of continuing sensitivity. It makes for many local barriers to re-evaluating an (originally weakly- argued) entrenched position.

In other countries, where Western ways are better known, but particularly in the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia, the vice of the Western view is tight. Yet, even this geographic area of focus is large and includes myriad possible local responses within it.

***

Besides the general issues of ‘art history’, attitudes formed by the Cold War to the topic of this thesis (including acknowledgement of which side the writer was supporting), and when in each sequence of events the text was written, the nature of art history in Asia has been directed by language and colonial history into silos that would be unthinkable in other larger conglomerates of culture. The questions about the global nature of art history are tested here not only for their methodological bases, but by cultural barriers. The ‘boundary riders’ of the Western art imagination are absent horsemen in Asian art historical practice. This issue was one of the nodes of the 2012 Piracy and Art History conference, under the rubric of ‘Latitudes’ and the “lateral migration of ideas, artists, and ideas about art within locales”.51 While suggestions for alternative ‘Asian’ methodologies are emerging, and the generic nomadic (Asian) artist today is well accepted, research about art in Asia even of the recent past remains tightly geographically held.

50 References to loss of face in cross-cultural understandings are many: one is Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar and Mary C. Kern’Managing Multicultural Teams’ in Harvard Business Review, November, 2006: 89. 51 Piracy, Art History and the Indian Ocean, 2012. 34

Almost no discussions about the practice of one nation seep over the edge to assess similar activities in the neighbourhood. As will be seen, experts on particular places and specific periods, like Matthew Cullerne Bown on Russian Socialist Realism, Julia F. Andrews on Chinese art of the mid-century, Nora A. Taylor on Vietnam and Alice G. Guillermo on the Philippines, remain focused there. All are to be read with great respect, though many can be criticised for not, as T.S. Eliot said, leaving home and returning to see it for the first time.52 Russian art historians are remarkable for almost never referring to their ‘prize’ of obvious cultural influence in China. Chinese art historians focus on China, with no reflection on the impact of their art on, for example, Vietnam or Australia, though increasingly there has been more research on the impact of the Russians on them, though this applies more to individual scholars than to official offerings. An example of the latter is the National Museum of China’s website description of the iconic image of Mao declaring the Republic in Tiananmen Square (fig.1.5), by Dong Xiwen’s (1914-73), as a hermetic Chinese creation.53 Taylor writes of the lack of local discourse around twentieth-century Vietnamese art, applying the comment more widely to ‘Southeast Asia’, although any view of, for example, Filipino art texts discounts this. Indonesians and Filipinos share many correspondences in the experiences of their artists, but these are rarely explored, despite two decades at least of widespread conferences and touring exhibitions throughout Asia.54 The Singaporean art institutions, like the Singapore Art Museum, their university art museums, and now the National Gallery Singapore, are endeavouring to encourage a Southeast Asian mentality of art scholarship, and the Japanese have been single-minded in curatorial cross-engagement as well as initiating a number of regional ‘style’ exhibitions and publications, but it is still more usual to see silo-like country research than any other.55

The xenophobic nature of this practice has its parallel in the West. One of the common qualities of Western texts that are very relevant about the East, or to the East, is an exclusion of any reference to it. This applies to art texts from Russia or about Russia, to general texts. Christine Lindey’s Art in the Cold War: from Vladivostok to Kalamazoo 1945-1962, 1990, despite its clear cauterisation of many issues of popular art being very relevant to this thesis, is notable for its Eurocentrism. A rare exception, and for reasons more extensively argued in

52 “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1943. 53 See www.http://en.chnmuseum.cn (accessed 15 July 2014). The site is at pains to describe the work as purely of ‘Chinese’ tradition despite its obvious debt to the Russians, as is discussed later. 54 Some of these are described in Chapter 4, but the main focuses have been provided by the Japan Foundation, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum, and QAGOMA in Brisbane. 55 Non-‘Asian’ texts are omitted here, but Caroline Turner’s remarkable Tradition and Change, published in Brisbane in 1993, should be noted, followed by her various other editions on issues of art of the region, as well as the work of the Asia Society in New York, led by Vishakha N. Desai for many years. Desai’s edition Asian Art History in the Twenty-first Century, of 2007, brings together a number of important non-Asian writers, including Frederick M. Asher (on Indian art history), and Alexandra Munroe (on Japanese art history). Exceptions to this comment about Asian authors are the Japanese specialists associated with the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and the Japan Foundation Asia Centre, as well as the Singaporeans associated with the Singapore Art Museum over the last two decades, and also Apinan Poshyananda, a Southeast Asian art historian of wide, international expertise. 35

Chapter 1, is the niche for Chinese art in Western texts on ‘totalitarian art’, that is, the art of the Nazis, Fascists and Communists. Examples are Golomshtock’s Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China of 1990 and Steven Heller’s Iron Fists; Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State of 2008, the latter choosing his group because of the “diabolically effective ways in which their propaganda machine created powerful visual narratives to seduce their respective populations”. 56

Equally, texts on political or social history rarely mention art. Texts on communism in Asia, like the collection edited by A. Doak Barnett Communist Strategies in Asia, of 1963, and Robert V. Daniels, A Documentary History of Communism, of 1984 are examples. The Oxford University Press 1967 publication The Impact of the Russian Revolution 1917-1967; The Influence of Bolshevism on the World outside Russia, includes no mention of art, and, for that matter, Asia only fleetingly. In other political texts focusing on particular countries, like Soviet Relations with India and Pakistan of 1971 by Devendra Kaushik, or Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000 of 2000, art makes no appearance.57

***

Fortunately for this study, the art of Russia during this period does have some important and revealing observers. Jack Chen writes an optimistic, detailed eye-witness account of the Russian experiment from when he first arrived in Moscow from China in 1927.58 Equally, Boris Groys’ wrestling with his Russian past, in The Total Art of written in 1988, offers challenging insights into a period that by then was a set piece for art historical opprobrium. Amongst his wider interests, he has continued to write about this period, including an essay on the Soviet poster in The Aesthetic Arsenal exhibition catalogue of 1993, and a section in Art Power, 2008.59

Chen’s little known volume was published in 1944 at the end of the period of more positive interest in the new Russian state and its culture, before the realignment of the Cold War.60 Between this volume and Groys’ more celebrated work have been troughs and crests of publication in this area. Many have been part of the official diplomatic and exhibition surges between Russia and the West, discussed in Chapter 1. The Russians have issued publications into the West, including Oleg Sopotsinsky’s Art in the Soviet Union, of 1978, and Mikhail

56 Heller, 2008: 8. 57 Full details are provided in the accompanying Bibliography for these texts and those included - but unfootnoted - on the following pages. 58 Chen (1944), 1945. 59Boris Groys, 1993. ‘The Soviet Poster: Art and Life’ in The Aesthetic Arsenal: Socialist Realism under Stalin. New York: PS1 Museum, 127-32; Groys, 2008: 141-8. 60 See Bown and Taylor, 1993: 7. 36

Guerman’s Art of the October Revolution of 1979 each published in Leningrad, though both include a smorgasbord of work of little interest to a Western audience predisposed to either Avant-garde, Sots Art or even Socialist Realist Russian imagery.

Specialist publications on Russian art of the period began to emerge in the West from the late 1960s. Paul Sjeklocha and Igor Mead’s Unofficial Art in the Soviet Union published in in 1967 provides useful background to the period; John Berger published Art and Revolution in 1969, and by 1973 C. Vaughan James published Soviet Socialist Realism; Origins and Theory. The main text of the late 1970s accompanied an exhibition, albeit an important one held in New York and , Russian and Soviet Painting, including a foreword by John E. Bowlt.

A hiatus followed, but then another surge occurred in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, coinciding with interest in the West in the political changes in the USSR. Were they documenting an era very obviously drawing to a close or wanting to re-evaluate a period both neglected and perhaps unjustly reviled? Curator David Elliott’s 1986 exhibition held in Oxford and related publication New Worlds: Russian Art and Society 1900-1937 heralded in a new era. In 1989 Margarita Tupitsyn’s Margins of Soviet Art; Socialist Realism to the Present focused on the new Sots Art coming out of Russia, critical of past Socialist Realism. Golomshtock wrote his book on Totalitarian Art in 1990, followed by a series of detailed tomes by Matthew Cullerne Bown: his 1991 central text Art Under Stalin, in 1993 with Brandon Taylor his editing of a collection of Art of the Soviets: painting, sculpture and architecture in a one-party state 1917-1992, and his 1998 huge volume Socialist Realist Painting. Others writing at this time, often of Russian background, included Golomshtock, Jacob Bakshtein and Groys in The Aesthetic Arsenal, Gleb Prokhorov and his Art Under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting 1930- 1950 of 1995 and Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko’s edition Socialist Realism Without Shores of 1997, an unusual selection of essays that does include material on Russia and China. Golomshtock’s book outlined an art that was ‘foreign’ to the ‘modern’, and the links between the practices of ‘totalitarian art’, but by the end of the century this was seen as too simplistic.61 Studies since then have been various, with one focus being art of the ‘thaw’ during the 1950s and 1960s, deemed ‘Nonconformist Art’, centred around the private collection of Norton and Nancy Dodge, now in the Rutgers collection in New Jersey and seen in major publications of 1995 and 2011.62 A most useful text for this thesis, from Russia, is the State Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val’s collection monograph published in 2015.

61See Golomshtock, 1990, 306; and Bown, 1998, xvii, 188, noting him not taking into account Soviet artists’ distance from and lack of access to works of, for example, the Nazis. 62 See Rosenfeld and Dodge (eds), 1995, and Rosenfeld (ed), 2011. Also of note is K. Andrea Rusnock’s Socialist realist painting during the Stalinist era (1934-1941): the high art of mass art of 2010. 37

There is one area of Russian art of the Soviet period that has attracted special attention: the works on paper of the regime, including documentary photographs and particularly posters. The availability of these works is one reason for this – individuals can build up publishable collections, but also important is the visual strength of the images, as will be discussed later. David King has been a leader here, with his The Commissar Vanishes of 1997 about documentary photography, followed by Red Star over Russia of 2009 and Russian Revolutionary Posters of 2012. Others include Stephen White’s The Bolshevik Poster of 1988 and Lafont’s Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection of 2007.

The Chinese have written about aspects of their country’s art during the twentieth-century throughout the period, with relevant texts for this thesis written by leaders in the field, from Lu Xun in the 1920s to Li Hua (1907-94) in the 1980s. Like the Russians however the uncertainties of the Maoist era led to a hiatus of critical analysis that only changed after political control lessened, after the end of the Cultural Revolution. There have been two stages since. The first was a spate of publications by foreigners expert in Chinese art starting in the 1980s through to the 1990s. There is Joan Lebold Cohen’s 1987 The New 1949-1986 which includes a small section on ‘socialist realism’, Ellen Johnston Laing’s detailed coverage of the 1950s to 1970s in The Winking Owl; Art in the People’s Republic of China of 1988, Michael Sullivan’s broader Art and Artists of 20th Century China of 1996 and the series of publications by Julia F. Andrews, often in partnership with Kuiyi Shen, which began in 1994 with Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China 1949-1979, followed in 1998 by A Century in Crisis: and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China, and then in 2012, the most useful The Art of Modern China. Andrews, in 1994, provides the first in- depth discussion of the impact of Soviet-style oil paintings in China.63

The second wave since the turn of the century is the rush of local Chinese scholarship and focus on the period: seen in Scott Watson and Zheng Shengtian’s (albeit Canadian) exhibition catalogue Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 2002, ‘the first comprehensive exhibition’ of this work anywhere,64 in Wu Hung’s Remaking Beijing, Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space of 2005, and in The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, with an introduction by Jiang Jiehong, using ‘revolution’ approvingly, of 2008. Zheng Shengtian’s ‘Art and Revolution; Looking Back at Thirty Years of History’ was also published in 2008 by the Asia Society New York. Lü Peng’s huge tome A in 20th Century China was published in 2010. Then came Hung Chang-tai’s Mao’s New world: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic of 2011, a very detailed and useful text following on from earlier

63 Andrews, 1994, see especially 148-60. 64 Zheng, 2002: 11. He notes that a poster exhibition including Chinese work had been held in Amsterdam in 1996 and a touring exhibition of posters organised from Indiana and London in 1999. 38 articles such as ‘Revolutionary History in Stone’ in The China Quarterly of 2001. Finally, in this by no means exhaustive list, is Gao Minglu’s Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art also published in 2011. The tenor of these works is in marked contrast to the non-Chinese writings, which are by and large measured, comparative and calibrated. Here is enthusiastic celebration of the political art of the period from the 1950s onwards, particularly the latter part. The volumes are physically large and the reproductions are of high resolution with the ‘message’ being that this work being promoted is important and worthy of attention.

A number of these texts focus on the Cultural Revolution. As is evident by the time of publication of the 2012 Andrews’ text, American scholars have increased their attention on this period. Two important American collections of essays of the late 2000s are Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian’s editing of Art and China’s Revolution, produced by the Asia Society in 2008, and Richard King’s editing of Art in Turmoil, The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966-77, of 2010. Both include a number of important essays by non-Chinese, as well as first-hand accounts by Chinese artists involved in the Cultural Revolutionary period.

While the central narrative in these Chinese texts is clear, there are various nuances in the telling. In Jiang Jiehong’s Red: China’s Cultural Revolution, visually splendid with images of a country “awash with red”,65 he nevertheless notes how this ‘red art’ of the Cultural Revolution has been largely excluded from Chinese ‘art history’. (This is particularly pertinent for the most extreme versions of a practice that essentially came from Russian ideas.) He notes that the exhibitions of art of the unnamed Red Guards were unheralded, with one display at the National Art Museum of China in 1967 of 1600 works by ‘officially 70% workers, peasants and soldiers’, that is, ‘amateurs’, was deemed ‘aesthetically poor’, and that there has been little evidence of it kept.66 There is an obvious comparison with similar value-laden filters being applied in China to Cultural Revolution imagery as they are in the West to Chinese and Russian general Socialist Realist work.

It is only very recently, in 2010-1, that Chinese art historians have begun to acknowledge the role of the Russians. Perhaps time has provided the greater capacity for objective judgement, and perhaps the sensitivities towards both the Soviets and the period of the Cultural Revolution in China are lessening. Lü Peng devotes a significant part of his 2010 book to an analysis of Russian impact on Chinese art. Hung Chang-tai in 2011 in Mao’s New World writes that Soviet influence is one of three themes of his book and “is an important chapter in

65 Jiang, 2010: 99. 66 Jiang, 2010: 165. 39 contemporary history rarely told in China today”.67 And in the same year in his Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde Gao Minglu emphasizes the link between the Russians and the Chinese at the centre of this thesis, and articulates some of its outcomes, claiming for the first time its precedence over any other Western art ideology. He writes that Mao Zedong brought Western culture to China through Russia:

It was unprecedented. Never before or since had any Western art theory played such a profound role in changing the Chinese mentality toward the making of art. Representation, or the reflection of life in the sense of socialist realism, had become a doctrine not only for official academic art, but also for certain forms of ‘realism’ among the Chinese avant-garde.68

He further states:

Though Mao’s site specificity was political, conceptually there had never been such a popular art in the world before Mao. This was the case not only because the art of the Cultural Revolution revealed life during the Cultural Revolution as an integral whole, but because the art involved the masses in its making. In this way, Mao’s art thoroughly transcended Soviet art, post-modernist art, and any commercial art in terms of the population of receivers, the scale of form, and the range of producers.69

Gao’s focus is the nature of the avant-garde in China, and so he reflects only in passing on Soviet and Chinese practice and the quality of the artworks.70 He does note that the Cultural Revolution “violently launched the destruction of the Soviet-influenced academic socialist realism”,71 applying this judgement to ‘realist’ during these years, and avoiding the argument that the imagery of the Cultural Revolution emerged from (rather than destroyed) the underlying ideology of the Soviets. He further avoids the argument that art after 1976 extended this ideology (even satirically) even more enthusiastically, and in that rediscovered medium of oil on canvas. These issues will be explored in depth in this thesis, as will the wider regional impact of the Soviets.

67 Hung Chang-tai, 2011: 18. He adds further on that this is “evident in the thousands of Soviet advisers sent from Moscow but also in their influence on city planning, the expansion of Tiananmen Square, national parades, art, and the construction of museums”. 68 Gao, 2011: 44. Things move quickly. By 2014 young art historians in China can write as if this situation is the accepted norm: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu in a recent e-flux article on Socialist Realism explores this as a “fundamental issue”, noting its birth in Russia and the response in China throughout the century, discussing the aspects of the contemporary sphere that continue “to follow Socialist Realism”. (From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position; The Echoes of Socialist Realism, Part 1. http:///www.e- flux.com/journal/from-the-issue-of-art-to-the-issue-of-position-the-echoes-of-socialist-realism-part-i: accessed 10 December 2014.) 69 Gao, 2011: 58. 70 He compares the Russian high status of artists, not having to experience the life of labourers and acknowledge the (greater) wisdom of the masses, with the expectations in China (2011, 44), as well as the romantic, symbolic themes of pre Cultural Revolution art (2011: 54-5). 71 Gao, 2011: 45. 40

A last observation is that again, more broadly through the period, as in Russia, graphic works on paper have attracted media specific publications, from Harriett Evans and Stephanie Donald’s Picturing Power in the PRC: Posters of the Cultural Revolution of 1999, to the large volume of poster reproductions published in in 2003, to the publications of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. Specific media foci include Claire Roberts’ 2013 work on photography, John T. Young’s 1999 text on public art and various publications through the period on ‘peasant painting’.72

Of the cultural followers of the Russian and Chinese communist regimes in Asia, it will be argued that Vietnam is the most interesting of these and North Korea the most astonishing. The smaller Indo-Chinese states have produced few texts or publications on their art under Communism, often included only in passing references added to comments on their more impressive neighbours – as here. There has been a small wave of foreign and local younger researchers in in recent years, and some of their findings are published in smaller catalogues, on the web, and in conference papers. They visualise an art world of marked difficulty in all ways. A more comprehensive text is yet to be published.

Vietnam is a different case. The conjunction of Confucian scholarship, research procedure and Socialist understanding of the usage of art for other ends has shaped scholarly focus on the art of Vietnam during the struggle for independence and afterwards. Images primarily associated with the School of Fine Arts and in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi have been repeatedly reproduced and discussed in publications supported by Hanoi-based Government-backed institutions, including the Department of Fine Arts, the Council of Plastic Arts, the Museum itself, and the Army Publishing House. Many texts are bilingual in English and Vietnamese, reflecting the ‘educational’ role of both the art and the publication. It is a seamless exposé. A more analytical view is given by the main foreign writers on this work, Nora A. Taylor, particularly in her 2004 Painters of Hanoi, and the most extensive research by Boi Tran Huyh in Vietnamese Aesthetics from1925 Onwards and Phoebe Scott’s Forming and Reforming the Artist; Modernity, Agency and the Discourse of Art in North Vietnam, 1925-1954, both University of Sydney PhD Dissertations of 2005 and 2012 respectively. The French writing about Vietnam focuses on Francophile interests and more recent art has its widest coverage in international curatorial and local commercial publications.

72 These range from Peasant Painting from Huhsien Country of 1974 published by the People’s Fine Art Publishing House in Beijing, to the Art Gallery of ’s 1988 Contemporary Folk Painting from Province, to Farmer Paintings in China, a commercial publication from Beijing of 2013.

41

The attention given to North Korean art of this period contrasts with that of Vietnam. It was ignored for decades by outside art historians, with the first glimmers of access showing in South Korea in 2000, with the Kwangju Biennale including a selection of art from North Korea and publishing rudimentary material in the catalogue. All foreign publications have been associated with either exhibitions or conferences. As listed in the Bibliography, a more serious focus after Kwangju was first Jane Portal’s 2005 book published by the British Museum, the material published by Queensland Art Gallery in 2009, and then the Rüdiger Frank collection of essays of 2010, published in . The latter is the first detailed research on the area. North Korea is never mentioned in Chinese, and certainly not in Russian, art history writings.

The Japanese art noted in this thesis is marginal to the whole research project, with the main focus being the usage in Japan during the mid-century wars of the ideas of graphic propaganda material coming from Communist experience. Barak Kushler’s Thought War of 2006, Annika A. Culver’s Glorify The Empire and Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa Mcdonald and Ming Tiampo’s edition of essays Art and War in Japan and its Empire 1931-1960, both of 2013, are relevant here. Likewise, the South Korean art discussed in this thesis is similarly of limited focus, though in reality in the history of Korean art it is of importance. The Minjoong Misul (or people’s mass art) movement emerged in the late 1970s notably in the small southern town of Kwangju as a protest against military control. It included a number of leading artists who made art works of social conscience and often in socialist realist mode through the 1980s and into the 1990s, whose work was especially celebrated in the 2000 Kwangju Biennale in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Kwangju Massacre of protesting students. Every history of recent Korean art includes a small but respectful section on this movement.73

The sympathy with left-wing causes in India meant there has been some analysis of the 1930s and 1940s period in Bengal relevant to this text, especially more recently in articles in magazines like Art India, and the on-line archives of Shantiniketan. The exception is Zainul Abedin (1914-76) with a monograph on his work by Rosa Maria Falvo published in 2012. Pakistani authors have published a number of general texts on art of their country during the century, all useful here: notably Ijaz ul Hassan’s text of 1991 and Salima Hashmi and Quddus Mirza’s of 1997. The special issue on Pakistan, published also in 1997 of Arts & The Islamic World, included a range of relevant articles.

In Southeast Asia, outside the Communist zone, there have been attempts at cross-national commentary, notably by publications coming from Singapore, but even within them each

73 An early example is Kim Bok-young’s ‘The Period of Conflict and Confrontation’ in the government-backed Korean Culture and Arts Foundation publication Korean Contemporary Art of 1995: 39-45, as well as Hariu Ichiro’s ‘My Concept of Art and Human Rights’ in Kwangju Biennale 2000; Man + Space, 2000, 24-35 and Roe Jae-Ryung’s ‘Politics and Realism: Minjung Art’ in her Contemporary Korean Art of 2001: 46-51. 42 country is discussed within its own context. Modernity and Beyond; Themes in Southeast Asian Art of 1996 is one example and Visions & Enchantment; Southeast Asian Paintings of 2000 another.

Singapore Art Museum has been the main institution to curate cross-cultural exhibitions with associated publications,74 with Queensland Art Gallery and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum the rivals for this mantle, exhibiting artists of the region usually without reference to nationality. Financial support in Singapore has been central to both the number and physical quality of their publications, as is facility with English for an international (purchasing) audience. Geopolitics in, for example Indonesia, has had both American and Dutch governments support high quality publications. More recently there, where special funding is not available and the diminished activity of art-book publishing, research is increasingly available on digital sites.

The Singaporeans have been researching and publishing material on their own relatively short art history with increasing intensity. The universities and their museums along with the Singapore Art Museum led the way but the National Library and National Museum and now the National Gallery Singapore have followed this publishing iniiative. As discussed in this thesis, the pressures in Singapore against Socialist Realist art were strong from the 1950s, and it is only in recent years that new exhibitions and publications of this imagery have emerged. Like the Chinese, the Singaporeans are facing their past with gusto. A number of individuals stand out in researching this thesis: Kwok Kian Chow for his thoughtful dissection of Asian art in general and Koh Nguang How who started to research this leftist imagery in the 1990s, leading to his exhibition 1950-65; Passage to Singaporean Art held in Fukuoka in 2002. Others include Ahmad Mashadi, with his essay on the 1970s in Third Text in 2011, Daniel Tham and his 2013 National Museum of Singapore publication A Changed World: Singapore Art 1950s-1970s, and Yu Jin Seng and his writing on the period.75 Malaysian institutions were behind publications of art in their collections from the 1990s, supported by the energy of Redza Piyadasa (1939-2007) and T.K. Sabapathy in particular, but of recent years this publication and research record has much reduced.

As will be later discussed, the Suharto years dampened Indonesian research, writing and general discourse on issues such as socialist art. It remained the purview of non-Indonesians, albeit ones expert in the realities of this culture. The late 1980s saw Keith Foulcher writing about ‘social commitment’ in literature and Britta L. Miklouho-Maklai writing on visual art, in 1991, both with prescient views though constrained by their time of publication during the

74 Two notable examples are Joanna Lee and Bridget Tracy Tan’s Imaging Selves, Collection Exhibition Series, Singapore Art Museum, 1998, and Landscapes in Southeast Asian Art; Works from the Singapore Art Museum Permanent Collection, Singapore Art Museum, 2000. 75 See Bibliography for details. 43

Suharto era. Three texts in the 1990s are overviews of recent - the edition edited by Joseph Fischer published in New York in 1990, Helena Spanjaard’s book published in Amsterdam in 1993 and Jim Supangkat’s first major work published in Jakarta in 1996 – all opening up new access to discussion of the previous 100 years. Through this period the collections of essays noted above began to be published, mostly in Singapore and Queensland, followed by Cubism in Asia and Realism in Asia produced in the 2005 and 2010 with support from the Japan Foundation. Two collections of essays - almost all written by young Indonesian artists, critics and academics - were published just after Suharto’s departure: AWAS! in 1999, and Outlet in 2001, both providing insightful discussion particularly for the 1980s on. A rare case of a artist relevant to this study being very well published are the texts on Sudjojono, particularly the monograph Visible Soul, issued by his foundation in 2006, and the focus given to him by two Singapore universities: the National University of Singapore in 2008, and Nanyang University in 2014.

The writing on this issue and era in the Philippines is markedly different. University academics have written extensively about left-wing art, particularly Alice G. Guillermo and more recently Patrick D. Flores. Through post-graduate art degrees in English-speaking countries, and the access to art-friendly philanthropic funds, substantial publications on Filipino art are notable by their number and their detailed research. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma is an eye-witness who writes clearly from the 1970s about the art and its issues around her. Even when funds are less, magazines and editions of essays published by universities and their staff investigate particular issues of the day, examples being the essay series of publications of the University of the Philippines from the 1980s, and Pananaw, an on-line Filipino ‘journal of visual art’. Filipino art is also included within the collective publications on ‘Asian art’ noted previously. It is a distinct issue however that despite their obvious capability, that the Filipino art historians more generally do not spread their wings to address parallel experiences around them.76

The focuses in the literature of Australian art relevant to this thesis include texts on art influenced first by left-wing utopian socialism from Britain in the nineteenth century, then by Russian ideology and practice pre-World War II, followed by that influenced by the Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s, and through this the ideology of practice that has synergies with both Russian and Chinese experience. The main block of texts interested in socialist, left-wing, ‘working-class’ ideas were published in the 1970s and 1980s: Charles Merewether’s exhibition and publication Art and Social Commitment, about art of the 1930s and 1940s, a project begun in 1978 and realised in 1984, is seminal.77 His and Ann Stephen’s edition Great Divide: An

76 Patrick Flores’ essay on manifestos in Southeast Asia, of 2011, is a rare exception. 77 See Merewether, 1984: 2. 44

Ongoing Critique of Australian Culture under Capitalism: Reviews of Oppositional Cultural Work and an Examination of Socialist Models, of ‘oppositional cultural work and an examination of socialist models’, had come out in 1977 and included a number of pertinent essays by writers who aligned themselves with the left. It was followed by Stephen’s and Andrew Reeves’ 1984 catalogue on union banners, Ian Burn’s and Sandy Kirby’s Working Art of 1985, and then Kirby’s study of artists and unions of 1992. Many of these had financial support from the Community Arts Board of the Australia Council, and frequently included introductions by the then director Deborah Mills. More recently Geoff Hogg’s (b. 1950) book, with Kristen Sharp, of 2010 and his 2011 RMIT PhD Dissertation continues commentary on this period. Graphic works are included in both monographs of left-wing artists like Robert Smith’s work of the 1980s on Noel Counihan (1913-86), and general texts, like Roger Butler’s Poster Art in Australia of 1993 and PRINTED of 2007, both published by the National Gallery of Australia. Apart from this is the Australian response, discussed in the Appendix, to Socialist Realism’s nemesis Abstract Expressionism. Relevant accounts here are by those associated with the purchases of this work by the National Galleries of Australia and Victoria, including Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond’s catalogue of 1992, ’s sequel in 2014, and Charles Green and Heather Barker’s discussion of 2013.

***

So has global ‘art history’ in the West grappled to re-assess long-held cultural positions about the centrality and superiority of European cultural ideas in contrast to new areas of focus - like the East. The East in turn has had its own journey of responding to this, particularly in rethinking the elements of what ‘art history’ might be. The next section turns to an equally vexing but central area for discussion here: how the divisions not of East and West but of Communism and capitalism affected the discussions about the efficacy of the art made under their respective rubrics.

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Chapter 1. Art and politics: Soviet Socialist Realism and art history in the Asia Pacific region.

The argument for this thesis is that the art and its practice developed by the Communist regime in Russia have been important in the Asia Pacific region. If this was so, why has it not been acknowledged? This chapter discusses why this situation, in the accepted versions of global art history, has occurred: not because the art itself is beneath consideration but because of the pressures of geo-politics. The chapter focuses on Russian Socialist Realism as the main target of Western art historians, as it set the paradigm in stone. These historians extended this position of either exclusion or critique when the ideology and style was adopted further East.

Thomas B. Hess begins his book on Academic Art, written in 1963 at the height of Socialist Realism in China and Abstract Expressionism in America (the latter movement of which he was a pioneer champion), by making the argument for a defence of this older movement:

Academy, Academic, Academism (or Academicism) – these words mean “bad” in the conversation of the art community… When words become so heavily weighted, their pejorative charge can blur the qualities of the arts they denote. And when this happens, it becomes necessary to neutralize the slogan in order to examine what is beneath dispassionately (or even with an advocacy for rather than against; after all, it takes a positive pressure to overcome decades of negation…).1

So it has been for Socialist Realism. Three reasons are given here why this occurred, which this chapter then discusses more fully. The last section of the chapter raises the question of the East/West nexus for Russia itself.

The first reason is the ideological and political struggle of the Cold War between the Communists and the capitalists played out over the twentieth century. One central ideological contest was between the individualism advocated in the Capitalist West and the communalism of the Communist ‘East’. Within this polarity was the tension between the idea of the individual artist encouraged and rewarded for the expression of their own personal ideas, versus the idea of art being part of a communal good, with the artist subsuming their individualism for the greater whole.

1 Hess, (1963) 1971: 2-3. 46

The second reason for this situation is the related practice of the of art, developed in Western Europe first in the Renaissance, reinforced in the nineteenth-century as a verbal and codified system of analysis of the visual arts, and most widely and deeply developed through the Western centre of Europe and then its diaspora, particularly in the USA. In light of the political overlay of the Cold War, the art of Communism is excluded or damned in discussions mounted by this enemy camp and against this camp’s rules. This attitude can become so accepted, or ingrained, in ‘art history’ that unless the practitioner or reader is tuned to the issue of exclusion or damnation, the censure of Socialist Realism seems reasonable. This becomes more nuanced when discussed within the ambit of Western ‘art history’ for a thesis about the art of the Asian region, through the inverse lack of impact of this ‘art history’ in Asia until recent times, as well as a seeming lack of art historical alternatives in Asia itself. A thesis like this and the references cited are grounded in this tradition, so it makes for continuous questions of positioning and analysis.

Two examples of the impact of Cold War pressures on the art history of the region is the anti- Communism, post-World War II, particularly notable in this study in Indonesia and Australia, leading to the exclusion or omission of discussion of earlier left-wing art that might impact on later work. As will be discussed, Suharto’s anti-Communism made it impossible for discussion (never mind research or publication) of art that showed leftist tendencies, a situation now being consciously redressed. In Australia, as Sandy Kirby has written in a text about the origins of community arts, there “is the tendency, with the passage of time, to overlook and lose the working class and radical origins of [these] cultural initiatives”.2 Post-War Australia, under the leadership of Robert Menzies who tried to ban the local Communist Party, was a difficult place to celebrate such connections.3 The later vilification of the symbol of the USSR, , makes the choice of his portrait on the cover The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1945 all the more notable.4

A third explanation for the neglect of Communist art, particularly relevant here, is the reality that the visual diaspora of Socialist Realism in Asia was out of sight and out of mind to both the commentators of the Cold War and the historians of the art of this time. The impact of this movement across the Asia Pacific region, traced in detail in this thesis, has been ignored in the centres of art history, and only marginally addressed in Asia itself. Gao Minglu’s recent text is a rare acknowledgement of the importance of this movement – and this is only related to the

2 Kirby, 1991: 27. 3 Deborah Mills alludes to this in her ‘Preface’ to Ian Burn’s Working Art; A survey of art in the Australian labour movement in the 1980s, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1985, 6, writing that the workplace-based arts activities, supported by the Trade Unions and the Australia Council, “has helped engender a renaissance in cultural production within the labour movement not seen since the period of the Curtin [Labor] Government in the 1940s”. 4 Joseph Stalin, cover, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 May, 1945. A reproduction was used as the cover of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by Richard Overell, Communism, Highlights from the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection, March-May 2005. The item is Catalogue no.34. I am grateful to Anne Richter for this information. 47

Russia/China relationship.5 Throughout the rest of the region it is single commentators, such as Charles Merewether writing about Australian art or Alice G. Guillermo writing about Filipino work, who acknowledge the debt, and again it is for a singular locality.6 For these latter places, again the hegemony of that Western perspective that Socialist Realism is not only unworthy but dangerous seeps into the writing of the times.

A further issue is the ambivalent situation of Russia itself: is it of the East or West in this mix? Either way is uncertain. The critique of any simplistic binarism is not relevant for this issue when the self-description of Russia and then how it was viewed was sited within this trope.

This thesis covers an area lacking in focus. Christine Lindey deems the Cold War and ‘the age’ to pertain to Euro-America alone,7 as does Greg Barnhisel in his own text on the Cold War.8 Laura Brandon’s Art and War of 2007 published in London and New York, is, she writes, “limited primarily to the art of the West, particularly the USA and the UK”. Certainly her chapter on the Cold War is only about the West, and even when addressing Asian theatres of war, the only artists discussed are Western.9 Further, in general texts about the Cold War, art is little mentioned. Equally, Russian writers and critics of their art during the 1950s and 1960s wrote for a local audience, usually in difficult to access outside their country.10 Cultural thinkers from V.I. Lenin to Edward Said have expressed unease in talking about visual forms of cultural expression.11 Art texts rarely mention broader issues about cultural influence. It all makes this an area of much possibility.

1. Art and the Cold War

5 Gao Minglu, 2011: see 44 and 58 in particular. Gao’s work is further discussed in Chapter 4. 6 Merewether,1984; Guillermo, 2001. 7 Lindey, 1990. A recent sign of change is Postwar, Art Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, 1945-1965, on view at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, from October, 2016. 8 Barnhisel,2015. The text, on art and literature of the period, includes no discussion of any Asian art of significance. 9 Laura Brandon, 2007, Art and War, London, New York: I.B. Tauris: 2, 83-6. 10 See Bown, 1998, 386, citing critics Aleksandr Kamenski, Dmitri Sarabyanov, A. Ginevski and Vladimir Kostin and generally quoting texts from three art journals Khudozhnik, Iskusstvo and Tvorchestvo. 11 Lenin did not write specifically about visual art - though at length on culture more widely and literature - but a conversation with Clara Zetkin, post-Revolution, is often quoted: he said “I have the courage to appear a barbarian. I cannot appraise the works of expressionism, futurism, cubism and the other ‘isms’ as the highest manifestations of artistic genius. I do not understand them. They give me no joy.” (see Lenin, (1967) 1975: 230). A further conversation, with British sculptor Clare Sheridan reported Lenin saying “that he knew nothing about art and that it didn’t interest him. Almost at once, however, he started to express strong opinions about ‘bourgeois art’, and how it always aimed at beauty and adding contemptuously that beauty was nothing more than an abstract ideal” (see David King, 2009: 124). Despite this, Anatoly Lunacharsky in ‘Lenin and The Arts’ published first in 1933, aware as all Russians were of Lenin’s great knowledge of literature, said that he held the art of Russian realism in “high esteem”, and further that “since dilettantism had always been hateful to him and alien to his nature he did not like to make any statements on art” (see Lenin, (1967) 1978: 281). Gorky and Marx similarly focused on literature as did Trotsky (see Baxandall and Morawski, 1973: 47). W.T. J. Mitchell said “engaging with a visual art form [was]… a medium that Said often confessed put him into a ‘panic’” (see his essay ‘Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation’ in Mitchell, 2005: 3). A general recent example of the hesitation, at least, with the visual arts is the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements Project, published since 2000 with Chen Kuan-hsing and Chua Beng Huat taking a leading role. There is no art history or visual art studies within its ambit. More precisely, reading on issues of ‘culture’ in Asia it is often literature and performing arts that take centre place. An example is Lindsay and Liem’s 2012 Heirs to world culture; Being Indonesian 1950-1965. Is it that there are no art historians interested in such areas, or is the research published in different, isolated outlets? 48

The guiding ideology of Communism has been seen as dangerous to the West for nearly 100 years, though the art most closely associated with it, Socialist Realism, has taken on this mantle only since World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The issue of the Cold War being in the past is moot. As Chen Kuan-hsing in Asia as Method argues the triumph of capitalism and through it globalisation has become the dominant narrative in the West, and so it has to insist that an ideological pre-condition for this is the end of the Cold War.12 The reality of Communist political hold in China but also in other countries of the region belies this, as does the current hostility to Russia as a political and economic force and the residual hostility to Communism as it remains mostly focused on China.13 Korean critic Gim Jonggil in a 2015 article about art and the DMZ in Korea dourly notes “the Cold War persists and is alive in our own society”.14

The term the ‘Cold War’ was coined by George Orwell in 1945, seeing the new struggle between the USSR and the USA for rulership of the world.15 The Socialist Realist art of the Communist axis mid-century and its nemesis in the USA (represented in post-war conceptualism and abstraction) is one avenue to understanding the age. The adversarial nature of dialectical materialism at the heart of Communist ideology encourages the idea of opposition and the need to argue. It raises alarm elsewhere to be on guard for a potentially hostile encounter. Lindey outlines World War II schooling people to think as adversaries, followed by the McCarthy era in the USA, where Nazi and Soviet arts were conflated, with Stalin’s abuses made widely known.16 How best could a post-war Western-trained cultural thinker or historian address this but by making sure that these vilified cultures and their art were discredited?

Yet, even through this period, individuals in the West endeavoured to maintain some appreciation of the achievements of the Communists and their culture, as well as of the politically charged criticism against it. Chalmers Johnson in Blowback: The Costs and

12 Chen Kuan-hsing, 2010: 118 ff. Chen’s answer to this triumph of global capitalism over Communism is to argue for a “third road” in Asia between these two contestations, rediscovering nativist, local traditions (p.9). As discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 5, this has been the way in Asia for many decades, synthesizing these various external ideologies with a local imperative. The ‘end of the Cold War’ phrase is usually equated with European events, particularly the timing of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Eurocentrism again), but also with reference to the end of the Vietnam War (see Welch 2013, 190). The issue of 1989 being the year the Cold War ended was specifically raised at the Cultural Rebellion in Asia forum, held in Tokyo in 2014, notably by Kataoka Mami, saying 1989 “from the Western sense it’s of course the end of the Cold War” (see Cultural Rebellion in Asia, 2015, 86). Japanese curator Suzuki Kazuo, in 2014, sees the end of the Cold War in Western terms but with a different date: 1971, the end of the Nixon Doctrine (see his paper ‘Imagining Cultural Solidarity in Asia Now’ in Cultural Rebellion in Asia, 2015: 12). 13 This thesis will explore this hostility in more depth. There are myriad examples but the mindset is epitomised by Robert Gellately’s 2007 book, published by Jonathan Cape, with the title Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: the Age of Social Catastrophe. He writes that Lenin’s first act was to repress freedom of expression (untrue as the support in the early days for creative life by Malevich et al shows) (43), and then more broadly, that “centuries of Asian civilization were threatened or rooted out, and new Communist regimes were formed at the cost of immeasurable suffering … [in] Eastern Europe, the scars left on the land and on the people can be seen to this day” (594). This text is unremarkable except for its publishing date, and, to a degree, its publisher. 14 See Gim Jonggil, 2015: 22. 15 George Orwell , 1945, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ in Tribune, 19 October, see http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by- orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/, accessed 12 December, 2015. 16 Lindey,1990: 7, 10, 33. 49

Consequences of American Empire, describes his own journey from a student of the 1950s seeing Communism as a “dangerous, deeply disturbing development” to graduallyrealising why it was the most attractive movement to farmers in China, and how every American writer who admired the new Chinese regime in the 1937-45 period had been routinely disavowed.17 Even in 1973, before the seeming official end of the Cold War but with the beginning of a new Western interest on the culture of Stalin’s era, C. Vaughan James could write the socialist dream still inspired millions, though Socialist Realism tended to still be taken wholly negatively.18 In 1977 Russian specialist John E. Bowlt wrote in the exhibition catalogue of ‘Russian and Soviet’ art touring the USA that “perhaps more than any other movement in modern art, Socialist realism is the victim of an intricate and misleading mythology, and it is difficult now to sift artistic fact from ”:

Actually, the aesthetic credo of Socialist realism, ratified in 1934, contained some very significant and innovative ideas, especially in its advocacy of the need to depict “reality in its revolutionary development,” to use “labor as a central hero,” to apply “typicality” as a primary principle, and so on. Whether or not we like the interpretations and extensions of this program is another matter, although, of course, there were “good” and “bad” Socialist realist paintings, just as there were “good” and “bad” social realist paintings in America during the same period… [The artists] strove to transmit the idea of an imminent fulfillment of a utopian dream through the lyrical distortion of reality. Socialist realism of the 1930s was a visual rhetoric, and its flights of fancy are rarely encountered now.19

As will be discussed, Bowlt’s words did not gain hold in the wider art community in the West. Art remained the lubrication of two competing political systems, significant internally to each and the narrative created therein, and used within each’s external spheres of influence, often, as in the Philippines, as direct political propaganda.20

The issue prior to World War II had been equally complex. The art of the Suprematists and Constructivists, so supportive of Lenin’s new political regime at the beginning, was seen by conservatives elsewhere as symptomatic of the new and distrusted political revolution in Russia, and criticised for being too ‘modern’. The collecting of ‘modernist’ art works after 1919 by the Imperial War Museum in London provoked protests of ‘Bolshevism in Art’.21

17 Johnson, (2000) 2004: xxiii- xxvii. He cites Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Nym Wales and others. 18 James, 1973: xii. 19 Bowlt, 1977: 13. 20 See Chapter 5. I use ‘propaganda’ in its benign form here. 21 Wall text, Time & Memory; British Art of the First World War, Imperial War Museum, London, sighted 3 August, 2014. A related tone is given by Sir Martin Conway M.P. in his book Art Treasures in Soviet Russia, published in 1925 (London: Edward Arnold & 50

Against this was the interest and sympathy among art groups for both the Russian cause and not only the Suprematist and Constructivist art but the new State-supported Soviet art. Bown and Taylor, in their 1993 book Art of the Soviets; painting, sculpture and architecture in a one- party state, 1917-1992, list supportive pre-War Western publications: ‘Art in the USSR’ in Studio in 1935, Cyril Bunt’s Russian Art from the Scythes to the Soviets and George K. Loukowski’s History of Modern Soviet Painting 1840-1940, both of 1945, published before the changes in critical attitude.22 Serge Guilbaut writes of a brief respite for left-wing artists in the USA during the 1930s.23 Artists in the West had often followed a general leftist ideology with little consequence to their careers. Diego Rivera (1886-1957), well known for his Communist links, had been supported by leading capitalists including the Rockefellers in the USA. (1912-56) and others were sympathetic to left-wing politics. Adolph Gottlieb (1903-74) had been a Communist activist.

But gradually a new voice critical of the art produced by the Soviet state began to emerge. Influential American critic Clement Greenberg laid down the gauntlet in 1939 in an article in the Review, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, with Socialist Realism clearly described in the latter camp, and abstraction in the former. The avant-garde was special, for the educated elite, pure and a-political (though dependent on this cultured, wealthy elite), and kitsch was “popular…commercial… mechanical” and formulaic, part of “ersatz culture” and “insensible” to genuine culture.24 Greenberg described how it borrows devices from established culture, and it was now international. He writes that the Russian peasant is the exemplar of the uneducated viewer, manipulated by the political regime establishing official cultural policy for the sake of demagogy.25 Greenberg never describes an actual work of kitsch Socialist Realist art – though he does describe the history paintings of Repin – but his article suggests the vilification that Russian art was to receive from so many Western critics since. Bown, in his 1991 text Art under Stalin, acknowledges the power of this, writing that the period had been virtually ignored because of ideological antagonism to the Soviets and the “impossibility of reconciling socialist realism with modernism”.26

Art historian Bernard Smith, in 1983, wrote with clarity about the 1940s in Australia making the point that the work of left-wing artists after 1947 became increasingly “under pressure

Co.), which starts, “I hope that no-one will be able to find in this book the faintest trace of propaganda… The Russian Revolution was a terrific tragedy, but Russia was a country of tragedy before the Revolution and is a country of tragedy today…” (v). 22 Bown and Taylor, 1993: 7. 23 Guilbaut, 1983, specifically page 18, but the entire book focusses on this. 24 Greenberg, 1939: 39-40. 25 Greenberg, 1939: 43, 46. This is not the place for an in-depth discussion of the ‘avant-garde’ but Rosalind E. Krauss’ discussion, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’ of 1981, is relevant to both Greenberg and Groys (see below). She writes “The avant-garde artist has worn many guises over the first hundred years of his existence: revolutionary, dandy, anarchist, aesthete, technologist, mystic. He has also preached many creeds. One thing only seems to hold fairly constant in the vanguardist discourse and that is the theme of originality”(157). Krauss critiques this and puts the notion into its cultural context, but it is an issue for the mid- century foci in this thesis, and, as discussed in Chapter 5, was neither an admired quality nor a constant in other cultures. 26 Bown, 1991: 7. 51 from the theories of socialist realism, long promulgated by Zhdanov and others in the USSR”, continuing: The main trouble with socialist realism both as a theory and as a practice was that it was dogmatic and historicist. It claimed to be the only true art of the future: all other forms were decadent.

Something similar happened to abstract art in the USA during the Cold War years. Highly influential American critics, like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg … succeeded in convincing themselves that a group of American artists had discovered a new language of art that made all other forms increasingly irrelevant and out-moded. Like socialist realism, abstract expressionism developed historicist and determinist pretensions. In the dogmas of abstract expressionism I found myself confronted with a mirror image of the dogmas of socialist realism. The extremes had met.27

It took some fifty years for a critic to emerge to counter Greenberg’s basic argument that the art is of no consequence, and he comes from inside Russia but practises in the West: Boris Groys. Groys in The Total Art of Stalinism, published by Princeton University Press in 1988, outlines the energy of the Russian revolution ‘mercilessly destroying the past’ and willing to organise life in new, unseen forms and experiments on an “unprecedented scale”.28 He argues that the interest in the ‘aesthetics and practice’ of Socialist Realism “has been inhibited by the question… Are we dealing with art here?” because of the links between the movement and the repressive regime around it. In answer to this rhetoric, he argues that much art has embellished and glorified power, that the avant-garde is seen as outside the power system but that, of course, this is not so, and finally he equates Socialist Realism with the evolution of the avant-garde in Europe, though it was different for its “radical methods and monolithic style”.29 Socialist Realism, he writes, continued the avant-garde because of its refusal to focus on representing life and beginning to “transform it by means of a total aesthetic-political project”.30 He takes up the issue of the basic spirit of this art being that it moved from representing to transforming the world, in other words, that the utopianism of its vision was its founding essence.31 It is Zhdanov’s revolutionary romanticism, the quality that is seen in the best of the later Chinese work.

27 Bernard Smith, in ‘Notes on Abstract Art’ in The Death of the Artist as Hero, published in 1988: 185-6. 28 Groys (1988), 1992: 4-5. 29 Groys (1988), 1992: 7-9. 30 Groys (1988), 1992: 36. Because of this associated repressive past, writes Groys, the style is even less studied in Russia than in the West (10). Groys, in 2008: 147, furthers his comments on the avant-garde and Socialist Realism, saying the style “may be understood as an attempt to abolish that split between the avant-garde and mass culture that Greenberg diagnosed”. The issue with this comment is that we today may wish to attempt this, but it was not an issue in Russia – or Asia – at the time. 31 Groys, (1988) 1992: 14. 52

However these intervening fifty years built up a strong history of disregard for Socialist Realism, and, despite Groys, this remains the case generally today, as will be detailed more precisely later in this chapter. Even with sympathetic writers like Lindey, we see the acceptance of the Greenbergian idea of what was avant-garde or not. Socialist Realism, she says, was not.32 This text follows these years between Greenberg and Groys more closely, then travels a little further.

A further venerable American art impresario of mid-century (first director of the Museum of Modern Art) Alfred H. Barr entered the centre of this debate, writing a finely balanced article for The New York Times Magazine in 1952, ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’. In this text he focused on the politically-driven nature of ‘totalitarian’ art, addressing the issue of ‘freedom’ in the West (“the modern artists’ non-conformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny”), and then moving to the issue of the lack of popularity of ‘modern art’, that is, Western abstract art, which therefore made “useless for the dictators’ propaganda”.33 Barr’s argument ends simplistically, that modern art is not ‘communistic’ because it is not guided by the Kremlin. The article is political, focusing on the reason and method (particularly the restrictions) of creation of the work, and seeing the results critically. However he is remarkable for knowing this Russian work and describing many examples of what was central to Socialist Realism, including work by Serafima F. Ryangina (1891-1955), Deineka, Evgeny A. Katsman (1890-1976), and Gerasimov, particularly his Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin of 1938 (see fig.4.6). Barr had travelled to Russia in 1927-8 and later returned in 1956 and 1959 and clearly kept abreast of art there in a way unusual at the time. As Lindey points out, part of the campaign in the West post-War discrediting Russian art meant few individual artists were known, even after the Khrushchev thaw34 – only coming into international cognisance since .

It was in this post-war period that things changed more generally and positions hardened. Frances Stonor Saunders, writing in 1999 in Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, follows the history of political links to art in America in this period, and the demonization of Communism. Congressman George Dondero received the Gold Medal of Honour in 1957 for his exposure of Communism in art, setting the tone (vide Alfred Barr) with his saying ‘all modern art is Communistic’, including criticising local artists: the abstractionists and their left-

32 Lindey, 1990: 44. Her chapter 6 carries this further: titled ‘The Soviet avant-garde: unofficial art in the USSR’, it follows the art made especially after the that did not conform to older Socialist tenets. 33 Barr, (1952) 1968: 214. Like many other Western commentators focused on the issues of Barr includes Nazi attitudes within his article on Russian Communism. 34 Lindey, 1990: 33. Clement Greenberg in his reissue of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in 1973: 21, has a postscript, in which he, to his credit, acknowledges this situation: “To my dismay I learned years after this saw print that Repin never painted a battle scene; he wasn’t that kind of painter. I had attributed someone else’s picture to him. That showed my provincialism with regard to Russian art in the nineteenth century”. 53 wing affiliations.35 ‘Art’s’ defence was to articulate the difference between ‘politically silent’ non-figurative painting and Socialist Realism – to start to clarify artistic outcomes as inextricably linked to a political nemesis. This led to the international strategy in support of the new non-figurative, American art, which because of resistance of conservatives like Dondero, was covertly driven by the CIA who in turn approached the Museum of Modern Art.36

Eva Cockcroft, writing in Artforum in 1974, observed “the purpose of MoMA’s international programme was overtly political, ‘to let it be known especially in Europe that America was not the cultural backwater that the Russians, during that tense period called “the cold war”, were trying to demonstrate that it was’”.37 To counter the Russians, the USA spent large amounts of time and money promoting this alternative to Socialist Realism. Cockcroft’s article followed the piece published the previous year in Artforum by Max Kozloff, titled ‘Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War’, where he sees the rhetoric of the Cold War and the individualist credos of the Abstract Expressionists as incidental. This was not the case, says Cockcroft, the first to frame the issues more precisely as a political campaign.38

The wider American international cultural campaign was run by Theodore C. Streibert, head of the Information Agency (USIA), founded by President Eisenhower in 1953. In 1956 he explained the purpose of the US government’s new focus on these activities, albeit in this case referring to performing arts:

… is to combat the Soviet and Soviet bloc advances in trade fairs and cultural activities. … This last year, 1955, the Communist bloc had exhibits in trade fairs in 41 different countries and in 149 fairs, and had 288 exhibits … In the fields of cultural dealings, in 1954, from the USSR alone, there were 88 cultural and sports delegations to countries of the free world. Last year the figure increased to 148. In the 2 years of operations under the President’s emergency fund, we have sent out 37 cultural and 7 sports delegations … We think this is necessary in not only countering Communist activities, but even without that, to show the world our productive processes for domestic and peaceful use of our products, and to show our true interest in affairs of culture, such as the arts, music, , and drama. This is particularly necessary in some of the newly developed areas of Asia and the Far East.39

35 Saunders, 1999: 253-4. 36 Saunders, 1999: 257. 37 Cockcroft, 1974: 40. The remark was made by Russell Lynes in his history of the Museum of Modern Art, Good Old Modern: an Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art. 38 Cockcroft, 1974: 39. 39 See Pierangelo Castagneto ‘Ambassador Dizzy: Jazz Diplomacy in the Cold War Era, Amerciana, X, Spring, 2014, in http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10jazz/castagneto, accessed 15 September 2015. The same website notes President Eisenhower writing to Steibert in 1954 saying: “It is my … desire that these funds be used for projects of all kinds that will demonstrate in a dramatic and effective manner the excellence of our free enterprise system as reflected in our products and our cultural values”. 54

However, the subtlety of the move for the visual arts is reflected by the comments of CIA staff recognising that the artists who made the work “considered themselves one way or another closer to Moscow than to Washington” and “so much the better”,40 presumably for the semblance of balance it gave. Barnhisel writes that these radical artists could be presented not as rebelling against the status quo as such, but as expressing ‘freedom, individualism and enterprise’ in comparison with the lack of these qualities in the Soviet Union.41 The Museum of Modern Art International Fund was launched in 1952, with a five year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Saunders comments that one of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the Cold War is not that it was part of it but that a movement so deliberately declaring itself apolitical could become so intensely politicised.42 Lindey notes that the US government’s support of Abstract Expressionism, as an answer to Socialist Realism, meant that Socialist Realism had an unexpected impact on American art.43

The success of this campaign was widely felt. The Preface of Two Decades of American Painting, which toured to Asia and Australia in 1966-7 after three years’ planning, written by Waldo Rasmussen of MoMA, stated that Abstract Expressionism was “the most important development in modern art since Cubism”44 and that this idea has been accepted widely.45 Malaysian artist Ismail Zain (1930-91), aware of the Cold War political connections for the movement and in the context of its significant influence on Malaysian art, wrote in 1989 that “Abstract Expressionism is truly one of the most successful exports to the world; perhaps next to McDonald and Coca Cola”.46 The impact of the Cold War was felt variously: Sophia University academic Hayashi Michio has written of the Japanese “‘indifference’ toward the Cold War structure and Asia’s political situation” which “had the effect in Japan of focusing political consciousness exclusively on Japan-U.S. relations” especially in the period from the

A specific study about Indonesia is Tony Day’s ‘Honoured guests; Indonesian-American cultural traffic, 1953-1957’ of 2012, 121 where he outlines the work of the Americans in 1954 keen to pursue cultural outreach in the region to “counter the Soviet threat”. See also Andrew James Wulf, U.S. International Exhibitions during the Cold War: Winning Hearts and Minds through Cultural Diplomacy, 2015, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowan & Littlefield, for discussions of trade exhibitions particularly to Europe in the 1950s to 1970s period. American art, including that of Jackson Pollock and Jack Levine is discussed in the relations to the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959: see 128-32. 40 Saunders, 1999: 260, quoting Donald Jameson. 41 Barnhisel, 2015: 28. 42 Saunders, 1999: 275. Martha Bayles, 2014: 136, quotes Ambassador George V. Allen’s disarming but misleading words that “Americans are the world’s worst propagandists”. He was director of the USIA from 1957-60. 43 Lindey, 1990: 85. 44 Two Decades of American Painting, 1967: np. The title page of the catalogue states the exhibition was developed under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council, linked with CIA and other ‘propaganda’ department strategies noted by Saunders in Who Paid the Piper? 45 There are examples without number displaying the dominance of this credo in the West. One, given authority by the US art hierarchy and particularly relevant for this thesis with its emphasis on art works on paper, is a key text on ‘world graphic art’ of 1976 including no Socialist Realist works, and only two ‘Asian’ works both of which are by Japanese. The text, Prints of the Twentieth Century: A History, part of Thames and Hudson’s World of Art Library, is by the curator of this media area, Riva Castleman, at the Museum of Modern Art. 46 Quoted in T.K. Sabapathy,1994: 52. Zain wrote this as part of his contribution to the First ASEAN Symposium on Aesthetics, held in Kuala Lumpur. 55

1960s.47 Pakistani artist, author and former head of the National College of the Arts in Lahore, Salima Hashmi, remembers the various performers coming from America like Mahalia Jackson and the Golden Gate Quartet in the early 1960s as well as a focus on library services and film. She writes that the Americans “did try to emphasise 'democracy' via the arts… The stress was on 'freedom of expression' allowed in the US versus the Communists”.48 Even in Russia itself, from the Khrushchev years on, when American art had toured (from the late 1950s) and publications were available, this new art from the West was seen as new and exciting, at the expense of Socialist art.49

Russian art itself continued to get attention, but it was for the so-called avant-garde work of (1879-1935) and his peers. Bown and Taylor list the 1960-82 era publications on Russian art as heavily focused on this earlier work, with only two including Socialist Realism (C. Vaughan James’ Soviet Socialist Realism; Origins and Theory, of 1973 and Elizabeth Valkenier’s Russian Realist Art: the State and Society: The and Their Tradition, of 1977) coming to terms with cultural traditions of the Soviet state.50 It is relevant however that Valkenier’s book focuses on the Peredvizhniki rather than Socialist Realism itself, and James’ text is more about the theory behind Socialist Realism than the art itself.

The history of exhibitions of Russian art generally in the West reflects the changing attitudes to both Russia and Socialist Realist works of art. The first major exhibition in the USA, Russian and Soviet Painting; An Exhibition from the Museums of the USSR Presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, was held in 1977. John E. Bowlt’s foreword, ‘Between East and West’, notes this exhibition is the first broader view of Russian art in the USA since 1924.51 The exhibition Master Drawings and Watercolours from the Hermitage and Tretyakov collections, held in Australia in 1978, notably included no Soviet images, and only a small number of less ‘avant-garde’ works by Natalia S. Goncharova (1881-1962) and (1887-1985), the remainder being conservative. In 1979 a further exhibition of Russian paintings came to Australia, USSR: Old Master Paintings, which again focused on academic work with only one (conventional) Malevich. The title of the

47 Hayashi Michio, 2015. ‘Cultural Rebellion: Japan from the 1960s to the 1980s’ in Cultural Rebellion in Asia/1960-1989; Art Studies 01. Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre: 44-5. 48 Email from Salima Hashmi, 15 September 2015. 49 Tupitsyn, 1989: 23: “The affinity of Soviet modernism in the late 1950s and 1960s for its American and European counterparts rather than the earlier Soviet avant-garde is a curious phenomenon considering that at the same time the heritage of Soviet revolutionary culture was just as ignored (or marginalised) abroad as it was as home”. Publications in English on the new Post- War Soviet art seemed to include a bit of everything. An example is Oleg Sopotsinsky’s Art in the Soviet Union: Paintings, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, published in Leningrad in 1978. 50 Bown and Taylor, 1993: 8. Another example is Mikhail Guerman’s Art of the October Revolution, published in New York in 1979, showing a large range of high quality images. 51 Russian and Soviet Painting, 1977: 11-3. Another exhibition in the West held in 1977 was of ‘unofficial’ art from the Soviet Union, held at the ICA in London, a much smaller institution, dealing with an area of art more comfortable with its aims. The works in the exhibition mostly came from the ‘Russian Museum in Exile’ in the suburbs of Paris: see Golomshtock and Glezer, 1977. 56 exhibition is eloquent, equating the threatening Soviet Union with something much more ‘civilised’ and acceptable like Old Master images.

The change really occurred in the 1980s. Bown and Taylor note “by the time came to power in 1985, Western audiences remained broadly ignorant of Soviet visual material after the hey-day of the Russian avant-garde”,52 however, the perceived ending of the Cold War in this period encouraged more exhibitions of Soviet art in the West. David Elliott’s exhibition in Oxford in 1986 was one of these. Further change came in the 1990s and even more in the 2000s. The ‘alternative’ museum PS1 in New York hosted The Aesthetic Arsenal: Socialist Realism under Stalin, in 1993, organised in co-operation with the Russian Federation Ministry of Culture. A major step up was the Guggenheim Museum in New York hosting Russia! in 2006 “under the patronage of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation”, an exhibition which included many major Socialist Realist works, along with the earlier ‘avant-garde’. This exhibition, like the Australian ones, had the overlay of external diplomacy. A further sign of reassessment - without this overlay - was the inclusion of a room of Soviet posters from the collection of David King in the Tate Modern, in mid 2014, taking its place in a major Western museum amidst key movements of the twentieth century.53 An associated response is the greatly increased, somewhat provocative focus on contemporary, indeeuygend political, Russian artists, like Vitaly A. Komar and Aleksandr D. Melamid, (b. 1943 and 1945, see fig. 4.1). The in London held an exhibition and produced a glossy publication in 2012 called Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union; Art from Russia - playing on the popular assumption that it was anything but -presenting eighteen contemporary Russian artists. The catalogue uses Socialist Realist graphic images to enhance the works of the contemporary artists – using the visual strength of the earlier works and quoting Stalin to give the whole more élan than it might otherwise have had.54

Asian Socialist Realist works of art have been little seen outside their own country. As noted in the Introduction, the ‘first’ exhibition of work of the Cultural Revolution in the West was shown in in 2002, with very few following, though notable among them the Asia Society’s exhibition in New York of 2008. The first time a Vietnamese artist was invited to show work in a major exhibition in the region was Nguyen Xuan Tiep (b.1956) at the first Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane in 1993, indicating the political situation even

52 Bown and Taylor, 1993: 9. 53 This author visited Russia! in 2006 in New York, and the Tate Modern in 2014, arrested by the inclusion of such work in both places. The Russia! catalogue includes detailed information on Russian artists studying in Europe from the eighteenth-century and Western European artists coming to Russia to teach (14ff). The exhibition included major icons like Deineka’s The Defense of Petrograd of 1927 and Isaak I Brodsky’s ((1884-1939) Lenin atthe Smolny of 1930 (fig. 3.13). 54 Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union; Art from Russia, 2012. The only artist who refers to Soviet politics is Anna Parkina: np. 57 then for a work of bucolic .55 In the same year the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney hosted Mao Goes Pop, the first exhibition of art from China, albeit from the post-Mao era, that was critical of the regime to be shown in the West. This thesis will discuss Asian contemporary art in this mode in more detail in later chapters.

Some comments should be included here on the issue of ‘propaganda’ as a critical term. Like ‘modernism’ and ‘realism’, it is a word with many contexts, and is therefore mostly avoided in this particular text. David Welch from the Centre for the Study of Propaganda at the University of Kent published Propaganda: Power and Persuasion in 2013.56 While noting the thousands of years of visual ‘propaganda’, he argues that its distinct political identity, apart from religious or commercial uses, came of age in the twentieth century with the introduction of mass media used by states in conflict. The significant change in the attitude to propaganda came after 1918 when it was increasingly equated with lies and falsehood.57 This was the social climate when Britain founded, in 1917, the Imperial War Museum, which even today includes exhibitions that promote imagery (propaganda?) in support of a political agenda (fig. 1.6). Jeffrey Schnapp, writing about the use of political posters during the century, remarks that ‘modern states need mass persuasion’.58 There is truth in this about democracy, however the culture – Communism – which most Western writers associate with propaganda, is not democratic. The situation seems more complex than this. The word itself had been relatively benign, coming from Reformation usage for ‘propagation of the faith’. Phoebe Scott and Timothy Cheek respectively identify Vietnamese and Chinese terms for propaganda (tuyen truyen and xuanchuan) as not sinister, but are rather propagating what one believes to be true, with overtones of an ethical orthodoxy.59 The illustration list of this thesis has ‘propaganda’ used officially in the making of various Chinese works, again a usage by no means sinister. Powerful sectors of society around the world have used ‘propaganda’ in its broadest sense (a selection of iconography of all media) to support their ends, with usually a large degree of lassitude beyond the ‘truth’. Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism all have partaken, and kings, sultans and emperors too, and now the commercial moguls have had leading roles. Even the idea of mass media as a conduit of change in the twentieth-century, as argued by Welch,60 is not strictly correct. Coins of the Roman emperors were distributed throughout the empire, and portraits of rulers, from English kings’ heads surrounded by Latin inscriptions emphasizing their

55 See Nguyen Quan, curator: “It was the first time that Vietnam participated in an international exhibition in the Asia-Pacific region” in Participants Comments: Artistic Report, Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Vol.11, 1994: np. Mr Tiep was invited to Australia by this author for this exhibition, part of her role as curator for Vietnamese inclusion of the first Triennial. 56 Welch,2013. Other texts include Robert Cole (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Propaganda, 1998, Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, and Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David Welch, 2003, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion; A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: ACB CLIO. Both texts, under ‘art’, (48ff and 21ff respectively) accept the widest range for ‘propaganda’, from government, religion or social powers, and acknowledge Western artworks like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, but all do focus particularly on first Nazi , then the USSR, then China. 57 Welch, 2013: 33. 58 Schnapp, 2005: 20. 59 Scott, 2012: 189; Cheek, 1997: 13. 60 Welch, 2013: 15. 58 greatness, to Napoleon astride (and controlling) a wild-eyed stallion, were transcribed onto the engraving plate and circulated widely.61 The engravings of Napoleon are as fictitious as any Socialist Realist image. By the 1980s Ronald Reagan could describe the Soviet Union as the ‘Evil Empire’ a term truly associated with fantasy world (cinematic in this case). What did change was the Cold War and the use of this word to denigrate the culture of one side.

2. Western art historiography – in the First and Second Worlds

The Introduction to this thesis articulated the situation with Western art history and its equivalences in Asia. This section analyses further the role of art history in its assessment of the art of the First (or capitalist), and more particularly, the Second (or Communist) worlds.62

The first part of this chapter has discussed why Socialist Realist art has been discredited politically in the (Western) art world. This section now analyses how it was discredited through the forces of Western art historiography, idenfitying four particular circumstances: firstly, by applying Western-driven concept of connoisseurship, with the associated idea of ‘taste’ (and for Socialist Realism as ‘bad taste’, that is, kitsch); secondly, through Enlightenment ideas of the elite individual genius (contrasted against Socialist Realism’s apparent disregard for individualistic creative processes); thirdly, the related discrediting of popular (mass) visual art (as opposed to Socialist Realism’s focus on mass popularity); and fourthly, through criticism of any role of the State in art’s creation (that focused, in turn, on the paramount role of the state in Socialist Realism and its apparently automatically deleterious effect on the quality of the work produced).

It should be said that many artists in the West during the twentieth century have also questioned the ‘forces of Western art historiography’ noted above: from the Dadaists to Pop artists, but they did it within the context of the scenario described, and ultimately, looking at the Western art world today, they bent to its power.63

The ubiquity of the acceptance of these critical positions towards Socialist Realism is one of the revelations of this study. It must be noted however, that there are glimmerings of change, in both the conventional attitude to Soviet art and awareness of its clouded view. Gao Minglu writes of the significance of the impact of Russia on China in 2011, while John Mateer writing about Melbourne artist Tom Nicholson (b. 1973) in Artlink, in 2015, comments that Nicholson

61 The Art Gallery of , where this author was curator of Prints and Drawings for ten years, has hundreds of these engravings in its collection, given to the institution in the early years of the twentieth-century. Multiply this by myriad private and public collections world-wide to gain a view of the spread of these images. 62 Even the nomenclature of these two worlds speaks of verbal hegemony. 63 I am grateful for discussion, 5 April, 2015, with Anthony White on this point. 59

(an artist concerned with a critique of elite art practice) “seems less to be following Western art historical examples than those of its vast, largely unappreciated alternative, namely, of art produced in what was called ‘the ’.”64 But such words are rare. In a general text on Global Art published in Germany in 2009, the editors write that in Russia “We all know that decades of political oppression put a stop to cultural development and left only the art of Soviet propaganda”.65 Two years later, in Spain, in a laudatory text on Aleksandr Deineka, one of the heroes of Socialist Realism, critics pose the reason for Stalin-era art’s lack of attention being because it “tends to be disregarded (or casted out a priori from the usual canon) as an unremarkable effort that simply resulted in a pretentious and monumental variant of kitsch”.66

Greenberg’s 1939 elision of Socialist Realism with kitsch retains its general hold. Through the decades critics have accepted his view. An example is Herbert Read in 1968 in London, after seeing reproductions of the iconic Chinese sculpture, Rent Collection Courtyard (fig. 4.9), dismissed it for being “exactly like similar groups in Madame Tussaud’s.”67 Igor Golomshtock could write in a catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Soviet art in New York in 1993 that Socialist Realism has been easy to caricature as “alien to contemporary culture”.68 The support of Abstract Expressionism by the CIA articulated by Donald Jameson, one of its staff in the post-War years, goes to the nub:

We recognised this [abstract expressionism] was the type of art that did not have anything to do with socialist realism, and made socialist realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was.69

If the artwork was ‘stylised and rigid’, one reason had to be the lack of support for individual creation in Russia, the second element in this critique. The hold of the idea of the individual masterpiece is hard to shift for a Western frame of mind. However, as Nelson H.H. Graburn articulated in Ethnic and Tourist Arts; Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, the “cult of individualism and originality is not a human universal.”70 It takes a different cultural view – from the East, or from Indigenous Australia - to put forward other viewpoints about this. There are countless examples of Western commentators repeating the critical comment about the

64 John Mateer, 2015, ‘Tom Nicholson; The activation of the artwork’ in Artlink, 35: 1, 57. 65 Silvia von Bennigsen, Irene Gludowacz and Susanne van Hagen (eds), 2009, Global Art, Ostfiblern: Hatje Cantz: 45. 66 Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 2. 67 See Anonymous, 1968, ‘A Critic of Art in the Cultural Revolution’ in the China Policy Study Group (London), Broadsheet, April- May, reprinted in Croizier, (in ‘Epilogue: Chinese Culture in the Cultural Revolution’) 1970: 296. Read wrote a letter “in distress” to Broadsheet saying, further, that with the Cultural Revolution “the artistic consequences are disastrous from any conceivable standard of aesthetic judgment.” The anonymous reply also printed does not accept this, saying Read does not consider “new standards” and the comparison with Madame Tussaud’s is inappropriate as the Chinese work moves “the peasants profoundly”, speaking to its particular audience (297-8). 68 Golomshtock, 1993: 12. 69 Quoted by Saunders, 1999: 260. 70 Nelson H.H. Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts; Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, (1976) 1979, Berkeley, , London: University of California Press: 23. 60 proclivity of Asian artists to copy both their own and introduced imagery, neglecting to discuss of how this, if true, might derive from other artistic traditions. Izabela Kopania gives one detailed account of Europeans in the nineteenth-century Siamese court, holding fast to their superior European views about general Asian imitativeness and cultural stagnation.71 A recent challenge to this notion in the West is an artist project at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London which involved inserting a replica Old Master into the display and asking students and the public to find it. It is an apposite questioning of the Western art historical assumption of ‘originality’ and ‘quality’ shining through.72

This leads to the third reason for Socialist Realist art being critiqued in the West: the elitist attitude of Western ‘high’ art being hostile to art aimed at the masses (until the impact of artists like Andy Warhol (1928-87) and others reappraised this positioning).73 Greenberg had elided ‘Bad art, popular art and the rear-guard’ together in his list of reprehensible practice and gives Norman Rockwell’s art as the popular example that proves his point.74 Socialist Realism is portrayed as old-fashioned in the West (didactic, illustrative, narrative and realist), but it was not so to its audience.75 Even putting aside the critical arguments such as Groys’ that it continued the avant-garde and that it was utopian in its spirit, aligned with James’ comment that it inspired millions, this work was hugely popular. Again Groys’ words about size are relevant here. Large numbers of artists were commissioned to make thousands of works in images shown in reproduction in every home, or shown in exhibitions attended by tens of thousands. Lindey quotes a broadcast of 1978 by Stephen Bayley of The Open University saying “Socialist Realism is, perhaps, strictly speaking the most popular form of the visual arts in the world today”.76

Relevant for this chapter is that this was, and is, not only an impulse behind the Iron Curtain. Lindey makes the telling comparison of Fedor S. Shurpin’s (1904-72) portrait of Stalin in his heroic Dawn over the Homeland of 1946-8 with Pietro Annigoni’s (1910-88) Queen Elizabeth II of 1954, reproduced in prints that decorated every public hall of the British Commonwealth, some to this day.77 Both enormously popular, well known, admired by the public for their ‘veracity’ and technical virtuosity, and for the wellbeing inspired by their subject. The resonance continues: in 2012, businessman Alexie Ananyer opened an Institute of Russian

71 See Izabela Kopania, ‘Anna Leonowens’ Observations on Siamese Art, Theatre and Literature within European Writings on Asian Art. A Preliminary Study’, in Kopania, 2012: 311-6. 72 Held 10 February-26 April, 2015. See: http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2015/february/made-in- china-a-doug-fishbone-project/ (accessed 24 February 2015). 73 The Andy Warhol - Ai Wei Wei exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria of 2015-6 highlighted Warhol’s recognition of ‘mass’ imagery, including the ubiquitous im age of Mao Zedong’s face, reinterpreted by him into the most ersatz of forms, wallpaper. 74 At the end of section II of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Greenberg writes: “It is lucky… for Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.” 75 Lindey, 1990: 62. 76 Lindey, 1990: 34. Besides the actuality of the comment at this time, in this context, it brings up the issue of Socialist Realism in China, where in strictly numerical terms it probably would have trumped the area Bayley was meaning: the European Soviet bloc. 77 Lindey, 1990: 52. This repeats Greenberg’s correct comment about the popularity in the USA of Norman Rockwell’s work. 61

Realist Art with his collection of 500 artworks that “meant much more to me than for anybody in the West – they were the realities and facts of my childhood and youth”.78

The fourth reason given here is that art in the service of the State must be bad. The very idea of officially sanctioned culture has been subtly or not so subtly criticised in the West since the Enlightenment through a broad range of social commentary. Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ are located in other places far from those with “self-consciously held political ideologies”.79 Even John Berger, writing in 1969 at the height of Soviet intractability in Art and Revolution, sees Socialist Realism as retrogressive because of this.80 The rare inclusion of the Chinese state in a text focused on Europe, Steven Heller’s Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State of 2008, is for their use of propaganda. Partha Chatterjee, proclaiming a more objective view in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World – A Derivative Discourse?, in 1986, describes the Creole nationalism of the Americas, the linguistic nationalism of Europe and a third model provided by “official nationalism” which was typically Russian. This third model involved the imposition of cultural homogeneity from the top, through state sanction: “‘Russification’ was a project which could be, and was, emulated elsewhere”.81

Part of the discrediting of Socialist Realism, equating it with the political practice of its proponents, is to link it with , as Heller does. Again Lindey is insightful here, comparing the Nazis’ attraction to mysticism, individualism and timelessness in contrast to the Soviets’ attraction to materialism, collectivism and change.82 While Socialist Realism is based on both Russian and Western European antecedents, it is an art looking to the future, rather than one looking to the past.

It is salient that in the time of the creation of Socialist Realism, in the 1920s and 1930s in Russia, witnessed by Jack Chen who wrote about it in the early 1940s, that the people in the centre of this activity thought it was new and important. Chen wrote how people ‘abroad’ were shocked that a political party should dare to pronounce an artistic judgement and put forward a clear cut policy on art. They had not read Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Gorky on art and they did not understand the Russian Communist Party was a “party of a new type”.83 He says

78 www.russianartdealer.com/journal/a-new-museum-for-moscow-devoted-to-russian-realism. Accessed 15 June 2014. 79 See Bhabha, 1990: 1. 80 Berger, 1969: 63. He writes that, after 1930, a sterile academicism descended on art practice and blocked development of the public it was intended for. 81 Chatterjee, 1986: 20. This is a general comment and he does not discuss art or arts infrastructure. 82 Lindey, 1990: 24-5. 83 Chen, (1944) 1945: 56. 62 these discussions on Socialist Realism were unique in Russia and had repercussions throughout the world.84

Jack Chen’s words are little known. Even Alfred Barr’s knowledge of Russian Socialist Realist art is a rarity among historians of Western culture. David King, one of the leading collectors of Russian cultural memorabilia of the early twentieth-century, notes that in Russia itself, through these years, books were lost, and officials denied access to archives and images, contributing to the difficulty of a knowledgeable critique of the area.85 King’s 1997 text The Commissar Vanishes; The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia is a roll-call of fabricated visual records of the times, contributing to the difficulties surrounding a clear analysis of the work produced. Later, as Boris Groys remarks, images of Stalin were in turn altered or repainted, as well as, inside Russia, the story of the past being rewritten to suit the current regime.86

That is the situation in the West. Asia is more complex. The anti-Communist states of Asia (most at one time colonies of Western European powers) have never shown Socialist Realism in their museums for both political and also cultural reasons – conservative regimes rejecting this non-Asian (and politically alarming) intrusion. Despite focusing on ‘Chinese art’, the Hong Kong Museum of Art to this day refuses to show art of the Maoist period, and it is only recently that the Singaporean authorities have accepted left-wing art of its own past being shown in public institutions. Academic research has usually followed Western leads, either viewing Socialist Realism negatively, ignoring it as an Asian , or, if addressing left-wing art at all, seeing it in purely local terms.

An exception is the work of historian Alice G. Guillermo. Her various books on the subject started in 1987 with Social Realism in the Philippines, which has a (very rare) account of ‘social realism’ in Europe and in her country, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.87 She does quote Mao’s Yan’an talks, and refers to the Russians, especially the avant-garde artists, but her focus, besides being on her countrymen, is on the USA and Mexico.88 She wrote this just after Marcos’ flight, in the maelstrom of the artists’ activities against his regime, and for a local audience familiar with the USA particularly, and to a degree the Mexicans, so the absence of analysis enabled by hindsight, or a wider view, is understandable. However what is very

84 Parts of his collection are in the British Museum however, and his role has been reassessed by Mary Ginsberg (2013: 28, 72, 74, 77, 156). He was well connected, the son of Eugene Chen, aide to Chiang Kaishek, and step-son of well-known Singaporean artist . 85 King, 1997: 12. 86 Groys, 1992: 6. 87 Guillermo, 1987. 88 Guillermo, 1987: 20, discusses Mao’s Yan’an talks, and she mentions Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (12). She begins Chapter 3, with the political art of “many countries, such as the United States, Mexico, and now here in the Philippines…” (21). She does quote Mao’s phrase about a type of ‘revolutionary romanticism’ as a focus for art (22). 63 obvious in this extremely pertinent text for this thesis is the absence of acknowledgement of the impact of direct Russian or Chinese iconography or style on the art under her focus. She also is susceptible to the view of the time about official Russian Socialist Realism, writing:

Official policy [in Russia] in culture rigidified from the mid-1930s to 1956 under the pervasive influence of Zhdanovism. It was under Zhdanov that Socialist Realism was canonized as official style. Zhdanovism which flourished during Stalin’s rule insisted on model-types in the arts and in idealized heroes for political edification. Scholars have exposed Zhdanovism as a perversion of the socialist theory of art.89

One of the arguments of this thesis is that the extreme of Socialist Realism coming from the Russians and arrived at during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was not a perversion but a celebration of this thinking, and, if one looks at many of Guillermo’s examples of Filipino paintings under her umbrella (or perhaps banner) of the 1970-80s, they too use ‘model-types’ and idealized heroes in the cause of political edification, because, visually, they are so effective (as will be discussed further in Chapter 4).

Much writing about recent Asian cultural history focuses on the motives and realities of Western colonisation and the post-colonial, though contemporary critics like Hou Hanru advocate for an adjustment to a new ‘internationalism’ rather than focus on the destructive ‘other’ of such studies, often called – by Chinese writers – the unproductive ‘politics of resentment’.90 However, this ‘internationalism’ has rarely included the Communists, as A. Doak Barnett, writing in 1963 about Communist strategies in Asia (A Comparative Analysis of Governments and Parties) has pointed out. He argues that a book about comparative Communism has lagged because Asianists have lacked knowledge of Marxism-Leninism’s own doctrine and practice outside Asia (and vice versa),91 that is, not only was it not threatening, it was also not seen as relevant.92 This means there is little local analysis of this style of art, though this is changing in recent decades.

3. Asian exclusion

To this point this thesis has been focused on the West, endeavouring to examine the critique of Socialist Realism at its source before venturing further afield. For most, this further

89 Guillermo, 1987: 42. 90 Hou, 1994: 249. Chen Kuan-hsing, 1998: 19; 2010: 2. Chen, 2010:1- 2, describes the impasse of post-colonial cultural studies, with the “obsessive critique of the West, which bounds the field by the object of it own criticism”and how the “politics of resentment, which are too often expressed in the limited form of identity politics”. 91 Barnett, (1963) 1976: 4. 92 Donald S. Zagoria in ‘Some Comparisons Between the Russian and Chinese Models’ in Barnett, (1963) 1976: 17, notes Mao’s words in 1946 that he had adapted Marxism to China and that both Marx and Engels were ‘European’, that is, different. 64 venturing does not take place. The idea that the Cold War took place only in the Western hemisphere remains present for most commentators writing in that Western hemisphere. Lindey notes how post-war Soviet art was not known outside the USSR, with few able to name a style or artist.93 She means few in the West are able to name a style or artist, unmindful, for example, of the Chinese artists to this day who are clearly familiar with the work of Konstantin M. Maksimov (1913-93). Indeed, the purpose of this thesis is to outline how Soviet art was known outside the USSR.

Texts about Socialist Realism gradually increasing in number during the later decades of the twentieth-century have been listed in the Introduction. Igor Golomshtock in his Totalitarian Art and Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenka’s edited Socialist Realism Without Shores of 1997 are the only two to include a non-European culture in their study of such art. The Lahusen and Dobrenka text is primarily about literature, but does include Antoine Baudin’s essay ‘“Why is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?”; Zhdanov Art and its International Relations and Fallout, 1947-53’ which traces links including to China.94 Another rarity is Steven Heller’s text, a decade later, including the Chinese along with the Fascists, Nazis and Soviet Communists. Golomshtock sees Chinese art through Russian eyes, noting the correspondences before any differences, saying “until the present day the culture of Communist China has followed this [Russian] path unswervingly”.95 The Chinese work was “second-hand” and their focus was in part because they were “inexperienced in dialectical subtleties”.96 He notes Mao copied Stalin’s verbal at Yan’an (the question and answer), the paraphrases of the Zhdanov-Stalin definition of Socialist Realism, the copy of the organisational machine, the lack of any alternative in China’s past to turn to, and so on.97 He does allow that Mao took the further step of ‘unifying form and content’,98 but he gives no credit to other possibilities that the Chinese might have followed, to how they melded this style to their needs and what they then achieved. Does he see the Chinese experience as a provincial extension of Russia rather than taking it to a new cultural context?

4. Russia

93 Lindey, 1990: 33. 94 Even in Baudin’s text, however, it is the European that is dominant. He cites European texts, not, in this case, Chinese, and his references to Chinese culture are both minimal and idiosyncratic: only two pages (242-3) of a thirty page text are about China, a country creating works that are appraised in first Russian and then Western terms. 95 Golomshtock, 1990: 122. 96 Golomshtock, 1990: 122. 97 Golomshtock, 1990: 123. 98 Golomshtock, 1990: 123. 65

Into this East-West mix is Russia itself. There is the question of what the ‘east’ meant in Russia through this period, how it was viewed politically, and what happened.99 Lenin memorably wrote about a generic Asia as ‘benighted and backward’, and equated Russia with this,100 his words an extension of Enlightenment pejorative thinking of the East. He did write about China specifically in 1912 and 1913, after reading Sun Yat-sen’s words, but it was a China seen in Western terms.101 Robert Service in his biography of Lenin contrasts his subject’s own persona, projected as “the fastidious European Russian gentleman,” with the peasants who worked in “an Asiatic fashion", and most particularly with “the Asiatic” Stalin.102

Russia has long wrestled with its position between ‘east and west’, from allegiance to the Byzantine Christians through to Catherine the Great’s enthusiasm, always tempered by the strength of Tartar and other local cultural beliefs.103 This dichotomy continued in Western European eyes. Jack Chen arrived in Moscow in the late 1920s, and wrote in 1944 that “to the vast majority of the Western peoples [who visited] Russia was ‘an Asiatic country’.”104 To this day, ‘Russia’, including St Petersburg and Moscow, is listed under ‘Asia’ on the British Museum’s website (with the and other Soviet-bloc states to the west placed under ‘Europe’).105 Russian political leaders can use this to their own ends, even today, with Vladimir Putin, for example, in 2012, writes Catherine Merridale in her history of the Kremlin, eschewing “imported western ideas such as individual freedom of expression” saying “‘For Russians a strong state is not an anomaly…but the source and guarantor of order, the initiator

99 An example is John J. Stephan’s The Russian Far East; A History, of 1994 (Stanford, Stanford University Press), 480 pages of closely written scholarship about literally ‘Russia’s Far East’, that is the territory from Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, rather than a broader view of Russian interests in the more global territory of this name, including in its relations in art. This is despite he himself noting the “conventional insularity of Russian and Asian studies” (vii). 100 Lenin wrote a short essay focused on an article he had read by Sun Yat-sen in the Belgian Le Peuple, printed as Democracy and Narodism in China published in 1912. He includes the rhetorical phrase “In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries” (see Collected Works, 1963, vol. 18: 163-4) but he is not more specific about any relationship. He also wrote Regenerated China in 1912, then The Awakening of Asia, and Backward Europe and Advanced Asia, both in 1913. All his comments are about a generic China of peasants and overlords, struggling for supremacy, describing its reality as “a backward, agricultural, semi-feudal country” (Democracy and Narodism in China, 166). 101 In Democracy and Narodism in China, Lenin’s debate is about bourgeois and proletarian power struggles in China and flaws in Sun’s attitude as at times reactionary according to the principles of Marxism (see Collected Works, 1963, vol. 18: 168). In other words, he is extending his European Russian position to that of a far distant and very different land. It is of note that Sun, in return, thought that because Russia “upholds justice to the utmost… [it will] therefore come to befriend the East, and break up with the West” (quoted In Wang Hui, (2003) 2011: 93-4). 102 Service, (2000), 2010: 453, 470. Service notes that in the specific example of Stalin being called ‘Asiatic’ Lenin was referring to his pipe smoking. 103 Camilla Gray in her The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, of 1962: 10 ff, succinctly describes the Wanderers challenging the Europeanisation of Russian cultured society and the idea that anything Russian was barbarous, promoting the traditions of the common man. Elizabeth Valkenier, in 1977: xi, furthers this, saying the art of the Wanderers and its political use in the early 1930s, “is the crux of what is unique about the Russian art scene…What realism signified, and how it related to society when it first was an antagonist and eventually an ally of the regime, is very much a Russian story, an experience that was not repeated elsewhere in Europe.” 104 Chen, (1944) 1945: 11. 105 Schimmelpenninck van der Oye’s 2010 text Russian Orientalism; Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration analyses what he calls a cliché in the Western mind that Russia is essentially Asian, despite the Russians themselves, for the last ten centuries, not seeing themselves as Oriental (2-3). ASEM, the cultural organisation of the European Union, in 2015, includes Russia under ‘Asia’. 66 and main driving force of any change’”.106 The overtness of Putin’s rejection of the ‘civilized West’ has reopened ambivalence in this West about his country.107

Attitudes in Russia to Asia itself are more complex. Lenin watched events in Asia closely, as he understood the size of the constituency. Trotsky followed activity in China from the 1920s to his death.108 Stalin said “he who wants the victory of socialism must not forget the East”109 and he, acknowledging Lenin’s comment, also said “I am Asian too”.110 Soon after the October Revolution, both Lenin and Stalin called on people of the East to overthrow the imperialist robbers, and by this they meant the Asian East, still under imperial rule. It was necessary “to convert the dependent and colonial countries from a reserve of the imperialist bourgeoisie into a reserve of the revolutionary proletariat”.111 And indeed the activities of the Soviet’s international arm, the Comintern, spread throughout Asia during the following years.112

However, the situation around ‘culture’ is less clear. The lack of interest in Russia about Chinese, Vietnamese and North Korean culture from early in the century through the years of close engagement in the 1940s and 1950s, and since, is, in hindsight, remarkable. The Oriental Museum in Moscow, the only large museum of ‘Asian’ art in Russia, focuses almost entirely on traditional works of art, without reference to the visual engagement between Russia and these political allies through the century.113 The Oriental Museum could be a case study for a museum reflecting attitudes: Asia is separate and exotic still. The Museum, despite its grand title and site in central Moscow, and its wide-ranging collection, attracts only a small, and mainly local, audience, primarily of school students on compulsory visits.114 Neither Lenin nor Stalin went to China (though Mao did visit Moscow, in 1949 and 1957, the only international trips he made), so there was no personal knowledge of the East as we describe it. No museum

106 Merridale, 2013: 386. 107 Examples are too numerous to list, but among them is The Age, 18 October, 2014, ‘Vladimir Putin ups the ante with reminders Russia is a nuclear power’ by Peter Hartcher, quoting ANU academic John Besemeres: “Putin’s Russia is heading towards a police state internally and a rogue state externally”, see http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/vladimir-putin-ups- the-ante-with-reminders-russia-is-a-nuclear-power-20141017-117pzr.html (accessed 18 October, 2014). 108 See Daniels, 1984, vol.2, 80. His writing on China, from 1925-36, was published in English in 1976, with an introduction by Peng Shu-tse, one of the founders of the CCP. This publication runs to some 500 pages: see on China, New York: Monad Press. In turn Trotsky’s writing was very influential in China, see Peng Shu-tse: 13, 31. 109 Quoted in Mishra, 2012: 195. 110 Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, 2010: 1. 111 Quoted in H. Seton-Watson 1960, The Pattern of the Communist Revolution. London: Methuen: 127. The USSR was quick to recognise the new Chinese government in 1949 signing a new treaty between the two in 1950 in Moscow. 112 The literature on this is large. Robert V. Daniels’ 1984 A Documentary History of Communism, vol.2 Communism and The World has around one quarter of its 450 pages on ‘the East’, especially China, but also Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and Indochina. A. Doak Barnett, (1963) 1976, includes texts by scholars comparing the Russian model with a similar range of countries. 113 One of the few publications in English from this museum covers their Korean collection (Ellisseeva, 2011). It notes that the period of engagement began from 1884 when a treaty was signed to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, that collecting for the Museum began just after 1918 and that the collection, in 2011 of over 600 items, increased “in the 1950s as the Soviet Union and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) pursued close cultural ties” (9). However all works were apolitical, including ceramic and porcelain, “medieval bronze mirrors, national clothing and furniture specimens” and later “personal ornaments” (9). 114 Albina Legostaeva, interview, 26 June 2015, noted that the museum received 100,000 visitors (mostly students) annually. Its local focus is evident in signs being in Russian only, with no foreign language collection publication. Reflecting Russian history over the last 100 years, three of its main departments are the Middle East/Central Asia and the Soviet East, as well as the Far East and Southeast Asia. Also pertinent to its position within Russian history is that much of its collection came from private collections given to the State after the Revolution. 67 collection in Russia includes extensive Asian material of the twentieth century.115 Russian artists, despite some going to China and Vietnam to tour and teach, were not, it seems, interested in Asian visual art and there seems no impact on their art.116 A pre-Revolution interest in Asian ‘folk art’ was held by ,117 who left for Paris in 1921 (fig. 1.7), and later a watercolour by Deineka, made in 1930 for use as a poster, China on the Path to Liberation from Imperialism. This image, which shows a Chinese partisan punching a Japanese military man while warships flying the Japanese, American and British flags sail behind them, is indicative of knowledge of the conflict further east, 118 and there were posters made of friendship between Russia and the Asian countries.119 However no major work acknowledged Asian visual aesthetics or any Asian artist.120 Was this again because of that post-Enlightenment view lurking still of the backward East, beneath interest?

Of particular note for this thesis, ‘Socialist Realism’ as a subject of text or exhibition for the Western and Russian art historian almost never includes any imagery made east of the Urals. As already noted, Igor Golomshtock is a rarity in including Chinese art, albeit in an Appendix called ‘the Chinese Variant’, in his 1990 book on Totalitarian Art. His earlier book, of 1977, Soviet Art in Exile is notable for not including any non-European places of ‘exile’. His focus is

115 The Hermitage Museum does include earlier items. Catherine II, in the thrall of French-inspired Chinoiserie, collected Chinese decorative pieces (included in the Masterpieces from the Hermitage; The Legacy of Catherine the Great exhibition in Melbourne in 2015) now in the Hermitage Museum collection. A Department of Eastern Culture was established in 1920, first with Islamic items, then pieces were bought in Paris and London and transferred from the palaces, says The Catalogue of Japanese Art in The State Hermitage Museum, 1993: xi, assuming ‘its form’ in the 1930s. The Oriental Museum in Moscow holds only a few (albeit interesting) Dong Ho woodcut prints from Vietnam, see Legostaeva, 2012, discussed in Chapter 3. Curator Albina Legostaeva, in conversation with this author at her museum on 26 June 2015, confirmed that few items had been collected of a political nature and no politically-driven works, particularly of a socialist nature, were on display on that day. Her museum had sent Russian posters to Vietnam in the 1980s and received silk and lacquer paintings in return. The Catalogue of Japanese Art in The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, published in Japan in 1993, notes the difficulty the Russian sailor who collected the works had in trying to sell them to the Museum in the late nineteenth-century. He wrote that there was not much interest despite the great interest “in Europe” (xii). Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (2010: 173 ff) outlines the development of the Faculty of Oriental Languages at St Petersburg University from 1855, mostly focused on the Middle East, with some attention turned to China at the end of the century, helped by the alliance with the Qing in 1896. This interest, he writes, had diminished appeal after the loss to the Japanese in battle. 116 See Chapter 3 for the career of Konstantin M. Maksimov in China, the most important teacher there in these years. Another figure of the Russian avant-garde who actually went to China in the early years of the Revolution, (from 1917-9), was Alexandre Y. Iacovleff (1887-1938), as he was later known in Paris where he went to live soon after his return to Europe. From Paris he went again to Asia, in 1931-2 including to China and while there made a fine, academically rendered study of A Lama, of 1932 (57 x 76 cm.), acquired for the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1938 (see Carroll, 1985, fig. 63). In his youth in Moscow, like Goncharova and Larionov, he had been interested in folk art, made images of some visual and psychic power, and showed his interest in ‘other’ cultures by his early and extended stay in the East. 117 Goncharova wrote in the Preface to her solo exhibition catalogue in 1913 that she had learnt from the French, who “stimulated my awareness and I realized the great significance and value of the art of my country – and through it the great value of the art of the East… Now I shake the dust from my feet and leave the West… [Soon the] West will be learning openly from us… [and art from] Aztecs, Negroes, Australian and Asiatic islands – the Sunda (Borneo), Japan, etc. These, generally speaking, represent the rise and flowering of art… For me the East means the creation of new forms, an extending and deepening of the problems of colour” (translated in Bowlt, 1976: 55-60). Goncharova was very interested in lubki prints but she also but she also collected fifty Vietnamese folk woodcuts very early now in the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow (see Legostaeva, 2012: 274). The yearning for the point of difference for is a continuous theme. 118 See Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 138. 119 See, for example, Lafont, 2007, 160, 174: Viktor Koretsky’s Happy Women’s Day/Our Friendship is Strong and Durable, 1954, published by Izogiz, Moscow, showing a Chinese and Russian woman embracing with Party above them, and Valentin P. Viktorov’s (1909-81) Friendship Forever, 1956, with Russian and Chinese text, Party symbolism and two figures standing together with arms raised in the Murkina fashion. 120 It should be noted however, that Xu Lanjun in an essay on the activities of the Chinese Foreign Languages Press, established in 1949, writes that Lu Xun, Ding Ling and Zhao Shuli were the ‘three best-known’ Chinese writers in Russia with a combined print run of their works of 500,000 copies (see Xu Lanjun, 2014: 81). 68 limited to , Czechoslovakia, , Great Britain, Italy, , Scandinavia, Soviet Union, Switzerland, the USA, Western Germany and Yugoslavia.

John Berger talks of Russian exceptionalism – the sense of prophecy and destiny, rising above individual interests.121 The politics of the Cold War in the West can shroud the legacy of many Russian great minds– from Tolstoy to Rachmaninov, from Malevich to Lenin, from Rodchenko to Turgenev, from Kandinsky to Tchaikovsky, from Trotsky to Gogol, from Dostoyevsky to (1890-1941). It is a roll-call equal to any national grouping and certainly equal to the forces pitted against its legacy – either in Western Europe or the USA – or continuing it, as in Asia. It can be argued that it needed this level of achievement to succeed in this task, though the task still is to persuade others of its outcome.

121 Berger, 1969: 20-1. 69

Chapter 2. Policy and practice: The significance of the new policies and practices created in the Soviet Union in the direction for art in Asia.

Socialist Realism is the nexus of art and politics to a degree rarely seen before or since, with the activities of artists and their relation with society decreed by their political masters. As Matthew Cullerne Bown writes, for the Bolshevik art world, artists’ lives gained a political dimension.1 Central to this were the art policies created and decreed by the Soviets which had great impact in Russia, and in turn in various parts of the Asia Pacific region.

This chapter begins with the political leaders’ views on art, culture and society, followed by arts leaders and their emulation of the politicians’ words. An assessment of the practical outcomes of these views follows: how art was made an instrument of the state through a number of applied directives that led to new and (remarkably) influential practices that still remain in the East. The core part of this chapter addresses the impact, speed and ubiquity of implementation of Communist policy in the arts in Russia, China and Vietnam as well as how other parts of the region responded. The last section analyses the ways in which information about Socialist Realism was spread.

1. Political leaders on art

In comparison with Western liberal democratic statements about art across much of the world, the alterity and unity of the Communist position is stark. The speed of the adoption of a new infrastructure is extraordinary but so also is its focus: it was patently, overtly organised, and from above. As Robert Service in his 2000 biography of Lenin says “High artistic and intellectual culture was rigorously patrolled”.2 Nothing in principle was left to chance, or to evolve by itself: talking about the lives of artists, Lenin noted “we should steer this process according to a worked out plan”.3 Trotsky put it a different way, in 1933, the tolerance of his first clause overwhelmed by the second: “The Party is obliged to permit a very extensive liberty in the field of art, eliminating pitilessly only that which is directed against the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat.”4 There is also a third extraordinary aspect here: the concentration on culture itself. While art gained this political dimension, the focus of the leaders on the arts themselves came from a knowledge and respect for culture, particularly literature, unusual in other political regimes.

1 Bown, 1991: 21. 2 Service, (2000) 2010: 480. 3 This phrase was said to Clara Zetkin, and is included in the anthology Lenin, On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 274. 4 Trotsky, 1973: 320. 70

The Russians devised these rules from the late 1910s, but they were only put into official practice in China from 1949, and even later in Vietnam. The latter had forty years to formulate and refine their ideas about how art might be focused in the service of the state - albeit these being years of war. Mao came to power just before Stalin died, and then the rupture with Russia occurred in 1960, at the end of only the first decade of official Socialist Realism in China. But the impact of Lenin’s words underlay the rhetoric of the 1942 Yan’an Conference, and re- emerged in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution: the ideological influence continued, despite the public repudiation of the Russia of that day. Despite the significant passage of time, the influence was extensive, literal, and on-going. Throughout the rest of Asia, and Australia, while direct reference to Soviet Socialist Realism and its theoretical base was either muted or absent, the reality of its thinking and visual presence was very clear.

An acknolwedgement of this political impact is seen in the resistance to Communism in the policies towards the arts devised in the non-Communist areas of Southeast Asia, especially in Malaya/Singapore with its strong ethnic connection to China. The international meeting of Communists in Calcutta in 1948 encouraged insurgencies in a number of Southeast Asian countries. The Malayan Communist Party was outlawed in this same year, leading to twelve years of the ‘Malayan Emergency’ between the Party and Commonwealth troops. As part of this, the British barred the return of young ethnic Chinese going to China to study, in an effort to stem the influence of these potential revolutionaries.5 Did the role of art as a potential political tool in support of Communism in Malaya/Singapore result in the little government support for arts infrastructure (until the last twenty years) particularly in art education in both Malaya/Malaysia (notably for its ethnic Chinese citizens)6 as well as in Singapore? Lee Kuan Yew, a well-educated and urbane man proud of the Confucian respect for learning and culture he inherited, is notable for never speaking or writing about art, unlike Mao and Ho. When Lee said memorably that ‘poetry is a luxury we cannot afford’,7 was he defusing a political threat into an economic issue? The main art school, Nanyang, was private for the first fifty years of its life; it focused on traditional Chinese literati brush painting and was markedly conservative in international agendas until very recently. A similar history is notable for the main art museum.8

5 The PRC supported young Chinese in Singapore to go to China to study, see Lee Kuan Yew, 2000: 574. 6 The official art school at Shah Alam outside Kuala Lumpur was well known for many decades declining to enrol ethnic Chinese students, who as a result set up their own private art school, or studied abroad. 7 The title of a speech delivered in 1968 at the University of Singapore. 8 The display of the national collection of art languished until 1996 when the refurbishment of a secondary school led to the stand- alone Singapore Art Museum. Gradually in recent years, exhibition of this important though sensitive period of local art has increased through this key institutional venue. However, the first important text for this period was produced not in Singapore but in Japan: Nanyang 1950-65; Passage to Singaporean Art, 2002, an exhibition and publication under the curatorship of (Singaporean) Koh Nguang How. In 2004 Koh then presented his research of the years 1950 to 1959 in Singapore not in the art museum, but in a Contemporary Art Space and then the National Library: Errata: Page 71, a project exhibited at p-10 in Singapore in 2004 and then at the National Library of Singapore in 2005, fortunately seen by this author. Individual works had been shown however before this, for example in Visions & Enchantment: Southeast Asian Paintings at the Singapore Art Museum, in 2000. 71

Indonesia experienced a different response to Communism and Socialist Realism – including them in the fabric of politics and culture until the anti-Communist actions in the mid-1960s. However this was a rarity for non-Communist Southeast and . The British had curbed the Communist Party of India, founded in 1921, and after Independence relations with Russia were delicate, improving only with the Bandung Conference and Khrushchev’s visit to Delhi in 1955. There had never been strong communication between Indian and Chinese Communists, with the 1962 Sino-Indian War severing what relations there were. It is unsurprising therefore that there was little impact of the Soviets, or Chinese, on the policies of art practice in India.

***

To demonstrate the reliance of Asian political leaders on Lenin, it is salient to compare statements from these men about their ideology of art, as well as key edicts. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh are central, but there is a role for and others as well.

In Russia, Lenin, writing in 1905 in Party Organisation and Party Literature, and naming literature as the cultural form with which he was most familiar (a practice that Mao and others also used) declared “literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat… a component of organised, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work”.9 He never deviates from this aim, nor from his declamatory, insistent style of expressing it. In 1913, he wrote “The slogan of national culture is a bourgeois… fraud. Our slogan is: the international culture of democracy and of the world working-class movement.”10 Clara Zetkin, who documented her talks with Lenin on art published in 1925, reported him saying:

Art belongs to the people. Its roots should be deeply implanted in the very thick of the labouring masses. It should be understood and loved by these masses. It must unite and elevate their feelings, thoughts and will. It must stir to activity and develop the art instincts within them.11

The issue of art’s relation to class was clear. In 1917, in the October Revolution Proclamation, he uses the description of ‘workers, soldiers and peasants’ that was carried throughout the Communist world. In 1918-9 Lenin wrote of the importance of non-professional artists,

Since then exhibitions have increased and include Yu Jin Seng’s From Words to Pictures: Art During the Emergency, at the Singapore Art Museum in 2007. 9 In On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 25-6. 10 In ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, in On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 92. 11 Clara Zetkin ‘My Recollections of Lenin’, variously quoted in English translation, but see in On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 275; Klingender, (1943) 1975: 49 and Sjeklocha and Mead, 1967: 28. 72 focusing in this case on their experience, but it is an ethos carried into art practice as well: “it would be very good if many more of those who have been working among the people and with the people, in the very thick of life, sat down to describe their experiences.”12 In On Proletarian Culture, Draft Resolution, he links education and art, and ‘class struggle’: “All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of class struggle being waged by the proletariat”.13

Stalin carried on Lenin’s words in literal action. His view of Soviet culture as ‘an art that is national in form, socialist in content’ was confirmed at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Following Lenin’s words almost exactly he stated “art belongs to the people, it should extend with its deepest roots to the very heart of the great working masses. It should be understood and loved by these masses. It should bring together the feeling, the thought and the will of these masses and elevate them. It should stir the artists among them and develop them”.14 He continued with this all his life, saying in 1939, at the Eighteenth Party Congress: “a follower of Lenin cannot be just a specialist in his favourite science or art; he must also be a social and political worker”. Under Stalin the ideology of ideinost, narodnost, partiinost and also klassovost (class content), became State dogma.

A more prescriptive influence upon the arts was Andrei Zhdanov, the ally of Stalin and Central Committee Secretary, who had spoken about revolutionary romanticism. At the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, he said society “demands from the artist a true and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development… combined with the task of educating workers in the spirit of Communism”.15 But he is remembered in the arts for the series of decrees made under his name from 1946 to 1948,16that included the directive that the Academy of the Arts must “wage a relentless struggle against all the various forms of toadying to bourgeois art”.17 In other words, control must come from the Academy and from authority; the term ‘Zhdanovism’ received its name from his hard-line position.

Lenin and Mao were well-read men, although coming from very different literary traditions. It is clear that both enjoyed words, and this enjoyment no doubt added to the potency of their writing and oratory, something that was not so apparent in other political leaders like Ho Chi

12 In ‘A Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems’ in On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 127. 13 In ‘On Proletarian Culture’, 1920, On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 167. 14 Bown, 1991: 25. 15 Bown, 1991: 90. 16 Baudin, 1997: 227, analyses Zhdanov’s effect internationally, including in China. 17 Bown, 1991: 206. 73

Minh.18 Another who loved words, coming from a long heritage of literature in Russia again, was Leon Trotsky. In 1924, he joined in the heroic style of prose that Lenin had employed, clear in this tract: “we reject the idealistic, high-flown, semi-religious interpretation of culture that also arises from class supremacy and serves to hide the fact that culture is monopolized by the possessing classes and exists, in the first instance, for their pleasure.”19

Nikita Khrushchev continued the content if not the style of his political predecessors with words like these, in 1963: “the party supports only such works as inspire the people and unite their forces. Society has the right to condemn works which are contrary to the interests of the people”.20 By this time Khrushchev’s role had been discredited in China, though this type of statement would have been acceptable. In contrast, in 1974, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, further softened Stalin’s rhetoric towards détente, saying art should be “socialist in content, but international in form, spirit and character”.21

The general intent and specific words of these Russian leaders (except the last) were closely repeated by politicians in China. Mao Zedong’s words at the forum on literature and art at the mountain retreat in Yan’an in May 1942 are central. He repeats the Russians almost word for word, and covers class struggle, the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, education and the arts, and art and politics:

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is no art for art’s sake, no art that stands above classes, or art that is detached from or independent of politics. and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine…22

Whether advanced or elementary, our literature and art are for the masses of the people, primarily for the workers, peasants and soldiers, and so it is for the use of workers, peasants and soldiers that we create…23

If our writers and artists who come from the intelligentsia want their works to be well received by the masses, they must change and remould their thinking and their feelings...24

18 Lacouture, 1968, 196, describes how Ho Chi Minh acknowledged Mao’s mastery of words, and that he could not match him in a task like writing the Little Red Book. 19 Trotsky, 1973: 144. 20 Speech to artists, Kremlin, March 1963, in Lindey, 1990: 172. 21 In Following the Leninist Course, Moscow, 1974: 59-60, in Tupitsyn, 1989: 36. 22 Schramm, 1967: 172. 23 Lü, 2010: 390. 74

Our purpose is to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and in attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind…25

The revolutionary struggle on the ideological and artistic fronts must be subordinate to the political struggle because only through politics can class needs and the needs of the masses find expression in concentrated form…26

He also said artists put “political criterion first and the artistic criterion second” but “works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically”.27

Senior officials in China followed. Zhou Yang, Vice Minister of Cultural Affairs, was fluent in Russian and had translated Russian tracts into Chinese. His acknowledgement of the importance of the Russian example is overt. He published ‘On Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism’ in Xiandai magazine in 1933.28 Writing in 1952 and quoting Mao’s conclusion on the road ahead for Chinese political life being “Follow the path of the Russians”, Zhou wanted this applied also to literature and art alongside the need for a reassessment not replacement of China’s own cultural heritage. He did advocate following the Russian “social order” as a means of achieving human happiness, using its “model characters endowed with the noblest human qualities and of the finest moral calibre” and combining “the reality of today with the ideals of tomorrow”.29 In 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he retained his fervour, making the Directive: “Art and literature should serve proletarian politics, the workers, peasants and soldiers, and the socialist economic base…The fundamental path for writers and artists to revolutionize themselves and become labourers is to go deep among the workers, peasants and soldiers and unite with the masses.”30

Ho Chi Minh learnt much from both Russia directly and through Mao’s example, saying he had “skilfully sinicized the doctrine of Marx-Engels-Stalin, applied it in the most judicious fashion to China’s situation and led the Chinese revolution to total victory”.31 Ho wrote a letter to artists in 1951: “Culture and art is also a front. You are soldiers on that front. Like other soldiers, the

24 Lü, 2010: 387. 25 Schramm, 1967: 173. 26 Lü, 2010: 390. 27 Schramm, 1967: 173. 28 Ng, 1988: 274. 29 Zhou, 1954: 89, 87. These quotations are from ‘Socialist Realism – The road of Advance for Chinese Literature’. One of his publications was the translation into Chinese of N.G. Chernyshevsky’s The Aesthetic Relationships Between Art and Reality. 30 Laing, 1988: 57. 31 See Lacouture, 1968: 196. 75 soldiers of art have a definite mission; that is, to serve the Resistance, to serve the nation, to serve the people, above all, the workers, farmers and soldiers.”32 In 1958, at the Conference of Art and Literature, he followed Stalin’s words that art had to be “Socialist for its content, national for its form”.33

Truong Chinh, General Secretary of the Communist Party and in a similar position to Zhou Yang and notably ‘pro-Peking’, outlined Socialist Realism at the National Cultural Conference of 1948, pertinent for being only a few years after Mao’s Talks and before the victory of the Communists in China. In his paper Marxism and Vietnamese Culture he said: “Socialist Realism is a method of artistic creation which portrays the truth in a society evolving towards Socialism according to objective laws.” However, Truong Chinh also reveals his different experience of international culture - through French colonialism - adding comments about Western modernism unlikely to be so easily quoted in China: “One would not be surprised to see sprouted from the rotten wood of imperialist culture gaudy mushrooms of Cubism, Impressionism, , Dadaism et al.” This tract became a golden rule in Vietnam for forty years, and was repeatedly cited.34 In practice though, like the Russians and also Mao Zedong, Truong Chinh gave little formal guidance for the visual arts.35

The Russian terminology for qualities desired in the population were translated and used in Vietnam from the 1960s: became tinh nhan dan; ideinost became tinh tu tuong; klassovost became tinh giai cap and partiinost became tinh dang. The relationship between Vietnam and China was complex and by 1960 had become embittered, so in art politics as well other areas Vietnam was as likely to be working directly with Moscow as with Beijing.36 It is of note in this period that the director of the Fine Arts College of Vietnam, Le Duan (1907-86), was overtly pro-Soviet.

Outside the Communist zone, leaders in the Asia Pacific region were variously engaged with Communist ideas, and this had impact on arts practice as well. Lee Kuan Yew was notably wary, explaining to Jawaharlal Nehru about “the demographics of Singapore and Malaya, and the hold the communists had on the Chinese population because of their enormous success in transforming China from a corrupt decadent society into a disciplined, clean, and dynamic if regimented one. But communism was totally unsuited to Southeast Asia.”37 In contrast, until his overthrow in 1965, President Sukarno’s interest in Soviet culture was overt, although it

32 See Scott, 2012: 244. 33 Huynh, 2005, 159. 34 Huynh, 2005: 139; Scott, 2012: 199 ff. In the Introduction it was noted that ‘Marxism’ as such was rarely used in a cultural context in Asia. This is an example of an exception. However it should be noted that, typically for such words, there is no clear explanation of the outcome of this concept in art, rather a general exhortation of intent. 35 Scott, 2012: 201.

37 Lee Kuan Yew, 2000: 404. 76 manifested in personal practical support rather than ideological tracts or indeed institutional outcomes. It is pertinent to this chapter that the most important collection of Indonesian art of this period was collected by Sukarno. Edhi Sunarso (1932-2016), lead sculptor for many of the Soviet-inspired works, has described the President‘s support:

Bung Karno was like a brightly burning flame when he talked about patriotism and the Indonesian struggle for independence. His fervour was infectious, allowing me to keep consistent, working on my devotional craft… [While] working on these statues Bung Karno seemed to always make time to visit us.38

Sunarso describes how the President sold a personal car to pay for one of these .39 Sukarno was not alone in this interest. By the late 1950s Adam Malik who became Indonesia’s third Vice President and ambassador to the Soviet Union had already collected over 500 paintings for his personal collection. Malik bought Sudjojono’s paintings at a time when the artist needed support. They had met in the 1930s when Sudjojono was working for PERSAGI, the artists’ organisation, and Malik recognised both his political and artistic .40 To provide a context for this relationship of politicians, leaders and the arts in either the literal or associated Communist environment, did many leaders in the Western, capitalist world support art, know artists and collect in a similar way? It was a rare one that did: among them was Gough Whitlam who went to China in 1971 as part of a Labor Party delegation, a month before President Nixon’s visit. Whitlam’s return in 1973 (fig. 2.1) was the first visit by an Australian Prime Minister, and again, as will be discussed, there were repercussions for the visual arts.

2. Arts leaders on politics

Arts leaders followed their political masters in articulating the relationship of art and politics and how it manifested in action. Anatoly Lunacharsky, who had his work translated into Chinese by Lu Xun, commented that “The Revolution not only was able to influence art, but also needed art”.41 Maxim Gorky who had been brought back to Russia by Lenin to support the new regime wrote On Socialist Realism in 1933, arguing it was “a new direction essential to us – socialist realism, which – it stands to reason – can be created only from the data of socialist experience”.42 His writing was widely available throughout Asia in translation, Lü Peng writing about Gorky’s influence on the youth of China in the 1940s and 1950s.43

38 Katalog Pameran Tunggal Edhi Sunarso, 2010: 78. 39 Katalog Pameran Tunggal Edhi Sunarso, 2010: 79. 40 See Syed Muhd Hafiz, 2014, ‘The Road in Front of my House’ in Sudjojono; Lives of Pictures. Nanyang Technical University, Singapore: 23. 41 See Bowlt, 1976: 194. 42 Bown, 1991: 89. 43 Lü, 2010: 499. 77

As well as Lunacharsky and Gorky, other Russian theorists were translated into Chinese and available. Chernyshevski’s essay Life and Aesthetics was influential to Lenin and in turn in China.44 It supports the Itinerants and their robust manner of painting. Even more important was the theory of Georgy V. Plekhanov, a Marxist aesthetician particularly responsive to the working class. He wrote ‘The Proletarian Movement and Bourgeois Art’ in 1905 and promoted the idea of production art (mass production/factory art), against that of the old Academy.45 His ideas were known in China from the 1930s, like Lunacharsky, having his work translated by Lu Xun. It was from these translations that leading artist Li Hua could write “I began to understand the relationships between art and politics, art and property, and art and social class, and to understand some aesthetic questions of historical materialism… This was a turning point in my thinking.”46 In Vietnam, as recently as 1987, historian Nguyen Khac Vien could write that, during the 1945-75 period, culture was “one of the essential weapons of national liberation and social renovation… [and] the epoch of romantic dreams, of hermetic literature and art for art’s sake was gone.”47

In China, this rhetoric escalated during the Cultural Revolution, with a literal return to Mao’s Yan’an talks, published and universally distributed in The Little Red Book.48 Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, chief cultural advisor to the People’s Liberation Army, returned to the peasant, worker and soldier phrases and how they should be at the centre of art’s iconography, stating in 1964 “The grain we eat is grown by the peasants, the clothes we wear and the houses we live in are all made by the workers, and the People’s Liberation Army stands guard at the fronts of national defence for us.”49 She is seen as being behind the mantra that Cultural Revolution artists should include the Three Prominences: “positive characters… heroic characters… and major heroes”,50 and that all should be “lofty, grand, and complete” (gao, da, quan).51

The new cultural possibilities from the USSR spread across arts leaders in Asia as far as Indonesia, where the first Communist Party in Asia was established, in 1920, and where by 1960 the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI)was the third largest in the world, after the USSR and China.52 It was in Indonesia in the 1950s that the PRC was seen as a new model of modernity,

44 Lü, 2010: 497. 45 Bown, 1991: 20 46 Lü, 2010: 342, 1195, note 29. 47 Nguyen Khac Vien, 1987: 355 and 360. 48 The Yan’an conference was held from 2–23 May 1942 and Mao’s talks were first combined and published on 19 October, 1943 in the Yan’an newspaper Liberation Daily. 49 Chen, 1970: 187. 50 Kuiyi Shen, 2008: 158. Andrews and Shen, 1998, 233, note the ‘red, bright and shining’ as a castigation by post-Mao artists. 51 This is variously ascribed to Jiang Qing, for example, see Yan Shanchun ‘Painting Mao’ in Chiu and Zheng (eds), 1998: 98. 52 Lindsay, 2012: 9. The chronicle of the period 1920 to 1960 was published by the PKI in 1960 (PKI 40 Tahun 1920-1960), noting that the Party was the largest in Indonesia, with a membership in 1959 of 1,500,000 (5). The publication is rich in photographs and drawings, including of Lenin on the podium with the text “the salvos of the 1917 October Revolution resounded in Indonesia”, and photographs of PKI delegates in Korea, China, the USSR and (13, 78). 78 and where “the speed of its social and cultural transformation [was] inspiring, fascinating and alarming to Indonesian artists and intellectuals”.53 Sudjojono was a leading artist in Indonesia at this time, and is notable for his political interests. He was a founder of PERSAGI in 1937-8, joined the PKI in 1950 and was elected as a PKI representative Member of the House of Representatives in the Indonesian Parliament in 1955. The artist subsidiary of the PKI, Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat/ League of People’s Culture (LEKRA), was formed in 1950, with Sudjojono one of its leaders. Both Sudjojono and fellow artist Hendra Gunawan (1918-83) were aware of activities in both Russia and China through close relations with those places forged by LEKRA.54 Sudjojono had been sent to in 1951 by LEKRA, Hendra visited Moscow in 1954 (fig.2.2), and both read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s writing, including his translations of Gorky. Pramoedya himself, acknowledged for his Marxist views, had gone to China in 1956 and 1958.

Sudjojono wrote the Indonesian cri-de-coeur for a new way in 1939 (republished in 1946 in Seni Lukis, Kesenian dan Seniman), saying that the Indonesian artist:

… shall create a new, enthusiastic and impetuous visual arts in the service of truth, leaving behind the past they shall live today to better the world of tomorrow. These new painters will not just depict idyllic huts, bluish mountains and romantic corners, in other words, picturesque and saccharine subjects. They will also paint sugar factories and the emaciated farmers, the automobiles of the wealthy and the long trousers worn by the young… Because those are our circumstances, thus is our reality.55

He wrote in 1947 that like the cultural progress being made in Russia, so in Indonesia the Revolution would be an artistic as well as intellectual one.56 Britta L. Miklouho-Maklai has described how these “left wing painters’ groups adopted the view that art was an essential part of the class struggle, and followed the guidelines of socialist realism”.57

At this time in Singapore, as Lee Kuan Yew noted, artists were looking to China. An anti-art-for- art’s-sake rhetoric was adopted in Singapore by a new generation of artists. The catalogue of the Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Art Association exhibition in 1956 has a foreword which reads: “Art belongs to society – it is public, and should serve the public”, and an essay by Lee Tian Meng which declares: “The so-called Cubist art is actually a type which

53 Lindsay, 2012: 13. 54 Jennifer Lindsay in her Introduction to Heirs to world culture; Being Indonesian 1950-1965, notes the various tours of the world by Indonesian delegations particularly of performers, from 1954 until 1965. The first international cultural tour was to China in 1954, by dancers. Lindsay notes that it was significant that China was the first focus, followed by the USSR (204). 55 From Seni Lukis, Kesenian dan Seniman, frequently quoted, but this from Yu Jin Seng ‘Nude’ in S. Sudjojono; Lives in Pictures, 2014: 29. 56 Sidharta, 2007: 56. 57 Miklouho-Maklai, 1991: 12. 79 denies the heritage of tradition, discards humanity and truth in art, and emphasizes hypocrisy and anti-realism. Reason, progress, love for mankind, peace and harmony are forsaken and replaced by decadent art which tries to propagandise bestiality, violent and anti-humanist ideas.”58 The left-wing arts group, the Equator Art Society, included in its exhibition catalogue of 1966: “The value of the genuine school of art lies in the fact that it does not lose its integrity amidst the ugly commercial dealings belonging to the decadent bourgeois. Instead it always works to faithfully reflect or expose the very root of reality of life, to spread the Truth, the Virtue and the Beauty of this world.” 59

3. The Soviet practice of art in Asia: organisation

This section discusses the impact of the arts infrastructure created in the USSR in the East. Like the control of art itself, the purpose is as often felt in principle as in practice: the idea that art could be organised to support a new ideology was often as significant as its actual implementation.

The change begins with the establishment of the new Ministries of Culture. The idea that arts practice in all its manifestations, including stressing the importance of accessibility for all, could be controlled through the State, top-down, based on a number of principles and strategies with accompanying practical support, was new in its visionary scale and control. There had been court and religious patronage in the past throughout most cultures of the world. The first glimmerings of change came in Western Europe in the mid to late-nineteenth- century, with two developments prefiguring the Soviet actions. First were the philosophically closer, though less influential in practice, private philanthropic schemes, such as William Morris’s (1834-96) ideas and the initiative at Dartington Hall in Devon founded on socialist ideology;60 second were the earlier changes in various central and European countries to create Ministries of Education that had various cultural responsibilities. Finland had a Ministry of Ecclesiastical and Education Affairs from 1809, which later became the Ministry of Culture and Education, and the Austro-Hungarians had similar institutions, again based on education but including cultural affairs, from the 1840s.61 However, as a matter of degree and focus, never before had the State had the control envisaged and practised by the

58 Hsu, 1999: 100-01. The Malayan art centres in Penang and Kuala Lumpur were aware of the ‘art for the people’ movement reverberating elsewhere, with the Asas ’50 group of writers in particular articulate about this, followed by the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung grouping of artists, but there was little similar activity in these centres as occurred in Singapore (see Piyadasa, 1994: 37-8). 59 Kwok, 1996: 72. 60 See Briggs, 1962. Morris wrote and spoke to various tracts about socialism and art, including ‘Art and Society’ of 1883 (139 ff), ‘Innate Socialism’ in 1878 (84 ff), and ‘The Worker’s Share of Art’ of 1885 (140ff). I thank Judith Staines for touring me through Dartington Hall in 2014. 61 I am grateful to Péter Inkei of the Budapest Observatory, and British arts consultant Judith Staines, for direction to this information (through emails 11 September 2015). Western European actual Ministries of Culture were set up after 1940 - the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art in Britain, in 1940, being the first. France followed in the late 1950s. 80

Soviets. It was this focus that an Australian Trades Unionist, the ‘tramwayman’ W.A. Smith, noticed visiting Moscow in 1934. In a (subsequently published) radio broadcast in Melbourne (fig. 2.3), he wrote how he was surprised that the arts were so supported by the State, and “included in the State budget or into social organisations.”62 Not only did the Chinese and the Vietnamese literally copy this, but its impact was much wider. The British Council, the first of the Western European organisations set up in similar guise, in 1934, still acknowledges that its founding was in part intended as an answer to the cultural power of the ,63 so ably put into reality through their organisational focus. The United States had the opposite ideological response, deliberating not using government instrumentalities, and indeed, even during this period, not establishing a ministry of culture at all.64

How these Soviet arts organisational directives were manifested is the central part of this chapter, discussed in detail in the following pages. The practical implementation is seen, first, in the creation and encouragement of politically supported (or supportive) artist groups, as well as a systematic agenda for publications, public meetings (specifically congresses and the ritual around these), and the development of museums and major exhibitions of art. Another practical mechamism was the way artists’ lives were controlled, particularly through training, and also through support for artists’ (less official) societies, stipends, and scholarships. A third manifestation were controls for the particular practice of art making, including emphasizing specific media, particularly print and poster making, the support of public art, including murals, public sculpture, and public events like festivals that have visual art involvement.

Inherent in these activites were the conceptual innovations of the Soviets that have had significant impact in the management of the arts since their time: first, the focus on social classes and art, and the importance of the idea of art by non-professionals; second, the focus on regionalism; third, the art of the collective, often named in Soviet circles as brigade art, and, last, links to the army. All had repercussions in the Asia-Pacific region. The antipathy in the West to both Socialist Realism and the Soviet state has meant there is little acknowledgement of the impact of this area of Russian arts innovation, apart from the rejection of the qualities of the art itself.

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62 W.A. Smith, 1935: 67. 63 See http://www.britishcouncil.org/organisation/history, accessed 10 September 2015. It is put in negative terms: that the Bolsheviks, along with Mussolini, Hitler and the situation in Spain were gaining ground, adding to global instability and impacting on Britain’s influence in the wider world. 64 Bayles, 2014: 141, notes the overtly non-government Congress of Cultural Freedom that worked with the Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford and Guggenheim philanthropic organisations, covertly funded by the CIA. The era ended in 1967 when exposed in the media. 81

The speed of the introduction of this new infrastructure in Russia and then China is significant. The Visual Arts Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education (Lunacharsky at its head) was founded in Russia in 1918. It was under the control of artists like Malevich, Vladimir E. Tatlin (1885-1953), Vasily V. Kandinsky (1866-1944) and others who did leave Russia a few years later. The Department made decrees on monuments to be built, stopped export of art, nationalised private collections (towards the “democratising of the artistic and educational institutions of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic”) among other initiatives.65 The first Minister for Culture in China, Shen Yanbing, was appointed in October 1949. In Vietnam, a similar Ministry of Culture and Information was established in 1955, in charge “of all cultural activities in the DRVN, including publications, exhibitions and propaganda… this institution helped divert old religions into a new belief officially represented by the Party.”66

The first of the devices used by these new culture departments to control the path of art were the politically supported (or supportive) organisations. The very idea of such organisations was implicit from the beginning, with Aleksandr Bodganov founding the (proletarian culture-educational organisation) at the time of the Revolution. It supported art responsive to the working class, and by 1920 had 400,000 members. These organisations had control of the various public aspects of their members’ artistic life, including arranging exhibitions, tours, lectures and debates, and in the case of the Union of Soviet Artists, sending their members overseas. The formalisation of artists’ organisations occurred quickly in Russia. AKhRR (Artists of Revolutionary Russia), founded in 1922, saw themselves as heirs of the Itinerants, toured shows, and were honoured by Stalin attending their 1928 exhibition. The OSt (Association of Easel Painters) was formed in 1925, and contributed subjects of the New Soviet Person, as well as industrial metaphors. The 4 Arts was also established in 1925, the OMKh (Society of Moscow Artists) in 1927, October in 1928, and so on. Then in 1929, painters, graphic artists, and sculptors were all included in a single artists’ co-operative, the Vsekokhudozhnik.67 This was consolidated by a decree in 1932 that all members of artists’ groups were to join together as a single union: the Union of Soviet Artists. Each national area had its own organisation, with the Moscow branch, MOSSKh, taking the lead. By 1939, the Union had 3,700 members. It continued on until reconfigured by Khrushchev in 1957.

In China, the Revolutionary History Painting Creative Committee was formed in January 1950 in Nanjing and the All-Chinese Association of Workers in Literature and Art was formed in

65 See decrees stopping the export of art and nationalising of private collections, in Lenin ‘On the Nationalisation of Art Collections’, 1918, in On Literature and Art, (1967) 1978: 249. 66 Huynh, 2005: 164. 67 Sjeklocha and Mead, 1967: 40. 82

Beijing in June that year.68 The general structure created then remains to this day. Indeed, artist Wang Zhiyuan (b. 1958), writing about the White Rabbit collection of contemporary Chinese art in Sydney in 2010, notes that the Chinese system still follows the Soviet model of academies and associations – and needs reform.69 The Vietnam Artists Association (Hoi My Thuat) was founded in 1957 again under the Ministry of Culture, and with other unions formed the Fatherland Front.70 Like the Russian model, it too had branches in all provinces and cities. In Australia, the collective ideology of the Trade Union movement spread to left-wing artists, with, in this later 1970s era, taking on various nomenclatures: the Socialist Artists in 1970s became the Revolutionary Artists, then the Community Art Workers (CAW) had an important role from 1975.

Many of these organisations published books and journals, and other publications getting information about the new art system to the public were very numerous throughout this world. In Russia new magazines included Art and Literature, Soviet Art, Art, Creativity and Art, and The Artist, issued monthly. The Stalin years in the 1930s with its promotion of Socialist Realism were particularly active: between 1936 and 1940, 5,000 books on art were published in 32 million copies. Amongst these were Marx and Engels on Art, published in 1937, Lenin on Culture and Art in 1938 and Gorky on Art in 1940.71

In China, Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art was published in 1943, followed in 1944 by Zhou Yang’s Marxism and Literature and Art, which included Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Lu Xun, and various journals followed, including the influential Art, which began publication in 1954. Mao’s Selected Works were translated and published in English in the early 1950s.72 A major publication of the Cultural Revolution, of course, in 1964, was The Little Red Book, first published for the PLA in millions of copies and, by 1968, translated into thirteen languages.73 The Foreign Languages Press was established in Beijing in 1949, intent on spreading knowledge of Chinese culture internationally, but particularly to the ‘in-between regions’.74 This was an organisational type taken up by the Vietnamese, in Hanoi, still publishing important volumes to this day (fig.2.4). The Vietnamese art magazine Van Nghe (Art and Literature) included articles and reproductions of both Russian and Chinese art from

68 Chao Chung, 1955, 29-40, details the various cultural committees and ‘literature and art organs’, and their staff members, set up in China in this period. 69 Wang Zhiyuan, 2010: 13. 70 Taylor, 2004: 17. 71 See Bown, 1991: 91. 72 Xu Lanjun, 2014: 86. 73 Xu Lanjun, 2014: 86. It has the official title of Quotations of Chairman Mao, and includes 427 quotations in 33 chapters, from his writing from 1929-64. Like much of Chinese culture it has its roots in both traditional China, in this case the Analects of Confucius, and the modern primers such as embraced by the Russians (see Çook, 2014, xiii for discussion). 74 Xu Lanjun, 2014: 77-8. The ‘in-between regions’ were socialist countries and countries of the developing world as well as capitalist countries. 83 the early 1950s.75 The Chinese International Bookstore was also established in 1949, again for ‘cultural exchanges’ with other countries, again very early in the regime. By 1964, it claims, it had relationships with 91 countries.76 Maya H.T. Liem notes the many books sent to Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s from China, translated into Indonesian in China, intended to demonstrate the success of the new Chinese model.77 The PKI itself published many tracts at the time including a commemorative forty-year booklet in 1960(figs. 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7).

It is salient to look at the use the Soviets made of publications when looking at Australia: in the 1930s, USSR in Construction magazine (published in four languages from 1931 (fig. 2.8) to 1950) influenced left-wing publications, from Proletariat (fig. 2.9), the journal of the Melbourne University Labour Club and the Australian Labour Defender in the early 1930s, to the Communist Review (Sydney) and the Trade Union Leader later in the decade, to numerous books with graphic covers with leftist content, from Franco’s Spain to anti-Hitler material.78 In the 1970s, the main publication was The Great Divide, published in one edition in 1977, but notable for the range of authors and people involved. Edited by Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen, it included Noel Sheridan (1936-2006), Norman Day, Julie Ewington, Terry Smith, Ian Burn (1939-93), Nigel Lendon (b. 1944), Chips Mackinolty (b.1954), Bonita Ely (b.1946), and others, most of whom have proceeded to have leadership roles in Australian art circles.

A further public iteration of the regimes’ ideas was the development of large public meetings of delegates from various sectors, including the arts. These congresses remain in Asia in particular as a special social form, organised with known ritual, often theatrical and pre- arranged. They had official approval, and were a method of marking special events and achievements, making new proclamations, and in a time when information was difficult to disperse, enabling the spread of new edicts to delegates coming into centres from outlying areas. These “speeches, conferences, toasts, award-giving ceremonies” often featured in the art of the Soviets (fig. 2.10) and in photographs today.79 Socialist Realism was confirmed officially at the First Congress of Soviet Writers. The first All-China Congress of Literary and Art Workers, in Beijing, was a forum where new political and social roles of art were announced, presented by Zhou Enlai, following on from the Yan’an forum. The Conference of the Association of Workers in Art and Literature in Beijing of 824 delegates, closely modelled on First Congress of Soviet Writers, followed very soon after the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 1950.80 At such congresses, the affiliation with the Soviet Union could be made very public. At the Second Congress of the All-China Federation, in 1953, the demand was that “energetic

75 See Scott, 2012: 227-8. 76 Xu Lanjun, 2014: 84. 77 Liem, 2012: 164. She also notes that the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and the were sending similar texts. 78 Reproduced in Merewether, 1984: 56-82. 79 Bown, 1991: 185. It is a particular formality of meetings in Asia still to have an official group photograph record the moment. 80 Golomshtock, 1990: 124. 84 measures be undertaken to study the mature experience of the USSR in the area of literature and to strengthen cultural interpretation between China and the USSR”.81 The impact of these congresses is evident in the number of attendees, for example 2,300 at the Third National Congress of Literary and Art Workers, in Beijing, in July-August, 1960.82 In Vietnam, it was at the 1948 National Cultural Conference that Truong Chinh delivered his important paper and in 1950 Ho organised a ‘conference season’ of twelve meetings, of which one was the National Congress of the Arts and Letters.83

The fourth area of art and public engagement occurred through the development of museums and large exhibitions. Lenin signed the Decree on the Nationalisation of the Tretyakov Gallery in 1918. Thirty-six museums were set up and art schools reorganised in this early period.84 Aleksandr Rodchenko was put in command of the new museum branch at first. The new Museum of the Revolution, established in 1919, was not only to show the history of the revolution to visitors but also through sending out exhibitions. These museums were highly successful, with large attendance figures. In turn the State was generous in support, with, in 1941 for example, ninety-five million roubles set aside for art exhibitions, art festivals and art scholarships.85 Today, the State Tretyakov Gallery, recognising its historic role in displaying art of the period, exhibits archival photographs of these past expositions (figs. 2.11 and 2.12). Among the large exhibitions organised was the 1958 exhibition in Moscow of art of twelve socialist countries, which included 280 works from China.86

As the Russian Museum of the Revolution had opened almost immediately after the event of its name, so in China, the Central Museum of Revolutionary History opened 1951. Leading artist Luo Gongliu (1916-2004) had the task of commissioning new works for this museum, mostly large oil paintings, needed to fill the big new building, a demand met by artists in three campaigns between 1958 and 1965. Those trained through the Soviet system directly got the most prestigious commissions. Large exhibitions had been organised in China through the 1920s and 1930s, with again very large audiences and these continued in PRC times.87 In 1949, at the time of the founding of the Republic, works by 300 artists were shown in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. The works intended for Russia in 1958 were first shown in Beijing.

Vietnam again was more muted, but did follow suit. Ho created the Institute of History & Archaeology to provide a new history of the peasants, rather than emphasize the imperial

81 Golomshtock, 1990: 127. 82 Laing, 1988: 34. 83 Huynh, 2005: 145. 84 Gray, 1962: 221, 333. 85 Chen, (1944) 1945: 9. 86 Laing, 1988: 30. 87 For example, in 1946, 916 woodcuts shown in exhibition in Shanghai. 85 dynasties, and the Museum of Fine Arts was inaugurated in 1966 again with leading artist Nguyen Do Cung (1912-77) in charge.

Japan enters this thesis only infrequently, but World War II was a time of challenge for their propaganda efforts in Asia. It is of consequence here that while their political masters were ideologically opposed to the Communists, the arts establishment used very similar tactics to those devised first in the USSR. They set up a propaganda art department at the time of the invasion of China that commissioned artists until 1945, as well as organising a series of major exhibitions in Japan itself seen by millions of people. The Imperial Army and Navy commissioned around 200 paintings of a similar size (they provided the uniform sized canvases),88 and directed the topics to be painted. The propaganda department used both the popular press, with newspapers and magazines for a local and international audience.

They produced FRONT magazine (figs. 2.13 to 2.15), modelled on USSR in Construction (see fig. 2.8, noted for its impact in Australia) which had been designed by El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko and others. FRONT, with ten volumes being produced, was sent to all Greater East Asian Co-prosperity zone areas, and published in fifteen languages.89 FRONT’s special edition that focused on the Philippines in 1944 uses the Filipino woman as a symbol for national effort (fig. 2.15). In comparison, the majority of print-making for the home market in Japan remained in nihonga (Japanese style) and of domestic subjects.90 Alice Guillermo discusses the ubiquity of Japanese propaganda in the Philippines (“posters, illustrations, comics, fliers and leaflets dropped from airplanes”) where the emphasis was on the combination of imagery and text, texts often echoing the high moral tones well known in Soviet circles: “To Work Hard Makes You Happy/ And Gives Glory to Your Country”, or “Crush Anglo-Americans, Build Up New Philippines”. 91

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The second device formulated by the socialist Ministries of Culture as a way to direct art activity was to manage the lives of the artists themselves. They did this through controlling training of artists, as well as through a more loose encouragement of artists’ societies and their role of providing support through stipends, backing for exhibitions, for projects and for

88 Tsuruya, 2013: 71. The standard size was c. 260 x 190 cm. 89 See example in Ginsberg, 2013, no. 21; Kushler, 2006: 74-6. 90 See Kendall H. Brown ‘Out of the Dark Valley: Japanese Woodblock Prints and War, 1937-1945’ in Ikeda, Mcdonald and Tiampo (eds), 2013: 208-27. J. Thomas Rimmer, in ‘Encountering Blank Spaces: A Decade of War, 1935-1945’: 57 (in Ellen P. Conant (ed.), 1995, Nihonga; Transcending The Past, St. Louis: The Saint Louis Art Museum/The Japan Foundation: 57-61) , describes the ‘blank spaces’ in the minds of traditional, nihonga, Japanese painters during the war, in response to the pressures around them, and how this medium was judged “relatively unsuitable for depicting the sometimes gruesome, and often moving evocations of combat managed by Fujita” (60), the master of large oil paintings of battles, though a small number were made depicting aspects of the war in Asia. 91 Guillermo, 1998: 37, 38. 86 awards. The pride in this model and recognition of its importance is shown in the special display made by Rodchenko of a ‘Workers Club’ room for the Soviet Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, albeit in his own creative format (figs. 2.16 and 2.17).

In 1928 the Russians declared formally that the role of the arts was Communist education. The closeness between art and education flowing both ways is a core principle of Communist society through these countries of focus, aided in East Asia by the traditional Confucian respect for education and for culture. The revolutionary activity in Russia was to overturn the past support for elite art and artists and enforce the principles of the proletkults, where children of working families were admitted first to the new (the State Artistic and Technical Studios). Lunacharsky had included the “proletarianization” of “institutes of art education” (opening up “workers’ departments in all higher institutions concerned with the plastic, musical and theatrical arts” as one way to do this) as his fifth ‘basic principle’ for the establishment of ‘proletarian asethetics’.92 Jack Chen provides a vivid picture of the close link of education and art in Russia in the 1920s, and particularly notes the innovation of Young Pioneers Palaces and Houses of Children’s Culture, providing art education for children as a special focus in addition to the inclusion of art being taught in schools.93

China followed this focus. Even in the harsh mountain environment of Yan’an, it was considered important to institutionalise the teaching of art, and The Yan’an Academy was founded in 1938, named after Lu Xun. With the coming of Communist power, a very early step again was to instigate an expanded (political) art curriculum at the newly reformed art institutions: the Beijing Art Academy became the College of Fine Arts (CAFA), modelled on the Repin Academy, with Luo Gongliu appointed to it.

More generally in the years 1950-1, thousands of intellectuals were given six to eight month courses at revolutionary colleges, led by PRC cadres, on the nature of the revolution, Maoist thought, and Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.94 Again, of particular interest, specialised high schools for talented children were established, affiliated with academies, adopted from the Soviet model.95

92 See Anatoly Lunacharsky and Iuvenal Slavinsky ‘Basic Policy in the Field of Art’ 1920, reproduced in Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 331. 93 Chen, (1944) 1945: 16. As the idealism of the early period of the Revolution gave way and with the trials of the Great War, Stalin and Zhdanov, in 1947, made new, tighter supervision of the visual arts, under the control of the Committee for Art Affairs. Instead of a looser system of colleges, the Academy of Arts was re-established, art education was more closely supervised, and published texts were overseen in a regime noted for its rigidity and conservatism (see Bown, 1991: 173-4). 94 Spence, 1999: 537. 95 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 148. A 1989 study of the Hangzhou Children’s Palace affirms the on-going importance of these institutions in China, remaining under the direct control of the Communist Party, with the role of developing skills and interests of the children in arts and sciences, as well as, still, teaching ‘socialist politics and morality’ (see Leslie M. Swartz, 1989, ‘“Raising the 87

In Vietnam, during the war against the French in the 1940s and in the difficult jungle situation, the Art School of Viet Bac formed, and endured poverty, war and repression. In 1946 a ‘Resistance Class’ of twenty-five students was created, with the same curriculum as the École des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi, but with Marxism/Leninism added and Socialist Realism also taught.96 To Ngoc Van (1906-54) made some delicate watercolours showing this jungle-based teaching (fig. 2.18). The Vietnamese Foreign Languages Publishing House, in 1987, produced an English- language text, Vietnam; A Long History, which describes the situation of literature and art mid- century:

The 1945 August Revolution freed writers and artists from the narrow and suffocating atmosphere in which they had been working under the colonial regime… Almost all the writers and artists of renown left the cities to join the anti-French resistance. Fighting, living among the people, and political and ideological work gradually transformed these artists of the former regime, while writers and artists trained by the resistance itself progressively emerged.

The complete liberation of North Vietnam in 1954 and the first steps in socialist construction created a new blossoming of cultural life. Exhibitions, conferences and festivals as well as specialised journals and publishing houses multiplied. The State at the central and provisional echelons encouraged artistic, theatrical, musical and dance groups, set up art schools, offices or studios to develop film-making. Amateur art troupes were formed in factories, villages and army units. Never before had the country witnessed such a ferment of cultural activity.97

Artists in the Communist countries were encouraged to work in groups for reasons of both organisational control and to encourage a communal attitude. Even in states outside the Communist realm such groups often formed for similar reasons, although working against the regime in power. In Russia organisations formed to develop students’ sense of civic duty, and all belonged. Jack Chen describes special study groups98 and how co-operatives of artists assisted with commissions, scholarships, and how wages were provided if the artist was a member of the Workers of Art Trade Union.99 On graduation the artist applied for membership of the Khudozhnik, or Artists’ Co-operative, where materials were provided as were studios in the artists’ centre, and exhibitions arranged. He adds that in Russia alone (of

Cultural Level” at the Hangzhou Children’s Palace’ in Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 23, 1: 125-39. This reference is on page 128. Swartz describes the obstacle course in the grounds simulating the Long March and its difficulties (129).) 96 Taylor, 2004; 49. 97 Nguyen Khac Vien, 1987: 359-60. 98 Chen, (1944) 1945: 26. 99 Chen, (1944) 1945: 40. 88 the Soviet federation) 400 artists were in this contractual arrangement, as well as 200 sculptors.100

Chen describes a liberal stipend system for artists in the USSR, a system followed by the PRC, though with seemingly less generosity, Laing commenting on the low rate of pay for artists in the 1950s and how Zhou Enlai endeavoured to improve this.101 Gradually in the USSR commissions from the State grew as a source of income in 1920s. In China commissions for the new Museum of the Revolution became a major source of revenue for artists there. The direct financial and physical support for artists who belonged to these societies was followed in Vietnam, where the Artists Association from 1957 provided stipends, and gave supplies and exhibition opportunities.102 During the 1954-75 period, writes Nora Taylor, being an artist “meant working for the government. The state commissioned artists to design stamps, currency, propaganda posters and billboards, as well as commemorative paintings and official portraits”.103 The Community Arts movement in Australia in the 1970s saw a move to provide an equivalent salary for arts workers as for other workers, accepted today as a ‘career’.104

As part of the State’s support for artists, awarding of prizes like the Stalin Prize was noteworthy, as was the status of being a People’s Artist in the USSR. The Stalin Prize was instituted in 1939, and very valuable: most of the artists with considerable official interaction with Asia (Vera I. Mukhina (1889-1953), Maksimov and Matvei G. Manizer (1891-1966) for example), all were awarded these prizes. In China, the writer Ding Ling got the Stalin Prize in 1951, though this did not save her later from official displeasure. Other cultures have long instigated awards for artists, but in the Communist arena these carry special official status.

The activities mid-century in Southeast Asia were more various. In Indonesia, at first the most benign of the non-Communist states towards socialist activity, various left-wing artists’ groups formed relatively informally. The Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM, Young Indonesian Artists) was founded in 1946, led by Sudjojono, Trisno Sumardjo (1916-69), Sunindyo, Soedibio (1912-80) and Sedyono. They got some funding for their activities, published a journal Seniman, and went to the front to document the conflict. In Singapore, left-wing ideas from China were running under the surface of the establishment of the new post-War government, with the Equator Art Society established in 1956 to support protesting young artists and their work, albeit without official approval.

100 Chen, (1944) 1945: 45, 50. 101 Laing, 1988: 25. 102 Taylor, 2004: 15. 103 Taylor, 2004: 16. 104 An example is The Open University Australia Pty Ltd including ‘Community Arts Workers’ amongst career options, with in 2012, the average salary of these some 2,700 people so described in Australia being (full-time) $48,000 p.a., see https://www.open.edu.au/careers/community-service---not-for-profit/community-arts-workers, accessed 13 January, 2016. 89

In the 1970s again the Soviet organisational blue-print was followed in the Philippines and Australia. The Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista at Akiteckto ‘71 was founded in Manila in 1971-2, closely following (Soviet or) Chinese exemplars, “with the aim of reaching and serving the masses”. To do so, “they held workshops in depressed areas such as Tondo [a poor area of Manila]. Large numbers left the city for the countryside for exposure to the day-to-day reality of the peasants. Artists developed popular forms such as cartoons, comics, and illustrations for people’s publications”.105 They showed art outside usual venues, only frequenting the Red Gallery, otherwise using public and alternative spaces like churches or schools. The Kaisahan group of socialist realists formed in 1976 and maintained itself during martial law. Alice Guillermo makes the point that Kaisahan’s purpose was anti-imperialist, not specifically following China and USSR,106 though the practices of the earlier established group (of group study, criticism and self-criticism, study of political art from the PRC, observance of clarity of form and content in figurative expression),107 certainly was influenced by Russian and Chinese models.

In Australia pre-War, artists like Noel Counihan, Nutter Buzacott (1905-76) and Jack Maughan (1897-1980) had formed groups like the Soviet-influenced Workers Art Club (see fig.2.9 and fig. 3.10),108 but by the 1970s the desire of both left-wing artists and government agencies was to endeavour to create a new official system of support for artists: public art commissions, artist- in-residency programs, workshops, and at first payment itself for artists(in Victoria, through the then Ministry for the Arts).109 The workers’ Trade Union system also entertained this idea of artists being a sector of the workforce, supporting the new Art and Working Life program that the Australia Council funded from 1982, but also generally encouraging the principle from early days.110 Indeed the links with the past direct association with the Russians is pertinent here. It had not been long since these had been active in the main cities. For example, Bernard Smith has described, in the 1940s art being ‘taken to the people’ “in factories, army camps and business establishments”; likewise, Oriel Gray’s autobiography Exit Left describes the association of the CPA with her New Theatre work in Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s; and Jan Friedel’s research on left-wing Melbourne artists and the Community Party in the 1950s

105 Guillermo, 1987: 7. 106 Guillermo, 1999: 32. 107 Guillermo, 1987: 7. 108 See Butler, 1993, 45; 2007: 253. 109 Hogg, 2011: 92. This author was employed by the Victorian Ministry in the late 1980s to supervise the commissioning of the very popular ‘artists’ tram’ program, not so much a community arts project but a method of providing income support to artists plus making imagery of some of Melbourne’s more inventive artists accessible as it trundled in full Socialist Realist majestic splendour along the tramlines of the city. 110 The Trades Hall’s long-term interest in the arts and its place in workers’ lives have been documented by Sandy Kirby and Ian Burn in 1985 and particularly by her in 1991 (see Bibliography). 90 describes “the characteristic of the period before 1956 … [as] the enthusiasm and the diversity of talent among socialist writers and artists”.111

***

The third device for controlling artists’ lives was through support for certain art activity, particularly promotion of print and poster-making, and also for commissions for public art: from murals, to shopfront art, to sculpture, to involvement in street parades and festivals. In the past, religious and court patrons had initiated various public visual displays to woo their congregations or subjects towards their cause – from street processions and extravagant galas, to superbly decorated religious institutions or large celebratory monolithic statues. This had occurred in Europe and also in Asian traditional societies. However, these had been only part of the art creations of those societies, with the aristocracy commissioning art for their private enjoyment as well. Now the focus was on art accessible to all. For the first time the public role of art, with its strong political purpose, was in at the core of cultural activity.

Lenin had discussed Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun with Lunacharsky and was aware of the practice of public frescoes to ‘provide the young with a visual education’.112 He articulated the employment of ‘expressive inscriptions’, didactic slogans (ever the focus on words) and monuments. Lunacharsky exhorted the Narkompros Committee to organise “decorations of the cities with emblems, inscriptions, etc.,” to reflect revolutionary Russia.113 Always the underlying insistence was that this was no longer elite work for private audiences but art for the people, for the masses.

The use of graphic art for public usage was also central, the innovation however being muted for today’s audience by its subsequent ubiquity, with billboards and hoardings in the street firmly adopted by the advertising industry of capitalism. Shop signboards and advertisements had been used pre-Revolution, and 700 European posters, including some by Russians, formed the major International Exhibition of Art Posters, shown in St Petersburg in 1897, followed by other international exhibitions of similar works in 1912 and 1916.114 The 1916 exhibition, of British war-posters, included brief and telling captions,115 influencing the Russians in the effectiveness of this trait in comparison to the much longer texts of their traditional lubki prints (fig. 2.19). These moved overtly to the streets post-Revolution, with wall newspapers

111 See Bernard Smith, (1945) 1979: 263; Oriel Gray, 1985, Exit Left; Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman, Melbourne: Penguin; Friedel, 2013: 24. 112 See Cooke, 1990: 136. 113 See Cooke, 1990: 137. 114 See Shkolnyi, 1990: 98. 115 See Shkolnyi, 1990: 98. 91

“which are so characteristic a feature of Soviet life”116 instituted, a practice of great importance as a way to spread information in resource-poor China in later years. Another innovation was the use of shop windows, including those of TASS, to show these images.117 Some posters were made by hand and some by hand-coloured linocut, a medium which makes for strong, simple lines.118 The scale was also important: twenty million posters were published by the Art Publishing House between 1918 and 1921, with 3,200 different images, most by unnamed artists and now lost.119 Similar numbers were made during the Great Patriotic War, with some 800 images made in Moscow, and one, titled Warrior of the , Save Them! 120 by Viktor B. Koretsky (1909-98), of 1942, printed in fourteen million copies. The Motherland is Calling! of 1941 is a similarly famous image (fig. 2.20). For this level of effort mobile lithograph presses were sent to the front. Vyacheslav Polonsky of the State Publishing House in Moscow and creative director of the Literature and Publications Department of the Red Army Political Administration (chaired by Trotsky), wrote in The Russian Revolutionary Poster in 1925: “The poster is a weapon of mass persuasion, a device for constructing a collective psychology.”121

China again followed this practice, basing their new poster production on the availability of lithography and its colours - following the years of woodcut printmaking. By 1952, 570 pictures were being issued in forty million copies,122 with artists in all media called to participate. In this same year, State-run publishing houses were set up in Shanghai and elsewhere, producing images like Yu Yunjie’s (1917-92) Celebrating with great joy and enthusiasm the publication of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China (fig. 2.21). In Beijing one publishing house printed twenty-eight million posters between 1951-9. During the Cultural Revolution, the image Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan was made into 900 million copies (see fig. 3.33).

Most Chinese posters include text with image, ‘reading’ literal text as well as image being a mode well accepted. The words were often slogans urging on the people towards a better future, words ultimately coming from Russian models, but taken up with enthusiasm in Mao’s China. The acceptance of the model of communal verbal encouragement is seen in the way twenty-first century capitalism in China uses the trope to further production: the British television program Panorama screened a documentary in 2015, on factory life producing

116 Chen, (1944) 1945: 90. 117 Chen, (1944) 1945: 102. 118 See Shkolnyi, 1990: 104. 119 King, 2012: 6. 120 Bown, 1991: 145. 121 King, 2012: 7. 122 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 141, 151. 92 components for Apple devices, included group sessions shouting slogans towards a better and more effective production.123

In Vietnam, a poster showing Ho Chi Minh was owned by nearly every family from the mid- 1950s (for example fig. 2.22) and Chinese posters were reprinted with Vietnamese translations.124 Poster production during the American war increased, with special workshops established. As in Russia and China, posters, cartoons and broadsheets were all produced to support the State (see fig. 2.23).

Outside the Communist zone, these methods were understood politically, and employed. In Indonesia from the mid-1940s Sukarno used artists to help in political struggle, with posters, cartoons and comic books produced based on Soviet models. One poster of 1945 had the slogan “Comrade, Come on, Comrade” with a figure with arm raised holding the Indonesian flag and breaking a chain, an image that spread throughout Java.125 Later in Australia left-wing groups like the Earthworks Poster Collective in Sydney and Progressive Art Movement in Adelaide produced large volumes of very successful politically motivated posters. In the Philippines in 1972 posters influenced by those made in the PRC were used in demonstrations against the oil cartel, activities that led to the imposition of martial law and forced all radical art underground.126 Guillermo writes that “a strong influence on the political art of the period [the 1970s] came from socialist realism in China in its reconstruction period, especially posters showing the power of the masses in militant and dynamic stances”.127 In Korea posters, street banners, et al, were made by left-wing groups in the early 1980s as a protest against martial law. Posters by the National Art Association Centre Workers Group were significant visual creations into the early 1990s (see figs. 4.51 and 4.52).

As early as April 1918 Lenin signed On Monuments of the Republic, with the idea of commissioning new public sculpture to reflect “the ideas and sentiments of the revolutionary working population of Russia”,128 seen most famously in ’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman of 1937, ‘the great symbol of Stalin’s USSR’ (figs. 2.24, 2.25 and 2.26).129 When the idea of public art reached China, it led to 10,000 such works being created there after 1949, most since 1980.130 A key early work is The Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square of 1952-8 (fig. 2.27 and figs.3.23, 3.24 and 3.27), but also other pieces were placed in hotels, halls and other public places.

123 ‘Apple’s Broken Promises’ BBC Panorama, Richard Bilton, 26 February 2015, broadcast ABC TV Four Corners, 2 March, 2015. 124 Huynh, 2005: 151, 149. 125 Sidharta, 2007: 53. 126 Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974: 174. 127 Guillermo, 1987: 7. 128 In ‘On the Monuments of the Republic’ in On Literature and Art, 1978: 245. 129 See Bown, 1991: 82. 130 Young, 1999: x. 93

In Russia, many of these works, being large and sited in unguarded places through turbulent times, have not survived. They include the large number of murals made since the 1920s, often in the outer Republics, with for example, Aleksandr N. Volkov (1886-1957) going to Uzbekistan in early 1930 to work on murals there, Aleksandr Deineka executing murals for the Red Army House in Minsk in 1937, and the Brigade of Odessa artists, Iosif M. Gurvich (1907-93) and others, painting frescos in the GPU Club in Odessa, in 1929-30, now destroyed. Bown notes the influence of Ukrainian muralists across the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.131 In Moscow, the new Soviet Metro provided a high profile opportunity for public art in the 1930s as well. Leading artist Aleksandr Deineka designed and installed mosaics for the Metro between 1938 and 1940, as well as the First All-Union Agricultural Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, in Moscow in 1939, no longer extant. The Metro murals are still in splendid condition, one of the remaining visual triumphs of the era (fig. 2.28 a-d).

Politically motived mural painting was not adopted so quickly in China as poster-making, but China had had a tradition of mural-making which encouraged some use of this practice. Village painters translated socialist imagery of bumper harvests onto their walls as they did onto sheets of paper. Certainly large paintings were commissioned for public buildings around Tiananmen Square and other highly visible public places.

In Indonesia in 1957, a year after Sudjojono first experienced parliament as a PKI representative, he was one of the thirty-six artists commissioned to create the mural for Kemayoran Airport – a bas relief including stories of Indonesian life, including “farming, fishing and mining”.132 In Australia in the 1930s, following the Russian example, artists painted banners and placards, staged plays and held talks,133 with Noel Counihan amongst others designing banners for Melbourne May Day parades bearing the faces of Lenin, Marx and Engels.134

A last area where artists and the State co-joined was in the great upswing of street parades. The first anniversary of the Revolution, in 1918, saw St Petersburg buildings around the Winter Palace covered in Futurist and Cubist designs. By the 1930s, seas of red, supported by artists, were commonplace in parades in Russia, replicated in the great gatherings of ‘red’ in China during the Cultural Revolution (see fig. 4.7). Street parades had been organised by Australian Trade Unions (albeit in the tradition closer to their British brethren) from the momentous

131 Bown, 1998: 128. 132 Sidharta, 2007: 74. 133 Merewether, 1984: 11. 134 See Stephen and Reeves, 1984: 40-1. 94 gaining of the Eight Hour Day in 1856, and the links with the Russians added to this practice particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. It re-emerged during the 1970s (see fig. 2.29).

4. The Soviet practice of art in Asia: ideological innovations

A central element for discussion of this new way of running the visual arts is to analyse the focus on innovation in the way that art was produced and managed. The Communists instituted a number of measures that are assumed arts practice in many Western societies today, including the public care of artists through societies and co-operatives, stipends, provision of studios and official programs supporting children’s art activities. Central is the re- evaluation of art being for and by the working classes. For the first time anywhere, there was a practice supported by the State where the work of amateur artists was given equal respect to that of professionals. It was not always evident in practice, but it was evident in principle. Art and class is a large topic and changing the focus of making art from trained elite stratas to access for everyone is one of the Communists’ major contributions to ‘art’ – a shift articulated in 1846 by Marx and Engels stating that “in a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, amongst other things, also paint”.135

The breakdown of those taught art in the USSR in 1927-36 was sixty percent from the working class, thirty percent of peasant origin, and rest from former upper classes. A guarantee of the majority of vacancies was a way to ensure the working classes had opportunity for education.136 October (Oktyabr), the Russian artists’ group formed in 1928, wanted a “blending of the amateur art of proletarian art circles and workers’ clubs and peasant amateur art with highly qualified professional art, standing on the level of the artistic techniques of the industrial epoch”.137 It meant that art by ‘the people’ was viewed seriously. Art exhibitions from collective farms were organised, first in Moscow in 1935, then in 1936.138 This followed through to participation of the working classes as audiences: “Factory committees often book whole theatres for their workers,” exhibitions were taken around factory clubs, and plays to the countryside. This was for people who thought art was ‘above them’ or ‘too expensive’ for them.139 In 1934, the Melbourne tramwayman W.A. Smith admired the reality of “unskilled workers” visiting the theatre, how so many Trade Union Clubs had theatres on their premises, and how the Travelling Children’s Theatres visited the villages.140 It is this attitude and the relation to political leadership that so struck John Berger in 1969, when he wrote that in the

135 See Klingender, (1943) 1975: 29. 136 Chen, (1944) 1945: 14. 137 Bown, 1991: 65. 138 See Rusnock, 2010, ‘Amateur Art’: 179-85. She describes how in the first half of 1936 fifty-two regional amateur art exhibitions were held in the USSR, how these non-professional artists had access to studios and art circles, with art practice being seen as the favourite part of their creativity (179, 182). 139 Chen, (1944) 1945: 87. 140 W.A. Smith, 1935: 67-8, 72. 95

USSR, the focus on visual arts through schools, museums, murals, factory art groups, and programs at palaces of culture “has made the entire Soviet people aware and proud of the fact that the visual arts can enter and play a part in their lives. The widespread public indifference to the fine arts as found in Britain, Germany or the United States would shock even the least privileged provincial in the Soviet Union.”141

The ideology remains part of North Korean art practice. In 2015 South Korean artist B.G. Muhn (b. 1954) reported that there “artists are well respected. Offices, factories and other organisations have art studios for talented workers who can work during their free time because making art is considered a noble thing.”142

In Vietnam, the Artists Association announced in 1957 that it wished to eradicate class background and competition, overturning the old order of East Asian cultural hierarchies. The opportunity for farmers to criticise professional artists’ work is ruefully told by Ta Ty (1922- 2004), writing that when he showed his work during the Resistance period of the late 1940s, it was criticised by farmers: “the cadre asked some buffalo boys and old peasants to make some criticism. I felt uneasy defending myself against their honest revelations, as they did not have any knowledge of painting. I was nearly driven mad, but I kept my demeanour until the end of that session.”143 This (originally Russian) attitude that everyone can have access to, and an opinion about, art has unexpected consequences, even today. In The Art Newspaper Russia provided by the Russian Pavilion at the 2015 Biennale, the pavilion’s curator Margarita Tupitsyn is quoted: “Russian artists are never happy, because there is always some ‘proletarian’ who would say, to paraphrase the avant-garde poet Deniil Kharms, ‘You think you’re an artist, but I think you are a piece of shit’. This dialectic is central to Russian art.”144

Lu Xun in 1931 described the traditional situation for the access of the lower classes to the arts in China: “The year before last, when Plekhanov’s and Lunacharsky’s books on literary theory were first introduced to China, the disciple of Professor Irving Babbitt [Liang Shiqiu] felt the indignation of a sensitive ‘scholar’, for he did not believe the proletariat had any art. If a proletarian wants to create or appreciate art, he must first work hard to save enough money to crawl up into the bourgeoisie – he should not burst noisily into the garden in his rags.”145 Zhou Yang advocated, in 1949 at the First All-China Conference of Writers and Artists, ‘Spare- time Literary and Artistic Activities Among the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers’, and especially approved of the PLA’s understanding of art and literature as a “powerful, political weapon”,

141 Berger, 1969: 58-9. 142 Muhn, 2015: 85. 143 Huynh, 2005: 146. It should be noted that Ta Ty’s initial work was overtly linked to Cubism, see Scott, 2012: figs. 71-4. 144 Interview with Margarita Tupitsyn, The Art Newspaper Russia, no. 4 (33), May 2015: 74. 145 Selected Works, 3: 122. 96 with activities reflecting “the men’s own life and struggles”.146 A few years later, as Vice- Minister of Cultural Affairs, he wrote that professional artists must guide the workers and peasants in these activities, as “to discover and train writers and artists among them [the workers and peasants] is one of the most important tasks in our work in literature and art”.147 Imagine the change, when, in China from 1950, factory workers had art training and were expected to produce songs, plays, poems, paintings and woodcuts.148 By the Cultural Revolution period a significant group of artists in the countryside had had teaching from professionals and in the Children’s Palaces. Special groups of peasant artists became known from the 1950s when the Ministry of Culture in 1958 urged farmers to take up painting during the Great Leap Forward. This was especially focused in Pixian in Jiangsu and Zhejiang Province, and works were exhibited in Beijing.149 This movement faded until 1972-6 when great attention was lavished on it, especially in Huxian County (see figs. 4. 10 and 4.11).

Again, the Chinese Pavilion of the 2015 had a reminder of the on-going effect of the idea of the amateur-artist, or, idealistically, that we all should be respected for our visual creative efforts. Wu Wenguang’s (b. 1956) China Village Documentary Project of 2005-6 was a video project of ten villagers being given cameras to record stories of their lives. Ten seven-minute films resulted. Wu interviewed the villagers and recorded their excitement to get cameras (one says worth at least fifteen pigs). The concept and some of their ideas then gained an international audience in this important art exhibition.

In non-Communist Asia, direct influence on organisational practice is less pronounced. Established systems, such as in the Philippines, bent to include more provocative teachers like Victorio Edades (1895-1985) in institutions like the University of Santo Tomas, but also supported the University of the Philippines with its establishment staff. For Indonesians, despite the Communist Party being relatively strong, less emphasis on developed systems meant that while the art schools of the USSR and PRC seen on cultural delegation visits during the 1950s and 1960s were “impressive”,150 these ideas did not lead to the implementation of left-wing institutional ideas.

In Australia, in the 1970s, long after Russian socialism’s impact had waned but with young people looking for alternative ways and inspired by leftist thinking, ‘art workers’, a term used in Russia from the 1930s and appearing in China in the 1940s (and after 1949 replacing the

146 Zhou, 1954: 65-72. 147 Zhou, 1954: 45. 148 Laing, 1988: 30. Chao Chung, 1955, 96, describes the “thousands of ‘propaganda corps’”set up around the country from 1951 “with the task of guiding the populace in literary and art activities.” One support was the establishment of 2,436 Cultural Halls and a further 6,000 ‘cultural stations’. 149 Laing, 1988: 31. 150 See Lindsay, 2012: 17. 97 words ‘artist’ or ‘painter’),151 was adopted as a phrase central to the establishment of what became known as community arts practice.The Art and Working Life Program, of professional artists spending time in factories or other work places and supporting those workers to make art, was in sympathy with the Soviet focus on the working man or woman. Sandy Kirby, writing the history of the Community Arts Movement in 1991, sees the seeds of this Program in the 1930s Communist “push towards a proletarian culture” and the “realism in the community arts movement [being]… undoubtedly linked to the Communist Party’s influence in the 1930s and 1940s”.152

It was in the milieu of Gough Whitlam’s two visits to China, first in 1971, and recognition of the PRC in the very early days of his new government, in late 1972, as well as his long-standing usage of the term ‘Comrade’ as a provocative but levelling title for all, that Australian artists turned with enthusiasm to these new ideas. It led to a return to working class objects and skills (often ‘women’s art’) in museums which also had government support. It had a proselytising aspect: a report of a ‘public participation piece’ Anyone Can be an Experimental Artist, in Canberra in 1980, includes the text “If experimental art doesn’t reach everybody and isn’t accessible to anyone then how can it change people’s consciousness? As soon as it starts to change people’s consciousness then it’s a cultural revolution”.153

The second ideological innovation that led to practical outcomes is the state-run emphasis on regionalism. The Cultural Palace of the Minorities was established in Beijing in 1959 and throughout Mao’s life paintings of him meeting members of the fifty-six ethnic groups of China are common (fig. 2.30). Images of ethnic minorities were emphasized in Vietnam from the late 1940s.154 In Russia cultural workers were sent to factories and to the countryside and students from the provinces expected to return to their homeland after training in the centres to promulgate what they had learnt.155 Each national area had its own lectures and debates.156 A Studio of Nationalities at the Academy of Arts was established in 1947 to give education to students from non-European republics, who returned home as teachers on graduation.157 Insightful as usual, in 1936, Lu Xun recognised the work in the Soviet Graphic Art exhibition of that year included “Ukrainian, Georgian and Byelorussian artists” and says “I fancy that if not for the October Revolution we should ever have seen such works”.158 After the establishment of the PRC, training for artists always included students from throughout

151 Lü, 2010: 496. 152 Kirby, 1991: 25, 27. 153 See Jane Kent, 1984. ‘Anyone Can be an Experimental Artist’ in Setting the Pace; The Women’s Art Movement, 1980-1983. Adelaide: Women’s Art Movement: 6. 154 Taylor, 2004: 20. 155 An example is staff and students of the Leningrad Academy and Moscow Arts Institute, with institutes in Kiev and Kharkov, going to Samarkand and Tashkent, see Bown, 1991: 143. 156 Chen, (1944) 1945:52. 157 Bown, 1991: 201. 158 Quoted in Lu Xun Selected Works, 1960: 4, 245. 98

China. Of the students of the Russian teacher Nikolai N. Klindukhov (b. 1916), who taught at CAFA from 1956-8, in a class of twenty-three, eight were from Beijing, five from Hangzhou, three from Shenyang, two from Sichuan, Guangzhou and Xi’an and one from Shanghai. All were expected, as in Russia, to return to pass on the new information to their colleagues at home.

During the Civil War and to escape the Japanese, art schools were forced to travel around China, from one base to another, and in the process exposed city-based young artists to the ways of the countryside. The Vietnamese similarly moved their Hanoi art school to the mountains when pressured by Japanese forces and later during the American war, young artists were again exposed to the reality of rural life:

Schools and colleges in the cities had to disperse to forests and villages, and village schools had to break up into small units. Each evacuated or dispersed school had to build new premises, shelters and trenches… This enormous task was performed successfully thanks to the dedication of the teachers and pupils, and to the affectionate assistance of the whole people.159

Later, from 1954 after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, artists were sent to “revolutionary outposts to sketch soldiers, workers, farmers, and to record life in collectives, in the countryside, in factories, and on the frontlines of the war with the south”.160 Boi Tran Hunyh notes, as a reaction to moves for greater liberalisation, in 1958 rectification programs under the Vietnam Artists Association had artists sent to villages and factories to live and work with these ‘new masters’ of the new society.161 In China, artists from the cities were sent to the countryside in the late 1950s, as part of the response to the Hundred Flowers movement, with senior artists staying for around three months. While there they worked on decorations, rural scenes, teaching art, and wall-newspaper layouts. The Cultural Revolution led to artists being sent to the country in a new and fervent way.

The left-wing Filipino group Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista at Akiteckto ’71 encouraged artists to travel to the countryside to understand the life of the farmers. The artists’ group Kaisahan also sponsored “out-of-town exposure trips to the cultural communities in Banawe, Mindoro and Palawan”162 and individual artists like Al Manrique (b. 1949) and Edgar Fernandez (b.1955) spent time in Davao and the Cordilleras respectively.163 The Indonesians, being least

159 Nguyen Khac Vien, 1987: 357-8. 160 Taylor, 2004: 16. 161 Hunyh, 2005: 161. 162 Guillermo, 1987: 9. 163 Guillermo, 1987: 95, 80. 99 involved with official groups after 1965, and with the centre of the art world sited in the relatively rural city of Yogyakarta, did not have this focus on officially-supported regionalism, but individual left-wing artists like Moelyono (b. 1957) included working with village children to make art as an important part of their creative activity.164 In Australia again this has official imprimatur, with arts programs for country regions prioritised by Ministries for the Arts, idealistically a response to the idea that art is a right of all and that especial support is required for its practice in less easily accessible places.

Another important innovation in arts practice is the institutionalisation of the collective, part of the relegation of the individual to support of the group, an issue that the Cultural Revolution took very seriously. The idea of the collective has had strong support throughout many art communities around the world since. It is of note that the term ‘collective’, so central to the Communist system, is a rarity for being used without disapproval in arts practice globally today.

In Russia, formal collectives were known as brigades. Officially these brigades emerged in the 1930s with the full flourish of Socialist Realism under Stalin and his desire for huge works made for the public sphere. Aleksandr Deineka did brigade work in 1939, On Stalin’s Path, for the World Fair in New York.165 After 1949 teams enabled “the creation of great canvases, group portraits, depicting the leaders of the party and government in personal contract with the people”, said Polikarp Lebedev, Head of the Art Committee.166 Konstantin Maksimov, who later taught in Beijing, was a member of a brigade led by Vasili P. Efanov (1900-78), in 1950 painting the very large Leading People of Moscow in the Kremlin (see fig. 4.8), and a year later painting A Meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences (fig. 2.31).167 At this time, when brigade art became very common, each group was led by an Academician of high status like Aleksandr Gerasimov, or Dmitri A. Nalbandyan (1906-93), firmly in the Stalinist group.168 The leader devised the subject, then various tasks were allotted according to skills, often with crowd scenes depicted as a mass of individuals.169 Of note, Nalbandyan was leader of the brigade that painted A Great Friendship, a portrait of Stalin with Mao Zedong, made in 1950 and now in the Tretyakov Gallery, created from photographs.

164See for example: http://www.academia.edu/6916710/Moelyono_and_the_Endurance_of_Art_for_the_Society , accessed 2 January 2015. 165 Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 20. 166 Bown, 1998: 269. 167 Bown, 1998: 271. Both of those works led to the artists receiving Stalin Prizes, something that would have elevated Maksimov in establishment thinking. 168 Bown, 1991: 182. 169 Bown, 1998: 269ff gives details on this situation. 100

Of importance is the willingness of each artist to “abandon something of his own personality, to relinquish his claims as an individual”170 to the group. This went to the extreme of art for the exhibition the Industry of Socialism, also of 1939, having ‘restorers’ repainting images for political reasons,171 in exactly the same way as the famous Dong Xiwen and Shen Jiawei cases in China in 1953 and 1974 which will be further discussed in Chapter 5.

The idea of the brigade was directly adapted in China: “The various levels of artists’ professional associations would select artists and organise them to work according to the ‘three-in-one’ philosophy, more formally including ‘the workers’: the leaders propose the subject, the workers discuss the method and the artists create the product. Within this loosely ‘collective’ structure there would be repeated discussion and revision before a final version was agreed on. After the work was finished it still had to be approved by several levels of leadership before it could finally be entered in an exhibition.”172

The brigade work made by the Russians was of a particular type: large canvases glorifying the leadership of the revolution at first and then the exploits of Comrade Stalin, often including interior scenes of meetings in sumptuous rooms with many portraits of important people. However, any overview of art made in China in this period has few images like this, Mao Zedong being usually the sole individualised figure (the Declaration image is a rarity and its history is testament to the problems of particular portraiture), and he is usually shown in the country, talking to groups of generic, admiring ‘people’. The most famous paintings of Chinese Socialist Realism prior to the Cultural Revolution are by named, single artists, though this was not the case for sculpture as the Tiananmen Square monument attests, a practice followed on with the Rent Collection Courtyard and even as late as 1978, the Memorial Hall Group Sculptures in Beijiing was a collaborative work of 108 artists.173 The more general surge of ‘brigades’ or collectives of artists arose with the period of the Red Guards (see fig. 4.3. and fig. 4.5) and also with the communal or peasant-painters movement in the countryside.174

Unofficial leftist collectives throughout Asia owe their organisational form to the Russian model, though they were pitted against authority rather than officially sanctioned. Artists in Thailand, influenced by Mao’s Yan’an talks as well as Thai leftist intellectual Chit Phumisak and his texts Art for Life and Art for the People of 1955-7, formed the Artist Front of Thailand in

170 Bown, 1991: 83. 171 Bown, 1991: 109. David King’s 1997 book The Commissar Vanishes is a 192 page text about the ‘falsification’ of photographs in particular but also in paintings, sculpture and works on paper of the personnel of Stalin’s Russia. 172 Xu Hong, 2005: 342. 173 Young, 1999: 22. 174 Lü, 2010, 678-80, reproduces a number of these images: figs. 14.90, 14.92, 14.93 and 14.97, including the collective work Xinxiang today; The new face of the Xinxiang team of Huxian county, of 1971, and the works by the Yangquan Handicraft Management Bureau Arts and Crafts Fine Arts Factory Workers Fine Arts Group. 101

1974, creating huge bill-boards along Ratchadamnoen Road in Bangkok.175 Poster-making collectives in Australia like the Earthworks Poster Collective, Megalo, Redback Graffix, Garage Graphix, Red Letter, Another Planet, Lucifoil,176 and others, as well as more general groups like the Progressive Art Movement are part of this, as are the Reality and Speech Group in Korea in the 1980s, the Black Artists of Asia in Bacolod in 1986, Kasibulan, the women’s group formed in Manila in 1987, and many in between, owe their beginnings to the example of the Russians.

The last ‘innovation’ discussed in this chapter is how the Russians linked art to the most powerful part of their society: the army. This has not been emulated outside the Communist bloc, but its significance is worthy of discussion as it indicates the proximity of the visual arts to ‘power’. From the 1920s the Red Army, close to the Party, recognised it needed the skills of artists to promote its ideology and activities.177 By 1932 the Army was able to be a focus for big exhibitions such as that organised for its fifteenth anniversary. Workers and farmers always joined by soldiers was a key theme in Russia, China and Vietnam, with the heroes being the border guards, the pogranichniki, and sentries, chasovoi.178 Equally, as a significant part of Soviet society, members of the army were encouraged to take up art. The Red Army units had art studios along with those in factories.179 Tramwayman W.A. Smith reported that one of his “greatest surprises” was how the Red Army was “among the most cultured strata of Soviet society.”180

As in the USSR, the People’s Liberation Army in China used major exhibitions of art to celebrate key moments of its history. In 1944, Mao had said “an army without culture is a dull- witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”181 The PLA’s thirtieth anniversary, in 1957, included three exhibitions of scenes of its history and valour. Among the tightly selected students of Maksimov’s class in Beijing in 1955 were two members of the PLA.182 Mao emphasized cultural activities of the PLA in the early 1960s, and it came to dominate the art world in this period as a prelude to the Cultural Revolution,183 with Jiang Qing appointed advisor to it in 1966, with her opera troupes under PLA protection. One of the performances she endorsed was the military ballet, The Red Detachment of Women of 1964. Another sign of the importance and closeness of art and the army was the major commissions for the Museum of Military Affairs in Beijing. The Museum commissioned Chen Yifei (1946- 2005) and Wei Jiangshan’s (b. 1943) The Taking of the Presidential Palace, in 1977, a

175 See Poshyananda, 1992: 160-5. 176 See Mackinolty, 1997: 71. 177 Bown, 1991: 49. 178 Bown, 1991: 101. 179 Chen, (1944) 1945: 90. 180 W.A. Smith, 1935: 73. 181 Mao Zedong, (from ‘The United Front in Cultural Work’ 1944) in Schram, 1967: 174. 182 See Andrews, 1994, Appendix 4. They were Gao Hong and He Kongde. 183 Laing, 1988: 34. 102 mammoth work of 335 x 466 cm (incidentally, chosen by Maksimov’s student He Kongde (b. 1925)). A final example of the links again with the USSR is that the 1960 exhibition included 650 works by PLA professional and amateur artists184 – soldiers in China as in Russia were encouraged in their creativity.

In Vietnam the human element comes to the fore. The British Museum has a number of works by soldier-artists of Vietnam: Nguyen Quang Tho (1929-2001, fig. 3.41), Van Da (1928-2001) and Nguyen Cong Do (b.1930, fig. 2.23). Nguyen Quang Tho was sent to fight against the French in 1945 and began to record events through his drawings. In 1955 he was sent to Art School in Hanoi, then fought again against the Americans, achieving the rank of colonel. Van Da who was in the army for forty-three years was also sent to Art School in Hanoi, and again recorded aspects of daily life. Nguyen Cong Do fought against the French then joined the poster propaganda section and again was sent by the government to Art School.185 Boi Tran Huynh gives the example of Nguyen Thanh Chau (b.1939) who studied in Kiev for four years, and then, in 1964, was sent south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He told her “The morale was high. We soldier-artists felt thrilled with our task, witnessing the battle. On the other hand, our troops felt honoured at having soldier-artists in the company, our drawings glorified their sacrifice and even their death.”186 The army these men joined was a guerrilla one, without the infrastructure to make a more formal nexus of art and military seen in the Soviet Union and then the PRC.

Soldier-artists are not uncommon in the fight for independence in Asia. In Indonesia Sudjojono led a group of sixty students as a guerrilla group in 1948,187 and he painted iconic scenes such as Guerrilla guards of 1949 (see fig. 3.51), alongside Harijadi Sumodidjojo (1919-97) whose famous painting At Malioboro also of 1949 (see fig. 3.52) was made when he was a soldier actively fighting against the Dutch.

5. The transmission of information from West to East

The last section of this chapter examines the methods used by artists in each relevant place to gain access to information and know about the activities elsewhere, particularly from the USSR to China, Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and from China to Vietnam and Chinese diasporas in the ‘south seas’, namely, Singapore and Malaya. This knowledge was communicated through certain favoured conduits: literal information channels, through travelling exhibitions, through international congresses, through individual travel, and through personal teaching.

184 Laing, 1988: 54. 185 http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx: accessed 16 June 2014: 186 Huynh, 2005: 173. She interviewed the artist in 2001. 187 Sidharta, 2007: 58. 103

Literal information about the culture of the Russian revolution available in Asia was primarily through books, magazines and small works of art. Russian literature, with books by Gorky, Aleksandr Serafimovich, Vasily Azhayev and Mikhail Sholokov, had been translated from the 1920s.188 In the period before the proclamation of the Republic in 1949, Lu Xun was the main activist in introducing information about Russia and its new art practice into China. He quoted Lenin’s The State and Revolution in an essay in 1927,189 translated (from the Japanese) and published the Marxist art theory of Plekhanov (The Theory of Art) in 1929 and Lunacharsky (The Theory of Art, Literature and Criticism) in 1930 and he also published Russian texts and catalogues on Soviet woodcuts (see figs. 2.32 and 2.33). In 1929 he started the Morning Flower Press to “introduce progressive literary works and woodcuts from the Soviet Union, eastern and northern Europe and other Western countries”.190 At the end of his life he published a volume of the prints of left-wing German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945, fig. 2.34). According to Li Hua, in 1934 “he printed his Soviet woodcuts in Japan in a small edition of only 300 copies and called them The Attracting Jade Collection”.191 Li Hua writes that Lu Xun obtained “Soviet woodcuts through a Chinese writer Cao Jinghua, who was living there, exchanging Chinese Xuan paper for them with Soviet woodcutters”.192 Further visual material came through the artist Xu Beihong (1895-1953) who travelled to Russia in 1933-4 with a touring exhibition of Chinese art. He “reported in detail on the situation of exhibition activities in Russia …”, introduced the Russian Itinerant School to China, and brought back “numerous works [reproductions] of the Itinerant artists”.193

The 1950s saw an avalanche of information coming from Russia into the PRC. Specifically for visual art, in August 1950 People’s Fine Art reproduced Russian (Repin) and Soviet works of art and included articles such as ‘Realism is the progressive methodology in the creative arts’.194 Art, the journal of the All-Chinese Federation of Literature and Art, which was published from January 1954, included Soviet images, as well as Stalin’s definition of Socialist Realism in March 1954, and a later edition gave specific instructions in realist history oil painting.195 Lü Peng writes that “the magazine regularly serialised Soviet theoretical articles about art and these became classic documents studied by Chinese painters.”196 In January 1957, Konstantin Maksimov published an article ‘Oil painting and oil painting teaching’ in Art, and it became very well known to Chinese students. Between 1952 and 1956 CAFA in Beijing and Hangzhou

188 Ng, 1988: 274. See fig. 2.31 of Serafimovich’s translated work. 189 Wang, 1984: 223. 190 Wang, 1984: 232. 191 Li Hua, 1982: 103. 192 Li Hua, 1982: 102. 193 Lü, 2010: 249. When in Moscow, in April 1934, he had demonstrated Chinese brush painting, with one of his famous horse images. 194 Lü, 2010: 495. 195 Lü, 2010: 501-3. 196 Lü, 2010: 501. 104 published eighty books with translation, analyses and surveys of Soviet art and theory.197As Xu Beihong had brought back Itinerant School reproductions, so artists who had been to the USSR in the 1950s “brought back the textbooks used in the middle schools attached to some of the art academies in the Soviet Union, which subsequently served as basic textbooks for painting classes in all Chinese schools”, notably the Chistyakov method of drawing.198

From 1950 to 1954, China was the only country providing military aid to Hanoi. Thousands of Chinese cadres arrived there and indoctrination sessions were instigated in the Viet Bac zone. These included classes in “political criticism, self-criticism and political-military teaching”199 with Mao’s talks at Yan’an translated into Vietnamese and printed by the State publishing house The Truth (Su That).200 However, as Phoebe Scott argues, little actual visual art or artists crossed the border,201 again an indication that words rather than images are easier to transport. The USSR provided help to Vietnam after 1954, and this grew in the 1960s, accelerating when the USA initiated bombardment in 1965. Again, the links to Western Europe remained in Vietnamese consciousness and their interest in its art facilitated through publications coming from the Soviet Union.202

However anti-Communist the authorities were in Malaya and Singapore, the art world was led by artists who had trained in China and, for various (family and political) reasons, migrated particularly to Singapore, and they knew both the art being made in China as well as in Russia. Leaders in this Nanyang diaspora who had direct experience of art in China included (1906-91), (1917-83), Georgette Chen (1907-93), Lim Hak Tai (1893- 1963) and Liu Kang (1911-2004).203 Information from China also came into Singapore through Chinese bookshops. Lee Kuan Yew writes that in the late 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution was at its height, the Bank of China in Singapore gave out pro Cultural Revolution pamphlets, and Chinese stamps and Little Red Books were available: “We arrested and prosecuted our

197 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 148. 198 Lü, 2010: 496. Pavel P. Chistyakov (1832-1919) had his teaching on drawing published in China in the 1950s. This formed the base of the CAFA curriculum in mid 1950s. 199 Huynh, 2005: 134. 200 Huynh, 2005: 147. 201 Scott, 2012: 183, 228. She gives the poignant picture of To Ngoc Van teaching at the Resistence Class with just one text hastily gathered on flight from Hanoi, a Histoire de l’art, from France (234). 202 See Taylor, 2004: 86. Picasso and Van Gogh were particularly popular because of the former’s Communism and the latter’s ‘suffering’. 203 Chen Wen Hsi: born Guangdong 1902, studied Shanghai, taught Shantou, arrived Singapore 1947, died 1992; Cheong Soo Pieng: born , studied Amoy and Shanghai, arrived Singapore 1946; Georgette Chen: studied Paris, in China in 1930s and 40s, arrived Singapore 1951; Lim Hak Tai: born Fujian, studied Fuzhou, taught at Amoy, arrived in Singapore 1937; and Liu Kang: born Fujian, studied in Shanghai and Paris, taught in Shanghai, arrived Malaya 1937. The most important was Liu Kang, who had training at the Shanghai Academy of Art under the leader of the modernist movement there, Liu Haisu (see Liu Kang at 87, 1997, 11, for the interest Liu Haisu showed in Liu Kang). Liu Kang’s family was living Malaya and he travelled to and fro, but was back in Shanghai in 1933, aged only twenty-three, teaching at the Academy, where he was noted for his encouragement of the en plein air technique. At the time of Japanese invasion in 1937 he was in Malaya again, and he stayed and became a mainstay of Singaporean art in the 1950s in particular as well as in later decades. With him on this same direct, educated Chinese trajectory was Chen Wen Hsi (see Nanyang 1950-65; Passage to Singaporean Art, 2002: 4, 6, 38 and 39). Georgette Chen had been in Shanghai in the 1930s, and had married Eugene Chen, Chiang Kaishek’s associate and father of Jack Chen who had studied and worked in Moscow. 105 own citizens who indulged in this frenzy.”204 Information also came directly from Russia: viz, the very Academically conservative painting of a still-life made in 1959, which includes a Soviet art book as part of it (fig.2.35)205 The Singaporeans published their own left-wing magazines, including the Singapore Machine and Engineering Employees Union Fifth Anniversary Souvenir Magazine of 1960, with the cover showing a worker with a hammer in his hand striding out in front of a large red and white flag, with a sea of red flags beneath his feet.206

In Indonesia, an exhibition of Soviet art from Russia included Jakarta on its international tour in 1956 (it also travelled to Pyongyang in 1958 and Colombo in 1959).207 In this same year Sudjojono sketched his first meeting of Parliament, annotated “First day, first meeting, of the first House of Representatives elected by the people, 20 March 1956. Gorky was born on this very day in 1845.”208

Charles Merewether writes about Australia in the 1930s, where groups:

… took on the voice of the people and ‘proletarianized’ themselves in their zeal to be in accord with the oppressed. For them, communism would lead the way but from within the working-class ranks. An enormous body of literature poured into the country … Still more literature appeared about the progress of the Soviet Union – pages full of smiling faces of its youth, and the heroic endeavour of men and woman labouring in solidarity, radiant with optimism and a faith in socialism.209

As early as 1931 artist Noel Counihan attended lectures of Friends of the Soviet Union, read both the Communist Manifesto and John Reed’s Ten days that shook the world210 and then joined the Young Communist League.211 USSR in Construction was well known (see figs 2.8 and 2.9).212

The posters made in the 1970s were an important part of Australian art, very much responding to the strong visual examples known from the PRC through bookshops and through individual politically-motivated colleagues. Chips Mackinolty, writing in 1997, describes the role of the

204 Lee, 2000: 575. 205 I am grateful to Yu Jin Seng for this image. 206 Reproduced in Tham, 2013: 47. 207 See Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 411. 208 Sidharta, 2006: 70. 209 Merewether, 1984: 11. 210 Robert Smith, 1981: 22. 211 Smith, 1981: 22. 212 Merewether, 1984: 56. Proletariat, the publication of the University of Melbourne Labour Club, 1933, encourages its readership in 1933 to read both USSR in Construction and Reed’s book.The overt soft diplomacy through art before the ‘iron curtain’ came down is exemplified by the a group of small photo-reproductions of Soviet artworks given to the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia in 1943, presented by the Soviety Society for Cultural Relations (VOKS). I am grateful to Alison Inglis for alerting me to this collection. 106

East Wind Bookshop in Sydney “a Maoist front” which gave the city its “imagery of the Chinese poster,” as well as other sources from as far afield as Cuba and the USA distributed through “places like the Third World Bookshop”213 (see figs. 2.36 and 2.37). Ann Newmarch (b. 1945) in Adelaide refers to Flinders University’s politics department as an important source of information for her imagery (see fig. 2.38).214 In Melbourne, Geoff Hogg describes how Chinese art could be seen through reproductions and posters, through Alice’s Bookshop in Prahran, as well as through the Worker Student Alliance and the Monash University Labor Club whose members had visited China in 1967 and brought images back.215 The Australia China Friendship Association was another key organisation making links with China. Hogg tells how bookshops in Melbourne and Adelaide had access to books printed in China showing Huxian peasant art, and how, in 1976 the Ewing Gallery at Melbourne University showed Huxian posters, an exhibition organised by Rachel Faggetter who had taught in China in the early years of that decade.216

Art works had also been moving from Russia to the east for decades, though in much fewer numbers than printed imagery. Modern Boy Modern Girl, the exhibition of early twentieth century Japanese art held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1998, included the portrait of Kurahara Korehito holding Pravda painted in 1928 by Isshu Nagata (1903-88). Kurahara had been to the Soviet Union in 1925 and studied Marxism and literature.217 This was the period when, after an initial exhibition of Russian painting in Japan in 1920, in 1927 a committee, headed by Trotsky’s sister O.D. Kameneva and including Lunacharsky, organised an exhibition of Workers and Farmers New Russian Art to travel to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. It included 387 works in the newly emerging Soviet style which proved influential to the fledgling ‘proletarian’ artists’ movement in Japan.218

A Selection of New Russian Paintings was brought to China in 1930, accompanied by a publication prepared by Lu Xun. His role spreading the knowledge of Russian, and other European woodcuts, included showing them, particularly in Shanghai, and publishing them in five volumes. In mid-1933, Modern Artists Woodcuts, including nineteen from Russia, were shown, followed in December that year by Russian and French Woodcut Illustrations.219 More particularly, in 1936 an exhibition of Soviet Graphic Art came, reviewed by Lu Xun,220 which

213 Mackinolty, 1997: 69. 214 Conversation with the artist ,11 December, 2013, at artist’s studio, Adelaide. 215 Geoff Hogg ‘An interconnected cultural practice’ in Hogg and Sharp (eds), 2010: 15. 216 Geoff Hogg ‘An interconnected cultural practice’ in Hogg and Sharp (eds), 2010: 16. 217 See Mizusawa, 1998: 103 and catalogue no. 113, reproduced on page 173. 218 This is somewhat contentious. The nature of the committee indicates the intention of the works, and Tsutomu Mizusawa is unequivocal in stating (1998: 100), “The great influence of socialist realism first introduced at the path-breaking Exhibition of Art of the New Russia held in Tokyo in May 1927 determined the tendencies within proletarian art in Japan thereafter”. However, Mayu Tsuruya (2013: 61) is more hesitant, saying the works were of ‘debatable influence’. 219 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 82. 220 Selected Works, 4: 243-5. 107 included work by Deineka, Goncharova, Georgy A. Echeistov (1897-1946) and Mikhail I. Pikov (1903-73), as well as Vladimir A. Favorsky (1886-1964) and Aleksei I. Kravchenko (1889-1940). Lu Xun notes Nikolai I. Piskarev’s (1892-1959) illustrations of Serafimovich’s Iron Flood “have long been enjoyed by many young Chinese readers” and that Dmitry I. Mitrokhin (1883-1973), Khizhinksy and Mochalov are all “previously known here” (see figs. 2.32 to 2.34).

After the founding of the PRC, exhibitions from Russia became larger and more official. In 1954 280 Soviet works were shown in Beijing at the new Soviet Exhibition Hall, accompanied by the Director of the Pushkin Museum, Aleksandr Zamoshkin who gave lectures in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and .221 The exhibition travelled to Shanghai in 1955. In 1957, an exhibition of Soviet Woodcuts, Pictorial Posters, Bookplates and Reproductions, with 286 woodcuts, by Kravchenko, Semyon A. Pavlov (1893-1941), Goncharova and others were shown,222 and in 1958 an exhibition of Works by Soviet Artists 1955-57 was in Beijing, while in the same year a joint exhibition from Beijing and Moscow of 107 Chinese and 153 Soviet works was organised.

Some Chinese painting was seen in Russia, part of the soft diplomacy of these years. The exhibition that took Xu Beihong to Russia in 1933 had been organised by him and André Dezarrois to be shown first at the Jeu de Paume then in , Moscow and Leningrad. It included 191 works.223 In October 1950 an exhibition of mostly traditional work, and a ‘modest selection’ of contemporary work, especially graphics and using Chinese techniques, toured Moscow and Leningrad,224 then in 1951 went to Berlin and .

Individual travel was an important part of this information trail, usually supported by the state after 1950 – an activity only matched by American grants for artists to come to the United States.225 Arts leaders in China in charge of new art institutions were sent promptly to learn in person in the Soviet Union. In 1950 Yan Han (1916-2011), from CAFA, and Wang Yeqiu, in charge of the new Museum of the Revolution, visited, 226 and in 1954 a group of artists representing the Chinese Ministry of Culture travelled there. They included Jiang Feng (1910- 82), Wang Zhaowen (1909-2004), Cai Ruohong (1910-2002) and Wang Shikuo (1911-73), toured for fifty days,227 seeing “good quality oil paintings in public buildings”, noting their popularity with the audience, meeting artists and carrying on exchanges.228 In late 1954 the

221 Lü, 2010: 502. 222 Li Hua, (1982) 1995: 148. 223 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 109. 224 Iskusstvo, 6, 1950: 11-31 ‘An Exhibition of the People’s Republic of China’, see Baudin: 242 and 254, note 26. 225 The Asian Cultural Program (later Council), launched in 1963 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, is notable for its focus on supporting Asian artists to experience America rather than vice-versa. 226 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 147; Hung, 2007: 786. 227 Andrews, 1994: 149. 228 Lü, 2010: 501. 108

President of the Soviet Artists Union, Aleksandr Gerasimov, visited Beijing, held an exhibition of his watercolour work made in China, and spoke on art of socialist countries.

Travel to the Soviet Union from the Asia Pacific region more widely was undertaken by leaders and ordinary citizens through these years. In Vietnam, from1975 onward there were delegations to Leningrad, , Berlin and Budapest.229 Jennifer Lindsay and Maya H.T. Liem have edited a selection of essays that outline the various cultural delegations, mostly of performers, going from Indonesia to ‘the world’ but mostly to the socialist world, from 1950 to 1965.230 President Sukarno himself had visited Moscow in 1956 and had been impressed by the work of Matvei Manizer, Vice President of the USSR Academy of the Arts from 1947-66. This led to the invitation for Manizer to come to Indonesia and devise a new statue for the President. An account of eight Australians travelling to Moscow in 1934 for the May Day Celebrations, including his account of Soviet art, is given by W.A. Smith.231

The last area to be discussed here is literal training or teaching. This was undertaken mostly by artists from Asia travelling to the USSR, but the Russians did send a number of teachers to the East whose impact was considerable. The idea of this international training was devised in the early years. Dutchman Henk Sneevliet, who went to Indonesia in 1913 and founded the forerunner of the first Marxist party in Asia, attended the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 and proposed then that Asian Communists be brought to Russia for training.232

Some two dozen artists from China were sent to Russia in the 1950s for long-term training. They included Luo Gongliu who studied at the Repin Academy from 1955-8 and was the first to return,233 and Wu Biduan (b.1926) there from 1956-9.234 The cessation of relations led to the last group returning in 1962. Others at the Repin Academy included Li Tianxiang (b.1928), Chen Zunsan (b. 1929), Lin Gang (b.1925), Quan Shanshi (b.1930) and Xiao Feng (b. 1932). All had impeccable party credentials.235

A number of teachers came to Asia from Russia. The most significant was Konstantin Maksimov who arrived on 19 February 1955 and stayed until 1957. He was part of the freeing of international exchange in 1955 by Khrushchev (which included Petr S. Sulimenko (1914-96) going to Burma).236 Professor of the important Surikov Academy, Maksimov taught twenty

229 Taylor, 2004, 86. 230 Lindsay and Liem, 2012. 231 W.A. Smith, 1935. A chapter ‘’The Development of Art in the USSR’ is 67-72. He was one of eight Australian delegates, among 300 international visitors, invited to the 1934 May Day Celebrations in Moscow, a trip that cost him his job. 232 Williams, 1980: np. 233 Andrews, 1994: 150; Andrews and Shen, 1998: 229. 234 Andrews, 1994: 150. 235 Andrews, 1994: 150-1. 236 Bown, 1998: 337. 109 students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and left an indelible mark in China. Andrews and Shen note that “by 1980 directors of all six major art academies [in China] were either Soviet trained or Maksimov students”.237 Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957) has written how much he, as a young painter in China, learnt from this one man.238 Maksimov based his course on the Soviet oil painting curriculum and methods, helped CAFA standardise its own teaching, based on Chistyakov, and he published his ideas. Nikolai Klindukhov, in the sculpture area, was central to organising for Qian Shaowu (b.1928), Dong Zuzhao, Wang Keping (b.1949), Cao Chunsheng (b.1960) and Situ Zhaoguang (b.1940) to study in the USSR.239 As well as these Russians in their midst, Chinese teachers at CAFA with Soviet practice were esteemed over those with European or Japanese training.240

Maksimov’s significance is extreme, particularly as he was the main Soviet art expert to come to China in these years when The Soviet Advisors’ Program was at its height and thousands came. Deborah A. Kaple in ‘Soviet Advisors in China in the 1950s’ notes the scale of this cohort that reflected the Chinese and Soviets’ belief that “it was crucially important for their cooperation to be centrally planned, integrating technical, educational, economic, and military support”.241 Most of these ‘thousands’ of experts were in industry or higher education and in Beijing, the last two descriptors aligning with Maksimov’s stay, though the actual paucity of art advisor numbers is noteworthy given the importance placed on the visual arts.

It is with training that Vietnam’s handling of the delicate relationship with Russia and China is very clear. Chinese cultural workers were sent to Vietnam from 1950,242 but the preference for training from the Vietnamese side was far greater towards the Soviet Union than to China – partly because of that undercurrent of European sensibility. Huynh says of the ninety-one Vietnamese artists undertaking overseas training from the 1950s to 1999, only six chose China.243 Of those in Europe thirty-two went to Russia itself, most others to variously Hungary, Ukraine, , Poland, and so on. Leading artist and critic Nguyen Quan (b. 1948), and Nguyen Cong Do were two who studied in East Germany. Forty Vietnamese artists and critics had graduated from this Soviet bloc by 1975, including Nguyen Phuoc Sanh, director of College of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City from 1975 to 1988. He had graduated in 1965 from the National Fine Arts College Moscow. Another reckoning suggests that fourteen Vietnamese artists studied at art colleges in the USSR between 1980 and 2005, including Vu Duy Nghia (b.1935), Ngo Manh Lau, Le Huy Tiep (b. 1951), Le Thanh Minh (b.1954), Le Lam (b.1931) and

237 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 151. 238 See Andrews, 2009, 66. The Shanghai Art Museum held an exhibition in 2002 of Cai’s art based on Maksimov’s painting. Cai had been able to buy Maksimov’s work cheaply in Russia, see Andrews pp. 53 and 54. 239 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 147. 240 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 148. 241 Kaple, 1998: 117, 120. 242 See Huynh, 2005: 145. 243 Huynh, 2005: 147. 110

Tran Gia Bich.244 Le Thanh Minh studied at the Surikov National Institute, Moscow, graduating in 1983. Nora Taylor notes that even though the Soviet Union had lost much status after 1975, artists still wanted to study there because it was ‘international’ and gave professionalism to their work and career. 245 As in China, it was the artists with impeccable political credentials who were awarded these opportunities.

The situation in Cambodia has its own particular chronology. It was only in the 1980s during the Vietnamese occupation that Cambodian artists began to be sent to the Soviet Union for training. Due to language as well as art training, they stayed for seven to nine years, coming back to a very changed country under United Nations control, where, writes Roger Nelson, evidence of their Soviet-training was ‘ideologically unwelcome’.246 It is reminiscent of Vietnam after 1975 where observing ‘a work looked Russian meant the work… had no redeeming qualities’.247

Russia also sent teachers to Vietnam, but none had the impact of the French directors of the École or of Maksimov in Beijing. At the Fine Arts College “from 1960 Mr Kuznesov taught painting, Mr Ghivi taught sculpture and Mr Iakovlev taught Marxism-Leninism at the College of Theories” and Soviet and Chinese books, magazines and films were available.248 Others included Ilya Glazunov (b.1939) who was sent by Moscow in 1967 at the height of the American war. He said he went because no “more loyal” artist would go.249

The role of the mentor is particular. It is of relevance that the teachers of young artists, even in Sydney, had strong political beliefs. Chips Mackinolty writes that his screen print teacher at the Student Underground Movement was Jim Percy “a loud-mouthed, earnest Trotskyist, but to me a bike-riding, wise and exotic figure.”250 Mackinolty describes the passion of these young people in their political work, making images and “dodging the cops at night across the suburbs of Sydney, armed with brushes and flour and water paste to get the message out”. 251

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The aim of this chapter has been to demonstrate the influence of the political and arts leaders on the role of art in both the Soviet Union and the Asia Pacific region. This influence had

244 http://home.thanglongartgallery.com/ Thang Long Gallery. 245 Taylor, 2004: 87-8. 246 Email from Roger Nelson, Phnom Penh, 8 August 2013. 247 See Taylor, 2004: 87. 248 Huynh, 2005: 167. 249 www.russipedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/art/ilya-glazunov. 250 Mackinolty, 1997: 68. Deborah Mills (email to author 25 September 2016) notes the im;portance of mentors like George Seelaf, inaugural Secretary of the Meat Workers’ Union and a membere of the Community Party to artists as various as Noel Counihan and Ric Amor, as well as to her. 251 Mackinolty, 1997: 69. 111 various intensities of outcome, strongest in the Communist countries but also significant in other countries of the region. The structure of analysis of these outcomes - through public manifestation, control of artists’ lives and usage of particular artistic materials, followed by a focus on the elite/amateur discourse, regionalism, the collective, and the importance of the army, and last, a description of the various methods of information transmission – is intended to build, brick by brick, a scenario articulating the full breadth and depth of the impact of the Soviet practice of art. The numerous parts lead to an understanding of the impact of the whole, not usually analysed in a Western art historical context, but underlying the importance of the art made through this experience.

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Chapter 3. The Art: The influence of Soviet Socialist Realism on the art of the Asia Pacific region, 1917-1975.

This chapter analyses the impact of the Russian Soviets on the art of the Asia Pacific region from the 1920s to the mid-1970s. The effect is as diverse as the region itself, but central for much of the important art made during this period. The influence of the Russians on China was extreme, overturning past traditions with swiftness and might. As Boris Groys has written about Russia, the strength of the response was only possible because of the desire of the intelligentsia and the people for change, and art was both a means towards and a result of this desire. Groys has argued that Western Europe never responded to revolution in the same way because of its evolving experience of historical change.1 In China, the idealism of young people for a new society is palpable in reportage, in writing and in art. When the political leaders advocated for a new art, young artists responded. The response in Vietnam was also of consequence, but more muted according to its different past experience of visual arts engagement with outside influences. In the non-Communist countries responses to the ideology and visual imagery of Socialist Realism was surprisingly potent - as well as diverse. The Japanese used both the Academic history painting ethos of Gerasimov as well as the stark stylised designs of El Lissitzky during World War II. The same practice of past Academic history painting was used by the Filipinos in this mid-century period to show both current suffering and ultimate triumph, and the Indonesians celebrated the strength of resistance to invading forces in large oil paintings that led to the later visual achievements of the 1980s and 1990s that, it is argued here, derive from the heroic, nationalistic, ideologically driven, generic forms called Socialist Realism created in Russia and transformed through China.

This chapter focuses on art made around World War II, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the time of the push of the Soviet Comintern for influence in the East, the resulting Cold War, and the independence movements in Vietnam and South and Southeast Asia. It is a central part of this thesis. This discussion is continued in Chapter 4, where the focus shifts to art made during the period from the mid-1970s to recent times, following the impact of Socialist Realism more recently particularly in China, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia. It is in this latter period that marks the culmination of the argument regarding Socialist Realism’s importance in Asia.

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1 See discussion in Chapter 1. 113

This thesis has the phrase Socialist Realism in its title, specifically referring to the style articulated by various Russians who either instructed or described its attributes: Lenin that it reveal class, ideology, and party consciousness, Stalin and Gorky that it be socialist in content, realist in style, and Zhdanov describing its emotional quality, its need to inspire.

In practice a wide degree of interpretation was possible both in Russia and later in the Asia Pacific region. The style is central to this discussion. However, hovering around the phrase Socialist Realism is ‘social realism’, a more fluid and open ended descriptor than the politically specific appellation of the Soviets. It often describes the more intimate, personal, frequently small imagery of social suffering, compared with the triumphant overtly Party political Socialist Realism. Bernard Smith is one of those who has wished to articulate the difference, in 1984 writing “For me there has always been a clear distinction between social realism and socialist realism; one is an art of criticism, the other an art of hero-worship”,2 or, in other words, one of critique of society and the other endorsement, but, again, these phrases morph under temporal and cultural pressures nearly as much as the ‘ism’s’ of Western art history.

1. Social realism in the Asia Pacific region

This chapter is constructed chronologically. The discussion begins with social realism, distinct from Socialist Realism, because it was both a preliminary style and also pervades the period in question. The social realist woodcuts made in China particularly prior to 1950, and then throughout the Asia Pacific region, owed their parentage in large part to Soviet and other left- wing European artists like Kollwitz – though also bearing in mind traditional woodcut practice especially in East Asia3 and the interest many of these ‘Western’ artists had in non-Western Academic art practices. An example is Natalia Goncharova’s interest in folk art and the art of the ‘East’ (see fig. 1.7).

Lu Xun, as the foremost chronicler of the importance of these woodcuts in China, and the main activist to introduce them to his followers and promote them, commended the Exhibition of Soviet Graphic Art, in Shanghai in 1936. He wrote of the “truthfulness” (including the fine-line detailing) of Favorsky’s work and his associates Deineka, Goncharova, Echeistov and Pikov, while the work of Kravchenko rouses the ‘slovenly’ Chinese artists from their ‘empty’ abstract

2 See Bernard Smith, 1988, in ‘The Truth about the Antipodeans’, published in The Death of the Artist as Hero: 201. 3 See Carroll, 2010: 56. Traditional woodcut practice in China in the early twentieth-century had withered to the extent that Lu Xun felt the need to introduce practical classes for young artists in Shanghai (see fig. 5.4), but with a Japanese printmaker, who in actuality came from a very different traditional woodcut practice of cutting along the grain rather than across it. This makes for a much smoother, less expressionistic result. It is of note that the Chinese printmakers stayed with the rough, across-the-grain woodcut technique and resulting style of the Europeans. 114 practices (where ‘two dabs represent an eye, whether long or round; one stroke represents a bird’ and so on). He finished the review thus:

Now these two hundred works have made a splendid appearance in Shanghai. As graphic art they may seem to us less delicate than French wood-cuts, less vigorous than German; but they are truthful without pedantry, beautiful without effeminacy, joyful without wantonness, forceful without coarseness. They are not tranquil, however. They make us conscious of a certain tremor – a tremor like that caused by the firm footsteps of a great company of comrades-in-arms as they advance, step by step, across the firm, bounteous black earth on the road of construction.4

Links between East and West were diverse. While European social realist woodcuts have a long Western European parentage, they were often made under the influence of Marxist ideals, as well as the alternative practices of folk or non-Western derived woodcutting. While particularly Kollwitz’s work was known in East Asia, the full impact on imagery there occurred through the strong communication between post-Revolutionary Russia and its Comintern and other culturally persuasive international links especially to China.

These woodcuts in China evolved over the years, with images by many, various artists made throughout the country. In the beginning, the wood-engraving fineness of some of the Russian work, like that of Favorsky, was dominant (fig. 3.1). The woodcut school in the south of China, around Guangzhou, was famous, led by the master of expressive graphic line Li Hua (fig. 3.2). These more emotive black and white, usually small, images were made using the roughness of the gouge in the wood itself to highlight the immediacy and rawness of the scene. A simple image, rough-hewn, of thick black ink on a small piece of white paper was the most frequent outcome. Subject matter usually was of single scenes or a single person, often showing simple life in the countryside, though others showed suffering through war, poverty, despair and upheaval: mothers losing children; landlords evicting tenants, or starvation (fig. 3.3). As Lu Xun described in the Russian works (though for him it was a positive force), these latter woodcuts made in China from the 1920s to the 1940s had added poignancy because the audience knew the reality of the social conditions depicted. Thousands were made in China, sent around the country in exhibitions seen by millions. These works and those directly from Russia in turn had impact, though of various strength, throughout the rest of Asia. Gradually the work simplified, the subjects became less complex, the lines became thicker and the gestures more extreme. This was particularly so after Mao’s Yan’an Talks encouraging Chinese artists to look to their

4 Lu Xun, (1936) 1960: 244-5. 115 own traditions, usually in the woodcuts or papercuts of folk art, an area further discussed in Chapter 5.

The response in the rest of Asia to ‘social realism’ per se was various, as will be discussed below. Bengalis and Australians received their social realist woodcut examples more directly from Russia and socialist or at least left-wing Europe. Other countries of the region, like the Philippines and Indonesia, had never had a strong graphic or works-on-paper tradition, and while some social realist woodcuts were made they are not of the visual importance of their more theatrical oil painting.

It is useful to start this analysis more closely on the Malay peninsula. Malaya does not enter this thesis frequently. However, the (often expatriate) Chinese artists in Kuala Lumpur and Penang pre-War were responsible for starting the art associations that began the career paths of many artists there. Malaysian artist and writer Redza Piyadasa has described his conversation in 1993 with Chuah Thean Teng (1912-2008), who, pre-War, “was inspired to produce woodcut prints for the local Chinese newspapers”saying “Chinese artists here were aware of the developments in China. His pre-War interest in woodcuts was fuelled by books and periodicals arriving from China”.5 The educational impulse towards a modern idea of art practice came from these Chinese rather than the colonising British or the indigenous Malays.6 After the War the focus in the new Malaya turned to abstraction.

The situation in Singapore was different. The artists who had strong links to the new revolutionary art of the time in Shanghai became part of the new Nanyang Academy established in 1946. However, the interest in depicting the downtrodden of Singaporean society was taken up by the next, locally-born or raised, generation. These young artists, calling themselves ‘realists’ and establishing the Equator Art Society, were inspired by the Lu Xun woodcut movement and made many prints themselves, as well as cartoons circulated through magazines. The prints use the rough outlines possible in woodcut seen in other works in both China and the Soviet Union, but their interest lies in their subject matter, made at a time of change in Southeast Asia, rather than their artistic achievement.7 An example is Choo Keng Kwang (b.1931) woodcut 5-1-3 about the vigorous physical confrontation of students with police on 13 May 1955 (fig. 3.4).

The Indian subcontinent remains as elusive in this text as the Malay peninsula. Though the ideology of Marxism or Communism spread in India and a number of artists were attracted to

5 Piyadasa, 1994: 26-7. 6 Piyadasa, 1994, 26, compares this British reluctance in this area with the Spanish in Manila and Dutch in Indonesia. 7 Examples are in Fukuoka Fine Arts Museum, for example by Chookeng Kwang, Lim Mu Hue and Tan Tee Chie – see Nanyang, 2002: 6. 116 it, its specific art did not follow as a significant movement.8 There was sympathy for the down- trodden, and depictions of their plight, but the iconography came from Western Europe rather than Socialist Realist Russia or post-1949 China. Geeta Kapur has described individual practitioners like Ram Kumar (b.1924), in Delhi, “influenced by the leftist milieu of postwar Paris, and the Mexico-returned, Orozco-inspired Satish Gujral (b. 1925) who, like his peer [M.F.] Husain, drew upon what would be called the left-liberal culture of the Indian state in the Nehruvian period to gain a public artist persona.”9 A typicpal work by Gujral is Despair of

1954, overtly influenced by left-wing Mexican artists (fig.3.5). While there were passing groups of leftist artists forming particularly in Bombay and Bengal, the art made was mostly by individuals loosely associated with them and if overtly politically in content it was comparatively meagre in both volume and energy.

The Progressive Writers’ Association had published a manifesto in Lucknow in 1936 often seen as the first call to arms to creative practitioners to put into action the ideas of an international revolutionary socialism. It called for stories of the “obscure lanes and alleys of our towns and villages”.10 Socially-focused groups of artists formed such as the Calcutta Group in 1943 (that included Gobardhan Ash’s (1907-96) depictions of poverty) but it dissipated in a short time. The Progressive Artists Movement (PAG) in Bombay from 1948 payed lip-service to an alternative route from the establishment, including a new way of practice (for example, exhibiting in unconventional locations), but the artists became impatient with the dictatorial nature of their political confrères and left.11 PAG practice was always about individual responses to the issues of their particular day. F.N. Souza (1924-2002) was the only member of the PAG specifically interested in Marxism, writing “during those years, even when I was at art school I had begun to study Marxism and socialist literature, for I was much disturbed and moved by the overwhelming poverty and condition of the masses of India, and immediately after my expulsion [from art school] I joined the Communist Party of India [in 1945]”. However, his work did not suit the Party as the Party, in the end, did not suit him. He wrote “on one occasion, some top members of the Party, including the Secretary, descended on a one man show of mine and denounced it, purged it as a manifestation of bourgeois aesthetics, unfit for the proletarian cause.”12 By 1949 he would write “we have changed all the chauvinist ideas and the leftists’ fanaticism which we had incorporated in our manifesto at the inception of the Group… Today we paint with absolute freedom for content and techniques almost

8 Leading Indian artist and educator K.G. Subramanyan’s book The Living Tradition; Perspectives on Modern Indian Art of 1987, is a good example. He writes in a wide-ranging manner of the visual culture of east and west and mentions Marxism as a “progressive thought system” (65 and 89), but there is no reference to Marxist art. 9 See Geeta Kapur ‘A Stake in Modernity: Brief History of Contemporary Indian Art’ in Turner (ed.), 1993: 35-6. 10 Dalmia, 2001: 39. 11 Dalmia, 2001: 42: “Left-oriented cultural groups tended to be somewhat Stalinist in their over-determination of art practices.” The PAG had had its first meetings in the office of the Friends of the Soviet Union at Girgaum in Bombay. 12 Quoted in Dalmia, 2001: 43. 117 anarchic …”13 While a member he had painted images of ‘labourers in the fields, in factories, beggars and prostitutes… with titles like The Criminal and the Judge are made of the Same Stuff and After Work the Whole Day in the Fields We Have No Rice to Eat’ (fig. 3.6).14

In Bengal from the beginning of the century, artists were attracted to an alternative path for art from the establishment European Academy. It was the ideas of ‘others’ - whether religious groups, or national art styles (like that of the Japanese), or social groups (like the local ‘tribal’ people, the Santhals) or ideologies other than Western capitalism (like socialism) – that were promulgated through art circles such as those supported at Shantiniketan by the Tagore family. Nandalal Bose (1882-1966) at Shantiniketan saw the use of woodcuts as a means of communication of such ideas and encouraged their practice. Bose introduced graphic studies into the curriculum at Shantiniketan in 1920-1 and he influenced many artists including B.B. Mukherjee (1904-80) through this.15 He and Ramkinkar Baij (1906-80) also made posters for the Non-Cooperation movement in the 1930s, but he himself always maintained his own stylised, simplified forms. Later, a number of artists in Bengal working for the Communist Party or called Communists by their peers, particularly Somnath Hore (1921-2006), Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-78) and Zainul Abedin, took up printmaking, choosing to wield the “burin and the bully to depict the wounds of ‘Hungry Bengal’ and arouse the patriotic fervour of an enslaved people.”16

Party member Hore, who has become a well-known printmaker internationally, made early woodcuts of working people and political protest, including imagery of the Tebhaga Movement around 1946, a movement led by the Communist Party in north Bengal that sought a revision of the crop-sharing system.17 Another Party member and print-maker Chittaprosad made pen drawings of political life of the 1940s often for Party magazines, as well as of the Bengal Famine. He also made relief prints of these unfortunate people: his linocut of Orphans uses the visual impact of the black and white lines to give strength to the image of three crouching children (fig. 3.7). Critic Kavita Singh readily calls his work ‘socialist realist’, showing “strong peasants and muscular workers filled with revolutionary potential”18 and Abul Monsur in 2012

13 Dalmia, 2001: 43. This was written in the foreword of the catalogue of his 1949 exhibition in Bombay. 14 Dalmia, 2001: 79. This title, After Work the Whole Day in the Fields We Have No Rice to Eat, was an proposal for the painting now called Indian Family, recently sold at Christies (see http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/francis-newton-souza- untitled-5850637-details.aspx#top, accessed 3 January, 2016) for nearly $1.5 million. 15 Sengupta, 2006: 26, in her article on the evolution of printmaking in India, lists Ramendranath Chakravorty (1902-55), Mukul Dey (1895-1989), Manindra Bhushan Gupta (1898-1968), Biswarup Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, B.B. Mukherjee, Surendranath Kar (1892- 1970), Ranee Chanda, Jagdish and Kamala Mittal. 16 Sengupta, 2006: 27. 17 See Roy, 2006: 110. Roy continues on to note Hore’s self-description by the 1950s as a ‘retired communist’ disillusioned by the politics of the day. His work is today on show at the Tate Modern in London. 18 Kavita Singh, 2011: 103. This is a review of an exhibition at the Delhi Art Gallery in 2011, where the critic admits that the images themselves are not as strong as the words about the situation depicted (104). He contributed drawings and cartoons and news reports to the CPI’s publication Janajuddha (in Bangla) and People’s War (in English). He went to Bombay for the Party (see Falvo, 2012: 31). 118 refers to the influence of Soviet propaganda art on his work. 19 But apart from a slightly muscular farmer, as Singh later notes, their strongest relationship is with the imagery of Kollwitz rather than those further north.20 Equally, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury (1899-1975) responded to the idea of the ‘industrial proletariat’ in his bronze sculpture Dignity of Labour of the 1950s, showing a realistically rendered sinewy dhoti-clad labourer trying to lift a large rock, seemingly more an excuse to show the naked body under strain than any social cause.21

The most famous of the Calcutta artists is Zainul Abedin and his Bengal Famine series of 1943. The British Museum has acquired one of the series (fig. 3.8), an image of great draughtsmanship and energy. It shares a relationship with images of poverty like those of Jiang Zhaohe (1904-86, fig. 3.9),22 drawn with similar facility of in this case brush and ink, and with a similar waif-life form placed against a blank background, but the relationship is parallel rather than direct. Further, the power of Abedin’s work comes in large part from his use of the Japanese reed pen (learnt from visiting Japanese artists) and its capacity for rendering an emotionally charged line.

In Australia, many works made in the 1940s by artists like Counihan and Ambrose Dyson (1908- 52) accepted socialist ideology and depicted it by portraying the lives of the poor and the disenfranchised.23 Counihan’s 1947 series The Miners is an early demonstration of his life- long commitment to both the ideology and the imagery of dispossession and the medium of the relief print (fig. 3.10).

In Japan the left-wing artists of the 1920s and early 1930s had established the (albeit small) Proletarian Artists League in 1929.24 The left-wing artists of this group made works like Toki Okamoto’s (1903-86) oil Attack on Factory Demonstration (161 x 227 cm) of 1929, which was firmly in the social realist mode. Many young Japanese artists had been iconoclasts from early in the century, had studied in Europe and been aware of international trends, including left- wing ideology. Eitaro Ishigaki (1893-1958), who painted Undefeated Arm in 1929, had worked in left-wing circles in America. 25 The composition depicts a stylised muscular forearm holding

19 Monsur, 2012: 31. 20 Kavita Singh, 2011: 104. The main period of social realism occurred in India before Independence when the Chinese example was known but without strong contacts between the Chinese Communists and their Indian counterparts. Manoranjan Mohanty, in his 2015 book Red and Green; Five Decades of the Indian Maoist Movement: 88 ff. describes the communication primarily being through the Comintern, and then it not being extensive; by the early 1940s CCP speeches were arriving in India only by mail or through British Communist sympathisers. M.N. Roy had been the Comintern’s representative in China in the 1920s, but he broke with Communism in the late 1930s. It made for difficult communication. 21 See Amrita Gupta Singh, 2011: 36. 22 Reproduced in MCR catalogue, no.12. 23 Roger Butler has written on this period in some detail in PRINTED; images by Australian artists 1885-1955, in 2007. He notes that Counihan, Rem McClintock (1901-69), Vic O’Connor (1918-2010), Yosl Bergner (b. 1920), Nutter Buzacott and James Wigley (1918-99) in the 1940s were “all fellow Communists who had made linocuts in the social realist style” (282). 24 Tsuruya, 2013: 61. 25 See Menzies, 1998: 152: “In 1929, [he] joined to form the John Reed Club and mixed with Mexican painters including José Orozco”, himself a member of the left. 119 the symbol of the Soviet worker, the hammer, and is now deemed a ‘masterpiece’ by The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. 26 Leading artists like Ai-Mitsu (1907-46) flirted with Marxism,27 but the military reality in Japan during the 1930s gradually loomed over such sentiments.

While social realism in Japan was not popular with the establishment, during the occupation of China and notably in Manchuria, the Japanese authorities recognised the effectiveness of the social realist woodcut movement in their larger neighbour and used it there for their own ends. Indeed, even after defeat, Fumio Kitaoka (1918-2007) made a series of seventeen wood- engravings called Return to the Home Country, showing the evacuation from Manchuria. He later said he had learnt this practice from Chinese artist Tian Feng whom he had first met at the Tokyo School of Fine Art.28

The post-War situation, naturally, had impact on the art world generally inside Japan. The large pro-War paintings of the period were generally discredited, and these years called ‘art’s blank period’, with the works removed from public view and other art works changing names.29 Maki Kaneko writes of Iwao Uchida (1900-53) as an artist remembered as ‘liberal or communist’, though only joining the Communist Party in 1948, and painting one work Come Sing Along: People Protecting Culture, in that year, showing a labour strike against a well- known movie studio that had “significant mass-appeal in Japan” but his death curtailed wider activity.30

Korean art at this time is of lesser import. Its pre-War colonial status had its art firmly in the thrall of official Japan, and afterwards the Korean War took most focus away from cultural activity. Kim Youngna has written of the meagre art activity immediately after the War in the South.31 However, technically trained (in Japan) artists like Kim Kwan-ho (1890-1959) chose to live in the North when the Communists were taking control and a number of his works are

26 It is included in Masterpieces from The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, exhibition and catalogue of 2005, no.106. 27 Culver, 2013: 1, 78 ff discusses his sympathy for the proletarian movement in Japan. 28 According to Kitaoka in 1983, “on going to Andong to rejoin his family after the surrender, he unexpectedly met the Chinese artist Tian Feng at the art college there, whom he had previously known as a student from Manchuria at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts; from this friendship, he came to know the wood-engraving being practised by Chinese artists”; see: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=777279&partId=1 (accessed 15 September 2015): 29 Hirase, 2013: 229. The main collection of these war works has been ‘on loan’ to The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and in the last fifteen years have been increasingly put on view and published: an example is The Unfinished Century, 2002 which included, figs. 221-31 in the catalogue, ten of these works. The loan was from the United States followed their post-war occupation of Japan. Hirase (2013: 237) gives the example of how the sculpture of the typical triumphant man with legs apart and arm outstretched, made by the Munitions Production Art Promotion Group in 1944 now in Yubari, a mining town, was renamed after the war as The Statue of the Nation-Saving Miner. 30 Kaneko, 2013: 191. The painting (195 x 130 cm) is now in The National Museum of Modern Art. The artistic link to Russia however does not exist: Uchida had studied in Paris in the 1930s and was drawn to left-wing and Marxist ideas then. 31 Kim Youngna, 2009, notes the small number of works produced and those focused on South Koreans in battle with no collective ‘national’ feeling of patriotism. The artists wanted to ‘avoid documenting the tragedy of our people fighting against each other’. She includes Moon Hak-jin’s (b. 1924) Trench of 1953, Park Deuk-soon’s (1910-90) Suicide Squad of 1941 and his Air Force Base of 1951, Yoo Byeong-hui’s Battle on Mount Dosol of 1951 and Lee Soo-eok’s Night Battle of 1952. 120 firmly in the school of showing the plight of the poor and the reality of a new industrialised world (fig. 3.11).32

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Five works illustrated here indicate the closeness of these connections: they show the dispossessed, the orphaned, beggars for food, or the worker in poor conditions. Kollwitz’s image (fig. 2.34) is not a woodcut, rather a lithograph, but she was admired by Lu Xun for the qualities that imbue the other works. Lu Xun saw in her images of “poverty, sickness, hunger and death” more “love and pity than hatred and wrath”,33 and this follows through to the pathos of the images from China (fig. 3.2 and fig. 3.3), Bengal (fig. 3.7) and Australia (fig. 3.10) analysed here. There is personal pain in these works, enhanced by the usage of the strong dark, rough lines of the relief print. The degree of skill of Western draughtsmanship, with body structure in particular and made in a medium quite difficult to control, is evident in its variety: Li Hua able to evoke bone and sinew, exaggerated for effect, Huang Xingbo simplifying the form down to stark essential loneliness, Chittaprosad moreinterested in the contrasts of dark and light to tell his quite complex narrative, and Counihan, the most literal and least personal, living in a society where the reality of dispossession was not so dire or direct. All are small; all use relief technique in black and white with the human story central.

2. Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region

2.1 Russia and China: (a) Socialist in content

The iconography or content of Socialist Realism is an issue for discussion beyond the depictions in these works. Indeed, the issue of content in itself is seen as a central characteristic of socialist art (recognized by Stalin), setting it apart from Western European ideals of visual creation. This discussion gained focus with John Berger’s 1969 description of the eighteenth-century Russian Academy taking over Western European history painting style so completely that the only choices left to the Russian artists was in the content,34 taken further, as Gleb Prokhorov describes, to the overshadowing of all other artistic qualities in Russian art, portraying an ideal and ‘desirable, hypothetical world’.35

There is a further discussion at play here. The idea of ‘content’ itself is broad, with a range of nomenclature: abstraction in contrast to figuration for example, or portraiture in contrast to

32 See Carroll, 2010: 50-2. 33 See Sullivan, 1996: 85. 34 Berger, 1969: 26. 35 Prokhorov, 1995: 8-12, 14. 121 narrative, or landscape in contrast to , or commercial advertising in contrast to religious symbolism. The Russians chose the content of European ‘history painting’, which had a long and accepted iconographic tradition: glorifying the person and trappings of the ruler (whether sacred or secular), glorifying the past history of the culture in question, and creating an accepted visual mythology of both sovereign and civilization. The Chinese in particular adopted this practice. It is remarkable how generic the elements of ‘history’ painting were in both places. The chosen image was full of political meaning, the moment of action worked up for its heightened drama and capacity to encapsulate the desired political intention. Veracity towards ‘history’ and its telling was incidental, with the truth of the image more in what it said about the time of its production than the (past) moment on show. All of this had been well understood by European audiences since the Renaissance, translated to Russia from the eighteenth-century, and then to China. Of note however is that European audiences, well- tuned to the foibles of ‘history painting’, could enjoy the contradictions of, for example, Giovanna Battista Tiepolo’s (1696-1770) Banquet of Cleopatra now in the National Gallery of Victoria, where a blond Venetian noblewoman dressed in the fashion of the eighteenth- century is described as ‘Cleopatra’. The Russian and Chinese audiences, less educated in this play, took the imagery before them much more literally – and, as is often the case, imbued it with their own vitality.

It was within these tropes that there was choice, and it is possible to talk of these as specific subject-matter: a choice of the tractor driver or the farm girl, the specific soldier on the front, the story of a heroine, or the leader as teacher or thinker or ideologue. These artistic choices were always of local relevance.

This control would be seen negatively in the individualistic West, but not elsewhere. The idea of a communal acceptance of iconography was not antithetical to Russian or Chinese culture, and the acceptance of these dicta speaks to a long-held cultural view not accepted elsewhere.

Argued here is that ‘social realism’ shows the suffering of the poor. In this subject matter the Russian antecedent of the Wanderers or Itinerants, despite making large dramatic oil paintings, would be called social realist. The distinction of the Socialist Realists is that their iconography shows the achievements of the regime, including the inspiring leader, the heroes of recent history and the new and wonderful circumstances of the people. Looking back to historical themes (infrequent though this was), the choice of subject matter was heroic deeds of nationalists (the Rus in Russia for example), or dastardly actions of the now-fled aristocrats or clergy. In contrast, it was the present – and its glory - that was the centre of focus. Indeed, Hung Chang-tai marks this triumphalism as a distinction between Russian and Chinese Socialist

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Realist painting, with the latter stronger in this regard.36 Such strict parameters were, of course, mutable: there were occasionally less-triumphant artworks under this rubric made in both places – in China’s case the Rent Collection Courtyard is one example.

Boris Groys notes the urge of the Soviet artists to “thematize” all subject matter.37 Indeed, there seems a compulsion in left-wing art in both Russia and throughout the Asia Pacific region after this (and particularly in China), following Lenin’s declamatory style, to set down sets of iconographic ‘themes’.38 A hierarchy of iconography has been variously itemised. Zhou Yang in 1949 approved of the new “tidal wave” of ‘New Themes, New Characters, New Language, New Forms’, analysing their content in a list of 177 literary works of the time as: 101 being about the ‘War of Resistance to Japanese Aggression’, the War of Liberation and the life in the PLA, forty-one being about ‘land reform in the countryside and other anti-feudal struggles’, sixteen being about industrial and agricultural production, seven about the history of revolution, and twelve others.39 In 1951, Mao’s Secretary and Deputy Directory of the Propaganda Department, Hu Qiaomu listed the themes artists should follow in his Thirty Years of the Communist Party of China as “the martyr, the military campaign, the leader, the worker and the founding of the nation”.40 Christine Lindey articulates four themes of Socialist Realism in Russia: patriotism, the , history, and the present. 41 These were all a focus in China, but with slightly different emphases.

This discussion continues this impulse towards ‘themes’, and focusses on the leader, ‘history and patriotism’ and the farmer-worker. We begin with the leader. Russia had three major visual art traditions (folk art, the Russian Orthodox church, and Western-introduced history painting), the latter two focused on ‘great men’ – the mosaic Christ Pantocrators, with protecting arms outstretched accompanied by moral stories from the Bible well known to all Russians, and the Emperors and generals safeguarding the motherland still parading up and down the corridors of the Hermitage. So, images of Lenin and then Stalin, and the occasional general, were a natural succession, especially in the forms of strong, patriarchal leadership. Paintings of Lenin made under Stalin’s rule show him canonised – god-like – enabling continuance of this mode for Stalin himself. Aleksandr Gerasimov made the large (288 x 177 cm) painting of Lenin on the Tribune in 1929-30 (see fig. 1.1), the dynamic leader leaning out over the red flag and crowd of people like a Christ figure ascending - with his arms to his body

36 Hung, 2011: 148. 37 Groys, 2008: 144. 38 This thematic mentality was wide-spread. In November 1949, two months after the founding of the PRC, there was a directive to artists to look to traditional New Year prints for inspiration. It included: “The new prints should convey the following messages: the grand victory of the Chinese people’s war for liberation and the people’s great revolution, the establishment of the People’s Republic, the Common Program, and the recovery and progress of industrial and agricultural production …” (Hung, 2011: 182). 39 Zhou, 1954: 53-65. 40 See Hung, 2011: 13. 41 Lindey, 1990: 51ff. 123 following the best known photograph of the time (fig. 3.12). Paintings of Lenin addressing the early congresses, with his arm outstretched, like Isaak Brodski’s (1888-1939) Lenin’s Speech at the Workers’ Meeting at the Putilov Factory in May 1917 (a huge 280 x 555 cm) of 1928, are firmly in the tradition of Eugène Delacroix’s (1798-1863) Liberty Leading the People, the great revolutionary pictorial antecedent to the Russians.42 A decade later, in 1937, Arkadi A. Rylov (1870-1939) painted Lenin in Razliv, again leaning forward seemingly to his destiny; another decade on, in 1947, both Viktor G. Tsyplakov (1915-86) and Vladimir A. Serov (1910-68) painted, respectively, V. I. Lenin, another huge oil, and Lenin declares Soviet Power, again each showing him leaning out, arm extended. In sculpture the prototype was the Monument to Lenin by Sergei A. Evseev (1882-1955) and others of 1924-6 in front of Finland Station in St. Petersburg. This public leader-of-the-nation figure is paralleled by the image of the leader as thinker, alone in his study reading or writing, as befits the creator of this new society, and as befits the respect in Russia for intellectuals, and writers in particular. The most famous of these is Brodski’s Lenin at the Smolny of 1930 (fig. 3.13), translated years later, in 1950 to Serov’s Peasant Partisans Meeting V.I. Lenin, using the Smolny image of Lenin but hovered over by three rough farmers (fig. 3.14). This private imagery transferred to Stalin, as in Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Artists at a meeting with Stalin and Voroshilov, of 1938-51, sitting with afternoon tea on the table, and Vasili Efanov’s An Unforgettable Meeting; Party and Government Leaders Meet Industrial Workers’ Wives at the Kremlin of 1936-7 (fig. 3.15). Stalin did not have the ‘Tribune’ iconography at his command, so he chose the leader of the nation, or perhaps father of the nation, in imagery showing him central, stable, large, often alone and looking forward to a future full of reward for the great Russian motherland. Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin of 1938 (see fig. 4.6), Shurpin’s Dawn over our Homeland of 1946-8, Fyodor P. Reshetnikov’s (1906-88) Generalissimo I.V. Stalin of 1948, and Viktor G. Puzyrkov’s (1918-99) Stalin on the Cruiser ‘Molotov’ of 1949 are all in the same vein. He wears not Lenin’s old suit but an army greatcoat as he oversees, in turn, the Kremlin, new electricity pylons, the plans on his desk and the view from the deck of the ship.

Scholars of Chinese literature, like Ng Mau-sang, have argued that the “celebrated nineteenth- century Russian superfluous hero and revolutionary Hamlet tradition” influenced writers in China in the 1920s and 30s, but with the increase of Soviet, Stalinist (Socialist Realist) influence in the 1950s, this submerged under the idea of the generic, ideal figure who acts out party policy. 43 The experience in the visual arts mirrors this.

42 The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which owns a greeting card published in the Soviet Union in 1987 of this image, likens it to a votive reproduction of Christ or the Virgin Mary (see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O12380/print-gerasimov- aleksandr-mikhailovich, accessed 15 October 2015). It is of note that Georg Baselitz (b.1938), originally from Eastern Germany, painted Lenin on the Tribune 9 A.M. Gerasimov, a similarly large oil of 250 x 200 cm in 1999. Yevgeniy Fiks, who was born Moscow in 1972 and is now in New York, has made constant reference to Lenin’s life, including painting Leniniana no. 1, after Aleksander Gerasimov, “V.I. Lenin on the Tribune” in 2008, showing just the point of the main flag. 43 Ng, 1988: 4, 6. 124

All these devices of public and private ‘leader’ iconography were used extensively by the Chinese for Mao Zedong. Luo Gongliu painted Mao Zedong Making a Report on the Rectification in Yan’an in 1951 (fig. 3.16).44 Luo had been at Yan’an but the image is firmly in the format of Russian images of Lenin, arm out in this image, standing above the crowd who raptly take in his words. The much-copied statue of Mao in a military great coat with arm outstretched made for Qinghua University in Beijing in 1967 followed the monument to Lenin at Finland Station. Ellen Johnston Laing writes that “depictions of Mao in this pose are direct links to the concept current in the Cultural Revolution that Mao was a second Lenin”: the paintings of Mao waving his cap surrounded by cadres, based on a photo, are “strangely” similar to that of Lenin waving his cap as he addressed the crowd at St Petersburg station.45

Previously in China, but also throughout East Asia, Emperor portraits were exclusive to the elite few and were made of calm, richly-dressed men gazing forward, alone, as befits the Son of Heaven and rulers in lesser tribute states. Portraits of lesser beings were made as memorials, for ancestor worship within the house, and again, still and frontally posed. The Chinese would use, naturally, the aura of such portraits for depictions of their new ‘Son of Heaven’. There is a certain harmony that the famous image of Mao Zedong’s face, full-frontal, alone, calm and grand, graces the main gate to the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors.46 Certainly Mao is seen as the father of the people, the leader, but with the difference from those depictions of Lenin being the calmness and stillness of his presentation. He is either alone (see fig. 3.33) or surrounded by others who all keep a respectful distance. Even Dong Xiwen’s image of Mao declaring the People’s Republic of China, so similar to Lenin on the Tribune, captures this mood (see fig. 3.32).

Other images are of Mao in contemplation, following indeed the image of Lenin alone and studious at the plain interior of the Smolny, such as Xin Mang’s (b.1916) major work Mao Zedong Writing Articles in Yan’an, of 1951 (fig. 3.17), or Luo Gongliu’s Mao Zedong at the Jinggang Mountain of 1961 (fig. 3.19). The former follows closely a photograph of Mao in 1938 in this room in Yan’an (fig.3.18) (and echoes the choice of subject of the learned man admired through Chinese history), though the painting considerably enlarges the scale of the room and Mao’s dignity. The portrait at Jinggang Mountain combines the traditional Chinese

44 In the collection of the National Museum of China. 164 x 236 cm. Luo, a highly valued member of the art fraternity, was later sent to Russia to study. 45 Laing, 1988: 66. 46 Wu, 2005: 68ff, describes the history of this image: hung following the initial showing of a leader, Sun Yat-sen, in this place in 1929, followed by Chiang Kaishek in 1945, and replaced by Mao in 1949, in an image that became a “primary symbol of the nation and the Party”. It has been constantly repainted, with some changes, but always Mao is seen from below and he makes no eye contact. The role of repainting the image became a ‘special profession’ for a number of artists. Wu notes how this image became the ‘standard portrait’ (78). 125 love of landscape with an image of the great leader deep in thought.47 The very famous Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan of 1967 by Liu Chunhua (b.1944, fig. 3.33) shows a youthful, serious scholar marching over the mountains alone. Other images of Mao, the teacher-leader surrounded by young people, include Yang Zhiguang’s (b.1930) Mao Zedong at the Training School of Peasants’ Movement, of 1959, and Ma Changli’s (b.1931)The Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1975, depicts him inspiring his people.

It is possible to trace very close specific iconographies. The Smolny/Yan’an study image (fig. 3 13 and 3.17) is one. Another is Ma Changli’s work, noted above, and Serov’s Lenin declaring Soviet Power of 1947. In both cases not only is the iconography alike, but the composition of the leader raised above the adoring masses on each side, benevolently looking down on them, comes from the same tradition. Serov’s 1950 image of Lenin with the three peasants (see fig. 3.14) is literally followed by Gao Quan (b.1936) in 1977 with his The CPC Branch Committee in a Company (fig. 3.20), light emanating from behind the leader to spread over the spellbound group of listeners.48 Also consider Efanov’s An Unforgettable Meeting, of 1936-7 between Stalin and a young woman apparatchik (fig. 3.15), and Lin Gang’s Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception, in a preparatory drawing of 1950 (fig.3.21 ) and the finished work of 1951 showing the young woman hero with Mao similarly smiling (fig. 3.22). Both make the engagement between the leader and young woman the moment of drama. Both are of similar scale, positioned in a convivial scene against a flat background, surrounded by recognisable historic figures applauding the event.49 The idea of the leader congratulating ordinary (if exemplary) young women previously would have been unlikely in both societies.

When turning to the theme of ‘History and Patriotism’ these comparisons become less clear. The distinction between ‘patriotism’ and ‘history’, Lindey’s two separate categories of Russian iconography, fuses in China. Painting in China before this had included imagery of specific historic and heroic events. The images the Emperors Qianlong and Daoguang commissioned in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries of victorious battles are examples,50 but the idea of ‘patriotism’ was strange to the Middle Kingdom, with other peoples paying tribute to the Son of Heaven. The self-conscious nation-state of Enlightenment Europe was an imported concept of the West, and patriotism, the ‘defence of one’s country’s freedom or rights,’ had not been part of Chinese experience in recent time.

47 Shown in Victory of Justice; Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of World War II, at the National Museum of China, seen by this author 8 September 2014. 48 See The Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution website: http://eng.jb.mil.cn/homes/collect/art/oil/index_5.html (accessed 14 January, 2016). 49 Hung, 2011: fig. 58. Zhao Guilan had saved a chemical factory. Zhan Jianjun (b. 1931), a Maksimov student, painted Mao Zedong investigating the Peasants Movement in Hunan, 191 x 321cm, in 1975, using a similar composition. 50 See Carroll, 1985: 12: The Battle of the Jo Shui River c. 1793-9 from the Gurkha series, and The Battle of the Honbasi River, and The Re-conquest of Kashgar (Shufu), of c. 1828-30 from the East Turkestan series, all showing many figures in a landscape. 126

With this background in mind, the situation of allegiance to this nation-state in Communist Russia and China evolved in a slightly different way. There is distinction, first, between the way Russian and Chinese ‘patriotism’ was experienced. Lenin, having lived most of his adult life outside Russia, had seen Communism as an international movement, unlike the untravelled and internal thinking of Mao Zedong. Russia’s link with Western Europe had long been close, in both positive cultural, and then negative military terms – the borders were relatively porous. Russians in general remembered Napoleon’s and then other close European invasions, and their elite had spent that past two hundred years in the thrall of the seemingly superior Western European cultural world. The Russian avant-garde artists easily went to other parts of Europe to work when their homeland proved less welcoming. So, to be a Russian patriot under Communism was a clear choice - with obvious alternatives. Images of ‘patriotic’ behaviour were immediate and clear. Certainly the Chinese had been humiliated by the Japanese and Europeans earlier in the century, and this was used by Mao in his rhetoric of the new China safe under his regime,51 but it was a diffused and general message, and mixed with the Communists’ recent and long battle and victory over their compatriot Chinese Nationalist rivals. While the PRC suffered internally during Mao’s rule, its external relations were a mix of rhetorical rebuttal of the West with some clandestine infiltration of left-wing groups elsewhere, but ‘patriotism’ was not a clear and immediate source for imagery, especially for that current time. Additionally, there is rarely insecurity about Chinese culture that is clearly present in Russian reflections of themselves (seen overtly in Lenin’s and then Stalin’s pejorative comment of Russia as ‘Asian’).

However, despite these historic and cultural nuances, patriotism in principle was used to try to create a visual idea of what it was to be Russian or to be a member of the new China, and in both places was relatively successful. The healthy, smiling or determined (depending on the scene) youthful figure, simply dressed, marching forward, only paying allegiance to the group cause, is the image that audiences at the time and now conjure of what it was to be a member of those communities – and they come from the art. So, if ‘patriotism’ and ‘the history of the nation’ are conflated, this iconography certainly was a central area of focus for artists in Mao’s China.

How were these two elements treated in Russia? They did paint a number of major history paintings about the heroes and villains of the past, often with the intention of showing brave deeds in defence of the motherland. These include Mikhail I. Avilov’s (1882-1954) enormous The Joust of Pevesvet with Chelubei of 1943, the statue Monument to Dolgoruki of 1954 by

51 For example see Mao’s words, 21 Sept, 1949, at The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference: “…the Chinese people, forming one quarter of humanity, have now stood up.… We have united and have overthrown through the People’s War of Liberation and the people’s great revolution, and now proclaim the establishment of the People’s Republic of China” (see Kau, 1986: 5). 127

Sergei M.Orlov (1911-71) and others, and Grigori M. Shegal’s (1889-1956) The Flight of Kerenski from Gatchina in 1917, of 1936-8, showing the ousting of the past prime minister by the Bolsheviks. Apart from these, specific references to Russian contemporary history are rare, with the most famous being Aleksandr Deineka’s The Defence of Sebastopol of 1942.

A contrasting example is immediately seen in the sculptural Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square (see fig 2.27), with the iconography approved by Mao himself, with eight large reliefs works showing key points in the ‘history of the new China’ according to the new regime. The Monument was made between 1954 and 1958 by a variety of artists led by Liu Kaiqu (1904-93, fig. 3.23). If patriotism is the notion of seeing the nation in opposition to the ‘outside’, this Monument’s iconography certainly is relevant, but it is also the newly minted mythology of the history of the nation for local people, an ‘instant heritage’.52

The Chinese had no taste for reminders of any glorious Imperial past and they identified the start of their story as the Opium War of 1840, showing the struggles of the victims of the powerful to achieve their destiny. The first panel of the Monument shows this War against European incursion in China (fig. 3.24), and the last shows the war against the Japanese invaders. The central panels concern ‘the people’ gaining power over the Imperial system, other internal unwelcome political hegemony and then over the Nationalists. This was history. As Hung Chang-tai notes, the external enemy in Maoist times was not Japan or the Europeans but the Americans and they were usually depicted in the most ephemeral of visual expressions, cartoons.53

The eight ‘themes’ of victory were taken as icons to be followed by painters commissioned to paint the huge canvases for the new Museum of the Chinese Revolution being built on the east side of the Square, and opened in 1961 (fig. 3.25). The main published document of the collection for an international audience, The Album of Paintings Collected by the Museum of Chinese Revolution of 1991, reproduces chronologically the ‘story’ of the regime.54

The first painting in this volume repeats the first subject of the Monument, depicting the Opium War, by Song Zhijian (b.1936) showing the Great Victory at Niulangang, with villagers in Guangzhou standing victorious over bald and bloody (and overdressed) British soldiers cowering in the foreground while their confrères chase fleeing European soldiers in the

52 A phrase used by Lindey, 1990: 69. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983. 53 Hung, 2010: 158ff. 54 The Album of Paintings Collected by the Museum of Chinese Revolution, published by the Museum in 1991. Another exceptional resource is the website of The Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution in Beijing: http://eng.jb.mil.cn/, reproducing many of the key works of the period. The museum is currently closed (when the author visited in September 2014) for renovation. 128 background.55 The next in the publication is Wang Xuzhu’s (b.1930) The Jintian Uprising of 1851 (second on the Monument), painted in 1961. A little further along is Wang Zhenghua’s (b.1937) The Wuchang Uprising (third on the Monument) painted also in 1961. Interspersed through the volume are paintings of dramatic and generic imagery of military engagement, like Wu Shuyang’s (1901-66) The Sino-Japanese Battle on the Yellow Sea, again painted in 1961, depicting the sea battle of 1894 - this was a defeat but painted for an audience well aware of the more recent ‘victory’ over the Japanese. The fourth scene on the Monument, by Hua Tianyou (1902-86), of The May Fourth Movement, was painted by Zhou Lingzhau (b.1919) in 1951 (and also included in the MCR publication), well before the sculpture.56 The dramatic energy of the clearly defined figures of this bas relief (by one of the artists trained in France) is much more successful than the unclear and confused crowd of this painting, but the choice of the rush of young people, and the youth raised (in the Monument somehow miraculously) above the crowd advocating the cause are the same. The next scene on the Monument, The May 30th Movement was painted by Chen Daqing (1936-77) in 1959, (and reproduced no.15 in the Museum publication, fig. 3.26), a year after Wang Linyi (1908-97, fig. 3.27) had made his relief. The stronger, more dynamic and dramatic painting (helped by the composition’s clarity and the variety of dark and pale shirts of the protagonists) with a surge of figures rushing to the left, leaning forward, with arms raised, is yet very similar in its choice, again, of a crowd scene of young people streaming towards their goal.57 It is of note that the ‘enemy’ (apart from the British soldiers) is rarely depicted, and certainly identifiable leaders like Chiang Kai- shek or the Japanese Emperor are never included. The spotlight is clearly on the heroic members of the new Revolutionary force. Even a rare reference in the publication to the Japanese (celebration of victory in 1945 in The Torches of Yan’an by Cai Liang (1932-95) of 1959), excludes any reference to the Japanese themselves.

The speed of the creation of these huge works is remarkable, as is the continued commitment to history themes after the founding of the PRC, particularly in the 1950s. In 1961 (with the completion of the new Museum and its needs) a large number of similar works were made: Yin Rongshen (1930-2005) produced The HeshengqiaoBattle (fig. 3.28), Hou Yimin (b.1930) Liu Shaoqi with Anyuan Miners, Wang Xuzhu The Jintian Uprising, Wang Zhenghua painted The Wuchang [or 1911] Uprising and Quan Shanshi painted Unyielding Uprising. Quan Shanshi and Li Tianxiang, who made Lin Xiangqian Dying a Heroic Death in 1977, had trained in Russia but apart from a certain bravado with figures, perhaps coming from a facility leading to their initial selection, there is no difference in the type of work, the selection of subject, the size or

55 Song Zhijian The Great Victory in Niulangang, 165 x 300 cm, was painted in 1972 about the British attack of 1840. 56 Zhou Lingzhao (b. 1919) painted The May 4th Movement, in 1951, showing a mass of young people surging forward. 57 The ubiquity of the influence is seen in numerous other works of the time. One is Ding Mou-long’s Shanghai Electrical Workers on Strike of 1959 also, painted however in brush and ink, but with the same crowd of young men, shirts off, leaning towards the upper left to the moment of ‘action’ (see Arnold Chang, 1980: fig.11). 129 handling of figures to those produced by their peers who had not had direct experience in the USSR.

The third iconographic or content grouping that the Soviets raised to official ‘centre stage’ and the Chinese adapted is the focus on workers and farmers. Such subjects had been painted in oils in Western Europe (for example by the ), and were an important part of earlier Russian iconography, as well as being central to how Socialist Realism was taken up in other countries of the Asia Pacific region - but had never been a central part of elite visual imagery in China. Traditional Chinese landscapes, on paper, did continue to be made, often of large size and for official commission, as Fu Baoshi (1904-65) and Guan Shanyue’s (1912-2000) This Land so Rich in Beauty, of 1959 for the Great Hall of the People, attests (fig.3.29). But this work, like many others done for private contemplation, excludes the overt scene of the ‘farmer-worker’ discussed here.

The visualisation of the lives of the people in the USSR emphasized workers and farmers and current events of the village. There are numbers of well-known examples, including Arkadi A. Plastov’s (1893-1972) Collective Farm Festival of 1937 with happy people of the commune basking in bright sunlight under the banner of Stalin, or his Haymaking of 1945 again of young people working together bathed in sun and surrounded by abundance. Tatyana Yablonskaya (1917-2005) painted Corn, of women harvesting the crop in 1949 (see fig. 4.12), like Haymaking now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.58 A smaller (56 x 45 cm) painting of Sashka, the Tractor Driver of 1945, also in the Tretyakov, is often reproduced for its depiction of an individualised ‘worker-farmer’ but is especially relevant here as the most famous work produced by Konstantin Maksimov, the artist who went soon after to Beijing.

There are few ‘iconic’ Socialist Realist Chinese paintings depicting life on the land. Was it because the Chinese leadership wanted to focus on more politically relevant images? Some works were made of the subject in oil, but usually with an ulterior motive of, for example, the situation of Tibet.59 This subject-matter did, however, translate to China in smaller works on paper. Works on paper certainly were made for mass consumption and they included both lithographic reproductions of these leadership iconic paintings and purposefully made graphic images of life in the country celebrating labour. Posters about the virtues of labour were created in both Russia and China, (in contrast, Lindey argues, to the taboo on this subject in

58 To prevent this becoming a long list, noted here are some other examples of life-on-the-land: Aleksandr N. Morovov’s The Departure of a Recruit from a Collective Farm, of 1935; Fedor F. Antonov’s (1904-90) Collective Farm Youth Listening to the Radio, of 1934; Aleksandr P. Bubnov’s (1908-64) Corn of 1948, Andrei A. Mylnikov’s (1919-2012) In Peaceful Fields of 1950, and Yaroslav Serov’s (b. 1932) Workers in the Virgin Lands of 1958. Most of these works are of huge dimensions. 59 For example, Luo Gongliu’s Spring comes to Tibet of 1954, now in NMC and reproduced in Lü, 2010: fig.12.51, and Pan Shixun’s We are Walking the High Road, of 1964, now in NAMOC and reproduced Lü, 2010: fig. 12.32, showing a group of cheerful Tibetans with a tractor in the background. 130

Western popular prints).60 They changed in China from the handmade woodcuts with their heyday before 1949, which showed the ‘present’ through images of the suffering of the people, to the didactic often educational posters in the 1950s, depicting a post Revolution utopia either currently achieved or soon to be so. Many collections of these posters demonstrate this. One example is that of Michael Wolf, published by Taschen in a large tome Chinese Propaganda Posters in 2003, where one section is ‘Building our Country through Diligence and Frugality’.61 This section begins with the 1950s educational image The story of how Yu Qingshou developed and spread a new wheat variety of 1951 (produced in Shandong in a run of 5000), in an awkwardly drawn multi-frame poster full of text (fig. 3.30), and leads to the large, single-image, expertly drawn images of Together the workers and peasants sing the song of the plentiful harvest, of 1975 (a period discussed in detail in Chapter 4), produced by (interestingly, named) “Chen Kai of the Shanghai Tractor Factory”, showing two young women, ruddy cheeked and healthily singing together surrounded by hayricks and corn (fig. 3.31).62 Other images include planting rice, harvesting it, cutting tomatoes surrounded by smiling children, building grain silos, a fine rooster, numbers of images about breeding pigs, milking cows, raising deer and fishing.

2.1 Russia and China: (b) Realist in style

The mirror of ‘socialist in content’ is ‘realist in style’. Lu Xun had been a strong advocate for Chinese artists learning the “special skills” of “progressive artists of the world” and in this specifically meaning draughtsmanship of the human figure learned from . Being a man of catholic interests, he was thinking about the ‘West’ in the broadest sense – from Western Europe through to Russia but with a special affection for the work of Kollwitz.63 Lu Xun was talking mostly about woodcuts but the advice affected painters as well. It was this recognition of Western technique – in art as in most other areas of activity – that led to Chinese artists from the 1920s studying in Western Europe and then more overtly in the USSR, leading to Russian academicians like Maksimov invited to teach directly in Beijing.

The Chinese had known of Western Academic verisimilitudinous draughtsmanship for many centuries, with the Qianlong Emperor’s interest in it clear with his support of the Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). Though this interest in Western art was fleeting and by the late nineteenth-century there was little skill for it remaining in the country, individuals fluent in this practice did emerge, especially those able to study in Europe, among them Xu Beihong. The Musée Cernuschi in Paris held an exhibition in 2011, Artistes Chinois à Paris; 1920-1958, de

60 Lindey, 1990: 59. 61 Chinese Propaganda Posters, 2003: 169-95. 62 Chinese Propaganda Posters, 2003: 175 and 174. 63 Wang Shiqing, 1984: 315. 131

Lin Fengmian à Zao Wou-ki, with the catalogue noting 100 Chinese student artists in Paris during these years. Xu Beihong’s Female Nude of 1924, a highly finished drawing of a standing woman, is reproduced in the catalogue, as are Wo Yuchen and Wang Rongjun’s male nudes of 1919 and 1921 respectively - much less accomplished, and awkward. The catalogue also includes a photograph from Chen Tian’s film, Resurrection, showing a Chinese artist in his studio, oil sketch on his easel and the nude model in front of him.64 Xu Beihong’s charcoal and chalk master study for Yu Gong Removes the Mountain of 1940, a sensual study of flesh and muscle, is often reproduced. 65 Despite this, the Musée Cernuschi exhibition was notable for its preponderance of works in Chinese brush, of fine lines, and of landscape, rather than heavily worked Academic ‘studies’. In the mid-1920s in China, Liu Haisu (1896-1994), fully supportive of Western art practice, had introduced life studies to the Shanghai Art Academy, but they provoked outrage and did not continue. Traditional social mores as well as art practice held strong. (1900-91), trained in European and Chinese practices, said his aims in founding the Hangzhou Academy in 1927 were “To introduce Western art; to reform traditional art; to reconcile Chinese and Western art; to create contemporary art”.66 However, it was Xu Beihong who was the director of Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1949, and one of the few Chinese in power who had a long and extremely sophisticated knowledge of Western history painting, when, into this milieu came the renewed interest in realism, but with a Socialist overlay.

The four focus areas of (Socialist) Realist style were, first, creating new types of composition, then using lighting to articulate space and form, followed by acquiring skills in draughtsmanship of the human body, and, last, learning the techniques of European oil painting, all part of an originally Western European Academic history painters’ repertoire. Maksimov’s legacy is in his technical advice, as Lü Peng notes, from plaster sculpting to anatomy, from sketching to oil painting, from studio to outdoor training and from compositional rough drafts to completed work.67 As his students noted, the Russian was not doctrinaire about Socialist examples, advocating study of various Western European artists as well as Russians.68 This tradition was taken up quickly in China, catching up after its slowness to respond to ‘Western ways’ highlighted by the prowess of the Japanese and without the centuries of Western colonialism of for example the Filipinos, Javanese or Indians. It meant that, when they did so, it was with unusual concentration, with groups selected for classes all aware of their fortune in being part of these select cohorts. A lack of original European works

64 Artistes Chinois à Paris; 1920-1958, de Lin Fengmian à Zao Wou-ki, 2011. The Musée Cernuschi, Paris: Paris-Musées: 21, 29. 65 See Carroll, 2010, fig.38. Andrews and Shen, 2012: fig.3.15, reproduce Xu’s Tian Heng and his 500 Retainers of 1928-30, a painting in the grand European history manner. 66 See Carroll, 2008 (a), 41. 67 Lü, 2010: 506. 68 See Chen Beixin’s remarks quoted in Lü, 2010: 507-8: “he insisted that we learn from all the great masters of the past and that we should study the masters through our lives”. 132 hampered the gathering of skill (with those available often minor) and many of the early Chinese work were made with notably poor technique. However, it was an issue so successfully addressed in later decades that the skill of Chinese oil painters is among the highest in the world, seen in the felicity of handling of paint and form in the large post-Mao canvases – and even in the frequent notice of Chinese forgers being responsible for various copies of famous Western artworks.69

Two famous Chinese examples demonstrate these qualities, but many works from other cultures relevant here would be equally apt. The two works are Dong Xiwen’s The Grand Ceremony of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China of 1953, centrally displayed now in the National Museum of China (fig. 3.32), and Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan of 1967, a large oil painting (220 x 180 cm, now in the China Construction Bank) known throughout the country through reproduction (fig. 3.33).

The compositions of both are centralised, with the most important figure the only one with slight action (reading, or walking forward), catching our attention. This activity, or moment of drama, is new in China. It is how to make a specific narrative come to life beyond any literal educational role. These ideas were specifically articulated in articles from Russia that the Chinese read.70 The space around each central figure emphasises his uniqueness, his separateness, his capacity for veneration. We look up at him, enhancing his importance, with only the infinite sky behind the figure’s head. A few devices, like the lantern blowing in the wind visually direct us to Mao in the first, or the folded umbrella again leading up to Mao’s face in the second, subtly taking our eye to the central focus. Both stand on a shallow stage, the first with Mao enclosed by figures on the left and balustrade on the right, and in the second rising high above the clouds in true Redeemer-like glory. Behind the central figure either the people in the square or the great spaces of China reach into the distance, immeasurable, further enhancing the aura around the figure in command. In both, knowledge of European mathematical spatial devices is used, with the city or the mountains decreasing in size into the background. Traditional Chinese paintings with the very different motive of philosophical, personal contemplation would likely ‘bleed’ at the edge, eschew mathematical space, include no or few figures (and then incidental), and have no literal story or intent. However in both these works local Chinese visual tropes are clear – in the first in the bright folk colours and outlines, and in the second in the reference to the ‘mountain and stream’ ideology and the much more subdued palette of literati paintings.

69 ABC RN, Books and Arts Daily, 10.45 am Tuesday 4 November, 2014, broadcast an interview with a studio in Darfan Village China where the workmen copy “30 landscape oil paintings a day”, as well as “making in one go five containers of Van Gogh”. 70 See Lü, 2010: 503. He gives the example of the Soviet article ‘The question of conflict in Soviet painting’ and its need for an emotional engagement. 133

What is most important, however, is the emotion engendered. The moment in world history when the PRC was declared, captured for all time, or the moment when the youthful Mao Zedong strides over the hills (as this script decrees) towards his and the country’s destiny. The imagery is contrived, certainly, histrionic perhaps, yet every viewer, Chinese or other, recognises this quality. We need to know some of the story – who the man is – for this is an illustration of a narrative, a moment in history, but it is extended by the compositional choices to the emotive status of an icon. In fact, the second composition is more successful in this, having the quality of strength in simplicity that Jiang Qing recognised when she lauded this work above all others. Christine Lindey makes the point that this type of work was not passive,71 that, at best, it had its own passion - as Zhdanov understood.

The second quality advocated in Maksimov’s teaching is often described by the Chinese students: his emphasis on the handling of external light and colour possible through oil painting. A sketch he made for one of the brigade works in Moscow painted just before he went to China is a good example of this focus (fig. 3.34). He said “Artists must devote enormous effort to mastering the depiction of light. This is essential. Here, I am advising everyone to notice that outdoor colours should be extremely bright and loud. The contrast between warm and cool colours should be sharper…”72 The Chinese learnt to recreate an illusion of space and form, using one light source and shading with the outline often disappearing within these shadows, deploying a full palette of colours, all foreign to traditional Chinese painting. The Liu painting, without the ‘folk’ art linear qualities of Dong’s image, shows a closer affinity to Maksimov’s dictum about the depiction of light, using it particularly to highlight the face of the figure. The earlier painting also does use a single light source, this time from the right, focused on Mao’s face and unifying the elements of the composition, but it is subservient to the depiction of narrative detail.

The third quality is the study of the human body, its physical makeup and proportions, and its capacity to emphasize the narrative of any artwork. Ren Mengzhang (b.1934) who was granted a major retrospective by The National Museum of China in August - September 2014,73 was one of Maksimov’s students. The exhibition included early, academic figure studies, of a nude and a charcoal study of a man in a felt hat, both of 1956 (fig. 3.35), made during Maksimov’s time in China. Spontaneity of brushwork was central to traditional Chinese painting, so this focus on rough drafts was new and from the Russian. Ren’s close attention to figure drawing and the tight handling of the charcoal and pencil are testament to the concentration he

71 Lindey, 1990: 20. Robert Cole (ed.), 1998, in International Encyclopedia of Propaganda (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn) 48, comments the usage of visual art for such purposes is for its capacity to use the power of emotion. 72 See Lü, 2010: 506-7. 73 20 August – 20 September: see: http://en.chnmuseum.cn/tabid/521/InfoID/101541/frtid/469/Default.aspx. The exhibition was seen by this author, 8 September 2014. 134 applied in this class and was able to use so successfully three years later (fig. 3.36). Dong Xiwen’s work is relatively static, the figures clothed, but their solid physicality surrounding the leader emphasizes the support they give him metaphorically. In technical terms, each face is individualised and calmly smiling as they look towards the central figure. The second work is more interesting, using the Classical Greek device of the muscular limb jutting out through a covering cloth to give greater emphasis and dynamism (and in this case decorum as well as a politically sensitive reference to traditional Chinese dress) to the figure. The clenched fist denotes further determination. All the limbs ‘work’ physiologically, not an easy achievement for such newly acquired understanding.

The last quality is the handling of paint. The Chinese had seen little oil painting directly and it is a medium that does not reproduce well, especially in the quality of reproductions of the time. The tactile feel of oil paint, thickly applied so the brush stroke is part of the vitality of the work, and the way it literally can catch the light to enliven a surface, needs to be physically observed. So the 1954 exhibition of 280 artworks from Russia in Beijing was important, “the first they had ever seen” notes Lü Peng, with the “Chinese oil painters… deeply impressed by the technical skill and the grey tones of the Soviet” works.74 Ren Mengzhang’s early oil studies with Maksimov demonstrate this teaching (fig.3.37), comparing closely with the sketch reproduced in figure 3.34, as does a detail from his large battle painting Capturing Jinzhou of 1959 (fig.3.38). The Russian’s influence is seen in the vigorous, overt short square brush strokes, earthy colours and the way the light moves over the canvas to create diversity of dark and paler areas, keeping the viewer’s attention as the narrative of the battle is absorbed (fig . 3.39). The 2014 exhibition included a number of sketches for this painting, demonstrating the careful build-up of the composition by grouping figures in their most dramatic physical arrangement. Dong Xiwen possessed a range of painterly skills - from the European oil painting practice honed over six months under the French masters at the Hanoi School of Art in 1939, to understanding of traditional Chinese techniques, particularly inspired by his time studying the Dunhuang murals in 1943. His work depicting Mao, focused on the ‘national’ style promoted by Mao himself, evokes the flat linearity of Dunhuang. The Liu and Ren works however are strong on such oil brushiness, using flicks of paint for details, allowing the paint to create the ‘smokiness’, the sfumato as the Italians call it, of shadows, enhancing mystery and energy.

2.2 Vietnam

74 Lü, 2010: 502. Having said this, there were a number of important paintings made in traditional medium of ink on paper, but using both the content and style of Socialist Realism. 135

As has been discussed with the Vietnamese response to Socialist Realist theory, so in art itself their resolution reflected their layered cultural history: their own indigenous traditions, long- held Confucian understandings, the School of Paris model, and the more recent impact of their Communist neighbours. The work made in Vietnam especially in the period of 1950s to the 1970s is called Socialist Realist because, after all, it is Socialist in content and Realist in style, but it is on its own terms – a situation that requires some background comment.

Visual arts in pre-nineteenth century Vietnam had not been a major cultural form. The rulers followed Chinese practice with frontal, static portraits of the elite, and highly-skilled carving and decoration (usually in wood) of religious and secular subjects. Village halls and pagodas were decorated with three-dimensional wooden carved figures; villagers enjoyed the folk traditions particularly of colourful, simple woodcuts on paper, showing divinities, good luck scenes and animals (see fig. 5.12); and locally-developed silk and lacquer painting was practised in the urban centres - but it was all of a domestic scale compared with the might of the Chinese. A watchfulness about Chinese influence meant that traditional literati landscape was rarely seen, though artists were trained to aspire to facility with ink and paper.75

The French brought their strong painting tradition into this milieu. There is a clear contrast with Chinese experience of European art. Certainly Chinese artists from the 1910s had been sent to Europe to learn, notably to Paris but also to Germany, and came back and taught their fellows, as has been discussed. But knowledge of Western art was for the few, was fleeting, usually second-hand, and the ease and knowledge of forms other than Socialist Realism was meagre. In contrast, the Vietnamese had been colonised by the French from 1884, with a painting class opened two years later in Hanoi, run by the French. The French-run Gia Dinh College of Fine Arts was opened in Saigon in 1913 and the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi in 1925. The Hanoi school was founded by Victor Tardieu (1870-1937), a popular and influential Director until the year he died. French teachers came to teach at this institution, and Vietnamese works were shown in Paris.76 Dong Xiwen had spent time there. While his Mao work is tightly painted, in this same period other works of his (like Shadows of Camels in the Gobi of 1947 and Spring Comes to Tibet of 1954) have an impressionistic fleshiness close to French exemplars. The latter’s subject of the sunny landscape, farmers in

75 The senior artist Nguyen Phan Chanh (1892-1984) had been trained in the Chinese literati tradition and throughout his long life used Chinese calligraphy on his very fine works with brush on paper and on silk. His Self-portrait of 1962 shows a white-bearded Confucian gentleman placed centrally, calmly staring out of the picture, framed by vertical Chinese script. His other works, including domestic images of women and children made in the 1960s, on show in the Museum of Fine Arts, slyly slip in an ammunition belt and gun to what in other times would be scenes of familial intimacy. 76 See Carroll, 2008 (a): 38. Nadine André-Pallois has made extensive research on the ‘cultural exchange’ between French and Vietnamese artists in this period: see André-Pallois, 1997 and further discussion in Chapter 5. 136 the foreground, and the handling of bright light, can be clearly seen in terms of his exposure to in Vietnam.77

The School of Paris was established in Vietnam conceptually and in practice. The ease with a variety of Western art ideas, a personal feeling for the stories and also the handling of the Western-derived oil, gouache or watercolour was common here in a way not seen in China. Phoebe Scott begins her 2012 PhD Dissertion on this subject by quoting an anonymous Vietnamese artist in 1945, saying:

Can you see that Western painting has some evolving magic that can express the complications of our hearts? . .. I find it so convenient to express my soul, the nervous wonderings dominating my mind.

In oil paint, I don't lie to others, I don't lie to myself anymore. I have feelings of being relaxed and comfortable, under no pressure, as if in my own domain.78

The Vietnamese continued these French-derived art schools under local directorship after Independence, paying only lip service to the new systems introduced in China under Russian influence.

The fifty years of French cultural influence had great impact on what the artists then painted. The domestic scale of local work was congenial to the domestic subject matter of the School of Paris in vogue in France in the early years of the century, with small moments of ordinary life, fragments of urban landscape, all lacking overbearing narrative or heroism or hubris. Maurice Utrillo’s (1883-1955) depopulated Parisian street scenes were a model for Bui Xuan Phai’s (1920-88) similar images of Hanoi. Even when the incoming regime wanted different subject matter, this model was so deeply ingrained it remained as an undercurrent beneath the new iconography.

As a result, the large dramatic narratives about the history of the Revolution and the key figures (leaders and heroes) who led it were not translated into Vietnamese imagery.79 An example is the 2000-1 publication of the collection of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, the Socialist government’s centralised institution for visual art in the country, showing images

77 Lü, 2010: 526 writes that Maksimov praised this painting, close as it is to his own handling of expressive brush strokes. Lü, 2010: 424, describes Dong’s education at Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai prior to travelling to Hanoi. 78 Scott, 2012: 1. 79 Taylor, 2004: 17ff discusses the delicate balance for artists in Vietnam with the dictates of the State, including joining the Artists Association which was not a Communist Party organisation, but which, nevertheless was governed by artists who were members of the Party. She notes that “Similar to the situation for artists in other socialist nations, such as China and the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese Communist Party has a position on art and culture and has made that position clear. But unlike more extreme movements, such as the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1970s and Pol Pot’s persecution of individuals from 1975 to 1979, Vietnamese political leaders have not always enforced the policies they have created.” 137 approved by the regime. Established in 1966 in a French colonial building in central Hanoi, this thirty-five-year anniversary publication of its collection is of high production quality, clearly produced with much pride.80 The remarkable aspect of the display of this iconic institution in the past and today is that, despite the millennia of Vietnamese culture, and the changes in the country since doi moi, the majority of galleries show paintings of the revolutionary period from the 1930s to the 1970s, a selection mirrored in the anniversary publication: seventeen works from the 1950s, twenty-five from the 1960s, fifteen of 1970s and fifteen from the time of the height of the war against the West are included.

Despite the focus on the revolutionary period, none of the works in the publication presents a specific moment of battle or victory of war, nor any specific war ‘hero’; rather they could be exercises of ‘figures in a landscape’. The few works that include Ho Chi Minh are small scale and relatively domestic – in the countryside (see fig. 2.22) or in his study.81 There are none of the famous General Vo Nguyen Giap, and certainly none of Lenin, or Mao Zedong, or even Stalin.82 There are only two paintings of individuals: both are public persona. The only work that includes an ‘historic’ event is the Hanoi, Night of Liberation of 1954 by Le Thanh Duc (b.1925, fig. 3.40) a small gouache that also could be merely an urban celebratory landscape with a soldier and a title. The only pre-revolutionary imperial reference is a small statue of Prince Hung Dao reading a book on the art of war, hidden away among ‘modern ceramics’ at the back of the book.83 This is but one publication, but its selection tells much about the choices in the visual arts in Vietnam. Almost all imagery of Vietnam comes from this Museum, which takes its role seriously as a supervisor of the ‘right’ imagery of the new Vietnam.84

Unlike the images of pre-revolutionary times in Russia and China where smaller, more intimate images of the ‘people’ often show great suffering, the domestic-scale images of the people in Vietnam right through this revolutionary period are celebratory. Images of the people and the land show idealised rural scenes, mostly under cultivation, or the seaside, and occasionally an urban scene, as well as the activities of the people within this landscape. There are special events, village festivals, or welcoming soldiers home, or domestic scenes, with women and children, including women soldiers, contentedly living their lives. There are many images of ‘war’, but those images are of soldiers amidst the people, or travelling through the landscape.

80 Artworks Vietnam Fine Arts Museum’s Collection (Tac Pham My Thuat, Suu Tap Cua Bao Tang My Thuat Viet Nam): 2002. 81 To Ngoc Van, Ho Chi Minh [likes to work at his home in the North] 1945, woodcut, 47 x 33 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi. Scott, 2012: 185, lists officially commissioned portraits of Ho from 1946, by To Ngoc Van, Nguyen Do Cung and Nyugen Thi Kim (b. 1917). She describes this ‘culture of identity’, but in comparison with the other leaders it is extremely modest. 82 A statue of Lenin by the Russian artist Aleksandr A. Tyurenkov (1924-2008) was erected in Reunification Park in Hanoi in the 1970s. Boi Tran Huynh writes this was the only public monument to a foreign politician in Vietnam, see Huynh, 2005: 168. 83 Artworks, 2002: 210. 84 I worked with the Ministry of Culture to obtain images for Revolutionary Century, 2010, and all images, of high quality, came from the Museum. Other collections of these works are few. The British Museum has a small collection, exhibited and published in Harrison-Hall,2002. Many of their works are by a past head of the School of Fine Arts in Hanoi, Nguyen Thu (b. 1930), famous as a silkscreen painter and a past soldier. 138

Paintings on the most sensitive of materials, silk, could be literati landscapes, elegies to the countryside, until the titles and the overlay of military details seeps in (see fig. 3.41). In all these images included in this publication just two could be called ‘battle’ images and they are not major works, and rather generic. There are a few images of industry but they are desultory, some of children learning, some minor ‘symbolic’ works of good fortune, and a number of the ‘minorities’ – all part of the Socialist Realist lexicon but not in major force here.

This focus on the bucolic countryside or homeland is seen in Vietnamese literature, viewed as part of the national psyche – their romantic attachment as witnessed by Jeffrey Hantover’s early book on Vietnamese art of this period, Uncorked Soul,85 and part of the reason for its focus in art. The French Post- Impressionist and School of Paris interest in landscape and intimate genre scenes is indeed another influence, however, local explanation for this iconographic focus is given by Nguyen Khac Vien in the Hanoi Foreign Languages Press history of the country in 1987:

…while the literary and artistic portrayal of the national struggle was relatively easy, the building of the new society, the new people, with socialism, which was only at its beginnings, was expressed with much less ease. In this domain, the transformation of villages, and the problems of the peasant world were reflected more often and more easily than those of industry and the workers’ world.86

The style of painting shows scenes of people and landscape with realistic skills based on knowledge of perspective and modelling but with ‘impressionistic’ light filtering through trees, shown in the gaps left on paper in particular, with overt brush-strokes building up form with different colours as was practised in France. Works gradually lightened from the brown sombre tones of the past in Vietnam - as they had done in France. Occasionally there is some impact of folk art in Vietnam, of the colourful paper cuts of the gods and animals well known in Dong Ho woodcuts for example, but it is fleeting. It could never be said to have had the impact in Vietnam that is claimed in China (as will be discussed below).

One practical element did impact on the history of how Vietnamese art developed: the lack of materials available to artists. Because the most local artists were first in opposition to French and then Japanese rule, with little financial resources, they made do with smaller canvases,

85 This is an essential mantra for Vietnamese. “My homeland is like a carambola tree/On which I climb every day to pick juicy fruit…/Each man has only one homeland/Just as he has only one mother” is how Vietnam; My Homeland, a promotional book about the country produced by Su That (Truth) Publishing House in Hanoi in 1989 begins its 190 page text. Huu Ngoc notes ‘love of country’ is an essential characteristic of Vietnamese (see ‘The Vietnamese character’ (2000) 2008, printed in his Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture, Hanoi: The Gioi: 499). Ho Chi Minh, in response to nature, could write “The moon shines through the window, asking for some verses/ Please wait til tomorrow because I am busy with military affairs” (see Pham Xanh, 2008. Ho Chi Minh; the Nation and the Times 1911-1946. Hanoi: The Gioi: 194). 86 Nguyen Khac Vien, 1987: 360. 139 paper or indeed newspaper. In the Museum of Fine Arts collection publication, only five works have one dimension over 200 cm and four of those are celebratory lacquer screens. All paintings on silk measure less than one metre, as do all the gouaches, as well as all except one of the posters (so different from the Cultural Revolution works) and all except one of the woodcuts. No oil painting (of forty included) has one dimension over 200 cm, and, of the others, fifteen are under one metre. These sizes lend to the intimacy of the response to Vietnamese work, in contrast to the dramatic monumentality of the Russian and Chinese canvases.

In other parts of Indo-China, hand-painted murals and billboards advocating the rule of the Government and sculpture in the Socialist Realist mode were made, as in Laos as is discussed below. However, production of small watercolours showing life in the countryside, echoing School of Paris forebears, are the main images to be seen on the streets of Vientiane through this period (as well as today in Phnom Penh), a practice at times seen internationally in group exhibitions of art of the region.87 The period in Cambodia was particularly harsh for artists. Few posters were made in Cambodia during Khmer Rouge rule and not of major import.88

2.3 Japan

Despite Japanese art historians not describing their art as ‘Socialist Realist’, there are some parallels of note. Mayu Tsuruya argues the history paintings commissioned by Japan’s national propaganda office in support of Japanese incursion and occupation in the Asia Pacific region, which came to the fore during the 1930s and 1940s, followed the experience of the left-wing artists of the 1920s and early 1930s.89 Rather than the left-wing artists’ smaller works showing the suffering of local underclasses, these commissioned works are of the grand, heroic, nationalistic, narrative content and ‘realist’ style of the Soviets. They are similarly officially condoned, a rarity in twentieth-century art outside the Communist bloc, again aligning them closer to Moscow than for example, London, whose war effort supported much more personal, intimate imagery. A ‘Painter Unit’ of eight artists was formed in 1938 to help

87 Examples are the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial for example including Laotian artists in 1994, Khamsouk Keomingmuong (169-71), Sikounnavong Kanha (142-3) and Luangrath Konphat (80-1), and the 7th Asian Art Biennial Bangladesh 1995 including Chanthavong Phouvong and Soun Thone Veunvilavong (cat. nos 5-8 and 16-18). 88 Email from Roger Nelson, 5 August 2013: “There are Khmer Rouge posters and visual propaganda, which are in large part Russian-influenced, but which were relatively rare given the anti-technology and anti-modern nature of the regime. I do not think there is any record of Soviet influence before the 1970s. And then it was only in the 1980s that artists began being trained in the Soviet Union, and their training generally took 7-9 years, including language courses…. By the time of their return the Vietnamese occupation was nearly over… Immediately after 1989 they were expected to abandon evidence of their Soviet training… With the arrival of the UN at the beginning of the 1990s a new market for Cambodian art emerged that artists responded to by providing what they thought of as specifically ‘Cambodian’ styles rather than Soviet influences.” 89 Tsuruya, 2013: 58-77 and particularly 61 ff. The large set pieces made show close iconographic and stylistic links between the work of Tsuguharu Fujita and Ren Mengzhang, discussed above, despite their purpose being for opposing sides in World War II. It is of note that these Japanese works, made for a nominally ‘democratic capitalist’ society, are never cited as ‘propaganda’ in the list of regimes that promoted art for this purpose (see Chapter 1), despite their work being so similar, though a major (related) reason for this is that they have been kept in the basement of the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, for many years and only recently displayed and published. 140 the Army’s Press Department, and by 1939 the Seisen (Holy War) Exhibition was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum before touring Japan. It was the first time art had been used openly to support military actions.90 The government in Japan, similar to the Soviets, wanted images of “documentary quality and artistic expression”91 and they used the works in these large travelling exhibitions to inspire the people to patriotic effort. The paintings produced ranged in subject from battles like the (despite the phrase above) fabricated, histrionic Last Stand at Attu of 1943 by Tsuguharu Fujita (1886-1968, fig. 3.42), to air-craft flying over targets, to soldiers helping civilians ‘in the field’ bringing a new freedom to Southeast Asian countries under their control (fig. 3.43). A number of works use traditional nihonga Japanese style rather than Western realism in oils, but still the subject matter remains of heroic war activity (fig. 3.44).

2.4 Southeast Asia

Discussed in this section are works that some in the non-Communist Asia Pacific region call social realist, particularly Alice Guillermo when she discusses Filipino art. The argument here is that work she would call social realist in both her homeland, and also at times in Indonesia and Singapore, is nationalist and celebratory of resistance if not triumph, and is made in large, histrionic style with grand gestures and an inference of romanticised heroism amongst the individuals included. This is said knowing some of these qualities are evident in various woodcuts made in China, as well as with the understanding of the pitfalls of such nomenclature’s prescriptiveness: artists do not fit such categorisation so easily. However, the following section is an attempt to see larger trends in the region and relationships that are not usually made between different creative groups of this wide geographic area.

2.4 (a): Malaya/Singapore

In the mid-1950s members of the Equator Art Society had made woodcuts following in the footsteps of Lu Xun as well as paintings that have the elements of Socialist Realism. Their direct contact with the PRC brought in new ideas through imported publications and personal exchanges. Lim Yew Kuan (b.1928), Lee Boon Wang (b.1934), Tan Tee Chie (1928-2011) and Chua Mia Tee (b. 1931) made a number of larger paintings at the time which are more melodramatic, more declamatory, and more complex in their story-lines than the smaller woodcuts. These works include Lim’s Searching (he searches for fairness, fig. 3.45) and The

90 See Masanori Ichikawa ‘20th-Century Japanese Art in the Context of Civilization and Culture’ in The Unfinished Century, 2002, 11-2. This author has viewed the main collection of large canvases made during this period, now in storage at the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, in 2008. The Museum in recent years has included them increasingly on public display. 91 Tsuruya, 2013: 73. 141

Night Arrest both of 1954(fig.3.46),92 Lee’s Road Workers of 1955 (fig. 3.47), Tan’s Market Scene in 1954,93 and On Strike in 1955 and Chua’s Road Construction Worker of 1955. Following in literal socialist footsteps, two of the Equator Art Society (Tay Boon Pin (b.1936) and Koeh Sia Yong (b.1938)) went to live with labourers and shipyard workers to experience their lives and enable the resulting artworks to be more credible,94 examples being Koeh’s Persecution of 1963 and Here they come! (depicting hawkers running from the police) of 1965.95 Chua made his important work Epic Poem of Malaya (fig.3.48) also in 1955. The iconography of this work is exceptional in the Singapore/Malay context for its literal and metaphoric nationalism, as well as its idealism: young people inspired by the idea of a better future. Chua had studied sculpture and the quality of a form held in space is one of the disquieting and arresting elements of his Epic Poem image, giving it the theatricality of many of the Socialist Realists works made elsewhere. The compositions are composed group tableaux, theatrically lit, and painted from specific angles in the same expressive brush strokes of oil on canvas. Chua followed a Socialist Realist trajectory, though one he does not discuss directly, of moving to more illustrative and didactic works: his National Language Class of 1959 (fig. 3.49) literally includes Malay on the blackboard and in true Socialist style it followed the ‘Use National Language Campaign’ of the time.96 Chua said then: “Who does not love one’s country? Who does not love one’s beloved compatriots? The fate of any country’s people is inseparable from the fate of the country itself. As Malayan people, we cannot help but be deeply moved by the recitation of poems of the difficult experiences our country is going through”. Lim’s Night Arrest, now in the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, is a good example. To look at the work, the viewer sees a generic scene of military police coming in the night to take away the son of a horrified family. However, the reality behind this general scene of disempowerment is more poignant: it is in fact the arrest of the artist’s older brother by the Japanese, unable to be protected by their father Lim Hak Tai (later head of the Nanyang Academy), and the brother was hanged.

The iconography of these works does not support the regime, or heroise its leaders or their recent political history. Rather heroism is found in the local story and the local worker, and portrayed with compositional grandeur, scale, complexity and drama, as well as the realist verisimilitude of draughtsmanship, light and shade possible in oil painting. Despite the

92 It has an alternative title Hatred, and has been alternatively dated, for example by Matthew Hsu, 1999: 103, as painted in 1951. 93 Chua Mia Tee’s Road Construction Worker is reproduced in Yeo, 2010: pl.24 and the others reproduced in Nanyang, 2002: 6, 8 and 10. See also Visions & Enchantment: Southeast Asian Paintings, Singapore Art Museum, 2000, 219 and 221. Tan Tee Chie’s On Strike is reproduced in Tham, 2013: 34. It shows a group of workers waiting out the strike, sitting under a tarpaulin. Tham writes that not many such works survived because of the fear of being associated with communism (2013: 34). 94 Szan Tan,quoted in Tham, 2013: 45. 95 Yeo, 2010: pls 25-26. They are in the collection of the National Heritage Board of Singapore. 96 See Hsu, 1999: 104. His Workers in the Canteen of 1974 is a continuation of this narrative form. In a recent interview Chua recalls this painting saying he “was moved by the workers’ life and plight” and “deeply influenced by the art catalogues and artists like Lie Bing, Rembrandt, Goya and Xu Beihong” and he “felt being an artist was a meaningful vocation”. (Tribute.sg: Chua Mia Tee, interviewed 12 October 2012, accessed 22 October, 2014). 142 rawness of their execution and the imported ideology behind them, as Lu Xun would have recognised, their documentary ‘truth’ – as well as the obvious idealism of their youthful perpetrators – makes them memorable icons in the history of art of their communities.

These paintings and works on paper provided the visual background in support of the political left-wing and idealistic and indeed Communist protests of the post-war period in the 1950s. However, the arrests of the pro-Communists in 1957 and the continuing campaign against them had its effect, and by the end of the decade this left-wing enthusiasm was waning.

2.4 (b): Indonesia

The first phase of Indonesian response to Socialist Realism occurred mid-century. The strength of the PKI and its association with leading artists like Sudjojono and Hendra Gunawan made for very different circumstances in Indonesia at this time than in other non-Communist Southeast Asian countries. As previously noted, Soviet art had been exhibited in Jakarta in 1956, information was coming in through publications. Hendra, who had been to Moscow, received visits from leading figures of the Communist world in Yogyakarta.97 While the iconography, again, of the Indonesian works did not include those in charge of the country (the Japanese and Dutch, and then Sukarno himself), it did focus on heroic, revolutionary moments of ordinary men and women during the country’s recent past. It was an iconography firmly of farmers-workers-soldiers.

Works on paper were made to support the political agendas of the day, as seen in the PKI booklets in figure. 2.5 and the poster perused in figure 1.3, but they did not attain the artistic strength of paintings and sculpture made at this time, nor of the posters later made in the 1980s and 1990s.98 Three paintings made mid-century in Java are worthy of special attention here. All were made by artists either officially members of the Party, or sympathetic to it, and all were involved either working with collectives of artists or actually fighting in the war of independence through the 1940s: Hendra’s Hello Hello Bandung of 1945 (fig. 3.50), Sudjojono’s Guerrilla Guards of 1949/68 (fig. 3.51), and the left-wing soldier-artist Harijadi Sumodidjojo’s At Malioboro of 1949 (fig. 3.52).99 All are large oils on canvas and all show the experience of war, exactly within the iconographic boundaries of the Communist model. They

97 IVAA’s holdings include a photograph of the Chinese Ambassador visiting the Pelukis Rakyat artists’ organisation, with Hendra in attendance, in 1964; see http://archive.ivaa-online.org/khazanahs/detail/2476. 98 In the late 1940s SIM artists were given the assignment to paint large posters for the arrival of the Komisi Tiga Negara (The Committee of Good Offices), as well as comic books to amuse the soldiers at the front, and cartoons for newspapers (see Sidharta, 2007: 57-8), and an example of a later poster is the Anti-nuclear poster, by Sarohandojo, of 1958 with the words ‘Save our children from the danger of A + H bombs” (see Ginsberg, 2013: Propaganda catalogue no.66.). These are full-blown Socialist Realist works of art, nothing humble or sorrowful from social realism about them. 99 Hendra Gunawan Hello Hello Bandung, 1945, oil on canvas, in a private collection in Jakarta;, Harijadi Sumodidjojo At Malioboro, 1949, oil on canvas, Presidential Palace, Jakarta, and Sudjojono Guerrilla Guards, (alternatively called Seko) 1947 (version 1), oil on canvas. The 1968 version is at times called Prambanan. 143 have the inference of documents of actual moments of battle (the Hendra and Sudjojono works) or the aftermath of battle (the Harijadi), and the urgency of people rushing to help the cause, in the first two, or its aftermath in the third. They are full of people, and drama and action. How the artists then imbued these compositions with their own local Indonesian qualities is discussed in Chapter 5. Their ‘realism’ is various. Sudjojono is the most academically conventional of the three, very skilled in composition, light and shade, draughtsmanship, and use of oil paint. Hendra is the most individual, instilling in his subjects his own Javanese dramatic energy and angularity, but still understanding and using the conventions of ‘realism’. Sudjojono’s Guerrilla Guards and Harijadi’s At Malioboro were both collected by President Sukarno, aware of the impact of these works for visualising a heroic history of Indonesian independence, and At Malioboro remains on display in the Presidential Palace. Their size is extraordinary, much bigger than past Indonesian works, and speaks to the artists’ knowledge that a public role was expected.

Two years after Hendra travelled to Moscow, Sukarno himself visited there. It was a year after the landmark Bandung Conference for Non-Aligned Nations, and Sukarno envisaged his new nation and new capital, Jakarta, symbolically displaying its true position as an international force. He saw in Moscow the grand rebuilding of a city with its major intersections embellished with icons of the Soviet regime and he not only bought large, heroic paintings for the national collection, he commissioned Socialist Realist-style sculptures for key points of his own newly independent capital. It led to an extraordinary time in Jakarta in the 1960s with the installation of sculpture from Russia, as well as works made by Indonesians following this course. 100 This is the main exception to Socialist Realism in non-Communist Southeast Asia critiquing the status quo: here it was used by the most powerful man in the country to celebrate the regime’s achievements. The iconography was of ‘heroes of the revolution’: generic figures, young, healthy, spirited, echoing physically and symbolically those of Vera Mukhina. The Welcome Monument (Monumen Selamat Datung) was installed thirty metres above the ground outside the new Hotel Indonesia at the apex of Jalan Thamrin, a key site, and was commissioned to welcome delegates to the Asian Games of 1960 (fig. 3.53). It was devised from a sketch by Henk Ngantung (1921-91) and constructed by sculptor Edhi Sunarso. In most aspects it replicates Mukhina’s twenty-four metre tall Worker and Collective Farm (Kolkhoz) Girl made in 1936 for the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937 (see figs. 2.24, 2.25 and 2.26) now on permanent display in Moscow but also known in smaller models that toured (as well as being the logo for the film studio Mosfilm and used on stamps). Both show a young man on the left, one arm raised, chest out, legs dressed in workers’ trousers placed apart,

100 It is of note that these sculptures, being very foreign, were never emulated further in Indonesia – the sculpture of today is emphatically of local materials, such as bamboo, and of local subject-matter. 144 partnering the young woman in her calf-length skirt flowing back to reveal the tension of her legs in stepping or leaning forward to this brave new world. Her arms too are expressive, one high, the other back; her build, like his, is athletic and bold, her hair short and brushed back. None of this relates to the tradional stance of Indonesian women, whose bodies are held discreetly, controlled and covered. The Indonesian work exaggerates the main aspect of the figures – their welcoming arm and hand movement – as the Chinese later did in images of the Cultural Revolution.

A later version of this type was placed in front of the Lao People’s Army Museum in Vientiane, opened in 1976, showing a woman ‘peasant’ on the left (though dressed in traditional costume) carrying a sickle, a soldier in the middle, and a ‘worker’ on the right, carrying a sledgehammer and with his arm outstretched (see fig. 4.25). Such a grouping, so overtly recalling, the triumvirate of Socialist types stepping towards the future indicates the ubiquity of this visualisation.101

The West Irian Liberation Monument (Monumen Pembebasan Irian Barat) came from an idea of Sukarno’s and again was first sketched by Ngantung, made by Tim Pematung Keluarga Are under Sunarso’s direction. The work was inaugurated by the President in August 1963 (fig. 3.54).102 It has a close antecedent in Sergei T. Konyonkov’s (1874-1971) The Golden Man (Liberation), now lost though a plaster model survives, where the muscular naked man with arms upraised breaks the chains at his wrists and ankles. Another well-known comparison is Ossip Zadkine’s (1890-1967) Destroyed City monument of 1951-3 in - perhaps known to Ngantung who had toured Europe in 1957. All these figures are men in anguish, legs apart, arms thrown up, head back, executed in the rough tactile style so well utilised by (1840-1917), though the Indonesia work is much more realistic and less extreme in its symbolism. It is relevant in this context that Ngantung became the first civilian governor of Jakarta, but had been a member of LEKRA, the artists’ group affiliated with the PKI, and, with the turn against the Communists in the mid-1960s, his star waned. The sculptor Sunarso had been a prisoner of the Dutch in the late 1940s, then joined the left-wing artists group around Hendra in Yogyakarta before studying at Shantiniketan in Bengal for three years in the mid 1950s - another site where such imagery was in favour.103

Even more extraordinary is the Hero Statue (Patung Pahlawan), also known as the Farmer Statue (Patung Pak Tani) inaugurated in 1963, dedicated to the fallen heroes of the independence struggle (fig. 3.55). It was made in Moscow by Matvei Manizer and his son Otto

101 A view of the statue is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbLPAdE-rX8, accessed 26 February 2015. 102 Sunarso in 2010 in Katalog Pameran Tunggal Edhi Sunarso (78) confirms that the idea for this work and the West Irian Independence figure came from the President. 103 See Katalog Pameran Tunggal Edhi Sunarso, 2010: 71. 145

(b. 1929) and transported to Jakarta. Ideas from the earlier visit to Indonesia included understanding of local clothing, so that the finished work incorporated the incision of batik design on the woman’s sarong, the giving of the bowl of rice, and the caping (hat). Apart from this it is a totally European creation.

2.4 (c): The Philippines

One avenue for Filipino visual art expression particularly during the difficult days of Japanese occupation and its aftermath mid-century was to turn to their strong and long history of painting historical subjects in large oil paintings. The narrative, politically-mindful drama, and the size of some of the works made then, led in 2007 to the National Museum of the Philippines selecting three of these compositions to display as exemplars of the Japanese atrocities during the war. Judging by social media, the images prompted many young Filipinos into reflective, and appalled, print.104 They are Dominador Castaneda’s (1904-67) Doomed Family of 1945, Diosdado Lorenzo’s (1906-83) Massacre and Rape in Ermita (a suburb of Manila) of 1947 (fig. 3.56), and Demetrio Diego (1909-88)’s Capas of 1948, which shows prisoners of war on their ‘death march’ (fig.3.57). They were selected by curator Patrick Flores as a protest against continued Japanese refusal to acknowledge the harm caused in the Philippines.

In the post-War period, however, the international art links in the Philippines remained with the West, with the tightening grip of Marcos’ regime beginning in the 1960s and confirmed in the early 1970s. It was then that certain artists, well-armed by Marxist ideology and knowledge of left-wing art elsewhere, started to flex their artistic muscles, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

2.5 Australia

Another stage in this analysis is the response to Communist imagery in Australia, from the 1920s reacting directly to ideology and art from Russia, and later in the 1970s to ideology and art from China – the latter with the sympathy for left-wing protest politics rising in the wake of the Vietnam War. Graphic work made pre-War has been described in Chapter 2, though an especially striking image by Jack Maughan, who had been part of the founding of the Workers Art Club, is worthy of inclusion here in a chapter about the visual power of this work: the cover of The Masses (fig. 3.58), emphasizing by the simple flat silhouette the strength of the

104 See for example, http://johnsilva.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/paintings-to-remind-us-of-japanese.html (accessed 16 October, 2015). 146 working man. There are various examples of the visual impact of the Soviets pre-War, including the Communist Party of Australia’s new 1924 banner for the street parades, common aroundTrade Union activities including the Communist International motto of ‘Workers of the World Unite’, with a Soviet-inspired image of a male worker with a hammer.105 A banner used in May Day marches in Sydney, given to the Miners Federation in 1934 by their Russian counterparts read “To our dear brothers, miners in Australia, from the miners of the Moscow coalfields of USSR”106 and the 1944 Australian Railway Union banner included the workers’ salute of the clenched fist (fig. 3.59).107

The second period beginning in the 1970s, and vastly more important in terms of its impact across the Australian art world (and, it can be said, society more broadly), is discussed in the next chapter.

3. Soviet influence further explored

Seeping through this text is the ideology of the left about art practice: to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln about equality and politics: that art was of the people, could be by the people, and was for the people. As has been discussed, more specifically, the general social realism of concern for the welfare of the less powerful is one outcome, and Socialist Realism, particular and focused, is another. There are two other aspects of relevance where art practice in the Asia Pacific region was influenced by the Soviets. They are distinct but important. The first is about art and the second is about ideology.

3.1 Other Soviet art in the Asia Pacific region

While Soviet art practice was more prescriptive in ideology than practice, the impulse behind approved art to support the regime and the iconography discussed here under Socialist Realism applied widely. However, how these ideas were formulated visually and transmitted took various routes. Two important elements that have little connection with Western European Academic antecedents are intertwined themselves: first, the folk and quasi-religious arts of Russia and, second, the (what is called) avant-garde work made there by the Constructivists, the Suprematists and their colleagues in the early years of the century – by artists like Malevich, Tatlin, Goncharova, Mikhail F. Larionov (1881-1964), Lissitzky and Rodchenko. Almost all of these artists made reference in their work to Russian folk art in motif

105 Stephen and Reeves, 1984: 39, reproduced plate 27. It should be noted however that the main impetus for these banners came from Britain, with types of imagery and text copied in Australia, and in large numbers particularly in the 1880s and after Federation. Stephen and Reeves point out that most banners were not provocative or ‘revolutionary’ in tone (39). 106 Stephen and Reeves, 1984: 40. 107 Stephen and Reeves, 1984: 40, 42. 147 and form as well as respecting its emotional power. They made not just shapes but shapes of moment and magic. Malevich did the sketches for the costumes and sets of the absurdist opera Victory over the Sun in 1913, where the intention was to drain formal narrative or ‘sense’ from the production and focus on sensual reactions. This process led to the first ‘abstract’ work, the , initially displayed in the same place as a religious icon. It became a work that could be stepped into, as into infinity, and it was in direct opposition to the ethos of the Wanderers or Aleksandr Gerasimov. Goncharova and Larionov collected not just Russian but also Vietnamese folk woodcuts and her words are quoted elsewhere on her interest in non-European cultures.

Most of the artists who could not endure the Communist political culture left. Those who stayed included graphic artists El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko, so central to USSR in Construction with the latter’s Workers Club prototype already discussed (see figs. 2.16 and 2.17), painters Aleksandr Deineka (see figs. 1.4, 2.28 and 3.61)and Yuri I. Pimenov (1903-77), poster-makers Dmitri Moor (Dmitri S. Orlov 1883-1946), Viktor N. Denisov, known as Deni (1893-1946) and Ivan A. Malyutin (1891/9-1932, see fig. 2.19). Their compositions are simple, and often flat, with plain white backgrounds. The graphic and poster artists generally use just three colours, red, white and black, and they include text integrated with imagery, all clear of outline, often in black, often with visual reference to the folk-print cut-out. They often incorporated photo-montage. They consciously integrate dynamism in their work, either in diagonal text or forms moving robustly across the space. If figural, the bodies are bent forward in motion, intent on their purpose. They are simplified, often in outline, often generic. Dimitrii Moor said “I wanted to give visual expression to words. I wanted the artist to wield the expressive power of the public speaker. It happened – through the medium of the political poster”.108 His Have you volunteered for the Red Army of 1920 was a model for images made twenty years later such as Iraklii M. Toidze (1902-85)’s The Motherland is Calling! of 1941 (fig. 2.20). Their commitment to the cause and their use of the avant-garde Constructivist model with new ways of integrating text and photography made for great works of art– those with what Nikolai Shkolnyi calls an “intense concentration of meaning”.109 Their meanings remained Soviet: Jack Chen, who saw it all, wrote that artists including Vladimir V. Lebedev (1891-1967) turned into “a popular, hard-hitting instrument of revolutionary

108 King, 2012, 8. Shkolnyi, 1990: 101, notes Moor’s debt to the British artist Alfred Leete (1882-1933) and his 1914-5 Your Country Needs You, and how an exhibition of war-time posters was shown at the Petrograd Academy of Art in 1916, where the captions and their immediacy and wit were noticed by the Russian designers. It is outside the remit of this thesis but the influence of British graphic design on Russian work, and therefore on Maoist imagery et al, is little acknowledged. The Petrograd Academy of Arts, in 1916 hosted an exhibition of British war-time posters and postcards. More importantly the exhibition showed the immediacy of the poster’s possibilities, the use of wit and the inclusion of captions or slogans. This exhibition followed a huge showing of 700 posters in St Petersburg shown in 1897, including the works of British Dudley Hardy (1867-1922), John Hassell (1868-1948), Frederick Hyland, and most importantly the Beggarstaff Brothers (1894-9) (see Shkolnyi, 1990: 98). The hand of the Beggarstaff Brothers in their reduction of form, flatness, linearity and inclusion of text reverberates with the local lubki Russian popular prints that also so attracted the attention of the innovative Russian artists of the time. 109 Shkolnyi, a curator of the medium in Moscow, writing in 1990: 101. 148 propaganda”.110 They included all the new motifs of the scientist, the industrial workers and the working-class leader.

These works, part of the Soviet visual armoury and working for the Party in their own way, had their own impact in the Asia Pacific region. Works on paper, including those intended for publications, could travel quickly and widely. The idea of an artist combining word and image for political education and having it reproduced sometimes in images without number which grew to new heights in the USSR had major impact in the East.

The most beguiling impact of Lissitzky and Rodchenko was on the Japanese. Rather than the smaller social realist works or the parallel battle-field melodramatic paintings, here the impact moved on from the interest in the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet graphic art to FRONT magazine. A journal comprised of large scale (29.8 x 42.3 cm) elaborate volumes published in Tokyo in the 1940s, under the editorship of Sozo Okada (1903-83), who had been in the USSR, it was overtly styled on USSR in Construction (see figs. 2.8, 2.13 to 2.15).111 The reduction and elegance of the Soviet line appealed to Japanese aesthetics and artists developed it with aplomb. These volumes include poster-size foldout pages, photo-montage, massed images followed by sparely worked pages, striking duo-tones, bled images, inserts, the use of high and then low view-points, great contrasts of light and shade, and particularly an inventive combination of image and text, all making the whole extremely dynamic. Many named photographers included their work.112 Mary Ginsberg reproduces the front cover of volume 1-2 (fig.2.13) in her British Museum catalogue, showing the angled, black and white, sharply lit face of the sailor, with the orange text designed within the whole.113 The frontispiece of this edition titled La Marine Japonaise garde de l’Asie, is in duo-tone, with blue across the page, and text within the image. The typography includes a mix of capitals and low case letters, words angled across the page, small and large letters, colour as noted, white letters on brown and brown on white. The Tokyo: Fall of 1945 sequel continues this use of graphic imagery and text, but it does not have the panache of FRONT. The bleakness of the situation spreads to the feeling of this publication.114

110 Chen, (1944) 1945: 49. 111 Accessed British Museum, 23 July 2014, PB 2008.3035.33 (1-2). With new printing practice at the end of the nineteenth- century, this affinity was developed in Japan in particular to the highest level. Kokka, the beautiful Japanese publication developed by the East/West scholar Tenshin Okakura in 1889, has printed papers, including overprinting in silver and gold, interleaved with hand-printed images with inserts of tissue, fabric patterns, and diagrams, as well as with the characters akin to imagery integrated into the script (Accessed British Library, 22 July 2014). This level of graphic sophistication was fine ground to receive the work of Lissitzky and Rodchenko. Andrea Germer has written a detailed discussion of the magazine in ‘Adapting Russian Constructivism and Socialist Realism: The Japanese Overseas Photo Magazine ‘Front’ (1942-45)’ in Zeithistorische Forschunger, 2, 2015. 112 It is always an indication of the respect paid to the image makers. They were Ihei Kimura, Haruo Kazano, Mitsumori Sekiguchi, Kazuo Nishino, Tadahiro Sakaguchi and Yunnosuke Tsuji. 113 See Ginsberg, 2013: Propaganda catalogue no.21. 114 Viewed British Museum, PB.87, 23 July 2014.. The imagery is of a defeated country: the homeless of Ueno Park, US soldiers in the streets of Tokyo, rubble and one sign saying “will remake steel helmet into pot”. 149

In the context of iconography, FRONT is notable for its selection of the 1840 Opium War as a cause célèbre with the associated text, which was sympathetic to the Chinese: “The real aggressor of Asia is to be adjudicated before the bar of history, not by mendacious propaganda to be let loose by false accusers, who have their ulterior motive”, followed by images of the “Anglo-American invaders” and showing how the Russo-Japanese war had enacted revenge on Russia for past wrongs. The three volumes were written in French, English and Japanese.

There were some Chinese artists pre-War who knew of this Constructivist based work: one was Qian Juntao (1906-98) who created a number of striking commericial images, either posters or covers around 1930 - a copy of his cover of the October magazine of 1933, translated by Lu Xun, on view in the Beijing museum in 2014 (fig. 3.60). Andrews and Shen,, in 1968, reproduce this115 and note that Qian had been influenced by Russian Constructivism at the time. The Chinese responded to the graphic simplicity of this style more fully during the Cultural Revolution.

Other forms of Russian graphic art were emulated, notably the political cartoon, with at times Russian works reprinted in the Chinese press (for example with works by Boris Efimov and the Kukryniksy (est. 1924) published directly from Russia in official newspapers like the People’s Daily and Progressive Daily), and serial ‘cartoons’ which had been produced in Russia from the 1920s extremely popular in China. Artist Feng Cheng (b. 1955) said “we zealously emulated Russian artists’ work published in Crocodil (Krokodil) and very soon our style changed”.116

A contrast to the impact of the Russian posters and also practice in China is the experience in Vietnam. The Vietnamese used the forms of Soviet poster-making in their repertoire - depictions of the leadership (see fig. 2.22), the text-and-visual imagery, including flags and the yellow star, as well as themes relating to education and ‘role of women’, and sometimes including folk style - but they are literally pale copies of the vigour and energy of other Socialist graphic work.117 Nora Taylor compares one poster by Nguyen Bich as closer to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People than any Soviet model.118 The occasional image that did show the impact of the graphic strength of the avant-garde Russian Socialist Realists, including photo- montage, is discussed more fully under the American War period in the next chapter.119

There were similar examples in Australia. Lissitzky’s and Rodchenko’s USSR in Construction was known in Australia and Counihan’s woodcuts and banner have been discussed. But he too

115 Andrews and Shen, 1998: 194, cat. no. 83. 116 Hung, 2011: 165, note, 42 – from an interview with Feng Cheng, 2002. 117 Huynh 2005: 149, notes that poster-making was not taught at the Hanoi Art School so it was a matter of trial and error to create them. 118 Taylor, 2004: 60. 119 See Heather and Buchanan, 2009: 11. 150 could simplify his imagery into blocks of colour and simple straight, dynamic lines, as the Russians had done so well for ‘image and word’ works. His cover of Proletariat magazine, published by the Melbourne University Labour Club, of July 1932, shows a worker shouting, fist raised in front of an industrial grid, with the typography similarly simplified and thickened, at one with the image.120

One of the most individualist Russian artists who worked under Stalin was Aleksandr Deineka. He painted the Defence of Petrograd in 1927, a large work (218 x 354 cm) now in the collection of the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow (fig. 3.61). Its subject is noted as part of the patriotic repertoire in the motherland’s safekeeping. John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World describes the energy of people roused to defend their patrimony, physically moving together:

Squads of soldiers marching out of step, with an affectionate jeer for the Red Guards; sailors, grim-looking; children with bundles of food for their fathers and mothers; all these, coming and going, trudged through the whitened mud that covered the cobbles of the highway inches deep. We passed cannon, jingling southward with their caissons; trucks bound both ways, bristling with armed men; ambulances full of wounded from the direction of the battle, and once a peasant cart, creaking slowly along…121

Deineka divides his image with two friezes of figures, walking across a flat simple picture plane in opposite directions, immediately creating a tension and energy. He removes all detail around the figures except for the device of the bridge on which the higher group of figures walk. A preliminary sketch shows more of the city, but this was removed for the final work; as he removed most colour. He emphasized outline (coming from his experience as a graphic artist) to great visual effect, reinforcing the rhythms of the rifles carried in unison by the lower group, as well as their in-time marching legs. These bent legs reinforce the momentum as they hurry across the bridge or to the front. The background is plain white.122 Others in Russia followed suit: Yuri Pimenov’s Getting Heavy Industry Going of 1927 has young men using all their forward might within the cauldron of industry, and Tair Salaklov’s (b.1928) The End of the Shift of 1957 being in the same vein of a frieze of young people rushing forward.123

120 See Merewether, 1984: 57. 121 Reed, (1920) 1977: 208-9. 122 Deineka is known to have been influenced by the work of Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918)’s Students Entering the 1813 War of Liberation, painted in 1908-09 for the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena. There are many other earlier examples, going back to Greek reliefs on Parthenon marbles or rows of Bodhisattvas on Angkor temples that attest to humanity’s capacity to make rhythmic, energised patterns of rows of figures moving towards some spiritual or military goal. 123 Wolfgang Holz, 1993: 74ff, writes of the importance of the ‘marching forward’ visualisation being a particular Soviet device, and cites other works (Boris Ioganson’s Students: the Workers Faculty is Marching On, of 1928, D. Shavygin’s At the Seaside of 1934, Deineka’s Donbass paintings of 1932-5 and Samuil Y. Adlivankin’s (1897-1966) Award of 1934) as examples. He argues that this imagery is one of five ‘allegories’ of Soviet art, this being the ‘illusion of instantaneous progress’. 151

This image has echoes in China in multiple ways.124 Tang Yihe (1905-44), like a number of the young sculptors who worked on the National Monument in Tiananmen Square, had studied in France. So how do we evaluate his Trumpet Call painted in 1941 (fig. 3.62), now a highly revered work in Chinese art history, which includes simplified forms of young people rushing forward in silhouette against a plain background to serve their country? Like the sculptures of active, purposeful ‘soldiers of the cause’ (see fig. 3.27), or paintings of some similarity (see fig. 3.28), was it the sympathy with the simple graphic tradition so well harnessed by Deineka, equally explored in a similarly ideologically driven arena. The sculptural group leader Liu Kaiqu echoed (somewhat stiltedly) this sentiment: “Soviet sculpture represents the superiority of the Soviet social system as well as the diligence and courage of the Soviet people”?125 Besides the enormity of the sculptors’ task in these friezes and their continued respect in China the compositional element of most note is of simplified figures moving at rhythmic speed across very flat picture planes. In almost all we look up to these heroic, driven young people, all generic, all serving their countries, all outlined against almost neutral backgrounds.

One of the differences between post-independence China and Russia is clear here. Deineka wrote about making his work: that he wanted “to create portrait likenesses of the people going to defend Petrograd by stingy use of colour, to give them concrete features of soldiers I met during the Civil War, defending the power of the Soviets. I wanted to convey their spiritual greatness – the steady march of people going to do great deeds…”126 Tang similarly individualises his people, but by the time of the creation of the Monument they have become generic - though heroic - soldiers for the cause.

3.2 The ideology of egalitarianism

The egalitarian ideology of the Soviets was central to the Chinese practice of amateur art of the lowest classes - peasant-painting - as it was to the establishment of Community Arts practice in Australia.127

124 Visits of Chinese to Russia would have included visits to Deineka’s painting on public display in the Museum of Military History which acquired the work in 1931, and, after 1940, he was a professor at a number of the institutions where Chinese studied, including the Moscow State Higher Institute of Art and Technology (1928–30), the Moscow Polygraphic Institute (1928–34), the V. I. Surikov Moscow Art Institute (1934–46 and 1957–63), the Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (1945–52; director, 1945–48), and the Moscow Architectural Institute (1953–57). His repute is overt in his public awards, including the Order of Lenin. His work was published from the 1920s, in magazine articles that specifically noted the Defense of Petrograd from 1926 (see Aleksandr Deineka, 2011, 416) as well as monographs in the 1930s. Lu Xun writes positively of seeing his graphic work in an exhibition in China in 1936, (see Selected Works, Volume 4, 1960: 244). This was part of the Soviet Graphics exhibition that travelled to Scandinavia, then “Nanking, Kwangchow, Hangchow, Shanghai” as noted in Aleksandr Deineka, 2011, 409. The Defence of Petrograd is proudly on display in a photograph of the Gallery in 1936 (fig. 2.12). 125 Chang, 2001: 469. 126 Sysoyev, 1982: np. 127 Ralph Croizier is unusual for a Chinese art specialist acknowledging this further background. In his writing on Xu Xian Peasant Painting in 2010 (137), he writes that the support of peasant painting “went beyond the particularly Maoist version of building socialism and harked back to Karl Marx’s vision in which socialism could unlock the full range of human potential.” 152

The Russians were the first to make support of non-professional artists part of State organisation, and to promote an ideology that gave status to their work. Soldiers were encouraged, as were talented factory workers. As is discussed in Chapter 5, the Chinese took this to another level, at least in proselytising the idea. There had been a directive in 1958 to the peasants to paint. The Peasant Painters movement of the 1950s and 1970s produced decorative, celebratory, and very colourful gouaches or woodcuts of their farm lives to local and then international acclaim.128 As Ralph Croizier writes, “for China, where, more than in most societies, mastery of the writing/painting brush, and thus monopoly of literary/cultural production, had demarcated the basic line between classes, putting brushes in the hands of peasants had truly revolutionary implications.”129 By the late 1950s in China every village, factory and street committee had its own politically-supported artist or group who did slogans and displays on blackboards and walls, on billboards and inside schools and halls.130 This had been part of traditional practice but now it was supported by the State. By the late 1960s, an aspiring artist coming from a worker-peasant-soldier background had an advantage when gaining entry into art educational institutions. John Gittings describes how he met students from factories at the Nanjing Art College in 1976, including a young man studying woodcuts who was also a crane-driver.131 This emerged more fully in the practice of the Cultural Revolution. Then, most of the many posters produced were overtly made by un-named groups of various workers; the 100 piece life-size clay figure diorama Ode to Red Guards of 1967 was made by Red Guards, workers, PLA members and artists;132 and most units of the PLA organised workshops for their army members to study art.

Left-wing artists from the Philippines to Australia wanted to subsume their individual practice to the advantage of the group, often making works anonymously. Many travelled to the countryside or to less-advantaged communities to take up arts practice as both a matter of principle (that we can all be artists) and practice (that making art makes for a more successful community).

The practice of art in Asia from the 1920s to the 1970s is as diverse as the cultures therein, but the Soviet Comintern would have been content with the impact Socialist Realism was having across the region, underlying the message, as Eva Cockcroft noted, that the Russians were in the forefront of cultural activity. The manifestations of this are various, omnipresent in the

128 See for example the exhibition of Contemporary Folk Painting from Zhejiang Province, China, that was toured by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Australia in 1988-9: Frangos, 1988. It has become an art industry today. 129 Croizier, 2010: 137. 130 See Gittings, 1999: 32. 131 Gittings, 1999: 39. 132 Watson and Zheng, 2002: 42. It was made in thirty days, displayed in the Red Guard Revolutionary Rebel Exhibition in Beijing, and then destroyed. Watson and Zheng include photographs of it in their exhibition catalogue: 30-1. 153

Communist zone, but with particular and significant local adaptions in Singapore/Malaya, Indonesia, Japan and Australia. How artists carried this forward will be discussed next.

154

Chapter 4. The contemporary response: the 1970s to recent times.

This chapter focuses on the impact of Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region from the beginnings of the resurgence in left-wing politicised art in the 1970s - an internal smoking fire that was fully lighted by young artists – to the period of energy and creativity in the 1990s. This conflagration grew and matured in the reflected glow of international recognition, then the trajectory softened and fragmented after the turn of the new century.

1968 was marked in the West for political or social youth revolution. Ricochets were felt overtly and covertly throughout the East (apart from China which had its own youthful revolt in the service of the State). For art, the period from the late 1960s to the end of the century produced a number of important movements, including four, it will be argued, which owe their origins to the influence of the Soviet Socialist Realiam (though at times through the filter of the Chinese). Together they show the significance of this particular influence on the art of the region.

The four are, first, the art of the Cultural Revolution and the reaction to this movement in China, then the response in Indonesia to President Suharto’s regime, followed by that of the Filipinos to President Marcos’ rule, and, last, the art practice in Australia impacted by ideology sympathetic to that of the Soviets. Additionally, some interpretation is given on art in the Communist acolyte states of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and North Korea, as well as responses in Thailand and South Korea.

The impact of Socialist Realism is clearly demonstrated in all these cases, to greater or lesser degree. There are some cross-cultural common threads. One is the youth of the protagonists, in line with uprisings of young people internationally from the late 1960s. Another is the element of humour. Youthful uprisings in the West included the creation of humorous images, but not with the ubiquity or central status of humour in much of what was made in the Asia Pacific region. I have wrtten previously about humour (as well as egalitarianism) in Australian art being one of this culture’s notable qualities,1 but so it can be argued in Indonesia and the Philippines, and, with a harder edge, in China. In China it is the Maoist Pop practitioners; in the Philippines it is Sanggawa, Santiago Bose (1949-2002) and Lazaro Soriano (b. 1943); in Indonesia it is Heri Dono (b. 1960), Apotik Komik, S. Teddy D. (1970-2016) and Taring Padi, and in Australia it is the poster-makers of the artist collectives. For young artists from the 1970s responding to Socialist Realism (in whatever guise or through various filters), this quality takes

1 Carroll, 1989. See Chapter 5. 155 the harshness from pedantic moralising, adding a human side to the (often) straight-faced self- importance and hubris of its parent. They joke, but they joke seriously. Underlying the humour, and in contrast to in the West, this work covers experiences of moment to its creators, with a serious intent coming from a passionate belief, still, that art can show a better way and lead to a better society. Despite the humour, idealism remains at the core of this work.

Contemporary Socialist Realism in Russia

In the context of the foundational ideology of Socialist Realism being primarily Soviet, is it appropriate to begin by making an assessment of this practice today in Russia itself, as a means to shed comparative light on the achievements of their comrades in the East. A discussion of the place of Socialist Realism in contemporary art globally, including in Russia, is included in the Introduction and a comparison between specific Russian and Asian art is made in Chapter 3. However, what has been called in the West ‘the second Russian avant-garde’ 2 which occurred in the 1970s was a critical response - or reaction - to Socialist Realism. The later 1950s and 1960s, under Khrushchev, had seen a number of artists like Viktor Pokov (1932-75) and Geliy Korzhev-Chuvelev (1925-2012) develop their own ‘austere’ style, simplifying the embellishments of recent Soviet art, but still keeping its grandeur, scale and moral intent. As Korzhev-Chuvelev stated: “Soviet power has forgotten why it carried out the revolution. We must recapture the spirit in whose name the revolution was seen through”.3 Others like Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov (both b. 1933) from the early 1970s reflected on the life under the Communist regime without this rhetoric, Kabakov’s Answers of the Experimental Group, observes Valerie Hillings, underscored “the rote sterility of public speech in the daily life of the Soviet citizen”.4

In the 1970s this focus on the revolution and its art continued, with a different attitude: a precursor of a similar reaction particularly in China in the 1980s, young artists, especially those associated with the Sots Art movement, sought to implode the old ideas of this ideology in a rampant wave of energy. They used the well-known imagery of their own Socialist Realism to gain immediate effect and frequent shock from their audience. The Sots Art term appeared first in 1972, associated with a series of paintings by Komar and Melamid who “used to point out that they were motived by a comparison of the Western overproduction of consumer goods and the Soviet overproduction of ideology”.5 They mocked official rhetoric using “the

2 See for example Michael Patrick Hearn in ‘To Finland Station and Back: RUSSIA!’ in Studio International, 9 March 2006 (see http://studiointernational.com/index.php/to-the-finland-station-and-back-russia, accessed 6 July 2015). 3 Terkhova ‘Geliy Korzhev-Chuvelev’ in The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015, 188. 4 Valerie Hillings ‘Ilya Kabakov’ in Russia!,2006, 54. 5 Andreeva, 1995:14. 156 low culture of the anecdote”and a “laughing folk chorus”.6 Their 1974 exhibition provoked authorities and was destroyed by the KGB, a precursor to The Stars exhibition in Beijing in 1979, which caused a similar reaction. Some of these young artists from both countries left fairly quickly to join the art centres of the West (Komar and Melamid are the best known from Russia, leaving the USSR in the mid-1970s to live in New York, where they made some of their best-known ‘Sots Art’ works).7 In the case of both Russian and Chinese artists these works were feted, instantly recognisable in the West as parodies of a disparaged regime in each place. They confirmed the worst of these other regimes, and they carried enough wit and power to hold their own amidst the maelstrom of the Western art establishments.

The authors of the State Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val’s collection publication of 2015 include six works which are part of this movement: Komar and Melamid’s Portrait of the Father of 1973 showing the latter’s real parent in the style of Soviet portraits, particularly Lenin: a male head and neck in profile, outlined against a solid red background; the Nest group of artists’ Iron Curtain of 1975, a flat piece of iron with the words ‘iron curtain’ in English written on it; ’s (b.1941) Stalin and Monroe of 1992, two more iconic heads against a gold background; Boris Orlov’s (b.1941) Pantocrator of 1990, an installation of enlarged military honours and medals above a staircase that cannot be walked on; Dmitry A. Prigov’s (1940-2007)critique of Soviet hierarchy made from the late 1970s; and Dmitry V. Vrubel’s (b.1960) My God, Help Me Survive this Deathly Love! of 1990-2005 showing Leonid Brezhnev kissing (of East Germany) on the mouth, with slogans in red above and below.8The authors of the Russian volume compare this movement to Western Pop art because it is driven by individuals critiquing society through its use of popular visual imagery,9 but it can be said that while certainly the critique and often irony is inherent, the content of these works (like that of the Chinese) is deeply heartfelt. It is part of a serious response to a remembered visual era of political import.

This new Russian work has been viewed variously in the West. The Guggenheim Museum’s large exhibition Russia! in 2005-6 showed contemporary work, with some satirical images, including, of those noted above, Komar and Melamid with two works from their Nostalgic Socialist Realism series (fig. 4.1), Orlov’s Imperial Totem and Sokov’s sculpture of a

6 Andreeva, 1995: 10, 14. 7 Their Nationalist Socialist Series of 1981-3, made in New York, also includes Stalin and the Muses, and Stalin in Front of the Mirror, playing with Western academic history painting format to include these leaders of the past. The Yalta Conference painting includes E.T. along with Hitler and Stalin. Of note, Ilya Kabakov is accorded an important exhibition at the Tate Modern in Britain in 2017. 8 The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015: 248-70. Vrubel’s artwork, arresting to Western eyes for the passionate kiss of two leaders, shows a practice accepted in Russia, and the artwork reflects another Russian visual icon, El Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-Küpper’s (1891-1978) 1940 poster of the Russian farmer kissing the Soviet soldier in a similar way (see Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: fig. 241). This work was published as the cover of USSR in Construction, no. 2-3, 1940, and would have been widely known. 9 The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015: 248. 157

Giacometti-like figure meeting a Socialist Realist Lenin.10 But a further twenty-eight works made after 1970 were also in that selection, works of great variety of style and interest. 11 Hal Foster in his review of the exhibition in the London Review of Books notes the Sots artists having ‘bite’ but that much of this later art “is as inane as art anywhere in the free world”.12 When this Russian period of reaction is assessed, certainly the works of the Sots Art movement and other politically-focused images are included as objects of relevance, but in exhibitions of ‘Russian art’ it is accepted that the Sots Arts artists moved on to other explorations and other artists with different interests have emerged.

The difference between this situation and what has occurred in China is overt. In China the period produced work of much greater scale both in the number of artists and works, there were no other developments of similar vitality, and this visual response lasted for a much longer period. Despite the public acceptance today of various alternatives to ‘political’ art, including traditional brush painting, as a 2015 visit to White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney could attest,13 the core elements of this movement ultimately coming from Socialist Realist beginnings, remains in China today. What caused this difference? Was it that since the 1950s the Russians had experienced the ‘thaw’ of and had had time to rethink their own art practice in relative freedom? In contrast, the Chinese had experienced the uncompromising rule of Mao Zedong in the 1950s leading to the Culture Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. In this last period, the force of Socialist Realism only increased – literally in the scale of the works and also in their emotional frenzy. The lack of alternative in China constrasts with the Russians’ knowledge of diverse trends in other parts of Europe and the USA. Was it also the collective framework of Chinese society that encouraged this larger, communal response, especially in contrast to the Russians who still understood the traditions of the individualistic Enlightenment?

It led to the situation where, for the last forty years, the practices of Socialist Realism originally developed in Russia have their strongest exponents in the Asia Pacific region, and indeed not

10 Russia!, 2006: 54, Nostalgic Socialist Realism, Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live, 183 x 148 cm and The Origins of Socialist Realism, 1983, oil on canvas, 183.5 x 122 cm; 58, Imperial Totem, 1989, painted aluminium, 254 x 139.7 x 91.4 cm; and 61, The Meeting of Two Sculptures, 1986, bronze, 48.9 x 40.2 x 16.9 cm. 11 The Guggenheim exhibition, held at various of its museums, but centrally in New York, was critiqued at length along the lines of its selection being too official, too weak in its 1910-20s works of the Russian avant-garde, and specifically with its Socialist Realism section criticised as images of little artistic interest – see Hilton Kramer ‘Guggenheim’s Russia! Show Gets Fascination After Five Centuries’ in Observer, 17 October 2005 (see http://observer.com/2005/10/guggenheims-russia-show-gets-fascinating-after-five- centuries/ accessed 6 July 2015); Hearn noted above; Mark Stevens ‘Constructivist Criticism in New York Art (see http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/14551/, accessed 6 July 2015); Margarita Tupitsyn ‘”Russia!: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’ Artforum International, 44: 3, November 2005 (see www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-138862166/russia- solomon-r-guggenheim-museum accessed 6 July 2015); Jamey Gambrell ‘An Affair of State’ , New York Review of Books, 12 January, 2006 (see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/jan/12/an-affair-of-state/ accessed 6 July 2015). Of note is that none of these reviewers remark at length on the works made after the 1970s, not seeing them as a coherent or strong part of the exhibition which was indeed made up of strong parts. 12 Foster, 2005: 28. 13 See p. 209 for a similar focus on literati paintings at the National Art Museum of China. 158 only in numerical and temporal scale but in the vitality of the art. Ultimately the Chinese did better than the Russians at their own game.

1. China

This section focuses on China’s response to the ideas behind Socialist Realism from the Cultural Revolution until today. At the end, reference is made to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and North Korea all remaining part of the political Communist Asian bloc, showing how the art of these entities reflects the continuing and extended impact of the Russian movement.

In China itself there were two stages for this art: the Cultural Revolution itself, from 1966 to 1976, and then the period from 1976 to the end of the century. In the first period of the Cultural Revolution, the art made took the various elements of Socialist Realism developed in Russia, and magnified them. Iconography was more: Maoist works made Mao more of a deity than Lenin ever was. Style was more: reality ‘grew’, with bigger images of everything, from powerhouses to mountain crossings, to muscles and white teeth. Physicality was more: a style of SIZE – huge paintings, huge sculptures, huge enterprises of groups of artists working together, the Five Year Plan mentality of the huge state pushing all before it. It was stage- managed from above: “Of all the characters stress the positive ones. Of the positive characters, stress the heroic ones. Of the main characters, stress the central one” said Jiang Qing in 1968.14 Jiang Qing was behind special model books giving advice on how to portray the body in the best revolutionary pose.15 All matters of iconography and style were about impact - and the impact was huge. Think of a Chinese artwork of the twentieth-century and a Cultural Revolution image will emerge (fig. 4.2 and fig. 4.3).16

It was in the Cultural Revolution that the idea of the political work on paper, with text and image, was re-enforced by a new order of graphic intensity. Forms were made more heroic, stronger, clearer and bigger. The new dicta of ‘red, bright and shining’ posters combined imagery of leadership and the history of the Present (notably the Cultural Revolution itself unfolding as the works were made), with the sensibilities towards the graphic qualities of (past) simple colours and strong lines of traditional Chinese art (fig. 4.4). The size of many graphic works made is extraordinary: Gao Minglu reproduces one poster being painted on the entire floor of a large building where eight artists are walking over the torso and outstretched fists of one figure (fig. 4.5).

14 Often quoted, this from Laing, 1988: 72. 15 See Sullivan, 1996: fig.13.8 for example. 16 These lithographs are relatively small in size, dependent on the capacity of the printing process. Much larger works were able to be made by hand. 159

As discussed at the end of Chapter 3, the support for the idea of workers, peasants and soldiers, that is, the common people, being artists was realised in this period. PLA members studied art with “Guangzhou, Shenyang and Jinan Military Commands … [making] the best achievements in ‘Soldiers’ Art Creation Campaigns’… [and more] than ten works by soldiers … [were] selected for the 1974 National Art Exhibition catalogue.”17 Zheng Shengtian writes that these works made by “workers, peasants and soldiers” had the best results in the “gouache paintings from Huxian county, Shanxi, posters from the Shipyard of Dalian, Liaoning, and the coloured woodblock prints by artists who served in the People’s Liberation Army.”18 Figure 4.3 is credited to the Nanjing airforce troop the Red Eagles.

It can be argued that this work uses the Russian model and in all ways makes it more powerful. Let us compare five types of work made in Russia and during the Cultural Revolution in China: a history painting; a street parade and its documentation; a collective work; ‘amateur’ work and graphic art.

Shen Jiawei, now living in Sydney and interviewed by this author in 2013,19 was assigned to work in the border region of China, across the river from Siberia. He has told the story of his painting of Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (see fig.5.8), of 1974, in detail.20 He says he learnt from books, in the tradition of Maksimov and his important acolytes in China. Compare this major work of Shen’s with one of Russia’s Socialist Realist best-known works, Aleksandr Gerasimov’s J.V. Stalin and K.K. Voroshilov in the Kremlin, of 1938 (fig. 4.6). In each case two men are painted heroically against a dynamic sky, with building accoutrements to set a particular, but general scene: the site of power, the border tower. The world flows beneath both of them. In both, the two men look to the future. The stances of solidity, trustworthiness, and slight motion, are the same. The positioning against railings is the same. Even the winter military uniforms are the same. But as Shen has said, his painting was heightened on political demand – the faces made stronger, of brighter hue. All along he knew that looking up to such heroes would enhance the work – they seem like gods above the fray. In comparison in the Russian work, while certainly heroicising the two men (making them seem taller than either were), they remain firmly on the ground, almost stolid in their positioning. Shen has said who his models were, but for the audience they are generic, unknown heroes, sons, brothers, men we want to know. The fact the Russians are known anchors them even closer to the ground. Shen has made his work ‘more’ and with this he takes his audience with him, to feel pride in the work and idealism of these young men, guarding ‘the great Motherland’.

17 Watson and Zheng, 2002: 47. 18 Zheng, 2002: 14. 19 A Journey Through Asian Art, episode 7, (see http://www.snodger.com.au/product/ajtaa-1-5/). 20 See Shen Jiawei ‘The Fate of a Painting’ in Chiu and Zheng, 2008: 138-47, and in Kime and Shen, 2010. 160

Socialist Realist imagery always accorded great emphasis on access – to visual displays amongst the people, and street parades are central to this. Jiang Jiehong has included some panoramic photographs in his book Red; China’s Cultural Revolution, focused around the colour of both China and the Communist cause. However, beyond the colour (that Jiang calls ‘the Red Sea’), what always strikes an outsider is the mass of people and the uniformity of their actions in these photographs (fig. 4.7). Lenin had always gathered crowds and some of the most famous images show him leaning forward rousing the thousands of people swirling around him. During the Cultural Revolution, this imagery of crowds came to a new height of size, scale and colour. The fervour of the young people waving The Little Red Book in unison, or carrying Mao’s face on placards is unmatched. The number and precision of these mass performances has been controlled in more recent times, to the faultless marches of both Chinese (vide the Beijing Olympics ceremonies), and also North Korean parades, without the energy looming from those of the Cultural Revolution period.

The Chinese followed the Russians in making collective or group works, usually led by a senior artist but with painters of note included in the cohort. Maksimov himself had worked on the brigade painting led by Vasili P. Efanov of Leading People of Moscow in the Kremlin in 1949 (fig. 4.8). A huge work now in the Tretyakov collection, it shows the splendid State surroundings of the Russian leadership, with a crowd of important people on the right, gazing up to the bust of Stalin overlooking the podium on the left, ceremonial flag below him and massive glittering chandeliers above it all.21 Made by a number of named artists because one person could not fulfil such a commission alone, it repeats earlier iconography of leadership on the podium above a crowd, but now with all the trappings and stability of power. Besides wonder at its size and skill, and awareness of its political messages of the importance of these people, it carries little empathetic or emotional weight. Let us compare one of the central collective works of the Cultural Revolution period in China: the Rent Collection Courtyard, whose creation and aftermath has been discussed in detail by various scholars. This work was made by a team of sculptors at the Sichuan Arts Academy along with various others, first of 114 life- size clay figures (fig. 4.9), with various iterations, including (by 1974-8) being remade in copper-plated fibreglass. At the time the makers’ names were not made known. It drew enormous crowds. Unlike the Russian brigade work, this piece invites its audience to see their own past predicament in the overtly wretched figures – to identify closely with them. Of equal ‘scale’ as the Soviet work, made by many hands following Russian models and certainly in the service of the Party, it takes the size and complexity of the Russian example to a new emotive height. As Britta Erickson reports, this work earned Jiang Qing’s highest approval in 1966 as a

21 Reproduced in Bown, 1998: 269. 161

‘model’ for artists, and through this became more than a work of art: it was, as Erickson writes “also an opportunity for the generation and propagation of rhetoric”.22 The Russians had understood art’s use for ‘rhetoric’ but the Chinese again took it further.

It was during the Cultural Revolution that art by ‘farmers’ came into its own (fig. 4.10). The Russians had never made this leap from their folk art, such as lubki prints, to a school of work that used the political agenda of the Party that still continues as an art practice to this day. The movement in China had support from above to put the Soviet ideology into practice: using the qualities of their folk art, particularly paper-cuts and simple woodcuts, for this new political agenda. The flatness of the forms, the primary colours, the outline, the simple scenes of life in the countryside are all based on folk art, with the added overlay of Party policy, which included the triumphal celebration of this life that is so part of Socialist Realism. The urban artists sent to the country to guide this practice certainly introduced technical skills in draughtsmanship, composition, lighting and perspectival space, as well as native Chinese understandings of space (leaving areas of paper to give breath to the imagery for example), although they still retained (and retain) those ‘folk’ qualities just listed (fig. 4.11). The issue of who is making these works links them to Soviet example, but there is another aspect as well. It is the subject matter itself, of celebrating work in the ‘countryside’. Painting life in the country had been part of Western European nineteenth century subject-matter, but the focus on heroic work in the countryside was new first in Russia and then certainly in China. Socialist Realism is Russia celebrated large paintings like Yablonskaya’s Corn of 1949, of robust, joyful women bringing in the harvest, bathed in bright yellow sunshine, beaming at the viewer (fig. 4.12).23 In China this focus on celebrating the real human labour of the majority of the population was further change, one they made their own.

Ralph Croizier argues that this country-based movement by the early 1970s provided the positive example for leaders in Beijing wanting to promote an anti-elitist movement, so its resultant support from the central arts organisations leading to the major exhibition at the National Art Gallery in 1972, and the following international recognition, similarly to the Rent Collection Courtyard piece, took this practice into an iconic position far above its actual physical presence. Peasant Art was important. Around the world after this, if such movements were advanced, there was this precedent of official and financial and, in many sectors, critical support.

22 Erickson, 2010: 123-4. 23 See The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015: 172-3. The painting was made from studies of a collective farm in the Ukraine, famous for its grain harvest, with eleven people from the farm being awarded Hero of Socialist Labour titles. 162

The most successful art of all these parts of Cultural Revolution practice is what was made graphically – painted on banners, made into posters and pasted on walls (figs. 4.13 and 4.14). Jiang Qing’s dicta of red, bright and shining, the size of the works, and their simple political focus were all central to them. But where did their actual imagery come from? It is possible to go back through the graphic work to works of German Expressionism and woodcuts like Li Hua’s Roar China Roar of 1935, to see the power that a simple image and energised line can have. But these were transformed through the lessons already explored by the Soviet geniuses of graphic art, first Deni and Dimitrii Moor and then Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. In the Cultural Revolution they extended this, creating the simple images of ordinary people struggling and succeeding against some unseen power, using the exaggerated gestures of both body and face, depicted with tough black outlines and simple, flat colours. Words are interwoven with the image. Compare Rodchenko’s poster for a publishing house of 1924 (fig. 4.15) and a poster made by the Tianjin People’s Fine Publishing House in 1968, The 3 July and 24 July proclamations are Chairman Mao's great strategic plans! Unite with forces that can be united with to strike surely, accurately and relentlessly at the handful of class enemies (fig.4.16). Of similar size, stylised and simplified with the important elements freed from any sense of ‘realism’in comparison to each other, flat tones intersperse with colour, lines surround the various elements, and white areas give brightness to the whole. Both exhort their audience to some action through the literal imagery and the dynamic forceful, clearly defined and expressive lines. Hung Chang-tai notes the comparison with Russian art, particularly in the inclusion of the phrases of revolution and that the Chinese used these more powerfully; that ‘liberation’, ‘up-rising’ and a sense of camaraderie through the ‘running dogs of imperialism’ reflect not just a change of form but a new form of political order.24

As quoted in the Introduction Gao Minglu writes in 2011 that this became the most popular art in the world, in part because it was made by the ‘masses’ and in this way it “thoroughly transcended Soviet art, post-modernist art, and any commercial art in terms of the population of receivers, the scale of form, and the range of producers”. 25 The issue again is what the Chinese did with these antecedents– they made it so strong and bold that the imagery and style became central to what the next generation of Chinese artists reacted against.

This reaction occurred after 1976, but particularly in the 1980s and 1990s when artists in China, post the Tiananmen Square incident, focused with great irony on this particular imagery, and with a scale and bravado rarely seen. These artists responded to the art of the

24 Hung, 2011: 2. 25 Gao Minglu, 2011: 58. 163

Cultural Revolution because they recognised its power and their great success came from the impact of this period.

Despite the upheaval of the period, the institutions of arts survived, and Soviet-trained leaders remained in them or were restored to power. In China, by 1980, the directors of the six major art academies who had been Maksimov students continued the teaching of highly skilled realistic oil painting, reflecting the continuation of the ethos of Russia’s on-going impact, as figure 4.17 demonstrates: an academic oil painting class in Beijing photographed in 1994. It also is reflective of the continuity of the institutional construct coming ultimately from Russia: stable State-supported institutions led by respected older men.

From the 1980s, Chinese artists used the iconography of the Cultural Revolution as a visual foundation from which to critique their world. In the moment between the Maoist past and a different future, young, keen, impatient Chinese artists turned not to traditional Chinese iconography or any outside Western style but to this recent imagery based originally on Socialist Realism. Gao Minglu writes that this 1980s avant-garde “did not happen by chance”26 but is the descendent of the May 4th Movement, Mao’s art and indeed a continuation of the Confucian moral order to change the world for the better. He cites a “merging of morality, politics, and art as the fundamental goal of human life”.27

Portraits of Mao either alone or in groups, but now with a mocking edge, became so ubiquitous that this period became known as Maoist Pop.28 However it can be argued that it was the stylistic as well as iconographic strength of the earlier work that provided the model for this new imagery. The artists used all the visual tricks – size, colour, over-blown figures, text and politics (or anti-politics) - of the recent past to create a new visually aggressive result.

They mocked the Cultural Revolution’s iconography, as in Wang Guangyi (b. 1957)’s 1992 series Great Criticism and his critique on Socialist Realism and capitalism (figs. 4.18 and 4.19).29 They mocked Mao’s image, as in Li Shan (b. 1944)’s androgynous Rouge series of 1994. They mocked the one-child family of the regime, as in Zhang Xiaogang’s (b. 1958) Big Family/Bloodline series (fig. 4.20). Fang Lijun (b.1963) mocked this society with his leering faces; and they used the anonymous face of the shouting cadre to mock this past paradigm, as

26 Gao Minglu, 2011: 33. 27 Gao Minglu, 2011: 33. 28 Geremie R. Barmé’s 1996 text, Shades of Mao; The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 44-5, follows the various responses to Mao’s imagery after his death, including the huge variety and number of commercial artefacts, remarking that these were more ironic than critical. He notes that artworks, including Wang Guangyi’s, ironic though they were, were part of the ‘Mao obsession’ of the time. 29 It is of note that such images were made in Russia: Alexander Kosolapov (b. 1943) made Lenin and Coca Cola in 1982, with the slogan included of it being The Real Thing: see Tupitsyn, 1989, 77. A version made in 1990 called Coca-cola with Lenin’s head and the Coca-Cola slogan is reproduced in Andreeva, 1995, fig. 31. Andrews and Shen, 2012: 257, note this ‘possible’ connection. 164 in the work of Yue Minjun (b.1962). The imagery is used again and again and through it they staked a new place for themselves in world art attention. It became so ironic and self- referential that even Dong Xiwen’s Founding of the People’s Republic painting was appropriated for mockery: Yue Minjun painted Founding Ceremony in 1997 minus all the people on the podium,30 followed by He Jie’s (b. 1977) less strident and more nostalgic response: in his I Have a Dream That I Will Stand on Tiananmen and Shoot the Oriental Arrow, of 2006, the original members of the leadership are replaced by a headless archer whose arrows are aimed at the head space of the now absent Mao.31

Many of these artists, quickly seen as seminal to their evolving culture, have reflected on their driving forces. Zhang Xiaogang was interviewed in 1996 about his Bloodline series. He mentions the formulaic ‘polishedness’ of old family photographs related to an “indistinct individuality” of Chinese culture and a beauty in its gender neutrality, but here standardised into ideology:

We are keenly aware that in reality we all live in a ‘big family’. In this ‘family’ we need to learn how to face all kinds of ‘bloodline’ relationships: familial, social, and cultural. Through all kinds of ‘’, the idea of ‘collectivism’ has in fact already burrowed deep into our consciousness and formed a certain unshakeable complex. In this ‘family’ where both standardisation and privacy convene, we counterbalance each other, dissolve each other and depend on each other.32

Such a statement could only be made within the experience of Communism.

The Chinese recognised their journey in the 1980s as a rejection of Socialist Realism’s relation with the State and its emphasis on the needs of the collective above the individual, but they used its energy, style and iconography in their protest to great effect. The important collection of documents of the period, Contemporary Chinese art; Primary Documents, edited by Wu Hung and published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010, gives a sense through its many pages of energetic resistance to the norm, either external or internal, of revolt, of refusal, of anger, and of energy. One section on new individualism in the later 1980s begins with Jia Fangzhou’s statement “A profound concern for human destiny has produced a deep sense of anxiety among Chinese artists”33 and the passion of the comments in this chapter demonstrate this deep concern: Gu Wenda rails against Western modernism; 34 Zhang Peili (b.

30 See Roberts, 2012: 109. 31 Now in the collection of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, see Keenan, 2010: 150-1. 32 Wu, 2010: 190-1,‘Report from the Artist’s Studio’; quotations from 191. 33 Wu, 2010: 100. 34 ‘Challenging Modernism – an Interview with Wenda Gu’ in Wu, 2010: 111. 165

1957) wrote in 1987 that “Now is the time for settling debts left over from the historical past… it is up to the artists to seize back the authority that they surrendered”;35 Wang Guangyi wanted to ‘purge humanist enthusiasm’;36 and Li Shan (with his lotus/Mao imagery) stated “here, sex and power construct a grand, sweeping, yet absurd scene”.37 Ever analytical, the Chinese intellectuals were writing about ‘the third generation’ of artists emerging from college in the late 1980s and their ‘apathy’ towards ‘their current state of existence’, called ‘Political Pop’ or ‘Cynical Realism’ by critic Li Xianting in 1992, with Wang Guangyi’s work typical.38

The artists went to the centres of art power, they worked together (using Chinese curator Hou Hanru to good effect), they never shrank from being bold, and they succeeded. Following Gao Minglu’s 2011 claims for the Cultural Revolution, Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen wrote in 2012 that this period allowed artists to emerge on the global stage in the late twentieth century, having given them training in posters, displays and murals to a great size as well as giving them motifs.39 They make the pointed note that the key international artists like Xu Bing (b. 1955) and Gu Wenda were invariably youth from urban centres sent to the country. Perhaps more important is the pressure of the Cultural Revolution making the response so extreme. There is a school of art in China in the 1990s that was so revolting, literally, with naked bodies covered in honey and fish oil and then flies (by Zhang Huan, b. 1965) (fig. 4.21.)40 or less revolting but still startling for its attack on social convention, of mating pigs (fig. 4.22), that it takes us back to Boris Groys’ comments about Russia: that the lack of tempering and incremental change in Russia led to the 1917 Revolution and its art; so the Cultural Revolution and the reaction to it by artists afterwards led to art works of a force and daring that have taken the international imagination.

Myriad publications have emerged over the last twenty years about contemporary Chinese art. All will include these images, recognising their visceral energy, their anger and their aggression towards this contemporary world. They are all qualities despised by traditional Chinese culture where subtlety, controlled energy, and refusal to reference the sordid reality of everyday life were admired aspects of an artist’s output.

Always reflective and analytical about Chinese cultural history, Cai Guoqiang has acknowledged key parts of this Socialist Realist art-political past in major internationally acclaimed works. He used a large area of the Arsenale of the 1999 Venice Biennale to

35 Zhang Peili ‘Against the Public, in Wu, 2010: 113. 36 Quoted in Huang Zhuan ‘The Misread Great Criticism (Da Pipan)’ 2008’, in Wu, 2010: 169. 37 Quoted in Gu Chengfeng ‘Tendencies in Chinese Pop’1996, in Wu, 2010: 176. 38 Li Xianting ‘Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art: Analyzing the Trends of “Cynical Realism” and “Political Pop”’, written in 1992 and reprinted in Wu, 2010: 157-65; these words 159. 39 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 198. 40 Zhang Huan, 12 Square Metres, 14 June, 1994, Beijing. He sat on a toilet covered in honey and fish oil for forty minutes, allowing the flies to gather and swarm around him. 166 reproduce, slightly smaller, the Rent Collection Courtyard, confounding Western viewers not so aware of the importance of this piece to Chinese art history, but even so winning the Golden Lion Award for that exposition. More recently, and intriguingly, he purchased all the remaining paintings in the estate of Konstantin Maksimov in Russia (cheaply it is said as they were of little account in his home country) to exhibit as part of his art history, at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2002.41 He wanted to remind Chinese audiences of the Russian’s importance.

It is instructive to read the large tome produced in 2010 reproducing many of the Chinese works collected by White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney.42 All works were made in or after 2000, with the writers of this text making a point of both this being a moment of change and the fact that a Chinese artist was key to the selection.43 If a comparison is made with the selection for the Saatchi exhibition of 2008, entitled The Revolution Continues, the differences are quite stark.44 The English publication includes many images with direct Socialist Realist and Maoist inflections, unlike the White Rabbit book. Is it a case of the attraction of the exoticism of Socialist Realism and Mao Zedong in the minds of Western taste-makers? Markers of difference? Markers of easy recognition? Even the title reinforces this view.

Certainly the White Rabbit book, so focused on work made in the new century, includes very few works which directly reflect this earlier period iconographically. Shen Liang (b. 1976, the year of the end of the Cultural Revolution)’s thick painterly pastiches of Cultural Revolution populist imagery are included; however, Elizabeth Keenan makes the point that “Among his generation of artists, Shen Liang is unusual in his focus on the political past.”45 Beyond this, and more important for Chinese art than obvious iconographic links to Socialist Realism, the tenor of almost all the works is overtly confrontative, both politically and visually. They are frequently lurid of colour, enormous in size, iconoclastic of social taboos of decorum, and usually there is an undercurrent of political critique of society.46 Often it is amusing, usually serious, but the edge of direct critique seen in the 1980s and 1990s is gone – as Keenan says, the artists have moved on. This is the debt contemporary Chinese artists – and their world- wide audience - owe Mao and in turn Lenin: the chance to overthrow the decorum of Confucian behaviour, made all the more powerful because the effort has been so dramatic.

41 See: http://www.caiguoqiang.com/projects/cai-guo-qiangs-maksimov-collection (accessed I July 2015). 42 See Keenan, 2010. 43 Wang Zhiyuan writes, 2010: 14, that he advised the collector Judith Neilson “A Chinese person participating in the selection of works by Chinese artists: this is a rare thing for international Chinese art collections”. He makes the point that foreigners select recognisable Chinese qualities rather than work that resonates for itself alone. 44 The Revolution Continues, 2008. 45 Keenan, 2010: 249. It should be noted there are other artists still focused on this area: APT8 in 2015 in Brisbane includes Liu Ding’s (b. 1976) work who is “specifically interested in the role of socialist realism in Chinese visual culture… He revisits symbols of politicised social realism, such as the ideal citizen, master artists, and official histories…” (see Tarun Nagesh, 2015, ‘The social medium’ in APT8; The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art: 152.) 46 Very few of the artists work in what might reference literati qualities. Among them are Du Jie, Lin Tianmiao, Lu Yifan, Yi Long and Zhou Yunxia. Tradition is used, as in the Tibetan Gade’s work, where religious imagery includes modern details, like syringes. 167

Vietnam

An exhibition in Paris in 2014 of posters by women artists during the ‘American War’ which ended in 1975 showed the flat tones, simplified colour, usage of text and image, as well as the political imagery of the work in line with their fellow Communist practitioners’earlier works (figs. 4.23 and 4.24). A comparison of Rodchenko’s and the Tianjin 1968 posters (figs. 4.15 and 4.16) shows the parentage of the Vietnamese works, close to Rodchenko, especially with the 4000 US Planes with its spare, stylised linearity. However, similarly to the softer quality of Vietnamese oil paintings, the woman soldier in Bringing Down the B 52s with its passive figure, flowers, and delicate cloud decoration is less strident and aggressive than those made further north.

Russia had been inviting students from Vietnam, even after 1975, and fourteen are noted to have studied there between 1980 and 2005. However, as was the case throughout the century, the Vietnamese followed their own course. The reaction after Doi Moi was not to turn to the energy of Socialist Realist imagery, but to turn, with similar energy, to rejecting it. The artists returned to their own School of Paris bucolic with enthusiasm. Buffalo Boys by Nguyen Xuan Tiep in Queensland Art Gallery is testament to this. Derided at the time as retrogressive on the assumption the artist knew no better,47 in fact it was a conscious step to a new future after Socialist Realism’s overt political imagery. The Vietnamese needed to have been through the Socialist Realist fire to know their own minds and seize this style with a will. It was again a local response against Western curatorial judgement.

Other Asian Communist states: Cambodia, Laos and North Korea

With minimal infrastructure, the artists of both Cambodia and Laos struggled to achieve a presence even locally. The most overt work was Socialist Realist public monuments (see fig. 4.25) and banners, but imagery that has received the most acclaim outside these countries has been ‘documentary’, painted by Cambodian artists of the Killing Fields. Vann Nath (1946- 2011) and Svay Ken (1933-2008) have become known for their work that illustrates with great emotional force and raw truthfulness the horrific scenes of the Khmer Rouge era. Vann Nath published his visual memoir A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21 Prison in 1988. It would be possible to say their factual, dramatic imagery had influence from Socialist Realism (and their ‘worker’ class relevant also) but they are really what would be

47 American curator Mary Jane Jacob made this remark during the Conference Identity, tradition and change : contemporary Art of the Asian Pacific Region, 17-20 September 1993. The painting by Nguyen Xuan Tiep is Song of the Buffalo Boys II, 1990, oil on canvas, 85 x 120 cm. 168 called naïve artists in the West: closest visually to traditional mural temple paintings though again not trained in this highly sophisticated school or any other ‘academy’. Svay Ken called himself a ‘worker-artist’, that is, an artisan,48 distancing himself from the cadre role of the political rule.49

Laotian official art remained very restricted. Even in 1990, the quarterly pictorial magazine Laos, published in Vientiane in Lao and English, has imagery of ‘life’ in the country, including, in the second edition of that year photography of the Celebration of the 35th founding Anniversary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (fig. 4.26) with an enormous backdrop of the hammer and sickle flag waving across the hall’s wall. The image is accompanied by the speech of the Secretary General saying “we must fight against objective appearance, spiritualism, voluntarism, conservatism, negligence as well as anarchism, irresponsibility.”50 Large hand-painted, Socialist Realist inspired street banners made to urge the people to greater good decorate the main points of Vientiane still in this period. This smaller satellite , set apart from art-world movements, has retained more of the ideology and practice of earlier Soviet artistic times than its larger neighbour of Vietnam.

The 2015 Asia Pacific Triennial had a focus on contemporary art made in the old ‘Indo-Chinese’ triangle. It is notable these mostly young artists, more comfortable in a world where culture as such is normalised, have turned to other traditions rather than the brutal art reflecting the Khmer Rouge years.51

Has North Korean art changed after the 1970s? Like the Lao response, the North Koreans continued with both Socialist Realist iconography and style and in an ever more all- encompassing manner, but did it change or develop into new forms, as happened in China? Rather than develop new forms, the North Koreans entrenched past ideology. Kim Jong Il’s Treatise on Art was published in 1992, various new artworks like Chong Yongman’s (1938-99) Evening Glow over Kangson painted originally in the 1970s (fig.4.27) were reformulated in the mid 1990s52 and imagery generally continued to grow in size and output by the turn of the

48 See Russell Storer, 2009. ‘Svay Ken; Painting from life’, in The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery: 135. 49 A more sophisticated visual view of the Khmer Rouge period was drawn by refugee Bunheang Ung in Brisbane in 1980, soon after his arrival. He drew 90 ‘cartoon’ images telling his story of the time, see www.khmerrouge-toons.blogspot.com.au,(accessed 7 May 2015). 50 ‘Determined to Advance Integrated Restructuring’ Laos, 1990: 2, 11. This edition includes photographs of the meeting in April 1990 “devoted to the 120th Birthday anniversary of V.I. Lenin, with the participation of over 1,000 people”. 51 Leang Seckon (b. 1974)’s Indochina, 2014, a work of ancient narratives painted with traditional mural and manuscript sophistication, now in Queensland’s collection, is one example. Vandy Rattana’s (b. 1980) response is with more contemporary documentary photographic media. 52 Reproduced in Hoffmann, 2010: 162, fig.13. The painting shows Kim Jong Il placed before an earlier 1973 painting by the artist of the Kangson Steelworks shimmering in a reddish glow. The photography here shows the work in the entrance of the Mansudae Art Studio. 169 century.53 Like the artwork itself, art practice became an extreme and monolithic example of the ideology of art and culture that Lenin himself had first put forward, and an example more extreme than any other in the world. Artist and worker have become one. The Mansudae Creation Company in Pyongyang employs (in 2014) 3,700 workers of which 1,000 are creators, divided into media units, such as ink painting, which has 150 artists in its section. They produce, they say, around 4,000 works per year, half for public orders and many for overseas, including examples commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial in 2010 (fig 4.28).54

There are two ways to respond to this work: one is to parody it, as is discussed below, and the other (useful for this thesis) is to see it continuing Socialist Realism’s core values of the State’s cause being more important than the individual, an argument advanced by Koen De Ceuster in ‘To Be an Artist in North Korea: Talent and Then Some More’ published in 2010.55 De Ceuster writes that North Korean art should be seen as pre-modernist, from a world where artists are not independent actors, but work within a prescribed context, stylistically and thematically, with a system that encourages conformity not rebellion. He writes that North Korean art is critiqued by those who universalise “a Bohemian understanding of art as an independent realm, and…artwork as the expression of wholly individual emotion by a wholly individual mind”.56 The flaw in this argument is how the North Koreans had used so much of Russian Socialist Realism which was a response, not a precursor, to Western individualism.

2. Indonesia

The influence of Socialist Realism continued not just in China but also in Indonesia and the Philippines. In Marcos-dominated Philippines and Suharto-dominated Indonesia, artists took these prototypes and applied them locally, creating an onslaught of images - often huge in scale, done in collectives and for public consumption in the street - that again can be seen as the pinnacle of visual art in both countries in the post-War period. However, in Indonesia at least, its debt to the Russians, or indeed the Chinese, is little acknowledged.

LEKRA had included Sudjojono, often called the father figure of Indonesian art, and his colleagues Affandi (1907-90), Hendra Gunawan, and others, who, as has been discussed, were well versed in ideas of Socialist Realism. It is argued here that Socialist Realist-derived

53 See Haufler, in Frank, 2010: 265. De Ceuster, in Frank, 2010: 69, writes of the yearly production quotas of the official Mansudae Art Studio, including the 2009 commission by Queensland Art Gallery, with collective paintings, called chipch’ejak, produced under a ‘speed battle’ for special occasions. B.G. Muhn, 2015: 84, describes the working conditions of a senior artist “with an honorary title like a ‘People’s Artist’ or a ‘Merit Artist’” being able to have their own studio. 54 See Portal, 2014: 127. 55 De Ceuster, in Frank, 2010: 51-71. 56 De Ceuster, in Frank, 2010: 53-4. 170

‘guidelines’, under the protective imaginary eye of Sudjojono, have re-emerged in the 1980s and 1990s particularly to create a new and vibrant art movement. The case put here is that overt linkages to Russian or Chinese Socialist Realism ideals in the 1950s and early 1960s were indeed lacking in this later period, but the left-wing ideology of Socialism and its art practice through Socialist Realism were reborn in the archipelago through the direct – and importantly local – link of Sudjojono and his colleagues. This link belies Keith Foulcher’s judgement, in 1986 and referring to earlier times, that Socialist Realism in the Indonesian context was seen as “infinitely flexible” and “signalled no more than the conscious engagement of art and artists with society and social commitment”.57 The permutations of the situation are presented by Aminuddin Siregar in 2008, musing on Sudjojono’s ‘realism’, as a:

… concept developed through certain feelings or perceptions, whose emergence was shaped by life experience, inner conflicts, struggling to oppose colonialism and wrestling with a very intimate social and political problematic. A few observers of Indonesian art have equated his concept with Gustave Courbet’s realism. Meanwhile, others have related it to the Soviet-style concept of Socialist Realism. This view may have started out from sources stating the proximity of Sudjojono’s and Lenin’s ideas of art.58

Authors like Asmudjo Jono Irianto and Rizki A. Zaelani when discussing the rise of protest art in Indonesia, centred around Yogyakarta in the 1980s and 1990s, easily relate the narrative of socio-political art in the city of recent times with the “Social Realism” of the mid-century.59 Foreign commentators like Julie Ewington have concurred. Writing in 1999 just after Suharto’s departure, she describes the:

… particular sophistication of contemporary Indonesian art: it is inextricably part of the social process, actively engaged with contemporary life. Today Indonesian artists, deeply involved in the current ferment in Indonesian society, are continuing the extraordinarily close connections between art and social developments that characterised the anti-colonial struggle and continue through the evolution of modern Indonesia.60

57 Foulcher, 1986: 202. 58 Aminuddin Siregar in ‘Sudjojono’s Pendulum’ in Strategies Towards the Real, 2008: 78. 59 Irianto, 2001, 77; Zaelani, 2001: 109. 60 Ewington, 1999: 60 171

She notes the importance of earlier artists like Affandi, Sudjana Kerton (1922-94) and Djoko Pekik (b. 1938) who testified to the difficulties of the orang kecil – the little man.61 Djoko Pekik had been jailed after 1965 for seven years for being associated with LEKRA.

The link between the current times and Socialist Realism per se is Sudjojono and the continuing respect he, his leadership, his writing, and his art (see fig.1.3 and fig. 3.51) receive. The importance of the man and his thinking is reflected in a number of ways. There is the personal recollection by the artist Hardi (b. 1951) writing about his meeting Sudjojono in 1974, and of their sympathy: “We were bound by the same ‘radar’, as I made a living by painting as well as writing as I was inspired by Pak Djon [Sudjojono], and my paintings were of social themes, therefore, I have had the experience of getting interrogated and kept behind bars, bearing the stigma of Leftists.” 62 There is the curatorial response, seen in two recent exhibitions held in Singapore and one in Jakarta with their accompanying publications: Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art, held at NUS Museum in 2008, Sudjojono: Lives of Pictures held at Nanyang Technical University in 2014, and Langkah Kepalang Dekolonisasi at the National Gallery of Indonesia in 2015. The first overtly focuses on Sudjojono’s impact on contemporary art in Indonesia, especially that of the 1980s and 1990s (as well as the changes since then, noting the decade of Reformasi leading to 2008 has “wrested itself away from the dominance of the political found in the previous decade”).63 In this exhibition, curator Wang Zineng summarises the ways that the contemporary artists reflect on Sudjojono’s work: Agus Suwage (b. 1959) “appropriates the iconic student demonstrator” of Sudjonono’s 1966 work; S. Teddy D. celebrates the term merkeda (freedom); Rudi Mantofani (b. 1973) engages “with history”; Iwan Wijono (b. 1971) and Taring Padi work with “people from the lower economic rungs of society”, a similar critique interpreted through caricature by I Nyoman Masriadi (b. 1973), Sigit Santoso (b. 1964) and Popok Tri Wahyudi (b. 1973); Abdi Setiawan (b. 1971) looks at figures from everyday life, as does Tisna Sanjaya (b. 1958); Heri Dono uses the wayang, while Eko Nugroho (b. 1977) has a “cynical interpretation of Indonesian history” and Arahmaiani (b. 1961) questions “patriarchal society”.64 This list of foci are as varied as the current mainstream of Indonesian art – but all are based on that tendency first brought to the fore by Sudjojono coming from the practices of the political left. The Indonesian exhibition catalogue includes work by Sudjojono (and Affandi, Henk Ngantung, and Dullah (1919-96)) of the mid-century period along with contemporary artists reflecting the issues of this seventy year old history.

61 Ewington, 1999: 60. 62 Quoted in Sidharta, 2006: 143. 63 Wang Zineng ‘Curatorial Notes’ in Strategies Towards the Real, 2008: 9. 64 Wang Zineng ‘Curatorial Notes’ in Strategies Towards the Real, 2008: 9-11. 172

The period of direct political repression began in 1965, with the purge of both the Communists and the Chinese, and ended officially with the overthrow of Suharto in 1998. Curator (and artist) Jim Supangkat (b. 1948) contextualised this for artists in 2001 by noting how Communism quickly became stigmatised “and artists, along with other societal groups, became afraid to pursue a politically activity approach”.65 Miklouho-Maklai, writing seven years before Suharto’s overthrow, adds that “after the army-led crackdown on dissent in the student movement and the artists at the time of the 1978 election campaign, political expression in the arts received a severe and lasting set-back. An atmosphere of extreme caution has prevailed ever since [to the period of writing in 1991] in the Indonesian art world.”66 She adds that the artists in the period in the 1970s “regarded socialist realism in the communist mode as dead and buried. It was not only banned, but its forms were seen as no longer relevant to the needs of Indonesian art and society.”67 This statement should be seen in the context of its time, when President Suharto’s control was at its height, the condemnation of ‘socialist realism’ unquestioned, and imprisonment of artists a reality, as Hardi’s words reflect. If a broader view is taken, then the artistic ferment against Suharto, in terms that related to Socialist Realist practice, certainly continued, though it was not articulated.

The decades of Suharto’s rule had quashed links and knowledge of Communist cultural thinking. Foulcher, writing in 1986 and mostly focused on literature, nevertheless articulates the resulting removal of reference to these early revolutionary times and their links to both Russian and Chinese communist thought:

The large scale eradication of Indonesian socialist thought, begun at that time [1965-6] and pursued through the working of cultural hegemony throughout the 1970s, has resulted not only in a general absence, in the mid-1980s, of an historical consciousness in mainstream Indonesian literary life. It has also meant that the ideologically legitimate picture of the years 1950 to 1965 has been so constructed to deny or largely misrepresent the role which that left wing tradition played in the cultural counterpart to the political/economic struggles of the Sukarno years. 68

Ruangrupa member Ade Darmawan (b. 1974), in conversation with this author in May 2015, reflected on the sympathy of his parents’ generation in the 1950s for Sukarno’s regime and its idealism for a new future for the country, and then how from his fall until the late 1990s the

65 Supangkat, 2001: 14. 66 Miklouho-Maklai, 1991: 2. 67 Miklouho-Maklai, 1991: 1-2. 68 Foulcher, 1986: 1. 173 history of that period was not discussed or documented by Indonesians.69 Dadang Christanto (b. 1957) has recently described the ‘forgetting for thirty years’ of the period of persecution, saying “the New Order regime does not want to open the past; they want to clean the blood on their hands. They want us to forget”. 70 It is what Tessa Morris-Suzuki calls the “historiography of oblivion”.71 Christanto’s father disappeared in 1965, taken by Government forces, and his work in recent years has focused on ‘remembering’ this personal, and wider, tragedy (fig. 4.29). Less personally affected, Ade Darmawan agrees that since 1998 there has been a renewed focus on this era, with new ‘experts’, and with artists using the LEKRA style (of politically motived imagery expressed with exuberant flair) almost too ubiquitously.

This period of intellectual isolation had consequences for the young artists of the 1970s onwards, certainly cutting off direct links to the left but also to the ‘right’ of the wider art world, a change from earlier, easier direct international contact. The critique against the ‘right’ or the ‘West’, sustained by post-colonial attitudes, gained hold. Supangkat gives a view of the particularity of the time and the resulting turn to local or indigenous traditions:

Following independence in Indonesia, the indigenous developmental stream that aligned itself with S. Sudjojono’s outlook became ascendant. … Records of the history of Indonesian art written by the artists themselves concentrate on the development of this dominant stream, ignoring the Dutch [Western conceptual] strand. The ongoing resistance that underlay this dominant stream tended to ignore the theory/development of modern painting (which claimed to have lost its specifically Western identity in universalism). The outcome was that modern painting in Indonesia developed independently (or in isolation) of modern art in the international arena.72

There are other reasons for what Supangkat calls ‘isolation’, including the reduction of European language skills, understandable in post-independence Indonesia, but further separating local artists from access to foreign material. And there were few opportunities for overseas travel due to economic hardship and the under-development of an official arts sector (without the close links through America in the Philippines, though the Netherlands did support some travel such as for Nindityo Adipurnomo (b. 1961),73 and Supangkat himself). Inherent in this is that Indonesian culture is based on collegiality and performance (as

69 Conversation with Ade Darmawan, Ruangrupa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 23 May 2015. 70 Email to the author, 4 December, 2015. See also Dadang Christanto 1965, QUT Art Museum, 19 November 2015-28 February 2016. The exhibition focused on the key year of political repression, 1965, and included Red Rain of 2003, a work now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, which has the faces of victims of the almost two million people killed. 71 Discussed further in Turner and Webb, 2015, 51. 72 Supangkat, 2001: 9. 73 There is a relevant reference in M. Dwi Marianto in ‘Yogyakarta Art: Trends Prior to the Third Millennium’ in Outlet, 2011: 165, to Nindityo facing culture shocks in the Netherlands, one being the individual studios provided by the Rijksakademie and how “culturally different all this was from Yogyakarta! Back home, collectivism strongly characterised the culture; in the Netherlands the emphasis was on individualism and liberalism”. 174 discussed further in Chapter 5). Texts are less important: the National Library officially founded in 1980s was originally, like the National Museum, a Dutch-created entity; bookshops are few and books relatively expensive; knowledge of foreign writers is limited; literary research is not a core impulse.74 The close parallels between the Philippines and Indonesian artists protesting against detested Presidents are never referred to in the literature of either country. Along with the flexibility and localism of the actual artists, and the on-going hesitancy to acknowledge Communist interests, it is unsurprising in this context that tracts on Lenin or Mao Zedong are never mentioned in artists’ development or the history of movements or schools.75 It is unsurprising that when this ferment did start with what was called the New Indonesian Art Movement in the mid-1970s the artists did not make ideological statements, but rather focused on more immediate concerns of teaching in the art schools and old art media (painting and sculpture) versus newer modes.76

However, despite political repression, critical art works were made from the 1970s as part of the New Indonesian Art Movement, and remain acknowledged as an element of the times. They include Nyoman Nuarta’s (b. 1953) The Generals of 1976 and Bonyong Munni Ardhi’s (b. 1946) The Flag of Red and White of 1975, showing a generic brutal military face and headless figures ranged across the red and white of the Indonesian flag, 77 as well as Nanik Mirna’s (1952-2010) Wanted of 1974 and F.X. Harsono’s (b. 1949) Paling Top/The Best of 1976, showing humans and guns behind bars.78 Semsar Siahaan (1952-2005) provoked authorities from the early 1980s. An early important oil painting was his Olympia, Identity with Mother and Child of 1987 (fig. 4.30) showing a Western tourist fawned over by officials and traditional cultural figures (in the form of a Balinese dancer) while a poor fishing family watches through the window and two farmers are barked back by a ferocious dog. Like much of the art made in the Philippines at this time, the spoof on Manet’s Olympia is amusing, until the true significance of the work is realised.79 Caroline Turner has written about the art of Dadang

74 See Ruangrupa’s methodology noted p. 177. The one exception to this list is the establishment of the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive in Yogyakarta in 1997, though it could also be seen as of special need because of the lack elsewhere. From the beginning it has been dependent on foreign philanthropic funds for survival. 75 It would be disingenuous to say there was no interest in Western art. As noted in Chapter 1, the Cold War had impact in Indonesia too. Miklouho-Maklai, 1991: 2, describes the books and magazines coming into Indonesia from the Western art world in the 1970s (which accounts for many of the new media experiments), and the inspiration of Joseph Beuys whom Hardi heard speak in Kassel in 1977. 76 Sumartono, in ‘The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art’ in 2001 gives a comprehensive description of the era, including The Black December Manifesto of 1973, the Group of Five (leading artists protesting the status quo), and the New Indonesian Art Movement founded in 1975, holding their debut exhibition in Jakarta in August of that year, a further exhibition in 1977 in Yogyakarta leading to a clash with police, before winding down by 1979. Jim Supangkat in his Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond of 1996, includes reproductions of three-dimensional works made at the time. 77 Supangkat’s Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond of 1996, published just before Suharto’s demise, includes these two images, surprising to see even in 1996 at the time for their overt criticism of the regime (70). Times change: The Flag of Red and White is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Indonesia. 78 See Outlet, 2001: figs 9 and 10. 79 Of note is Semsar’s time as a youth in the mid-1960s spent in (as well as later as an art student in San Francisco and Amsterdam), close to information about other political systems (see Miklouho-Maklai, 1991, 96). Some of his drawings of the time, including Perang untuk Keadilan (War for Justice), with impoverished farmers surrounding a corpse and the slogan/title on a banner above them, are reproduced in Miklouho-Maklai: 56-7. 175

Christanto and the politics of human rights,80 with the artist often making poignant works in public places that refer to political injustice. His large bamboo-based installation of memorials to those who have been persecuted called For those who have been killed, shown at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane in 1993 and now in the Queensland Art Gallery collection, remains one of the key works of the period, and refers to the purges of hundreds of thousands of people at the time of banning of the PKI, and atrocities since.81 Moelyono’s teaching art to young people in the villages was because he, like other artists before him, believed in the idea that art was for the people.82 Dede Eri Supria and Heri Dono are other major artists whose paintings and installations always have a political edge. Supria’s (b. 1956) Labyrinth of 1987-8 is a self-evident exposé of the pressures on a lone boy in a literal urban jungle (fig. 4.31) One of Heri Dono’s early works, Fermentation of Minds, of 1993, included a row of heads, modelled on his own, seated at old-style school desks, nodding to the teacher before them; however the teacher was a TV monitor showing cartoons. He was commenting on the quality of education in Indonesia, using the traditional form of the puppet performing, translated into contemporary terms (fig. 4.32).

President Suharto was deposed in 1998. M. Dwi Marianto, writing in 1999, described the scene:

… the occupation of the Upper House of Parliament for several days… Students climbed onto the building’s roof to attach banners, and made speeches designed to attract attention both within and outside the country… Their actions were presented creatively, through spectacular performances, and focused the world’s attention on a regime that had been painfully slow to realise it must respect human rights and abandon policies of arbitrary brutality…. Artists have picked up on this change… In Yogyakarta, , the crisis has merely lengthened the list of issues to be addressed by artists, who have for decades in that city turned their attention to social problems.83

Marianto continued:

In less than two years, the language of art and the language of everyday life in Indonesia have been blurred beyond easy recognition. A new language has emerged:

80 For example,Turner,2007. She edited Art and Social Change; Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific in 2005, and her reecent book, written with Jen Webb (2016) focuses on art and human rights specifically. 81 See Rifky Effendy ‘A Credo of Contemporary Indonesian Art’ in Strategies Towards the Real, 2008: 58. 82 See Adi Wicaksono in ‘Moelyono’ in Beyond the Future, 1999: 64, describes how Moelyono working with children in the Brumbun-Nggerangan fishing village led them to thinking that “art is not an activity to be performed by only one individual applying a set of esoteric procedures, but is available to anyone, using whatever materials may be at hand.” Moelyono, as Wicaksono says, clearly linked creative activity with social empowerment. 83 Marianto, 1999: 59. 176

that of the protest of daily survival. It takes the violent form of demonstrations and strikes, but it is also the regular activities of ordinary people: T-shirts proclaiming bodily solidarity with change; stickers attached to motorbikes, cars and lamp-posts lampooning a new discredited way of life.84

Morality, humour and humanity are qualities of the art that emerged. It is moral: young artists turning to subversive subject matter around the lives and struggles of the common people as well as criticism of authority, articulated by Supangkat: “Its centre of gravity is placed on defending those on the losing side” based on feelings of “sympathy or empathy” rather than “conceptualising or seeking remedy”.85 The idealism about the possibilities of art’s role in society, a quality in Indonesian art since mid-century, parallels practice under the Soviets. It is humorous: Marianto titled an article for the 1999 exhibition catalogue Awas! (Beware) ‘Mainstreaming of Ngeledek in Indonesian Contemporary Art’ - with ngeledek meaning ‘teasing’, where artists ridicule recent events.86 There is a level of parody and satire, as well as good natured mirth throughout the works of these young Indonesian artists, a quality that is appealing to outsiders as well, conscious of the pitfalls of hectoring that often accompanies leftist imagery. It runs through posters, cartoons, billboards, comic books, performances and ordinary paintings.

Then there is an expressive, humanist mode of this imagery, a quality again long associated with Sudjojono. Supangkat sees the outcome as an “emotional articulation – which in painting appears as an expressive style – in a dramatic mode”. 87 (Zhdanov’s ‘romantic revolution’ comes to mind.) Iconography was focused on local people, and if the artists used paint, they used it with flourish; if wanting to send a message, they made it large and often in a public space, particularly on walls, and often invigorated by dramatic, theatrical elements.

However, the inclusion of figures modelled with plasticity, here painted in oils, telling local stories is not indigenous to Muslim Indonesia or to the model of refined watercolours of the Dutch (or, as seen in the Appendix, in the context of Western abstraction), though the link to Buddhist and Hindu Java can be argued.88The ethos of painting such works was firmly within the framework of the Socialist Realist agenda.

The practice of these artists also paralleled Socialist principles: collectives and art made within communities, not often shown in galleries but in the streets, on walls, and using posters and

84 Marianto, 1999: 59. 85 Supangkat, 2001: 10. 86 M. Dwi Marianto ‘Mainstreaming of Ngeledek in Indonesian Contemporary Art’, in O’Neill, 1999: 17-27. 87 Supangkat, 2001: 10. 88 With Borobudur and Prambanan inspiring Sudjojono for example and wayang stories following the Hindu epics. 177 prints. They loved the declarative nature of the manifesto. LEKRA’s founding in 1950 concurred with the writing of their Manifesto, or Mukadimah, which mirrors the phrasing of early Russian models.89 Certainly manifestos as such are not owned by Soviet practice (with famous examples by the Futurists and others), but their love of short, uplifting, declarative verbal decrees about art have parallels to the 1917 Revolution and practice since.90

Patrick Flores has written about the spate of manifestos produced by alternative artist groups in Southeast Asia during the 1970s.91 The young artists of East Asia were so aware of the practice as a modus of protest that they mocked it in their Manifesto of the Ecole de Great Taipei of 1 January 1966. The first of its eighty demands is “Do not be tragic, or, pretend to be tragic” and it is signed off: “Manifesto of the Ecole de Great Taipei is written in the quotation form for easy misquoting out of context.”92 However its usage remained cogent for artists interested in changing the world. Heri Dono wrote the Kuda Binal (Wild Horse) Manifesto in 1992. It has six elements, including Kuda Binal, an alternative art event in Yogyakarta, representing an art that is not compartmentalised and that “makes us question our concept of art [and]…encourage [s] us to value art as a normal part of our daily existence”.93

The resurgence of the collective was close to Communist hearts but in sympathy also with local Indonesian culture, and these groups came to the fore in the early 1990s particularly in Yogyakarta but also in Jakarta, a trend through which the artists have become recognised internationally as major practitioners. The collectives are organic and mutable but are collectives nevertheless. Indeed, one of Indonesia’s most successful collectives Ruangrupa (see fig. 4.33) makes this thinking part of their work. Interviewed in 2012, when asked their opinion about artworks in social and cultural life, they answered:

Making socially and culturally engaged art doesn’t require academic or politically- correct research – even incorrect ways define social and cultural life. Most of the time we do visual research – wandering around, experiencing and being inspired by the city, drifting.94

89 It is reproduced and translated in English in Foulcher, 1986: 213-7. 90 This is exemplified by a 2011 text on the work of Aleksandr Deineka which includes in its appendix seventy-eight pages of short manifestos and declarations about the role of art – for a social purpose – from 1913 to 1935. See Aleksandr Deineka, 2011: 313- 91. 91 Flores, 2011: 224-71. He cites the various Indonesian manifestos of the New Art Movement in 1974, 1975 and 1979, then 1987, as well as Kaisahan in Manila in 1976, and the Artists Front of Thailand in 1975. 92 Quoted in MAM Research; Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan: Mori Art Museum, sighted 22 July 2015. The Manifesto was published in the magazine Theatre and on the invitation of the exhibition of Taiwanese artist Huang Huacheng (b. 1986) (more is quoted in http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2015/07/asian- agitations.html accessed 15 September 2015). 93 Heri Dono, Kuda Binal, catalogue, July 29 1992, Yogyakarta. It has a fine heritage with Sukarno’s Manifesto Politik followed by left-wing artists associated with the PKI in the early 1960s issuing their Manifes Kebudayaan or Cultural Manifesto. 94 Interview with Ruangrupa, 2012 by Julie Ewington, in APT7 catalogue, 2012: 190. 178

However, practice remained crucial. The elements of political protest in realistically rendered imagery often produced by collectives and displayed in public places have resonances back to Sudjojono and his colleagues, and from them back to Socialist Realist understandings.

The creation of art among the people, in the street, is another focus of Socialist Realist practice. An article in Awas! by Laine Berman argues the case for “the streets of Indonesia [being] very consciously used as a space for negotiating meaning and as a source for legitimacy in understanding local theories of identity”,95 a place where art was made, seen and engaged with: the antithesis of the private perusal of art in many cultures or the codified, institutionalised perusal of it in others. Street exhibitions had been used in the LEKRA- dominated 1950s.96 Now they re-emerged. Making murals became a core activity (fig. 4.34), large posters were made and posted up; events were held. This extended to international arenas (fig. 4.35). Curator Hendro Wiyanto describes the Apotik Komik group thus: they “initiated drawing projects at community rooms, kampong (village) and station walls, flyover columns in the middle of the city and public schools. Meanwhile, the Taring Padi group demonstrated their proximity to the critical ideas of socialism through discussions, exhibitions, banners, posters, postcards, community festivals, music recordings and by publishing comics” (fig.4.36). 97 Even for more conventional art galleries selected works include those originating in the communal space of the street. Other leftist artists include Wedhar Riyadi (b. 1980) working with “murals, comics, customised skateboard decks and limited edition toys”,98 Eddie Hara (b. 1957) making postcard works of 1998 including cartoon figures saying “I’ll shoot this Dictator Down!”,99 as well as Hedi Hariyanto (b. 1962), F.X. Harsono, Agung Kurniawan (b. 1968), and Edo Pillu (b. 1968).100 Again, as in writing about the sympathy of Lenin and Sudjojono for the idea of art being for the people, it could be suggested that the Russian leader again would approve of the way the Indonesians put this art practice into action.

In comparison to the murals, street art and collectives of central Java, on small sheets of paper shrinks into the background. They had been made in modest numbers from the 1940s,101 reappearing mostly in woodcut from the 1990s. The artists of the collectives added this practice to their repertoire with seeming ease. Indeed the black lines of woodcuts suited the

95 Laine Berman ‘The Art of Street Politics in Indonesia’ in O’Neill, 1999: 82. 96 Foulcher, 1986: 41. 97 See Hendro Wiyanto, 2002. ‘Eko Nugroho’ in The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery: 164. Eko Nugroho was behind the publication Daging Tumbuh (Diseased Tumour) that began in 2000. Reproductions of Apotik Komik’s murals are in Outlet 2001: figs. 68, 93 and 99. Samuel Indratma, one of Apotik Komik’s founders has his Mural Blues, photographed in 1997 as fig. 86. A large Taring Padi banner of 1999 is reproduced fig. 100. More of Indratma’s work and that of Apotik Komik is reproduced in O’Neill, 1999, 10, 59, 72. Taring Padi (Fang of Rice) began in 1998. Apotik Komik (Comic Chemist) began in 1997. 98 Laura Mudge ‘Wedhar Riyadi; Colliding contradictions’, APT7 catalogue, 2012: 184. 99 See Outlet, 2001: fig.21. 100 See Outlet, 2001: Hedi Hariyanto, fig. 26, 27 F.X. Harsono fig. 10, 15,Agung Kurniawan, fig. 31, 32, 33 and Edo Pillu, fig. 34. 101 See for example the lithograph of 1945-9 Nation Awake! Crossing Boundaries; Bali: A Window to Twentieth Century Indonesian Art, 2002, Melbourne: Asia Society Australasia Centre: xii; Foulcher, 1986: 100-2. 179 graphic needs of the political poster, used occasionally in murals and posters by masters of both: Muhamad ‘Ucup’ Yusuf (b. 1975) is one practitioner, making woodcuts in 2000 like Change with a woman, fist raised and the text below her, and Peace on Earth and in the Heart of a woman with her baby and the text below.102 Another is M. Sofyan Zarkasi, with Today News, a woodcut of 1998 showing the headless drivers of the Indonesian state.103 However, the style of woodcut transcended its origins, moving straight to drawings, charcoals, pen and ink and other techniques used in single sheet imagery, without the serious ‘distribution’ issue of the poster.

The graphic work of Timor-Leste should also be acknowledged with the recent usage of similar print (woodcut) technique, as well as the combination of text and image, the rough vigour of the style, and a socio-political purpose. Independent from Indonesia, but attracted, as many young artists are, to the vigour of the Yogyakarta scene, the main works made at the Gembel Art Collective in Dili in the early 1990s (fig. 4. 37) reflect all the attributes of the young agitators in central Java.

The link to Sudjojono and Socialist Realism would be less important but for the fact that the work these Indonesian artists made particularly from the 1980s is some of the most important in the region, and has now, it can be argued, held a banner for recognition of Indonesian art as one of the most lively and interesting movements in the world.

There have been critiques of the too-simplistic binary of ‘abstract, conceptual, individual Bandung and political, realist Yogyakarta’,104 but the reality is that this political, realist, communal often humorous Yogyakarta mode is what has made the world aware of current Indonesian art. Ask any non-Indonesian curator, whether from Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, Paris, New York or Sydney whose work in Asia they admire and Indonesian names will come up - Heri Dono, Dadang Christanto, Taring Padi, Ruangrupa – and they are all political artists. The artists included in the international touring exhibition Awas! were all politically focused, from Moelyono working with communities, to Tisna Sanjaya parodying the Suharto years, to S. Teddy D. and others linked to the banned People’s Democratic Party.105 Sanjaya’s art environmental project Cogondewah working with a local community in Bandung is a more recent activity gaining international attention. In the catalogue of the related exhibition at the National University of Singapore in 2011 he mirrors Lenin’s thinking, saying “Art is life. It is

102 Reproduced, Crossing Boundaries; Bali: A Window to Twentieth Century Indonesian Art, 2002, Melbourne: Asia Society Australasia Centre: 103. Ucup is a member of Taring Padi. 103 Reproduced in Outlet, 2001: fig. 58. 104 Zaelani, 2001: 125 for example. 105 Marianto, 1999: 59. 180 always open to anyone. The job of an artist is just to lead the way or open the door as wide as possible”. 106

One measure of ‘significance’ is the inclusion of artists in international curated exhibitions and it is the political artists who emerge.107 The Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane is one case in point. Of the Indonesian art exhibited over the last twenty-two years three-quarters would be called ‘political’ or socially critical work.108 Ewington, writing in the 1999 catalogue indeed even comments on this: “Indonesian artists … were among the largest groups represented [at the first two Triennials], a testimony to the energy and diversity of contemporary practice in Indonesia and the respect with which is it regarded internationally.”109 One of the leading artists of this movement, Heri Dono, is another example, having solo exhibitions over the last twenty years not only in Indonesia, but at the Museum fur Volkerkunde in , Canberra Contemporary Art Space, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, The Japan Foundation Forum in Tokyo, Singapore Art Museum, Sherman Galleries in Sydney, Centre A in Vancouver, CP Artspace in Washington, Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne, and the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam. Not many artists of any nation could rival this, especially from Asia, and especially from a nation where there is no official infrastructure or financial support for such expositions. His Political Buffoonery of 1998-9 (fig. 4.38) is so endearingly ridiculous, creative and serious, that one sees the reason for his resonance with audiences everywhere.

It is noteworthy that while each Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane is chosen by different curators with specific objectives, the inclusion of socially critical work from Indonesia has been strongest in the 1990s (leading to Suharto’s departure), before a dip into the 2000s, and only a smattering of ‘political artists’ now. The dip of political art from Indonesia in the early 2000s was not filled by non-political art – the caravanserai had moved to other pastures. It should be added however that APT7 in 2012 included a strong showing of six individuals or groups from the archipelago, including Ruangrupa’s iconoclastic The Kuda, with text ‘Yihaa’ and ‘Ride to Hell’ emblazoned across its graphically constructed surface. It refers, as does much Indonesian art, to performance, in this case underground music (fig. 4.39). Writing about Edwin Roseno

106 See Cigondewah; An Art Project; Tisna Sanjaya, 2012. Singapore: National University of Singapore Museum: 31. 107 A similar methodology of measuring the importance of these artists internationally is used by Turner and Webb (2016: 40, 50, 62, 81, 88, 96, 156 and 165) for the artists from Asia and Australia who they select for special focus. The lists of international curatorial selections mirrors those articulated here. 108 While it is simplistic to overly define the artists as ‘political’ or not, in the framework of this thesis’s argument a judgement can be made on artists’ leanings. In APT1 of nine Indonesia artists Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono, F.X. Harsono, Sudjana Kerton and Dede Eri Supria would describe their work like this; in APT2 of four artists, Nindityo Adipurnomo, Arahmaiani, and Agus Suwage are artists with a political agenda; in APT3, of six artists or groups, Mella Jaasma (b. 1960), Moelyono, Tisna Sanjaya, S. Teddy D., and Dadang Christanto are included; in APT4, a much smaller show included one Indonesian Heri Dono; APT5 included Eko Nugroho alone, an artist who delights in art of the street; APT 6 did not include any, and APT7 of the six included, Wendhar Riyadi, Edwin Roseno, Ruangrupa, Tintin Wulia, Hahan and Tromarama, perhaps only the last could be said to be without socio-political intent. 109 Ewington, 1999: 60. This comment reiterates M. Dwi Marianto saying Indonesian art is a major contributor to international art, quoted in Irianto, 2001: 63. Irianto himself tracks the interest of foreign curators in the type of art (Christanto, Dono) supported by, in this case, the Yogyakarta gallery Cemeti Art House (75). He further comments that such work is better known “and appreciated” outside Indonesia than within (2001: 82). 181

(b. 1979), who was included in 2012, Zoe De Luca makes specific reference to his interest in mass media coming from the New Indonesian Art Movement of the 1970s.110 It underlines the issue of energy for a politically alternative view translating to artworks during the period of heightened tension in the 1990s which can be ultimately traced back to Socialist Realist roots.

3. The Philippines

The Philippines had a different path to democracy from Indonesia: they had not had to fight again after World War II to gain independence from (by this time) the USA and their links to that country continued through strong inter-cultural programs. International (albeit Western) ideas, information and discussion were accessible: the US Information Service circulated (their) information widely; long-established Filipino-run universities continued through the period, providing academic leadership and discussion options for young people; English was widely spoken and scholarships abroad were not uncommon; and the Indonesian anti- Communist and anti-Chinese purge of 1965 which curtailed so much communication there was not emulated in the Philippines.

The entrenchment of the Cold War in Manila, with American support for the Marcos regime, following on from a century of articulate unrest against colonial powers, led to a highly aware political consciousness for the 1970s art movement widely called Social Realism. It is seen as a specifically Filipino movement, both outside the country (with curators like Masahiro Ushiroshoji in 1994 writing about the Philippines as “a country with an inherently strong tradition of social realism”),111 and inside, with academics Alice Guillermo and Patrick Flores using it in titles of books and articles112 and young writers describing contemporary projects in the community in 2010 as “a reminder that Philippine art remains a potent response to socially situated realities”.113 While this identification followed close reading of Communist tracts and practices, actual reference to Communism is rare. Perhaps this is the reason ‘socialist’ usually has its verbal tail removed, to be, like a too wildly wagging dog, less obtrusive. As in Indonesia, this is one of the great periods of art in Asia in the last 100 years. However, unlike the experience in their neighbouring country, its debt to the Chinese in particular is acknowledged.

From the 1970s President Marcos increasingly applied military pressure to dampen debate but links to various outside sectors, including those of the left-wing, were established and continued. Artists, well-armed now by this time in Marxist ideology and knowledge of left-

110 Zoe De Luca, ’Edwin Roseno, ‘Green Hypermarket unpacked’ APT7 catalogue, 2012: 187. 111 Masahiro Ushiroshoji, 1994, ‘Realism as an Attitude: Asian Art of the Nineties’ in 4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka, Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum: 35. 112 Guillermo, 1987, and 1999; Flores, 2013. 113 Lisa Ito ‘Engaging the Social: Four Projects’ in Pananaw7, 2010: 93. 182 wing art elsewhere, started to flex their creative muscles. Guillermo discusses this period in Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines, focused on the decades 1970-90. She describes the founding of the the Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista at Arkitekto, or left-wing militant artists’ association, in 1971 and how Mao’s talks at Yan’an (available in The Little Red Book) was the basic text for revolutionary artists in the Philippines, particularly his words about national identity: that Chinese revolutionary art bore the imprint of Chinese artistic identity and that other places would “also bear their own cultural identities, springing from their social and historical developments”.114

In 1981 Guillermo spoke at the First National Convention of Artists in Manila with a paper entitled ‘How can We Generate the Social Realist Aesthetic Proper to this Country?’ saying:

Social realism may prove to be an art too stern and severe for a regime that solicits harmony and prosperity and conducts beautification projects that would banish grime with a stroke of the brush… For social realism, as different from art of a broadly social theme, is based on struggle and social contradictions. As such it can never be ingratiating, complacent, or self-indulgent, nor does it engage in puerile exercises of national self-adulation. It is not an art of myths because it is an art of the dynamic present.115

Filipino artists’ organisations have been fond of manifestos, perhaps even more than their peers in Indonesia. Kaisahan (or Solidarity), the group of left wing artists formed in 1976, included in its Declaration of Principles:

…we must break away from the western-oriented culture that tends to maintain the Filipino people’s dependence on foreign tastes and foreign ways that are incompatible with their genuine interests. We reject this culture in so far as it perpetuates values, habits and attitudes that do not serve the people’s welfare, but draw from it whatever is useful to their actual needs. We shall therefore move away from the uncritical acceptance of western models, from the slavish imitation of western forms that have no connection to our national life, from the preoccupation with western trends that do not reflect the process of our development.

114 Guillermo, 2001: 38. For her first text, published in 1987, on this period, she includes Mao’s Selected Readings, publicised in London by the Anglo-Chinese Educational Institute in 1971 and Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life, published in Moscow by Progress Publications in 1957. 115 Quoted in Patrick D.Flores ‘Temerities’ in Pananaw7, 2010: 23-4. 183

The Declaration includes the words that art is a collective experience, and that “art is for the masses”.116 Kasibulan, Women Artists in Sisterhood, established in 1989, also wrote their own manifesto in similar terms, as did the Concerned Artists of the Philippines whose Declaration of Principles starts “We hold that artists are citizens and must concern themselves not only with their art but also with the issues and problems confronting the country today.”117

Martial Law was imposed in 1972 and all radical art went underground. Guillermo describes this as it being ‘anti-imperialist rather than pro-communist’, 118 and by ‘imperialist’ she means the West (the Americans) and their ally Ferdinand Marcos. Martial Law triggered both new iconography following Socialist Realism and the style and type of art part of that left-wing movement. Guillermo writes that examples of political art came from the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “Artistic models were primarily posters and book illustrations showing dynamic and rhythmic militant stances and gestures…”119 The theatricality of such images suited Filipinos well and more than anywhere else it was used to criticise and undermine the regime.

The new art was a profound and energised rejection of the hold of American Abstract Expressionism in the Philippines, so supported by Imelda Marcos in the post-war period. Jeannie Javelosa and Paul Zafaralla, in ART Philippines, discuss the evolution of individual artists like Onib Olmedo (b. 1937) and Danilo Dalena (b.1942) during the 1970s, painting images of personal and social distress and psychological torment, but distinguish these descendants of the paintings of war-time trauma from artists using posters, illustrations, cartoons and comics to support their cause.120 Javelosa and Zafaralla use the phrases of the Soviets to describe the situation: “Social Realism sought to depict the situations and concerns of the poor and the voiceless majority under the authoritarian regime. It addressed itself to the comfortable middle class – to awaken its social and political consciousness – as well as to workers and peasants, to inspire them to take part in the national struggle.” They list the second group of artists involved as Pablo Baens Santos (b.1943), Orlando Castillo (b.1947), Antipas Delotavo (b.1954), Leonilo Doloricon (b.1957), Edgar Fernandez, Al Manrique, Papo de Asis (b.1949) and Heber Bartolome (b. 1948).121 As Javelosa and Zafaralla write, “landowners tower over their tenants. Workers of the earth… stare blankly into the distance, the weight of years and of an exploitative system marked on their faces.”122 Castillo spent time with Communist insurgents and painted images of peasant solidarity, “farm folk at literary classes;

116 Reprinted in Pananaw7, 2010: 19-20. 117 Reprinted in Pananaw7, 2010: 60 and 61. 118 See Guillermo, 1999: 33. 119 Guillermo, 1999: 52. 120 ART Philippines, 1992: 214ff. 121 ART Philippines, 1992: 241. 122 ART Philippines, 1992: 241-3. 184 village doctors ministering to the sick and wounded”.123 Baens Santos who also made many political works on paper painted Manifesto in 1985 (see fig. 1.2) as a call to arms, where the American flag is destroyed, and a new Filipino flag is the one point of light as the down- trodden people are called to rise up. Remarkably in this painting, on the left side, he shows artists painting a mural with the upturned faces and clenched fist of Cultural Revolution iconography, under further figures holding up posters over their heads and yet others working on a banner in the centre.

Artists in the Philippines gathered momentum with this left-wing political imagery, increasingly bearing similarity to the large scale practices of the Communists in Russia and China (though direct allusion was still sensitive to declare). By the time of Marcos’ departure, these images were the core of Philippines art, outweighing the abstraction of the 1960s. Afterwards, rather than decreasing in intensity, came an explosion of intensive, celebratory, slightly wildly anarchic imagery, intent on glorying in this victory and the sense of a new political freedom. Even with Marcos as the main target removed, the artists, forever vigilant about abuse of power, continued with their critiques. Edgar Fernandez for example was included in the first Asia Pacific Triennial of 1993 with a huge work very much at home in the Socialist Realist tradition: Unfinished Painting of Present of 1990-3 (fig. 4.40).124 It is a heroic personification of the nation in the centre (and an obvious continuation of the identification of the Virgin Mary with the nation), standing on a skull (death), but holding an eye with a foetus (life), surrounded by vignettes of Filipino history. He uses the red, white and blue of the Filipino flag and includes the farmer, the industrial worker, pollution, armaments and a possibility of hope. One of the foundry workers, making armaments, wears an apron on which is written ‘Peace and Security’. Fernandez had become associated with Kaisahan and it is clear he believes in this cause, inviting none of the ennui such images might create elsewhere.

Importantly, works on paper followed Soviet form: Leonilo Doloricon is a central figure. Also a member of Kaisahan he puts his political ideology most clearly into relief prints (made on rubber but looking like woodcuts), the favoured form for left-wing artists around the world. He made a significant series of twenty-four large rubbercuts from 1987-91 on social conditions in the Philippines, mostly of the labouring farmer and the rich living from them (figs. 4.41 and 4.42). In the harsh, rough vigour of the relief printing with its expressive black outlines, Doloricon follows practice initiated in Europe, made in China from the 1920s, here in a resurgence in the Philippines. Continuing Revolution of 1998 shows his on-going commitment

123 ART Philippines, 1992: 243. 124 Pintang Hindi Tapos ng Kasalukuyan (Unfinished Painting of the Present), 1990-93, oil on canvas, 10 panels, 150 x 120 cm each. This author should declare an interest here, being the selector of this work for inclusion in this first Triennial. I saw it first in segments, the whole too large to be displayed in the artist’s small working space. 185 to this ideal (fig. 4.43).125 The KKK on the banner refers to the late nineteenth-century secret organisation aiming to gain independence from Spain but also speaking for the interests of the common people. In Tagalog it is Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang Katipunan nang mga Anak nang Bayan, translated as ‘Highest and Most Respectable Society of the Children of the People’ and more generally known as Katipunan. Its leader, Andrés Bonifacio, is shown with his arm thrust forward in the classic stance of the youthful revolutionary. Below, his contemporary José Rizal awaits execution and all around people labour both in the field and in industry. This tableau, including rural and industrial work, is remarkably close to Edgar Fernandez’ large painting. The didactic symbolism in each owes its creation to left-wing antecedents.

The art collective, that ubiquitous left-wing and locally sympathetic cultural response in Southeast Asia, had very important exponents in the Philippines. It is again a sympathetic alignment that suited the communal, human side of Filipino culture. Salingpusa and Sanggawa were two leading collectives which came together respectively in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, with many artists, such as Karen Flores and Mark Justiniani (both b. 1966) moving from the first to the second. They made major statements again in street art, particularly in murals, and in huge politically-driven canvases. Salingpusa painted murals through Manila about social and political conditions, with individual members like Emmanuel Garibay (b.1962) continuing on with imagery about the ills of the city. Sanggawa126 was formed as a group as late as 1995. These collectives’ association with mural projects included Hope in Struggle for Quezon Province, Payaso for Baguio Art Festival, two lightning murals for the Social Work Department of a college in Quezon City and for a concert in Baguio, all in 1991; Bayview and Goddess of Manila Bay, two more lightning murals part of the Save Manila Bay Protest in 1992; Pusoy, a mural dedicated to Filipina migrant workers at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in 1993; and Prusisyong a mural for Cancer Week in 1994. The works were in situ or given to their hosts, all focused on socio-political causes. By 1995 this energy was starting to be recognised internationally, with exhibitions following in Sydney that year, including seven murals at Ray Hughes Gallery, as well as a mural for the University of NSW,127 and then in 1996 selected for both Traditions/Tensions in New York with three large oil on canvas paintings and for the Brisbane Triennial, and in 2000 for the Sydney Biennale. Their large (198 x 305 cm) oil Palo-Seba was purchased by Queensland Art Gallery.

Sanggawa painted the huge (207 x 619 cm) The Second Coming, (fig. 4.44) now in the Singapore Art Museum, about Pope John Paul II coming to Manila in 1995, with all the qualities

125 The work was displayed in Thrice Upon A Time, Singapore Art Museum, 2009. 126 Sanggawa means ‘one voice’ and was made up of Elmer Borlongan, Mark Justiniani, Karen Flores, Federico Sievert, and Joy Mallari. 127 See Poshyananda, 1996: 226. 186 of Socialist Realism: the collective making it, its size, its medium of oil on canvas, its celebration of figuration with dozens of figures spilling across the composition, its political moral subject, its inclusion of historic leading figures and generic members of the community, its energy of flailing arms and bodies engaged in this socially charged situation, and its theatrical viewpoint and lighting. Its ‘revolutionary romanticism’ is not celebration of injustice but that hope and justice will prevail over it. The subject matter “also suggests a rupture between the pomp and circumstance and ostentation of religious institutions, in contrast to the austere, simple life led by Jesus Christ himself.”128 Philippine Cardinal Sin is the accompanist singer to the Pope in this zarzuela entertainment.129 The Pope stands on the Philippines flag, while people throw money to the church attendants before him. Avenging angels are painted behind and his Swiss Guards protect a golden throne. On the right side a young, local, poor, protesting, Christ-like figure rises up. As people turn away, the edifice cracks and the skies implode. The small roundels have paintings of the real Christ on his way to Crucifixion. The inclusion of a political leader like the Pope emulates the Russo-Chinese Socialist Realist mantra in a way that is unusual outside those countries, though as Guillermo has pointed out he was the anti-Communist Pope from Poland who supported the conservative status-quo in places like the Philippines.130 It makes its mark through its humour, its lampoonery – mocking the social order – from a similar and similarly attractive position as the young artists in Java. The artists described the work of the period and this one in particular in 1996:

Religion and entertainment then became the prevalent theme… Whatever was in Manila back in 1994 and early 1995 – the Miss Universe brouhaha; the Pope’s record breaking crowd on his second visit; the EDSA anniversary [of Marcos’s overthrow and ‘People Power’] celebration which preceded a fraud-laden election; the rise to power of Mike Velarde’s El Shaddai, a religious organisation that says liking money is not at all a sin; and through it all sin, sin and more Sin with the good Cardinal hogging the political limelight as usual – these events became fodder for more gawang editoryal (editorial artworks). The murals tend to hold up a mirror to Philippines society, asking the people to confront and laugh at their demigods, that they may discover their real voice from within.131

128 Thrice Upon a Time, 1992: 82. Further descriptions of this work are in Guillermo, 1994:73. 129 Guillermo, 1987: 2, notes that the zarzuela, a local form of a Spanish musical drama, had been used since the 1890s to critique the ruling status quo. 130 Guillermo, 2010: 73. 131 Sanggawa Artists’ Statements, 1996, in The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, leaflet, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery: np. 187

Salubong of 1994, also large (252 x 300 cm), shows a similar parody of the swimsuit attired Miss Universe winner brazenly defying the modestly dressed Virgin Mary, both carrying their sceptre of material or spiritual victory.

Brenda Fajardo (b.1940) includes political figures like Imelda Marcos and Cory Aquino in her compilations of history, humour, didacticism, tradition and contemporary politics, all usually painted on small pieces of paper in the rich jewelled tones of medieval religious manuscripts (fig 4.45). These are tableaux painted in miniature. Lazaro Soriano has, like many, worked with local village people endeavouring to make their creative lives lead to beneficial financial returns, in his case with ceramics. But he has also painted his own work, full of satirical edge, but humorous and human, coming from his affinity with local sayings and local people. Jak En Poy (Sticks and Stones) of 1987 (fig. 4.46)refers to Cory Aquino’s political campaign, a Jack of Hearts playing card slipped into her shirt, with the ubiquitous Jaime Cardinal Sin and later president Fidel Ramos among those lurking around her. She uses her Laban (fight) gesture of finger and thumb, a gesture variously taken up by the people around her who grimace, snigger and worry, and above them all amid floating balloons a monkey provides the final judgement of the melée that is this situation.

In the provinces, the Black Artists of Asia, a communal group of professional artists working with the farmers creating left-wing images, was formed in Negros Occidental in 1986, with Nunelucio Alvarado (b.1950) and Charlie Co (b.1960) leading exponents. Guillermo remarks the use of ‘black’ refers to the province of Negros Occidental and “also connotes a strong and militant sense of oppositional identity and solidarity with marginalised groups”. 132 Most leading artists like Santiago Bose used left-wing political imagery critically, at the Havana Biennale in 1989 for examplewith its melange of Filipino nationalist symbols (see fig. 4.48). Alvarado, interviewed by this author while filming A Journey Through Asian Art in 2013, speaks fondly of ‘the people’ as the true heroes of the Philippines.133 His work traces back stylistically to the Mexican muralists, painting the stories of ‘the people’ in grand heroic tableaux, both linked significantly to Russian prototypes.134 Alvarado’s work in the poor region of Negros working directly with farmers, as Moelyono and Dadang Christanto had done, was part of the collective he formed. However, his own work, like Land not Bullets, is even more powerful as art (fig. 4.47). A huge work going around three walls of a gallery in both Brisbane and later at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in Manila, it has a farmer, as Christ, crucified on a cross

132 Alice Guillermo, 1993, ‘Nunelucio Alvarado’ in The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, catalogue, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery: 31. 133 A Journey Through Asian Art, 2014, Episode 4, Trade Winds, see: http://youtu.be/4Wqhf3wdDHY. 134 The links of the Mexicans to Communism are all well-known. The Mexicans’ work, in turn, was known and admired in Manila, for various reasons, including their non-European heritage, but also for the focus of their work on the dispossessed (see the Appendix). This author has written on this influence in ‘East and West? A different story: the impact of Mexico on 20th century Asian art’ Art Monthly Australia, September, 2008 no.213, 11-6. 188 of sugar cane, while to one side the society lady and her businessman/gangster partner prowl. On the other appears the snake-like Mad-Max clothed figure of the military. Alvarado continues this iconography into the next decade, with Crossing, now in Singapore Art Museum, of 2000, two metres high, showing a farmer crucified on and with sugar cane, with canes taking the place of the nails. Both works are similar in subject to Baens Santos’ New Christ of 1980, with the farmer here also crucified but against the American flag.

The combination of imagery and style of these works has led to wide recognition: frequently selected for international exhibition (the main art museums in Singapore, Fukuoka and Queensland all highlight these works) and exhibitions in the Philippines to this day reflect on the period and on recent iterations of the movement. Certainly the situation in the Philippines made the call for ‘justice’ understandable. Like Indonesia, the Philippines has had a strong presence at the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. The first Triennial, in 1993, included nine Filipino artists of whom eight would be considered focused on socio-political agendas; the second included five Filipinos, all socio-political in their interests; and in the third, three of the four selected would be so regarded. Again like Indonesia, by 2000 this fire had dimmed for Filipino artists, reflected in only one (non-political) artist being selected for the fourth Triennial in 2002, with none in the fifth and for the sixth and seventh again only one in each, both of whom are interested in social issues but would not be described as overtly politically focused.135

The Traditions/Tensions; Contemporary Art in Asia exhibition organised by the Asia Society in New York in 1996, curated by Apinan Poshyananda, included works from only five Asian nations, of which Indonesia and the Philippines were two. The others were India, South Korea and Thailand, the curator’s homeland. It is a strange and interesting selection for focus, without the powerhouses of expectation of China and Japan for example, and including a nation that often is ignored in the ‘Asian’ agenda: the Christian, long-colonised, politically marginalised Philippines. The Indonesian artists were Nindityo Adipurnama, Arahmaiani, I Wayan Bendi, Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono and F.X. Harsono, all discussed previously except for I Wayan Bendi (b. 1950), a Balinese painter. The Filipinos were Agnes Arellano (b.1949), Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (b.1949), Reamillo & Juliet (b. 1964 and 1966) and the Sanggawa Group. All have a narrative, realist edge, tinged to greater or lesser degrees by a politico-social agenda. Cajipe-Endaya’s focus on the plight of poor women and children relates to the agendas of Socialist Realism, and Sanggawa’s imagery is one of the exhibition’s major foci. The

135 Despite a retreat from the heady days of the late 1980s and 1990s, Filipinos continue to recognise and celebrate ‘social realism’ as an important part of their art history. In 2010 the University of the Philippines museum, the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, held an exhibition called KAPITAL: Tribute to Labor. In 2013 The Philippines Inquirer reviewed an exhibition devoted to ‘social realism’’ (see www. http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/121967/exhibit-features-social-realist-works/, accessed 10 July 2015). 189

Second Coming is included, as well as Salubong described above, and The House of Sin of 1994, with Cardinal Sin again central. The Second Coming became the cover-image of the catalogue of the ensuing exhibition at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1998, At Home and Abroad, 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists.

The main other venue for Asian art during the 1990s was in Fukuoka in Japan, with its own Asian Art Biennale/Triennial. It has a slightly different agenda of including all Asian countries rather than a curatorial selection, so the focus on which nationality is included is not relevant here. However within each country, it is possible to see where the interest lies. In 1994, it included a section called ‘Society as Reality’, with nine artists from a possible seventeen countries, which included Dadang Christanto and Heri Dono, but also Noel Cuizon (b. 1962) and Elmer Borlongan (b. 1967) from the Philippines. In the other sections only one other Filipino is included, in ‘Intimations of Violence’ (Antonio Leano, b. 1963). The first Triennial was held in Fukuoka in 1999 with artists from twenty-one Asian countries including Indonesia and the Philippines and while that representation was again socio-political and strong the number of artists for each (two and one) was much reduced.

A number of individual Filipinos who have attracted the world’s attention all work with socio- political arenas. In the 1990s it was Santiago Bose, whose work focused on colonialism, marginalisation and identity was included in the Fukuoka Biennial and the Havana Biennial in 1989 (fig. 4.48), and in 1993 in the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, the Adelaide Festival exhibition program in 1994 and the Kwangju Biennale in 2000 (in a section called ‘Art and Human Rights’), all with major works. He had had solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver, as well as inclusion in group exhibitions in Spain, the USA, Canada and Australia. His work, with its seemingly uncontrolled, brave and celebratory inclusion of the cultural flotsam of the Filipino experience was always one of the highlights of these events.136 In recent years it has been Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan (b. 1962 and 1965), who focus on the realities of transmigration, loss, and homelessness, coming from personal and wider Filipino experience of enforced (for economic reasons) loss of homeland (fig. 4.49). Like Bose, they are sensitive to the plight of the outsider, and they express it in powerful visual form, in their case with three-dimensional installations of the detritus of literal belongings. They have been commissioned for major pieces at the Queensland Asia Pacific Triennial and the Fukuoka Triennial in 1999, the Venice Biennale in 2003, the Sydney Biennale in 2006, the Echigo Tsumari Triennial in Japan in 2006, the Singapore Biennale 2008, and the Liverpool Biennale 2010, and for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand in 2011, the 21st Century

136 Alison Carroll, 1994. ‘Santiago Bose’ in ‘Beyond the Material World’ Adelaide Installations. Adelaide: Adelaide Festival of the Arts, vol. 1 and 2; Alison Carroll, 2003. ‘Santiago Bose Obituary’, Artlink, Vol. 23, no.1, see https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2457/santiago-bose-1949-2002/. 190

Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa in 2013, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, in 2013-5, none of which except the Brisbane Triennial has an Asian (never mind country-specific) curatorial bias. They are selected amongst artists from all over the world, but their work reflects their Filipino, socio-political concerns.

Thailand

Thai artists have taken a shadowy role through this thesis, partly because the artwork made in terms of Socialist Realism has not been as dominant as elsewhere. The 1970s in Thailand saw a moment of protest against the status quo, through The Artists’ Front of Thailand which formed in 1974 before being quashed by the authorities by 1976. Like other young artists around the world they came from university backgrounds, were attracted to alternative messages, had read Mao Zedong’s work and were influenced by their own left-wing intellectuals, particularly Chit Phumisak. During their brief heyday they made protest art replete with banners, posters and an outdoor exhibition, in 1973, in one of the main boulevards of Bangkok,137 and produced a manifesto soon after.138 Clearly, in Thailand, the ideology that reflected Soviet and Chinese models is taken up with enthusiasm, even for a brief period, but the works of art themselves do not follow this. The most highly regarded works of protest, by Pratuang Emjaroan (b. 1935), use Buddhist iconography and a mix of style – what might be called abstracted expressionist surrealism if one were to enter this game of nomenclature – rather than the expected imagery of Communism.

Twenty years later, in the 1990s, a further a surge of young, angry artists like Vasan Sitthiket (b. 1957), and his politically explosive works like Buddha Returns to Bangkok of 1992, and Chatchai Puipia (b. 1964), and his leering ironic Siamese Smile series of 1995, were caught up in the mutinous politics of the time, and they do use some of the stylistic rhetoric of Socialist Realism – large, figurative forms in graphic outline – and its energy of dynamic protest to a receptive albeit shocked local and then international audience. Thai art in early Asia Pacific Triennials reflected this and examples were included in major exhibitions internationally, including Traditions/Tensions, as well as strongly featured in art publications.139 This was due,

137 Poshyananda, 1992:164. Clark, 2010, 125, transliterates Chit’s name as Jit Poumisak. Clark refers to conservative teacher Pishnu Supanimit, at Thammasat Univeristy, and his impact removing “leftist humanism and its stylistic of a socialist realism” from the academy’s references after the suppression of the left in the late 1970s (121). 138 Their manifesto was unpublished until Patrick D. Flores included it in his essay on manifestos in Southeast Asia in 2011: 261-2. This is part of it: “We, who are not satisfied with what the ‘big people’ have done and we who are conscious of the priceless Thai culture art’s conservation, innovation, and development for the ‘little people’, then organise ourselves into The Artists Front of Thailand. Our mission is to conserve, innovate and develop Thai culture art and make it serve all Thai people in the correct ways it should.” The focus on ‘big and little’ people is reminiscent of the ‘little people’ often mentioned in Indonesian tracts. 139 Simon Soon speaking in Tokyo in 2014 notes his research into Santi Isrowuthakul and Sinsawat Yodbangtoey as two artists working today who continue their idealist left-wing beliefs from the 1970s (see ’Discussion’, Cultural Rebellion in Asia; 1960-1989; Art Studies 01, 2015, Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre: 107.) 191 in part, to the role of curator Apinan Poshyananda - Cornell-trained and articulate in English - whose writing on the period was a lightning rod for international access.

South Korea

A further examination of the art of South Korea is warranted here. Firmly under military rule until 1980 when the Gwangju Massacre (of protesting students) led to cracks in this control, artists in South Korea began to protest at their political reality – in Socialist Realist terms. This became the Minjoong Misul movement, seen in banners, posters, flags, cartoons, photography, film, woodcuts and large paintings, including murals that certainly owed their content and form to models from the Soviets. The Minjoong Misul artists wanted to use media familiar to the public, so chose traditional woodcut prints, influenced by the Russian woodcut movement according to curator Park Hyesung, though she adds that while their work was stylistically similar to Socialist Realism it was more an attitude than an exact style that made it so.140Oh Yoon (1946-86) created woodcuts like Four Kinds of Body System of 1985 which satirised the vulgarity of the ruling business elite, using the rough, linear vigorousness possible in this medium (fig. 4.50). The street banner painted in 1991 by the National Art Association Centre Workers Group, dedicated to student Kang Kyung-dae who had been killed by police, is painted with socially critical intent and realist style, but again with an idealism for a better future of the Socialist Realist works seen elsewhere (fig.4.51). 141 Another similar street banner is The Kabo Peasants War of 1989 (fig.5.52) A further collective piece of great size (nearly ten metres long), painted with the Socialist Realist qualities noted above, was made by the Kwangju Visual Media Academy in 2000 and exhibited at the Kwangju Biennale of that year. Called the Eyes of May – Martyr, Yoon Sang-won’s Eye, it is a complex narrative tableau of Korean history and protest. It heroicises the death of Yoon Sang-won at the Cholla Provincial Office, part of the Kwangju ten-day protest. The text for this painting in the Kwangju Biennale catalogue ends “through the Door of the ‘Kwangju of May’, we will represent the universal values that we human beings must aspire to in a new age”.142 This was an important moment in South Korea when art and protest were closely aligned, but, with change towards democracy, it retreated accordingly.

4. Australia

140 See Park Hyesung,2015. ‘Discussion’ in Cultural Rebellion in Asia, 1960-1989; Art Studies 01. Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre: 95. 141 See Carroll, 2010: 131, 134. 142 Kwangju Visual Media Academy, in Kwangju Biennale 2000; Man + Space. Kwangju: Kwangju Biennale Foundation, 54. Note: Kwangju changed the Romanised spelling of its name to Gwangju soon after this. 192

In 2015 the Australia Council for the Arts, the Government’s arts funding and advisory body, proudly wrote on its website:

Since its inception in 1973, the Australia Council for the Arts has been a world leader in having dedicated and unbroken funding to support community arts and cultural development practice.143

The Australia Council remains clear about the particular identification of this form of arts practice, saying on this same website that “Community arts and cultural development is distinct from other arts practice as it is the creative processes and relationships developed with community to make the art that defines it, not the art form or genre.” In other words, for this elite arts body, in this particular area the people are driving the agenda.

On one hand it seems surprising that this is a commitment, albeit which flooded the Western world of the late 1960s, which found such strong ground, if the Australia Council is to be believed, in Australia. An advocate of this movement, artist Geoff Hogg, has written in 2011 “to this very day I am surprised by how soon our apparently radical ideas were accepted through all levels of government in Australia”.144 Perhaps it is explained by Australian pride in its egalitarian society, with its background of strong Trade Unionism, along with availability of financial support from Government for arts ventures. These realities do not occur in most Asian societies, so it seems more reasonable that it is in Australia that this thinking has been institutionalised.

Hogg, in both his 2010 co-edited book Outer Site and 2011 PhD thesis, has given the history of this movement. He says the response towards art for the community was affected in the 1970s era in Australia, by reference not to Russia but to China:

For those students [in 1970s Australia] interested in an alternative to the commercially oriented art that was the staple of the New York art world…put forward by Clement Greenberg, peasant art from revolutionary China was more exciting than the stodgy Social Realism of the Soviet Bloc.”145

143 http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/artforms/community-arts-and-cultural-development/ accessed 6 May 2015. Graham Pitts writing in 2002 on the history of the formation of the Community Arts Board within the Council in 1979 notes that the “sophisticated political campaign which cited ‘democratisation of the arts’, ‘accessibility’, ‘equity’ and ‘arts for the people’” was “strongly but unsuccessfully resisted by most of the other Boards of the Australia Council with arguments about ‘artistic excellence’ which persist to this day (the argument being that the inclusion of non-artist members of a community in arts production lowers the quality of production.” See ‘A Brief History of the Community Arts Board’ http://www.abc.net.au/arts/fertile/essay_2.htm, accessed 17 September 2015. 144 Hogg, 2011: 56. 145 Hogg, 2011: 31. The thesis’s title is Repeatable Shape; Designing a Cultural Practice. In it, he further notes that the Melbourne CPA (Marxist-Leninist) which supported this art movement was “sympathetic to China… scathing about the bureaucracy and 193

Following Whitlam’s Prime Ministerial visit in 1973 (see fig. 2.1) there had been visits to China from Australian students and left-wing groups, where the idea of a new ideal of participatory art was inspiring: seeing farmers – the peasants – encouraged to make art, and art about their own world. In Sydney, activist Ian Milliss (b. 1950) had been similarly impressed by imagery brought back from China by his fellow artists - and as editor of the Contemporary Art Society’s newsletter Broadsheet had published a portrait of Mao on the cover and a reproduction of The Rent Collection Courtyard. 146 The key attraction of China’s peasant painting movement was the practice of participation of communities in making art, often in collaboration with professional artists.

Writing during this time, Dallas Smythe is more conciliatory to the Soviet style, saying in ‘Socialist and Capitalist Realism’ in The Great Divide published in Melbourne in 1977, that socialist realism led to public welfare, no class distinctions, no notion of genius or the star system, and to art reunited with production, public decision-making and cultural diversity.147 Also at the time, speaking on the general principles of Russian art practice, academic Brian Medlin wrote “If we have any function at all as artists, it’s a very humble and hard one – to take art out of the hands of jokers like ourselves and put it where it belongs – in the hands of the people”. 148

To this milieu, arts leaders like Andrea Hull brought their own experience of British community practice to bear.149 She was involved with setting up The Community Arts and Development Committee, in 1973, at the Australia Council. It led to the idea of community arts workshops, an area that soon took on capital letters,150 with the concept of art being for and by the people taking strong institutional hold. It led to the formation of the CommunityArts Board of the Australia Council, which in turn initiated the Art and Working Life Program, funded by the Council and supported by the Australian Council of Trades Unions. The Art and Working Life Program was focused on ‘workers’ creativity’, with workshops, residencies, exhibitions, and other activities. Sandy Kirby, in her history of this movement, states that “The academic culture promoted through our ‘narrow and class-ridden’ education system has tended to devalue the history, skills and interests of the working class”, and that was relevant because “Art and Working Life acknowledges working class culture and promotes creativity among failure of the USSR. This hit a chord with militant students, many of whom had visited China through the Australia-China Friendship Society, difficult before the advent of diplomatic relations introduced by Whitlam after 1972” (39). 146 See Wendy Carlson, 2006. ‘The Invisible Artist’ in Ian Milliss: http://www.ianmilliss.com (accessed 30 March, 2017). 147 Dallas Smythe ‘Socialist and Capitalist Realism’ in Merewether and Stephen, 1977: 42. It is of note that the terms Social and Socialist slide around here, unlike the adherence to the former in the Philippines, but still there is a hesitation in Australia to overt use of the Communist term. 148 Brian Medlin ‘Culture, Ideology and Power’ in Merewether and Stephen, 1977: 123. 149 Conversation with Andrea Hull, 1 October, 2015, Melbourne. She cites ED Burman and the Islington Bus Company in particular as influential to her. 150 Bernard Smith ‘Community Arts Workshops’ in Merewether and Stephen, 1977: 140-4. 194 trade union members”. 151 While the raw politicisation of this movement has tempered over the decades, the ideas underpinning ‘community art’ have remained a central part of Australian art consciousness, either directly through funded programs, through art groups spread widely in the population, or, importantly, through the structural components of the employment of arts officers with associated funding by Local Government. In turn this has led to public art commissions, street festivals including artists and their work, and art events designed to break down the professional/amateur divide and take art to the people.152 Art classes abound in halls around the country. Public Art, with the commissioning of artists to make works in the public space, very often with some relation to the surrounding community, has become one of the important income sources for many Australian artists.

An important development of left-wing focus on ‘the people’, leading to a new interest in the imagery of ordinary people in Australia, had impact on the esteem given to women’s work, to work made by mothers and grandmothers for domestic use, particularly textiles like embroidery and knitting, as well as other ‘crafts’. Exhibitions, publications, museum displays and indeed museum collections began to reflect this. Documentary photographers began to celebrate these stories with poignant images of family life. The imagery made was of home- life, quilts telling personal stories, and ceramics painted with local scenes.

The idea of the commune, with emphasis on groups of artists either literally working together or in the same workshop, was practised widely in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and later in Darwin. It took various forms, led by professional artists often working with communities or collectives, and in the process making their names for both their iconography and their style. Geoff Hogg’s work has a literal, clearly didactic edge. Marie McMahon (b. 1953) uses fine continuous narrative cartoon-like images. Ann Newmarch used a softer more mellow painterly style (fig. 4.53) for her political messages, including quoting the words of Chairman Mao (see fig. 2.38). Chips Mackinolty’s imagery always had a specific and often witty political point, introducing well-known icons with slogans that made fun of the whole political jape (fig. 4.54). His and Toni Robertson (b. 1953)’s Daddy what did you do in the nuclear war? of 1982 uses the

151 Kirby, 1992: 7, 30. 152 Websites for funding organisations in Australia, even in 2015, reflect this. The Victorian Ministry for the Arts (now Creative Victoria) began funding of artist in community schemes, including for what has become codified as Public Art, in the early 1980s. In 2015, this has developed to numerous programs. One is Collaborative Initiatives which includes the 100 Story Building, which “Works with children and young people focusing on literacy as a mechanism for development, self-confidence, access and equity”; Footscray Community Arts Centre, which is “A community-engaged, contemporary arts organisation working with local, regional and international communities”; Western Edge Youth Arts “which creates unique, socially engaged performances working in collaborative partnerships with communities, schools and young people”; and the Women’s Circus, “A community arts organisation delivering training, collaborative community projects and an artistic program to a diverse audience and participant base”. See http://creative.vic.gov.au/Projects_Initiatives/Collaborative_initiatives/Arts_West, accessed 6 May 2015. Deborah Mills (email to the author 8 October, 2015) writes that “many of the characteristics of community arts practice in Australia have been appropriated by contemporary visual arts practice” including valuing different forms of virtuosity and diversity itself. 195

World War I illustrative poster of the family gathering, but now the little girl has three legs and a pig’s snout.153

The large scale of murals and their need for their message to be understood from afar led to hard-edge, realist depictions of men and women often in energetic protest. The Mexican muralists had been a key antecedent, but Hogg is one who also says that peasant painting in China, well known by this stage, and seen not only on paper but on village walls, with its literal, linear narrative form, was influential to mural painting in Australia.

Artists in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide responded differently to this movement, according to circumstance and inclination. The central site of the Trades Hall councils in Melbourne and the history of the CPA there informed a seriousness and purpose around the imagery made in that city: there was a focus on public art, particularly murals, painted with self-conscious inclusion of ‘communities’ around political causes of the day and celebrating histories of the ‘working man’. Women’s traditional work was celebrated and included in new banners made for Trade Union parades. In both these forms, the focus was on realistic depictions of workers in action, full of energy, looking towards a new day. The Builders Labourers Mural in Hawthorn (fig. 4.55) co-ordinated by Hogg in 1977 was painted as “a tableau of construction and conflict”, a huge, flat, graphic recreation of the history of the union, defined by the individual strength and indeed heroism of its members.154 Hogg, Mark Wotherspoon and Alan Morgan painted a banner in 1981 for the Melbourne Trades Hall, with support from the Australia Council, as a large colourful collage of working men and women on a flat ground, intersected by text, including ‘Unity is Strength,’ where the central working man even holds a hammer, albeit rather a small one (fig. 4.56)155 It is poignant that these banners are so close to the Russian examples of revolutionary times.156

Murals were made in Adelaide as well, but they were not so ubiquitously taken up in Sydney, though examples were made by activist artists with communities in Woolloomooloo, Waterloo and other sites (fig. 4.57). A more iconoclastic, anarchic and individualistic mood took hold around the ‘Sydney Push’ at Sydney University.157 It meant that when artists who were stirred by the new ideals of an alternative system got together it was under the aegis of the University and its new alternative site the Tin Sheds, founded in 1969, supported by artist academics

153 It is an unsettling image in view of later revelations of the relationships between chemical warfare of the Vietnam War and resultant birth defects. 154 Hogg, 2011:54. 155 Reproduced in Hogg, 2011: 73, fig.38. 156 An example is the parade of tramway workers in Leningrad in 1918 with the banner held aloft with the slogan Proletarians of All Countries Unite! reproduced in Susan Causey (ed.), 1990, Tradition and Revolution in Russian Art (Leningrad in Manchester). Manchester: Manchester Free Press: 143, fig.4.6. 157 See Kenyon, 1995, for a history of this period and its mood. 196 associated with the University. There they made posters which have become the iconic art form of this movement.

The effectiveness of poster art in China was widely known and influential. However, screen- printing was the medium of choice used in Australia. The artists loved the colours, the sharp lines and flat areas of tone so well emphasised in screen-print practice; and they liked the way the medium enabled the use of text, photography and imagery. The standard size papers that fit the screen-print frames forced a smaller scale than much of the imagery made at the time in China, enforcing imagery that could arrest the viewer’s attention from a shorter distance, and with that shorter distance enabling inclusion of more detailed and complex material. Information drove the iconography of each: which campaign, which event, which movement, using photographs of the key figures if appropriate (see fig. 2.36). It is highly figurative, with known figures – through known photographs – regularly used. Icons of European art are included, particularly the perennially popular Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, though this time she is dressed in workers’ overalls and says, inviting people to the Second Triennial May Day Revolution Ball in Sydney, “come as your favourite faction” (and if you do, ‘kids are free, and there is a discount for bludgers’, fig. 4.58).

Gradually the impact of the Sheds grew, writes Chips Mackinolty, from 200 people using the facilities each week in 1973 to 750 a week using them in 1977.158 There was an ethos of the collective, with artists’ names at first not attached to works, reflected in the activities of the Earthworks Poster Collective. However, the small size of these works and the different styles and interests of the artists meant that names have been attached and they are now in public art collections, with most major museums in Australia owning many.159 It is of note that Mackinolty writes that the then Director of the National Gallery of Australia, James Mollison, started to collect Chinese posters at around the same time as he started collecting works from the Earthworks Poster Collective.160 Mollison had visited China in 1976 for three weeks sponsored by the Chinese Government to tour the cultural sites, “a reward for Whitlam’s early recognition of China”; he purchased a few posters then, and later negotiated through the Department of Foreign Affairs to collect “a full range of the prints available” for the National

158 See Chips Mackinolty ‘The Tin Sheds’, in Merewether and Stephen, 1977: 136. 159 Artists and academics formed the Progressive Art Movement with work from the Sydney-based Earthworks Poster Collective being shown at the Experimental Art Foundation and the Contemporary Art Society in 1977 seen as the climax of the movement there. Public collections with large numbers of these works include the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 160 Mackinolty, 1997: 70. The majority of Earthworks Collective posters were acquired a year or so after their creation, which is very fast in the nature of institutional collection-making. The two main periods for acquisition were 1977 and 1982. Sixteen Chinese off-set lithographic political posters were acquired by the National Gallery in 1981 (and one in 1978) with the notation: ‘Australian Embassy, Peking- Director's allowance, International Posters’ (from emails from Lucie Folan, Curator, Asian Art, National Gallery of Australia, 11 and 17 September 2015). The very important collection of Chinese political woodcuts, made before and around the founding of the PRC, was acquired from Peter Townsend, mostly in 1985. 197

Gallery collection and in due course 1,004 images arrived.161 This was extremely prescient. They added to the very important collection of pre-PRC woodcuts, and caused a visiting Chinese cultural official to declare “eventually we will have to borrow from you, nothing like either of these collections exists in China.”162

When Julie Ewington wrote of the Australian print-works in 1978 in ‘Political Posturing in Australia’, she spoke about the subject-matter of the imagery, saying “to my mind, it is the strongest and certainly the healthiest, development in the art of the late 1970s. Many young artists are giving up the merely decorative and absorbedly self-referential art in which they were educated for engagement in social and political issues, for dealing through their art with the lives and concerns of real people”.163 She could have been quoting from a long list of previous exhortations to this end or descriptions of the result throughout the region. It is of note that her opinion continues to have credence: Celia Dottore, writing in 2014, says the printmaking of the 1970s and 1980s, in this case in Adelaide, “captures the revolutionary spirit that shaped an era of printmaking in South Australia that to this day remains unmatched.”164Mackinolty, one of the early members of Earthworks Collective, has spoken about the direct impact of Russian imagery on him as a boy of twelve visiting Moscow in 1966,165 and how his work until today shows the direct impact of the Russian and Chinese imagery, as well as, as he wrote in 1997, the world-wide practice of making ‘political prints’.166 A 1995 screen-print made by the Green Ant group in Darwin, of which he is part, called Onward to the next glorious 5 year plan, (see fig. 2.36) is inscribed, lower right ‘With apologies to the 1967 Chinese poster “We are determined to liberate Taiwan”’,167 and his United in Struggle image of 2012 reflects a long history of such imagery both in Australia and elsewhere (fig.4.59).

161 Letter to the author from James Mollison, 18 November 2015. 162 Letter to the author from James Mollison, 18 November 2015. 163 Quoted in Carroll 1981:.56. Ewington’s article was published in Imprint (1978) 1. 164 Dottore, 2014: np. 165 Mackinolty, 1997: 68: “My first conscious memory of the war in Viet Nam was a visual one: not from the lounge room, television war that reputedly changed the hearts and minds of the West, but that of a poster in Moscow street pasted strategically just down the road from the Australian Embassy….I was fascinated with the posters, billboards and newspaper hoardings of the streets of London and the continent, and my memory of this particular poster in Moscow is still vivid: a sharp, graphic image of US planes and Vietnamese peasant fighters.” Mackinolty, as his reference to ‘London and the continent’ implies, did have other influences. In this same 1997 article he talks of Picasso’s Guernica and as a youth of the “oppositional images that circulated the walls of the world”. 166 Mackinolty, 1997: 69: He describes the East Wind Bookshop in Sydney “a Maoist front” where Chinese posters were available, but also those from the US distributed through The Third World Bookshop and other venues. He notes particularly the importance of the Cuban OSPAAAL “the largest political poster producer in the world” (72, note 5). In an email to the author, 20 August 2014, Mackinolty reiterated the importance of the Atelier Populaire/May 68 and then Cuban posters, and how he did his first poster in January 1969. He notes the importance, similarly to Ann Newmarch, of the bookshops, especially the Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street, Sydney, where he did his first poster, and learned the techniques of screen printing. 167 The screenprint includes , Mona Lisa with a gun, Van Gogh with no ear, a Gauguin Tahitian maid and Marilyn Monroe (Warhol-like) holding a little red book inscribed GREEN ANT 5 YEAR PLAN. It was the lead image for the exhibition Not Dead Yet, Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty; a retrospective exhibition, Flinders University Gallery, Adelaide, 4 May-14 July, 2013. 198

The debt to the Russians or Chinese is in the idea of political critique through art, the left-wing ideology that drove the messages, and the creation of a new, accepted area of ‘art practice’. Apart from examples like the Green Ant poster, there is little direct iconographic reference to Russian or Chinese imagery, though examples were known. There is certainly not the iconography of uncritical nationalism or respect for the political leadership, nor an earnest idealisation of the worker or the farmer.

***

Today Socialist Realism itself has become historical. The response to the arts’ style has diminished, but the history of its making is being reassessed by artists. The Venice Biennale is variously regarded as central to the art issues of the day (albeit mostly through the lens of the Artistic Director), and one focus in 2015 was on the left-wing, if not socialist concerns of international art. A central part of the presentation, in a new arena area, was daily readings by professional actors from Das Kapital, interpreted by British artist Isaac Julien (b. 1960). In the curated area of the Giardini a number of important works reflected responses to such discussions, including Room 12 with Julien’s video on Marxism, capitalism and consumption today, and Alexander Kluge’s work in Room 9 on leftist thought, News from ideological Antiquity; Marx, Eisenstein, Capital. In the Arsenale at least six artists selected made work either about Russian or leftist politics, including a piece on the leftist women’s movement in Sweden in the 1910-20s, industrial imagery from Rostov-on-Don, sardonic drawings of Russian life, a critique of Putin’s election, international tension with Russia, and a reflection on ‘heroes’ of the Revolution.168 The Russian Pavilion itself, with work by Irina Nakhova (b. 1955), included a focus on Lenin’s mausoleum and the “instability of historical assertions”.169

Artists in other international exhibitions in Asia are increasingly bringing issues of the socialist if not Communist past of their societies into their art. The Time of Others at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, shown in early 2015, included two works that are part of this. The first was the display of Socialist material from 1930s-60s in Indonesia as part of Saleh Husein’s (b. 1982) installation Arabian Party, 2013, and the second was Singaporean Ho Tzu Nyen’s (b. 1976) The Nameless, a mesmerising video of 2014 about the life and work of Lai Teck, the

168 These are in order by Petra Bauer (A Morning Breeze, 2015), Sonia Leber and David Chesworth (Zaum Tractor, 2013), Olga Chernysheva, Natalia Pershina Yakimanskaya (GLURLYA) (Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin, 2011-5), and David Maljkovic (New Reproduction, 2013-5), and Liisa Roberta (Petersburg Underground, 2012). 169 The Russian Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia; The Green Pavilion, Exhibition flyer. There is even a nice reference in the Spanish Pavilion, Ca Bello/Carceller The State of Art, 2015, in a video about drag queens: “It’s all Lenin’s fault; he didn’t understand Proletarian glam”. The repercussions about the political gesture, so central to the left, are seen in myriad ways by artists today. Other examples are German artist Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto piece shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in December 2015: including quotations from over 54 manifesti, from Marx and Engels to Aleksandr Rodchenko, and the work of STAB (the School of Theory and Activism, Bishkek, in the Kyrgyz Republic) shown at the (eighth) 2015 Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. The wall text noted they meld “disregarded Communist histories, tactics from the Soviet avant- garde art and activism, and queer and postcolonial politics”. 199

Secretary General of the Communist Party of Malaya from 1939-47, and the shifting realities of his existence.170

As artists respond to Socialist Realism, the centre of it all, Moscow, seems to have turned aside from this part of its past. The main public collection of Socialist Realist works of art has been moved from the imposing, historical Tretyakov Museum building to a new Soviet-style square block in a hard-to-access park, and is little visited,171 and there are few reminders on the streets – though beneath the streets in the underground stations the magnificent mosaics of Aleksandr Deineka and others still are astonishing in their achievement. The hammer and sickle USSR flag has been replaced by the pre-Revolutionary Russian tricolour and imagery of Lenin is in little evidence, his mausoleum as much visited by foreign tourists as Russians (unlike in China where Mao’s tomb attracts huge and patient local crowds to this day and the central square is dominated by the banner of his face).172 The rabbit-warren State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia includes few artworks though a Vera Mukhina Worker and Farmworker model is displayed. One remnant, like the slightly askew Space Museum with stuffed space-dog Laika at the entrance, is the All-Russia Exhibition Centre (VVTs) which was the Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR (VDNKs) just to the north of the central city. The central Pavilion of the Peoples of the USSR remains with a rare figure of Lenin looming in front, seen from the enormous entrance arch, above which soars theTractor Driver and Farmworker holding up in triumph a gigantic sheaf of golden grain (fig. 4.60). Mukhina’s original Worker and Kolkhoz woman was disassembled and only restored in 2009, though smaller versions are on display elsewhere, and this original is proudly photographed as the cover-image for Moscow In Your Pocket guide to the city of February-March, 2015. They have become part of the golden past.

The idealism and nostalgia around leftist ideas in Asia is one side of the coin. The other is more practical, described by Prapon Kumjim of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok at a Japan

170 Time of Others, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 11 April – 28 June, 2015. Husein includes Rakib Almoedi’s 1933 Indonesian Socialist Party Manifesto, Socialisme Indonesia, 1962 (H. Roeslan Abdulgani Handbook), and a brochure for the recruitment of members of PASI, an Indonesian Socialist Arab Party. Lai Teck, says the text with the exhibition, was known as ‘Malaya’s Lenin’. 171 Oleg Krasnov writes, in Russia Beyond The Headlines on 22 June 2015, that “Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery to be free on Wednesdays… Entrance to the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val will be free for visitors on Wednesdays until the end of the summer. Museum aims to promote avant-garde collections and boost visitor numbers…As director of the Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova noted in an interview with RBTH, there is always a huge number of people in the famous building on Lavrushinksy Pereulok with its collections of icons and Russian paintings from the 17th-19th centuries, while the building on Krymsky Val is empty. This is despite the outstanding collection of avant-garde [art], which is known all over the world’.” See- http://asia.rbth.com/arts/2015/06/22/moscows_new_tretyakov_gallery_to_be_free_on_wednesdays_47137.html, (accessed 21 July 2015).’ 172 It is difficult to get precise figures on visitation as identification is not required, but general reportage follows Matthew Clayfield in ‘On Putin Lenin in his place, mummy’s the word’ on 20 March 2012 in Crikey writing “Compared to Mao Zedong’s Tiananmen Square mausoleum, with its giant white statue of the god-like chairman, thousands of mourning visitors streaming through at a militarily regulated pace, and kitschy souvenir stands out the back, Lenin’s is a modest affair. Visitor numbers have dropped off substantially in recent years”. See http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/20/on-putin-lenin-in-his-place-mummys-the- word/?wpmp_switcher=mobile (accessed 21 July 2015). 200

Foundation Asia Centre forum in Tokyo in 2014. He talks of the problem of discussing the left- wing movements of the 1970s:

The problem that I had… was to do with the fact of ‘now and then’; people change, people have to survive… Some artists who were very leftist at that time, in the early or mid-1970s, became ministers who took all the money in the last government. My friend and respected artist Vasan Sitthiket was very much about the people in the late 1970s, but now (there’re rumours that) he owns a resort and it’s quite a different story… I didn’t choose artists groups [to discuss] who represented any kind of ideology, because it risked tripping over the cruel reality of survival.173

173 Prapon Kumjin, 2015. ‘Discussion’ Cultural Rebellion in Asia; 1960-1989; Art Studies 01. Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre: 107. 201

Chapter 5. The Local: The adoption and adaption of Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region.

I visited the Lu Xun Museum in Beijing in September 2014. It was a microcosm of this thesis: traditional Chinese children’s woodcut books of The Mouse’s Wedding, alongside notes on the impact of the Japanese victory over Europeans in the early years of the century, alongside texts on social Darwinism. Displayed in cases were Russian books Lu Xun had translated, including Serafimovich on Woodcuts of Modern China and Soviet Graphic Works, photographs of No.40 Qianaili, Shanghai (a European-style house), where the exhibition of woodcuts sponsored by Lu Xun and Kakechi Uchiyama was held in 1933, a flyer for a publication of Käthe Kollwitz’s work, Dawn Blossom Society publishings, and publications by young Chinese authors supported by Lu Xun. The traditional past was never lost, as the new from Russia and elsewhere was absorbed, and all was reinterpreted by young people keen for a new, idealised future. Lu Xun died before Mao Zedong put this all into a new format, but his legacy has long been recognised in China. As Wang Shiqing wrote in 1984, Lu Xun advocated learning special skills from progressive artists the world over, and to combine these with “revolutionary ideology and one’s national traditions”.1

***

A central issue of this thesis is a discussion of the old value systems so challenged by Lenin and then Mao. Both used extreme force to overturn their own imperial, elitist societies. They pressed a new ideology onto their subjects. Then, practically, Mao used very similar means to change the arts as had been introduced in Russia. However, running beneath this continued other local cultural traditions and mores that permeated how these new ideas were interpreted in each different place in the Asia Pacific region. It is a case, in the words of sociologist Roland Robertson, the theorist of globalisation who coinced the term ‘glocal’, that “unless a new product or process resonates in a local culture, it will not be adopted; and that when a process or product is adopted, it is typically also adapted, and takes a local flavour.”2 One local resonance is the issue of communalism in Asia, a significant force in the acceptance of ‘communist’ art there, beyond what had happened in Russia. Even more important is the extension of this – the idea that a popular art could be seen as meritorious. This is inferred by

1 Wang Shiqing, 1984: 315: 2 From Turner and Webb, 2016: 115. 202

Lenin when he said he liked the avant-garde youth but he did not like their abstract works.3 In the new China, collective art, amateur art and public art all were the centre of focus. It is the other side of the cultural agenda of the last century for half the world’s population - who did not care what the individualistic Western art world thought of them.

Stalin had defined the culture of the new revolutionary ideology as being narodnost, ‘national’ (or local), as well being ‘realist in form, socialist in content’, aligning with the issue Lu Xun knew so well, that of one’s own cultural tradition. The Soviets themselves had their own version of ‘local’ Socialist Realism coming from history, cultural attitudes and art traditions - as specific to Russia’s past, social situation and geography as are those of each part of the Asia Pacific region – where this chapter focuses.

This chapter traces how local culture of the East helped turn artistic influence from Russia into something new. Pankaj Mishra in Ruins of Empire discusses three ways for cultures to move forward: through remaining faithful to the old ways, by making some adaptions, and by total renovation.4 The effect of the Soviets on Asian societies, particularly the Communist ones, might, at first, be seen to be taking the last way, but the reality was that they chose, as most societies do, the middle course.

1. Local history

All art from outside comes into an existing context. In discussing the impact of Socialist Realism over the large area of the Asia Pacific region, particular past history and contemporary events and individuals naturally are relevant to how it was received and interpreted in each place. The issue of which place had been colonised by European powers or by Japan – or not - had significance for how the impact of Socialist Realism evolved, as did the reach of both a Chinese ethnic diaspora, as well as which place took over the political ideology of Communism – or not. Then the rise of charismatic leaders like Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh who recognised the use of art is relevant, as are the roles of articulate and supportive advocates within bureaucracies or within the circles of power, like Jiang Qing. Her knowledge of the power of art and her association with the premise of ‘red, bright and shining’ came from her individual early experience, put into reality through her relationship to Mao. It was a particularity that changed the course of Chinese and now world art history. Equally the long and ultimately vilified careers of army general-dictators in the Philippines and Indonesia made the ground ripe for artists to create politically potent imagery that relied on Socialist Realist

3 As previously noted, Lenin said he did not understand the ‘isms’ of modern art. Anatoly Lunacharsky, writing in 1933, recalled Lenin said he was not competent to talk about art with young art students but “he found the young people themselves a very fine lot, and was delighted they were communist-minded” (see Lunacharsky, 1978: 284). 4 Mishra, 2012: 10. 203 precedents to protest against these regimes. In Australia the perceived egalitarianism of the nineteenth-century gave the reception of the ideology of Communism its own local story. Many of these issues are so important they are accepted unquestioningly, but imagine the route of Asian art this century without Mao’s words and presence - if Chiang Kaishek had succeeded. Look no further than to Taiwan and the support for literati traditions there in the period after 1949 to see the likely consequences.

This thesis does not intend to understake an encyclopaedic examination of this issue. Three examples are given here in which local history or cultural circumstance has affected the way that Socialist Realism was adopted and adapted in art in the East as demonstrations of the importance of this reality. They extend on information already introduced in chapters on the art made, but put this in a specific, local cultural context. First is the remodelling of particular long-held, indigenous cultural histories to service the new practice; second, the impact of other external forces on the uptake of this ideology from Russia; and third, the issue of contemporaneous political realities. The first focuses on China, the second Vietnam and the third Australia.

The first example is the respect for culture expressed through the Confucianism of East Asia and its diaspora that gave prominence to the practice of art and the role of artists to a degree often lacking in Western cultures. Artists and teacher-professors have an elevated place in East Asia that made art both a central part of the new society and an area in which much attention was focused. It is striking that, despite the lack of materials during the disruptions particularly in China and Vietnam through the mid-century decades, artists continued to make work. Granted, thepolitical leaders supported this for propaganda reasons, and the artists were ideologically in support of a new regime, but the number of works and difficulty of making them in the circumstances of jungle and war attests to this local cultural impetus.

The other issueto consider is that for China particularly, where the hold of the past was so strong, much energy and enthusiasm was needed to introduce change from accepted tradition to a style as radically different as Socialist Realism. Counter-intuitively, as there was little knowledge of its history nor experience of how to absorb such a new style, the energy needed to change to this new thinking lead to its imagery and form being taken further, beyond the more subtle nuances of the parental form. As has happened frequently in different cultures forced to adapt to incoming visual practice, the reaction can seem naïve, or simplistic, or over- blown to those familiar with their original source.5 However, in the new culture it worked

5 There are myriad examples, Albert Namatjira’s work is one in Australia; the Filipino reaction to Catholic iconography is one in Asia. It is now recognised the Australian was melding his own cultural mores with Western ones, and in the Philippines the Biblical narratives refined visually over centuries in Europe were taken on with the visceral gusto of pre-Hispanic forms. Symbols were 204 well. Chinese artists took on the new Russian idea with such unfiltered enthusiasm that this became one of the characteristics of the art. It can seem too energetic (those eager faces and muscular arms) to an outsider, but that is what has made it exceptional. Even in use of text, scholars have made the point that the Chinese used phrases in art like ‘liberation’ or ‘uprising’ more powerfully than Russians had, with extreme (and memorable) phrases like ‘Running dogs of imperialism’ helping evoke the camaraderie of the comrades.6 For a culture of respect, order and politeness such as traditional China, the freedom to utter such words must have been exhilarating.

The second example here is the impact of a further external force on the indigenous in Vietnam which changed the nature of how Socialist Realism was subsequently adopted. The impact of French art is very particular. The small size of the Vietnamese art world no doubt was part of reason for the strength of this but so was the appointment of Victor Tardieu to head the École des Beaux Arts from its founding, establishing a curriculum viable until today (fig. 5.1).7 Tardieu encouraged the use of non-European media like lacquer and silk painting and promoted the exhibition of work by Vietnamese artists in the then centre of power, France, though he died well before the impact from socialism started to flow in the country. The imposition of the École and its charismatic early leader took strong hold very quickly. The French government put much effort into the cultural relationship with, for example, ‘Indochine’ being the focus of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Nadine André-Pallois lists the more than 300 painters from France who had been to Indochina from the 1880s to the 1950s, and although most were of ordinary talent this level of attention is extraordinary, and in marked contrast to any European artistic presence in China.8 The voyage of the French to Indochina was mirrored, albeit in a far lesser way, by Vietnamese being sent to France: Le Huy Mien (1873-1943) in the late nineteenth-century, Nguyen Nam Son (1890-1973) in 1925, and Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000) and Le Pho (1907-2001) in early 1930s, both of whom later returned to live in France.9

The impact of this on Vietnamese art, including during the height of Socialist Realism, remained strong. One key outcome was the focus on landscape, which, as Nora Taylor notes, had no indigenous tradition.10 It is a romantic notion of the life of the land - with war being but an interruption - that claimed the Vietnamese imagination as nowhere else, and imbues enlarged, expressions exaggerated, and mythical scenes given full physical form. Local spiritual, magical practices give added potency. It makes for a dynamic, local Filipino interpretation, see Carroll, 2010, 19. 6 Hung,2011: 2. 7 See Scott, 2012: 33-80 and especially 54 ff for discussion of the French role at this time. 8 André-Pallois, 1997: 71 ff, and Annexe 1. Of the artists Alexandre Iacovleff, see fig. 25, produced interesting work and Joseph Inguimberty (1896-1971) is celebrated today as a quasi-Vietnamese artist; certainly his work is included in publications and exhibitions of ‘Vietnamese art’: see for example Landscape and People of Tonkin, of 1933, included in Visions & Enchantment; Southeast Asian Paintings, shown at Singapore Art Museum in 2000, and reproduced in the catalogue, plate 8. 9 André-Pallois, 1997: 224-8. 10 Taylor, 2004: 36. It is an interesting contrast to Chinese art, where landscape has dominated for millennia. 205 the works of this period with an attractive yearning nuance for an ideal, bucolic past. Artists like To Ngoc Van (see fig. 2.18) chose to use Western watercolour and naturalism, and use them well – perhaps better than his contemporaries in China were able. There was a desire to emulate the Soviet constructivist style especially in posters, adopting photomontage and angled text and abstracted imagery,11 but this was incidental in comparison with the ubiquity of the School of Paris. This French style and its impact is part of Vietnamese local history too. Images of ‘Asia’ in the tourist brochures, and the attraction of Vietnam for Western travellers, comes back to this type of imagery, which speaks for its success.

The third example of the importance of local contemporary history, is provided by democratic Australia, in the use of art first to celebrate the contribution of the ‘working man’ prior to World War II, and second to criticise and satirise the status quo, political and otherwise, particularly in the political posters of the 1970s and 1980s. Sandy Kirby has argued this art and practice Australia in the 1970s re-emerged from remembered understandings of the strong working-class movement that had been part of Australian history. Born of various factors, from the convict experience to dissenting Irish prisoners, the egalitarianism of Australian society led to the strength of the Trade Union movement of workers and the successful campaigns in the nineteenth century for their working conditions. The campaign for the Eight Hour [working] Day is the most famous, coming from a society that has “one of the oldest, strongest and historically important trade union movements in the world”,12 giving rise, writes Kirby “to a distinctive working-class culture”.13 This was the type of culture to hold dear the practices of the union parade, the banners, then the political cartoons, woodcuts and posters of pre-War times, and then celebrate the foibles of the powerful from the 1970s in politically potent prints. It helps explain why the community arts programs of the Australia Council and other government bodies were taken up so quickly and with such support.

The political art of the 1970s and 1980s owed part of its parentage to working class ideology. It was also part of youth movements globally defying authority, protesting against involvement in the Vietnam War, and other perceived ailments of the contemporary situation. Their irreverence for a leader like Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in Chips Mackinolty’s For the man who said life wasn't meant to be easy – make life impossible, of 1976, was unthinkable for those directly under the guidance of the Son of Heaven (see fig. 4.54). Ann Newmarch made Women Hold Up Half the Sky in 1978, based on a small photograph of her Aunt Peg, laughingly

11 Heather and Buchanan, 2009: 11. 12 Burn, 1985: 14. The enthusiasm for both the idea of the worker’s united power, the celebration of the Eight Hour Day triumph, and the sheer enjoyment of mass parades is demonstrated by the size of the processions in Australia: in 1891 53 unions, accompanied by seventeen union bands marched, and in 1912 over 11,000 unionists marched in Melbourne carrying over 100 banners: see Stephen and Reeves, 1984: 11. 13 Kirby, 1991: 21. 206 carrying her husband on holiday, and transferring this working woman’s story into a wider statement (see fig. 2.38).

2. Cultural attitudes

The second section of this chapter focuses on how local cultural attitudes in the Asia Pacific region affected the adaption of Socialist Realism. Discussed first is the special issue of Chinese exceptionalism, an attitude with origins from long before the idea of the nation state came to hover over all intercultural engagements but which in the last decades has often been interpreted as nationalism. The second focus is the idea of communalism, the third social cohesion and fourth is a special attitude to time.

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To be Chinese was to be a member of the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the universe, united in harmony under the rule of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor.14 When Mao took on this role, the desire to re-assert China’s former glory was palpable in young artists’ hearts after decades of ignominy through the Opium Wars, European gun-boat diplomacy, and the military and economic rise of Japan. They wanted Mao’s words and direction to be right and they followed them (to a Western-trained, individualistic, critically educated eye) with fatalistic devotion. Heroes and martyrs for the cause have a more important part in China’s Socialist Realist art than elsewhere, part of this cultural attitude of service to the ‘nation’.15 Arguments have been made about the over-riding positivism of imagery of China’s art of the time.16 Work under Mao took on a scale that suited this idea of China being central to all.17

China had had a tributary system of acknowledgement of hegemony from surrounding societies for centuries. External links remained strong even after the tributes to the Emperor had ceased through ethnic Chinese overseas who understood the cultural power of the

14 This is a complex issue, beyond this thesis’s scope to discuss in detail. Frank Dikötter, 1992, in The Discourse of Race in Modern China, London: Hurst & Company, discusses the development and centrality of ideas about race in China, especially the concept of national and nationalist ideology (chapter 5), noting the Confucian thinking that racial distinctions in China would be obliterated to emphasize cultural continuity and harmony. It was assumed that foreigners could be transformed and absorbed into this harmonious centre (29). This was further articulated in the nineteenth-century under the rubric of ‘race’ with the focus on the group (qun) used with lineage (zu) and typle (lei). Liang Qichao published on qun (as a group or flock) in 1897 as a quality leading to nationalism (103). 15 Ng Mau-sang (1988: 50, and 280) gives the example of the difference in literature and China and Russia and how unheroic are Russian heroes in comparison, and further discusses the campaign against Russian humanisation in literature. Hung Chang-tai in 2011 (213-6) discusses the long history of the martyr as hero in China, and how this was used under Mao’s regime, even codified to seven historic conflicts, with, by the 1990s, more than 5,000 memorials throughout the country. 16 Hung Chang-tai argues the Chinese did not follow the Russians in this, citing Shegal’s Flight of Kerenski (1937-8) and an image of Hitler’s death of 1948 (2011: 148). It should be noted however that one of the great artworks of the Cultural Revolution, the Rent Collection Courtyard has the role of the hated rent-collector as its central motif, with the plight of the peasants very obvious – it is a complex area. 17 An example is the scale of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum: small and companionable. By the time the National Museum of China was built in the 1950s the need for scale of building and artwork had arrived. 207 ancestral hearth, exerting more control than for expatriate societies which do not privilege this relationship. When political cadres from China targeted ethnic Chinese communities in Malaya, Singapore and elsewhere, they were ‘heard’. Equally, the developments in the arts in China were followed in the diaspora, reinforced during the middle years of the century by artists both travelling to raise funds for the homeland, and to escape its turmoil.

The Cultural Revolution, as Jiang Jiehong has demonstrated in his text Red: China’s Cultural Revolution, imposed “an unparalleled visual experience on China’s 800 million people”, Jiang saying that without it there would have been another modernity entirely, and that the visual impact of the work of the Red Guards has fostered the cultural complexity of post-Mao China and contributed to the power of Chinese art in the international arena.18 The argument is that the Cultural Revolution occurred with such passion because Mao was able to rally that sense of self-belief so strong in the Middle Kingdom.

An undercurrent to this self-belief is the sensitivity to (especially) officially articulating the impact of an outside force – even an ally like the USSR – on China’s culture. Lu Xun had been alert to the need to encourage the best of traditional Chinese visual art as well as curiosity about new ideas from outside. Mao, so supportive of Marxist-Leninism’s political use in China, appealed to Chinese cultural specificity or ‘localism’ when he said “foreign stereotypes must be abolished…they must be replaced by the fresh, lively Chinese style and spirit which the common people of China love.”19 During the 1950s both Zhou Yang and Lu Dingyi, director of the Propaganda Department of the Party’s Central Committee, spoke about the importance of national heritage. In 1953, Zhou noted the importance of reassessing and studying Chinese traditional culture, with, for example, artists improving and developing classical Chinese painting to show people of today (that is, daily life), not “hermits leading secluded lives far from the haunts of men”.20 In 1949 he had applauded the continued creation of “woodcuts, New Year’s pictures, picture story books, etc. [that] are all rich in Chinese style and flavour”.21 In May 1956, Lu Dingyi followed suit:

Socialist realism, in our view is the most fruitful creative method, but it is not the only method… in learning from the Soviet Union we must not mechanically copy everything from the Soviet Union in a doctrinaire way. We must make what we have learned fit our actual conditions.22

18 Jiang, 2010: 241. 19 Mao Zedong, The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War, 1938, quoted in Laing, 1988: 15. 20 Zhou, 1954: 9. 21 Zhou, 1954: 62. This is from his report on literature and art made to the First All-China Conference of Writers and Artists in July 1949, published as ‘The People’s New Literature and Art’. 22 Quoted in Laing, 1988: 22-4. 208

Conditions in mostly rurally-based China were different from industrialised Russia, and Mao, understanding this, turned to people in the countryside for support, rather than to the middle- classes as had been the case in the USSR.23 This recognition of the reality of the ‘people’ permeates Mao’s art establishment, with city artists sent to the country, ‘peasant painters’ supported, and simpler, stronger, folk-derived, caption-supported styles understood as effective. Jiang Qing directed artists in this way. Earlier, however, Mao had not given directions about how this could be done, and when the artists like Dong Xiwen in the 1950s painted the major works required of the regime, they struggled to articulate more than folk colour and decoration. They had the problem that the strong Chinese visual tradition of literati brush painting was the remit of the elite so it could not be the national language of that day. The issue became, after the freeze on relations with the Russians, on how much to, officially, acknowledge the Soviet antecedents. Today, as previously noted, the website of the National Museum of China praises Dong’s painting, calling it a “masterpiece” without mentioning any debt to European or Russian art. Rather, in 2014 having moved on from the denial of the Imperial past, it says Dong “borrowed techniques used in Tang-Dynasty Dunhuang murals, ancient Chinese figure paintings and Ming-Dynasty portraits”,24 eschewing the ‘realism in style, socialism in content’ (as well as the oil paint on canvas) that are the basis of the painting. The rehabilitation of the Imperial past, to the exclusion of Russian or other European impact, continues today at the Museum’s sister institution, the National Art Museum of China, which has a focus on literati, large-scale, landscape brush paintings (fig. 5.2).25

This continues in other intriguing ways. Scholars like Hung Chang-tai struggle to articulate the difference between Russian and Chinese Socialist Realism, referring to positive imagery (but the Rent Collection Courtyard belies this), as well as colour (and this too is moot for the majority of oil paintings made during the period, as will be discussed below), the turning to local subjects (but this is a trait common to most art movements), as well as the lack of landscape in the main Socialist Realist period in China (also with major exceptions discussed under literati practice below).26 In comparison with what the Chinese learnt from Russia, these are small diversions. Where they made their mark was during the Cultural Revolution, but that, for other reasons of sensitivity, is less celebrated today.

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23 See A. Doak Barnett’s 1963 edition on Communist strategies in Asia, including Robert C. North’s chapter comparing the Russian and Chinese models, in which he clarifies the Russian reliance on bourgeois structures (by Stalin’s time at least) and Mao’s turning to the countryside, in other words that the definition of class boundaries being so different in China gives wider context to the study (39-41). 24 http://en.chnmuseum.cn/english/tabid/549, accessed 13 August 2014. 25 Author’s visit, September 2014: only these were on show. In its international program it privileges these works. One example is the officially backed Reflections of Soul; Chinese Contemporary Ink Wash Painting, an exhibition sent by the National Art Museum of China to the National Museum of Australia and Geelong Art Gallery, 2011. 26 Hung, 2011: 148-9. 209

The following discussion of local cultural attitudes in the Asia Pacific region is broader than the issues outlined above on China: it is about the notion of communalism, within which, rather than apart from, the individual saw themselves - particularly pertinent in comparison with the elevation of individualism in Western Europe. Lenin had challenged this Western paradigm in his writing on Party Organisation and Party Literature in 1905:

We want to establish, and we shall establish, a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois- anarchist individualism.27

This would have been more easily accepted in Asia under various cultural understandings, from Confucian to Islamic desire for harmony and group cohesion, still reinterpreted in posters in the subways of Beijing today (fig. 5.3). The communal tradition in China is exemplified by Lu Xun and his thirteen students learning woodcut techniques with Kakechi Uchiyama in 1931 (fig. 5.4). 1930s, like the Left-Wing League of Artists in Shanghai, the MK Society, the group formed around printmaking, the Modern Woodcut Society, established in Guangzhou in 1934, and so on. As Confucius saw China in familial terms, with the Emperor at its head, so under the PRC, writes Jiang Jiehong, the family became the collective, a central belief of the PRC: to be part of this collective was not necessarily distinct from individualism but represented a “kind of conformity, with which an individual can be recognised and valued with legitimate status”.28 Chinese artists were part of a group: the Chinese people, a provincial group, a work group, a school group, or a Red Army group. Across Asia, artists’ associations are strong, with for example, the Artists Association in Vietnam formed in 1957 and still existing. The artists responded to the ‘good of the whole’ within the regime’s philosophy.29 Only group exhibitions were allowed.30 An associated aspect of this, as seen through the spread of Socialist Realism, was the display of art amongst the community – in the streets, on buildings, in parades. Large posters, writing tracts on walls, banners on parade were all taking art to the people as a whole,

27 In ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ in On Literature and Art, (1967), 1978: 27. 28 Jiang, 2008: 86. 29 Ng Mau-sang in 1988 writes that Chinese authors in the Khrushchev period chided Russian colleagues for their excessive humanitarianism and individualism of the new hero (xi), and further (6), that in the 1950s China was more Stalinist than Stalin’s Russia, leading to the proletarian positive hero who acts out Party policy especially during Cultural Revolution.Mayu Tsuruya (2013: 70) makes the point that the ‘heroes’ of the commissioned works in Japan are different from those shown in similar works in the West: “Japanese culture has traditionally idealized the understated hero and promoted the virtue of selfless collectivism, a value rooted in Confucian tradition”. Ryozo Suzuki’s ( 1898-1996) Evacuation of the Wounded and the Hardworking Relief Unit, of 1943, shows quiet, everyday heroes (see fig. 3.43) 30 See Nguyen Trinh Thi, 2015, in Discussion, in Cultural Rebellion in Asia 1960-1980, Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Centre, 98. She says in Vietnam, “from the late 1980s there started to be solo exhibitions for the first time, because before that, in the past decades, there were never solo exhibitions. They were always state-sponsored or collective group exhibitions because in a socialist country you’re not supposed to have solo exhibitions.” 210 and accepted.31 In China, Jiang Jiehong sees this in visual terms, in the photographs of mass rallies from the late 1960s, and in the focus of contemporary artists on imagery about identity among the ‘countless’ people of that nation.32

One aspect in Socialist Realist practice in Russia was the use of the official or specified collective of artists working together: the brigade. They had been developed because Stalin wanted huge celebratory canvases made quickly in the elaborate Socialist Realist style that one artist could not possibly deliver. The major crowd scenes in the 1940s and 1950s were made by brigades: Leading People of Moscow in the Kremlin by Vasili Efanov and others (see fig. 4.8), The Oath by Gerasimov and others (400 x 530 cm), of Stalin, and Lenin’s Speech at the III Congress of the KomSoMol of 1950 by Boris V. Ioganson (1893-1973) and others (see fig. 2.10). The main example of a similar grouping of artists in China was for similarly large works, notably the team who made the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, where the sculptors sublimated their individual styles to the point that the works by the seven artists “were so similar in form and treatment that it was hard to detect the work of any individual, regardless of whether the sculptors had studied in France or were more interested in Soviet sculpture”.33 Later large sculptural works, like those made during the Cultural Revolution by students in Beijing and Sichuan had need for similar collective organisation. As the Kiangsu Studio of Traditional Painting in China said in 1958, “these combined efforts manifest the communal spirit and sense of cooperation among artists under socialism”.34 The apex of group activity for visual art came with the Red Guards, and their Capital Red Guard and Revolutionary Rebel Exhibition, held in Beijing Exhibition Centre in June, 1967,35 a focus of their activity along with giant posters and street manifestations. Unfortunately, the images made by the Guards are not easily accessible for analysis, as the institutions that protect such material were purged, associations and unions abolished, journals ceased and individuals punished, leaving many works of art destroyed or unnamed.36

This communal, government-dictated practice continues today in North Korea. South Korean B.G. Muhn states: …under the guidance of the authorities, North Korean artists have developed a unique practice of collaboration in all media, including painting and sculpture. The themes are

31 Hou Hanru has made the point (Asialink 2013) that artists in China today are comfortable working outside institutions, in the street and at any number of sites, coming from a tradition that includes Mao’s support of allowing intellectuals to write large critiques on walls. 32 Jiang, 2008, includes photographs of these mass rallies, as well as more recent artworks by Bai Yiluo: People, of 2001, of identity photographs; by Li Songsong (b. 1973): The Decameron of 2004, of a huge Party meeting; by Yue Minjun: pink generic faces, by Miao Xiaochun (b. 1964): Rise of 2006 of a huge physical education class; by Yang Zhenzhong (b. 1968): Spring Story of 2003, a video of 1500 Shanghai factory workers, and by Zhang Dali (b. 1963): One Hundred Chinese of 2000 of rural migrants. 33 Lü, 2010: 539. 34 Chang, 1980: 39. The joint works painted in the 1950s included Patriotic Health Movement by eight different artists of this Studio (see fig.10). 35 See Lü, 2010: 635, fig. 14.21. 36 Laing, 1988: 63. 211

determined by the Party, usually to commemorate an event, and many artists work together to create grand, epic-scale paintings and sculpture that usually have to be produced in a short period of time. Sometimes 30 or more artists get together to complete one huge painting … There is a government entity called the Artists’ Association of Korea. The Party and the leading group of artists decide what work to make at the beginning of each year that might relate to the important goals of the country. The artists follow the instructions of the Party and create propaganda art posters and postage stamps.37 He continues that in the West “it is about individual glory for the artist but in North Korea, there is a collective mind of respect and contribution along with dedication to the country”.38

The de-individualising of faces in Socialist Realism is another element of the communal. In the West, it is assumed that the more individual the face the greater the impact of the work. Christine Lindey is party to this, writing that human beings replace idealised stereotypes in the best of Russian work (and that passion replaces sentimentality, a more easily defended position).39 Certainly political figures wanted to be recognised, but this does not apply to ‘heroes’ either general or particular. Does the stereotypical Socialist Realist figure, with glaring eye, strong jaw and muscular body have any less power because he or she is not individualised? Do figures on ancient Greek pots, which have the same generic features, have less power for this?

The communalism of the cultural acceptance of the style shows in ways pertinent to the historical, and art historical reading of the period. There was no desire to challenge the status quo of certain art principles - rather to improve them. So, academically realistic oil painting today is probably best undertaken by Chinese-trained artists, as Shen Jiawei’s Crown Princess Mary in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery attests.40

The most dramatic example for a Westerner is the acceptance first in Russia and then in China of other artists or photographers changing the original artwork without the initial artist’s agreement. Art works were over-painted – the individual’s ownership of the image (the Western idea of copyright) unimportant.41 David King in The Commissar Vanishes of 1997 documents numerous instances of imagery changed by others in the USSR. He calls it

37 ‘An interview with BG Muhn on the art of North Korea’, in Artlink, 2015, 35:4, 83, 84. 38 ‘An interview with BG Muhn on the art of North Korea’, in Artlink, 2015, 35:4, 85. 39 Lindey, 1990: 60. 40 It shows an idealised image of the Princess, painted with photographic detail. The website of the National Portrait Gallery notes the popularity for visitors of this work, with many visitors asking for directions for it at the front desk (see http://www.portrait.gov.au/postcards/2012/10/an-audience-for-the-queen, accessed 9 September 2015). 41 This is a further step than copying as a method of learning. As had occurred in European ateliers, Gu Kaizhi, (344-406) of the Qin Dynasty wrote an essay on copying as part of an artist’s skills: how to do it well (see William R.B. Acker, 1974, Some T’ang and Pre- T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, vol.II. Leiden: E.J. Brill: 68-9). This attitude has remained more alive in Mao’s China than the Western insistence on originality and ownership. 212

‘falsification’ – of portraits in particular but group scenes as well of Russia’s revolutionary history. He shows how people were expunged from group photographs as they fell from favour, and other figures were regrouped to reinforce the particular message desired by the leadership. It began with images of Lenin, with King annotating numerous examples through to the 1960s. It extended to oil paintings. Other scholars have written how Stalin’s execution of thirteen of his fifteen generals “and no less than 35,000 officers” in 1937 necessitated the repainting of the military canvases to be displayed in the twentieth anniversary of the ‘Industry of Socialism’ exhibition in Moscow in 1939.42

It was a model that Dong Xiwen’s painting of The Grand Ceremony of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China famously emulates in China, with others repainting people in and out of this image. The appearance of the painting today, sited in pride of place in the National Museum (fig. 5.5), can be compared to the second version of 1955, known in a poster of the time (fig. 3.32). Later versions are shown in posters made during its changes (fig. 5.6 and fig. 5.7). Shen Jiawei has described how his work Standing Guard for our Great Motherland was altered in the 1970s without his knowledge when it was displayed at the National Art Museum of China (fig.5.8). The two faces of the guards were repainted to make them fuller, wider, pinker and fiercer. The painting was never signed because the artist was not accorded such acknowledgement.43 On one level these are direct examples of Chinese emulation of Russian practice, made clear in David King’s last image in The Commisar Vanishes which shows the changes made to a photograph of the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship in February 1950. Originally Mao was positioned next to Stalin and Stalin’s successor, Georgii Malenkov, three places to the right. In the photograph published in Pravda, Malenkov has jumped three places to be next to Mao.44 However, on another level, these interventions exemplify the acceptance of such a practice in a communal society, where the interests of the group override personal accreditation.

Directives came from above and also from the people. The Rent Collection Courtyard (see fig. 4.9) was of 114 life-size clay figures, a tableaux vivant, with the figures caught in motion of protest or fear, made in 1965 in Sichuan Institute of Fine Art. It was created using the ‘three level approach’, namely, of the leadership directing, the experts making it and the masses critiquing it and suggesting improvements. It had a number of revisions, with five more figures added after initial group showing, and some remodelling, incorporating the ideas of the audience, to give it a ‘bolder expression’.45 Liu Chunhua says he sought workers’ and comrades’opinion to make changes to Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan (fig. 3.33), saying it was

42 Wilson, 1993: 114. 43 Shen describes this treatment in ‘The Fate of a Painting’ in Chiu and Zheng, 2008: 144-5. 44 King, 1997: 191. 45 Laing, 1988: 62. 213

“collective wisdom and effort that decided the final composition and colour”.46 Zhao Zhitian showed his paintings of mining to workers who wanted him to make them look cleaner.47

The issue extended elsewhere. In Vietnam, the Museum of Fine Arts, established in 1963, evacuated artworks during the American War and had copies made, some of which, says Nora Taylor in 2004, were still there, noting education was the key point,48 not the integrity of the ‘unique and original’ artwork. Taylor argues in Painters in Hanoi; An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art that the artists’ role in the community overrode individual considerations. She argues that their age, role in society, and relationships gave them status, based on the respect for the nation and family, and that this is the reason many images were replicated or imitated.49 She further explains that for this reason she focuses in her research on Vietnamese artists rather than the art – the ethnography rather than the art history.50

The artist’s place in the community is another subject into which ‘local’ considerations impinge. Taylor describes the respect held for Victor Tardieu by his students, in the cultural mode of respect for learning and age.51 She makes the point that artists during the height of Socialist Realist practice who did not want to work for the state were officially marginalised but still celebrated in the art world.52 This idea of the artist as a lone, anti-authoritarian figure was a French tradition that did not extend, for example, to China. In recent years following Doi Moi artists have decried this Socialist period as one of repression, and are pleased to have individual choice of subject again, in true School of Paris fashion.53

Outside the Communist sphere of influence this issue of communalism continued to affect art being discussed under the rubric of Socialist Realism. In Indonesia it was the communities around the sanggars or open studios that attracted left-wing artists like Sudjojono and Hendra Gunawan in the late 1930s.54 Hendra ran a collective for young artists serving the interests of the common people. Even in Australia some fleeting communal practice was seen, with, first, supporters of the Communist ideal, and later a community collegiality (especially in the 1970s

46 Laing, 1988: 67. 47 Laing, 1988: 76. 48 Taylor, 2004: 57. 49 Taylor, 2004: 20. 50 Taylor, 2011. She notes that the ‘artist as a person’ mattered more than their work (485). 51 Taylor, 2004: 29. 52 Taylor, 2004: 43. 53 This is a universal comment of the generation of artists practising in the 1990s, as told to this author in Hanoi in 1990, and since. 54 Max Cox (2012: 248) describes how Sudjojono preferred the sanggar where artists could meet and offer criticism in an open and friendly way, rather than the formal academy of the Dutch. This alternative way including the Taman Siswa system owed some debt to alternative education models from the West (as did Shantiniketan, through the links to Montessori) of indirect guidance. Sudjojono received his training like this, as did other members of Persagi, including Basuki Resobowo (1916-99), Rusli Alibasjah (1916-2005) and Affandi. It may have had sympathy with Western movements but the fact that it suited so many in Indonesia is telling – it related to their own cultural models. 214 and 1980s). For example, at the Tin Sheds Workshops at the University of Sydney, works of art were owned and acknowledged collectively.55

The issue of communalism does have cogency in India -indeed the term is often used pointedly to describe religious communities and their potential aggression towards each other. But, with the exception of village practice, the term is not used in the art world. Art historian Akira Tatehata called his 1998 exhibition of contemporary Indian art Private Mythologies because of the individual (sometimes articulated as ‘isolated’) stances of the artists.56 Had this evolved through entrenched British concepts of the Academy with its hierarchies and notions of individual prestige? Or because the regional alignments between Bengal and the other widely- spread artistic centres of the subcontinent, as well as between Hindu and Muslim, and between castes, have overtaken any sense of a broader cultural panorama? Whatever the reason, it meant that while groups of artists did occur in India (the Calcutta Group, the Progressive Artists’ Group, the Delhi-based Silpi Chakra, and later Group 1890), they were were not collectively focused and they had little effect on turning Indian art away from individual pursuits. The communalism of artistic activity elsewhere, that found sympathy in Soviet ideology, struggled in infertile ground in India. It could be said that this was India’s own ‘local’ response to this outside force.

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A third ‘cultural attitude’ toward social cohesion that is concerned with the ‘harmony’ implicit in a community ideal is also appropriate for an examination here of the discourse surrounding Socialist Realist art in Asia. Pankaj Mishra writes about the importance in China of the Confucian idea of kingship and empire, rather than city or nation, taking on a human holistic idea of the group, and how Mao succeeded in reviving and unifying China as a shared ethic.57 Confucius wrote about the role of the son, and the citizen, to be obedient to his superior, and then harmony would prevail. Artists in China accepted this and served the State obediently. Directions from the leaders about colour, red or not, according to which person was in political power, were accepted as legitimate. Under Mao, artists conformed and either did not dare or did not wish to publicly criticise the regime or its dictates. The reward of a harmonious society was that all work was directed towards social cohesion. Even under ’s more lenient rule he still expected artists to listen to him and support the common good. In 1983 he spoke at the Twelfth Party Congress ‘condemning artists and writers who dwell eagerly on the

55 Louise Dauth, Tin Sheds employee, electronic correspondence to author, 20 September 2014. 56 Tatehata, 1998: 83. 57 Mishra, 2012: 144, 257. He writes Mao “never seems to have shaken off his early Confucian moralism despite his public and virulent criticism of Confucianism. His utopian socialism carried more than a tinge of Kang Youwei’s fantasy of a harmonious world” (256). 215 gloomy and the pessimistic’, those who are “doing anything for money… indiscriminately giving performances… using low and vulgar form and content to turn an easy profit.”58 So art, which in the West had long adopted the role of critiquing authority, was accepted to be only in the service of the State and, through this, in the service of the community. As Timothy Cheek writes in 1997, originality and creativity were “not similarly prized goals in China’s intellectual establishment”.59

One side issue to emerge frm the emphasis on social harmony was the Communist states’ determination to depict the ‘minorities’ – ethnically different peoples usually living in the marginal areas around major cultural groups. Mao emphasized the inclusion of images with groups from the many Chinese minorities, and the Vietnamese followed suit. This was a practice that had started with the Russians, but the inclusion of these locally specific cultural groups forced the focus of artists on subject-matter close at hand not previously part of the canon.

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The fourth reason is a different attitude to time coming from a complex web of Confucian and Buddhist teaching. This manifests in various ways pertinent here. In Buddhism time is a successive flow of components, characterised by the moment. There is an endless cycle of birth and death. In East Asia time was referred to in relation to each imperial dynasty, which keeps repeating.60 The length of time of Socialist Realism’s hold in China and the acceptance of the existing leadership again reflects the idea that time is endless. The ending of the political alliance with Russia in 1960 did not mean the end of the impact of the Russian cultural ideology in China; rather it was impossible (or not expedient) to alter course from a new ‘tradition’ in the short time-lines of change usual in the West – the idea of progress not necessarily pertinent. When Jiang Qing wanted to refocus artists’ activities in the Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s she went back to Mao’s 1940s teachings published as The Little Red Book. Through this, the style of art was reinforced and heightened, to powerful effect. While the style did evolve, the central core of the role of art and its subject matter remained static. Even today the central role of the State remains, despite the changes to the working of society around this.

58 See Merewether, 2005: 113. 59 Cheek, 1997: 13. 60 There is no classical word in Chinese for ‘time’, rather shi which means timeliness or seasonality – the time when it is proper to do something. Chinese language gives meaning through word order and context rather than different tenses or verb forms. Chuang Tse (vi: 9) wrote: ‘There is a time for putting together/ And another time for taking apart/ He who understands/ This course of events/ Takes each new state / In its own proper time/ With neither sorrow nor joy.’ Marra, 2011: 20, discusses the “discontinuous continuity” of time in Japan, where one continuously went back to origins, the ancestral temple, “in order to make sense of what was happening in the present”. 216

Chinese scholars understood linear time, but it was not central to order. Historicism, or the compiling of facts in temporal (and in Western terms, developmental or progressive)61 order, again is understood but not crucial. Mao re-ordered ‘history’ at will, expunging, for example, figures from his Tiananmen podium: truth is mutable; art historical veracity is not highly valued. In practical terms it means websites for Chinese museums are inscrutable and access to imagery and vaults extremely difficult as openness to such ‘evidence’ is not seen as a core activity. Historical (passing, superficial) facts are less important the on-going essential qualities that Buddhism and Confucianism endorsed. Vietnamese Socialist Realist art born in the early 1950s did not change its format until Doi Moi. For thirty years it is difficult to differentiate between a painting made in 1955 or 1975 from either its subject matter or its style. Any publication of such work mixes images of various dates throughout its own organisation, as, in Vietnam, there is no change or ‘development’ through the period.

3. Local traditions

The last section of this chapter focuses on local art traditions: first, the literati tradition of East Asia, with its focus on ink painting and its synergy of writing – calligraphy – with imagery; second the importance of the vernacular, or folk art, and the promotion of the role of non- professional artists; third the humanist traditions of particularly the Philippines and Indonesia; and, fourth, the history of egalitarianism and humour in Australian art.

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The literati tradition of East Asian art has remained one of the currents beneath the surface waves of Socialist Realism. An artist might be encouraged to practice in a certain way, but their role and existence still retained respect. Centuries of working in a particular aesthetic could not be so easily expunged from these practitioners’, and their audiences’ psyche. At times traditional literati work of non-political landscapes for example were, if not feted, accommodated.62

More relevant for this argument is how this tradition was adapted to Socialist Realism. It had two aspects: the use of traditional ink and brush on paper to paint Socialist Realist subjects, and Socialist Realist subjects painted in oil on canvas but incorporating literati aesthetic traditions of spatial harmonies and a focus on brush-work. The former was wide-spread. In

61 Chakrabarty, 2000: 87 and 88, usefully discusses historicism and ‘progress’ and its associated logic of decision-making, leading towards an “inherent modernist elitism”. This was beyond the reality of Mao’s China. 62 Arnold Chang, 1980: 32, has written about three literati painters who survived through the period, one in Guangzhou, one in Beijing and one in Nanjing. He notes at first that these artists were not forbidden, but not encouraged. Their works were not exhibited. 217

1958, 280 Chinese works of art were shown in Moscow including those painted in brush and ink (guohua), which were praised as they showed how these artists were ‘coming to terms with the realities of the new society’.63 The high point of literati traditions being used within the Communist framework is Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyu’s This Land So Rich in Beauty, commissioned in 1959 in Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen, a landscape, though with nationalist and subtle political allusions (the red sun and the subject celebrating a poem by Mao written in 1936), painted in brush and ink style (fig. 3.29). Of the 244 paintings commissioned for the Museum of Revolutionary History, 136 were guohua in the new Socialist Realist style.64 Among memorable images in this vein are Song Wenzhi (1919-99) and Jin Zhiyuan’s (1930-84) Digging a canal through the mountains, Li Shiqing’s (b. 1908) Moving Mountains to Fill Valleys, both of 1958, the latter with the high perspective noted as a particular Chinese trait,65 and Lin Yong’s (b. 1942) Great job! (Investigating the Peasant Movement in Hunan) of 1970.66

Artists also using oil paint for Socialist Realist subjects incorporated literati aesthetic traditions. Wu Zuoren’s (1908-97) Crossing the Snowy Mountains, 1951, is one, overtly depicting the Great Trek but the subject is really mountain landscape, even using the traditional device of cutting across the vertical picture plane with a bank of cloud.67 Similarly, Ai Zhongxin’s (1915- 2003) The Red Army crosses the Snowy Mountains of 1957 is a horizontal oil painting of the same sort of winter mountain landscape with figures disappearing into the distance, but also enjoying the traditional Chinese love of atmospheric play over nature, here again a snow storm obliterating the clarity of the forms before us.68 Julia Andrews observes that the famous work by Luo Gongliu, Mao Zedong at the Jinggang Mountain (fig. 3.19), made after the split from Russia in 1960, has increasingly nationalist Chinese features, including outlines, flat areas, simplified colour and brushwork with striations and stippling suggesting texture similar to the strokes and dots of Chinese ink painting.69 It should also not be overlooked that much of the graphic power of woodcuts made in the 1930s and 1940s, that influenced later Cultural Revolution imagery, included not only Western ideas but also the very East Asian construction of space where the eye travels vertically up and down an image undifferentiated spatially, where often central areas of ground are left unpainted or printed, creating the energy of a ‘vacuum’ drawing all other elements towards it. It is a common device in the woodcuts of the period, seen in any selection of images (see fig. 5.9).70

63 Laing, 1988: 31. 64 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 166. 65 Laing, 1988: fig. 32. 66 See Andrews and Shen, 1998: 233, cat.no.155. 67 See Lü, 2010: fig. 12.35. 68 Lü, 2010: fig.12.37. 69 Andrews, 1998: 230, and, with Kuiyi Shen, 2012: 156. 70 Another random example see Laing, 2003: fig.1, an image by Huang Yan of the Han River Bridge Construction Site of 1954, with all the elements (mostly cranes) leading to an ‘empty’ centre. 218

A further traditional Chinese aesthetic trope is the combination of text and image, and the esteem for the scholar artist valued equally for his skill with language as well as imagery. This tradition suited well Socialist Realism’s use of words for slogans or general educational edicts. Calligraphy was easily integrated through imagery. It is argued elsewhere that the slogans themselves used by the Chinese became stronger and also more poetic and memorable than their paler cousins in Russia. Many of the slogans are as well-known as any literary phrases. Joe Boyle for the BBC in December 2013 isolated eleven that he says have become ‘an art form’: Let 100 flowers bloom; Dare to think, dare to act; Smash the four olds; Smash the gang of four; Reform and opening up; Seek the truth from facts; Have fewer children, Raise more pigs; Three Represents; Harmonious society; Three Supremes; and Chinese Dream. These date from 1956 to 2013.71

A feature of traditional literati art in East Asia was the ease of ink and paper techniques. Woodcuts, it is said, were first made in China and this tradition informed Lu Xun’s encouragement of the form in the 1930s. Guohua painting on paper was the norm, unlike the introduced oil on canvas. It is to be expected that the East Asians continued to use paper, and ink, and to exploit their qualities.

This brush, ink and paper tradition of East Asia of course was present in Vietnam, which then experienced the overlay of the French colonial watercolours on paper, and faced the shortage of art materials through times of war. It naturally led to the majority of Vietnamese works made during these years being on paper, to a degree even greater than that experienced in China. Many drawings survive from this period, unlike any analogous tradition in China, as well as watercolours and gouaches on paper.72 Associated with this is the tradition, encouraged by the French, of painting on silk, a medium in which the Vietnamese artists came to excel (see fig. 3.41).

This thesis has not discussed the traditional Japanese elements clearly used in paintings made for World War II propaganda, but FRONT magazine with its relation to the Russians is relevant here. FRONT magazine took much from the Russians, but the Japanese designers and photographers already had their own spare, flat aesthetic and facility with compositional angles and high vantage points that made the ideas of Lissitzky, Rodchenko and others easily acceptable. They then applied their own way of working with composition and mass to this European blueprint.

71 Joe Boyle ‘11 slogans that changed China’ 26 December 2013, BBC News, see bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-24923993 (accessed 21 November, 2014). 72 See the collections of the British Museum, or Sherry Buchanan’s Mekong Diaries 1964-1975, University of Chicago Press, 2008, which attest to these French-influenced drawings. 219

Another issue critical to the influence of local traditions is the role of vernacular or folk art. Almost all Chinese texts identify this as the key local signifier of the nation’s adaption of Russian Socialist Realism (or ‘Socialist Realism’ as indeed the moniker of ‘Russian’ is rarely used). How important is it? Its use by non-folk artists in China certainly is not unique. The Russians themselves had always acknowledged their own interest and use of Russian folk art, especially lubki prints, which depicted folk stories and parables often of serial images, in a style of strong outlines and flat simple colours, originally in woodcut and hung up in the house. This is exactly like Chinese folk prints in their various forms of New Year pictures, serial pictures and so on. Artists in Russia like Malevich, Goncharova and Larionov overtly responded to folk practice, but so did Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Deineka, closer to the centre of Socialist Realism.

The other issue for Chinese claims for folk art is that the works they distinguish as using this ‘national’ form, like Dong Xiwen’s Tiananmen painting, are only marginally convincing in this. Dong was responding to a local imperative when he wrote in 1957 that Western oil painting had to be nationalised for it to take root in China, assimilated so it became “part of our blood”. He says, for this Tiananmen work, he purposely “lessened the contrast between warm and cool colours” and “simplified the extensive gradation of light and dark”, giving his work a strong “ornamental effect” typical of Chinese painting.73 In other words he evened the colour range – to brighter tones – and flattened the forms. He also made use of clear outline. Certainly, in comparison with his more brushy earlier paintings like Shadows of Camels and Spring comes to Tibet, this work clearly demonstrates his homage to folk traditions. The difficulty of this argument is that this purposeful modification by Dong Xiwen is hardly discernible to a viewer experienced in looking at Western art, and is, apart from The Liberation of Beiping of 1959 by Ye Qianyu (1907-95) in the Central Hall of the National Museum of China (fig. 5.10), the only work at all in this vein within that august room.74

The Liberation of Beiping is one work where the use of flattened forms, simpler clearer colours and black outlines was certainly applied. Andrews and Shen note the painting was believed at the time to be by anonymous folk artists, and that Ye Qianyu changed the colours from those dedicated in the past to images of Buddha to a scene of a ‘new, happy China’.75 Ye had a past in the sophisticated publishing world of Shanghai, very different from a folk artist from the countryside. Ren Mengzhang’s history paintings in oil on canvas have been discussed, but he

73 Dong Xiwen From the expressive methods of Chinese painting to Chinese characteristics of oil painting, 1957, 78 and 80, quoted in Hung, 2011: 149. Hung Chang-tai is among those who write that this most important difference between Russian and Chinese art was the use of native colour in China, saying they did this “to produce a national style of oil painting, known collectively as the nationalization (minzuhua) of painting” (149). 74 Indeed, if one were to compare Russian and Chinese works of the period together, the Russian would probably have a more extensive colour palette. 75 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 142. 220 too could emulate this ‘folk’ style, as seen in his Mao in Tibet of 1965 (see fig. 2.30), as could Lin Gang, in his Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception – modelled on Russian subject-matter (see fig. 3.22). A comparison of the Lin Gang painting and drawing and Russian work stylistically shows the Western construction of the Chinese work, with mathematical perspective and three-dimensional modelling, sinicized by the overlaid flattened ‘folk’ handling of the pigments and lack of shaded highlights,76 as well as its Chinese ‘restraint’ after the exuberance of the Russian scene. Wu Biduan and Jin Shangyi’s (b. 1934) Chairman Mao Standing with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, of 1961, is also indebted to Russian subject-matter (Wu had studied there from 1956-9) but shows again the flat areas of colour, minimal shading and outlines.77 Sun Zixi’s (b. 1929) In Front of Tiananmen Gate of 1964 is another example. In all these Chinese works, this often superficial folk stylisation is balanced by the structural bones of the Western (Russian) model.

Much stronger claims for the general impact of folk art can be made for works on paper. This applies to woodcuts in particular, which were simplified after Yan’an, with typically academic European qualities of shading and mathematical space removed, making them more closely aligned to their media brother of folk prints and papercuts, and indeed more intelligible to and accepted by the common people.78 Laing describes the increase in white areas, less depressing black, and the greater simplicity of the new style, comparing Gu Yuan’s (1919-96) Divorce before 1942 and after to show this.79 Other examples are in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection (fig. 5.11). Mary Ginsberg notes that the Japanese used traditional folk styles in their propaganda art in occupied areas of China because it was more effective than realistically realised imagery.80

It can be argued that an equally convincing ‘local’ tradition of China came through in the Cultural Revolution: that self-belief which led to the huge and spectacular work created then. The local formal devices derived from the simple outline and flat areas of space of the 1930s woodcuts (albeit themselves having various European, including Russian antecedents), as well

76 Andrews and Shen, 2012, 141, link the perspective to local nianhua tradition; indeed the connection to the Russians is speculative. The Lin work is small, but the Russian work would only have been known through reproduction, so size was not the issue. 77 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 156, say Wu was probably inspired by compositions like Mylnikov’s Awakening, showing people of Africa, Middle East and Americas marching with raised fists. Other works in this vein include Lin Yong’s The Spirit of Yan’an shines forever, 1971, 220 x 380, ink and colour, all theatrical illumination and ruddy complexions and Liu Wenxi’s (b.1933) New Spring in Yan’an 1972, ink and colour, 243 x 178 cm showing Mao, which is bright and references folk prints (see Andrews and Shen, 1998: 233-4). 78 Artists at Yan’an who started to experiment with folk styles, from 1939, included Jiang Feng, Wo Zha, Hu Yichuan, Chen Tiegeng, Luo Gongliu and Yan. Andrews and Shen, 2012: 132, say they abandoned shading because it made the figures look dirty to the locals. Folk-inspired style was standard after 1942. 79 Laing,1988: 15, fig.21. Gu Yuan’s Office of the District Government of 1943, reproduced in Andrews, 2003, fig. 27, is another good example: flat to the picture plane, with vertical composition constructed in a pattern of black and white ‘blocks’. 80 Mary Ginsberg, conversation with the author, 21 July 2014, London. Ginsberg is the author of The art of influence: Asian propaganda, British Museum, 2013. 221 as vernacular forms like the New Year prints, combined with the size and the drama of the late 1960s and early 1970s political works to make these images of great visual effect.

We turn now to specific categories of visual expression in China in the context of ‘the local’: New Year pictures, woodblock prints and serial picture books all specifically promoted from 1949.81 The first example of the nianhua or a New Year picture under Mao’s dictum is deemed to be Spring Ox by Wo Zha (1905-74) of 1939, showing a boy leading the animal in silhouette, with the title within the image.82 This was followed by images like his Five Grains (fig. 5.12) made in 1942, then Luo Gongliu’s Hygiene Model and Li Qun’s Well-clothed and fed of 1944 in New Year picture style, though with true Soviet didactic subject-matter. Then came the directive in 1949 to use the forms of nianhua and focus on subscribed subject matter. General terms, like ‘the progress of industrial and agricultural production’, were translated into traditional images of plump, rosy cheeked babies, favoured farm-yard animals like the rooster, and over-large images of the products of the rural harvest. Hung Chang-tai notes that the Chinese took the Russian form much further, replacing the Christian deities of the Russians and folk deities of the Chinese past with Mao and Zhou Enlai.83 They were made using the bright colours, clear black outline, flat forms and busy compositions of the nianhua. Particular centres created their own styles. They were published in very large numbers and their form remains popular: in 1952 alone 570 new pictures had been issued in forty million copies84 and posters using this visual language of the papercut are common still today in China, as one example extolling the importance of education (fig. 5.13) on a park railing in Hohhot in 2014 testifies.

Another favoured group of Chinese imagery were lianhuanhua, or serial works. This traditional form re-emerged in Shanghai in the late nineteenth-century in lithography, and became very popular in the 1920s and 1930s when they could be rented out. Lu Xun championed them as works of art, and after the 1950s they were treated as equal, almost, to other visual arts, with artists like Li Qi (1928-2009) and Wu Biduan from the Central Academy drawing them. These picture books were influenced by Russian examples published in the Chinese press and used for political messages, including anti-Japanese, anti-bourgeois, even anti-military propaganda early on, as the popular series about the boy Sanmao demonstrates. Sanmao was drawn by Zhang Leping (1910-92), starting in 1935 and reveals “the irony and mockery of reality and exposes the wickedness in humanity” says Gao Qian, curator of the Memory of Childhood: from Sanmao to White Light at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2008.85

81 Andrews and Shen, 2012: 141. 82 Laing, 1988: 15. 83 Hung, 2011: 199. 84 Hung, 2011: 182. For the 1952 figures, see Andrews and Shen, 2012: 141. 85 Gao Qian, 2008: 34-5. 222

This exhibition revealed the range of style for the picture books, from Zhang Leping’s East Asian fluid and seemingly spontaneous use of line and space along with his moral story, to He Youzhi’s (b.1922) Great Changes in the Mountain Villages of the 1960s. He Youzhi made precise line-drawings following Socialist Realist didactic imagery very closely, though also with the understanding of East Asian space to give pictorial charm to his work. His much later White Light, published in the 1980s, from a story by Lu Xun, is an example of the power of traditional Chinese painting to tell a tale.86 The height of the serial pictures’ popularity occurred during the 1950s to mid-1960s. Hung Chang-tai gives the example of 1952 when 670 new serial books were printed.87 Like all popular media there is a human narrative to these works told in a manner that unites the draughtsmanship of European practice, Russian ideological purpose, with the Chinese ease of brush and ink painting space. It enabled them to infiltrate the consciousness of the wider population very easily. Again, the Chinese used their own traditions to emphasize (some of) the teachings of the Russians.

The cartoon is related to this, but more based on newspapers and immediate public audiences. Because of the political relationship, their focus and artistic quality are both more fleeting, but like the Russians, the Chinese turned to their own popular imagery for inspiration, as well as to traditional wash and ink. One of the leaders of this medium, Ye Qianyu, founded the Resist Japan Cartoon Propaganda Team with Zhang Leping as early as 1937 and their work was shown in travelling exhibitions.88 Some of his drawings of soldiers in this mode are now in the British Museum (fig.5.14). The Chinese added more text to these works than the Russians ever had, including proverbs and folk sayings.89

The next conundrum to be addressed here is the issue of non-professional artists. The Russians had been the first to make support of non-professional artists part of State organisation, and to promote an ideology that gave status to their work. In China, the directive in 1958 for the peasants to paint led to works being exhibited in Beijing in 1958, showing folk motifs in decorative, all-over work without perspective, using bright colours but with new themes of the regime.90 Their life-force was recognised:

The peasant artist, to express his own feelings paints the flame of the fertilizer incinerator, so high that even Monkey with his magic fan cannot put out the flame. This poetry in graphic form, art true to its name: this is lyricism unattainable by those

86 See Memory of Childhood; From Sanmao to White Light, Shanghai Art Museum, 2008. The catalogue by Gao Qian reproduces all the images. 87 Hung, 2011: 156. 88 Fitzgerald, 2013, includes a chapter on Ye Qianyu and his ‘search for the sinicized cartoon’: see 80 ff. 89 Hung, 2011: 178. 90 Laing, 1988: 31. 223

professional painters who think that exercises in sketching can be considered works of art.91

The idea of supporting non-professional artists was harder for literati-trained professionals in China to accept than it had been for their avant-garde colleagues in Russia (at least in the 1920s before this group dissipated). Laing notes that ‘non-professional’ works were not included in the exhibition of Chinese art shown in Moscow in 1958, the year of this Beijing exhibition.92 The layers of consciousness about hierarchy had had less time to be examined and laid to rest than the same conventions had experienced in Russia. It meant that when the movement then languished after this initial push, it was not revived until Jiang Qing promoted this activity in the early 1970s. She put the ideology of the 1940s into action in this area as in many others.

Spare-time art groups in factories and street communities and the number of amateur peasant painters grew. Every village, factory, and street committee had its own propaganda artist or group. They did slogans and displays, worked on blackboards, made billboards, painted on walls, outside and inside schools and halls. They got ideas from cheap copybooks, which date back to classical times. 93 If they worked in a factory or at a worksite, they got critiques from the relevant workers.94 Huxian County became a focus (see fig. 4.11). In 2013, 100,000 painters were cited as working in this manner, particularly in the centres of Dongfeng, Huxian, and Jinshan, with 20,000 works exported annually, painting images similar to those of the 1950s, of happiness and prosperity and celebrations of farmers and rural life.95 The Chinese local aspect of this is again the force and scale of the movement – the fact it is still energetic today, albeit as a commercial entity – while in other places such as Russia this movement fell away.

The relation of image and text has been discussed. Colour is raised frequently in discussions about folk art in China, partly because its counterpoint of literati painting is distinctively monochromatic. Yet, the situation is more complex: certainly folk artists liked bright colours, and they used red, because of its special association with good fortune, in turn used by Mao to embody the idea of revolution: Jiang Jiehong titled his book about the Cultural Revolution “Red”.96 However red is a colour of good fortune elsewhere, notably when used in

91 Wang Chao-wen commenting on work in the 1958 exhibition in Beijing, quoted in Chang, 1980: 40. 92 Laing, 1988: 32. 93 Gittings, 1999: 32. 94 Gittings, 1991: 39. 95 Zhang Wei,2013: 1, 5. This text promoting ‘Farmer Paintings’ sees it was an industry, enabling the artists to ‘buy a bigger house’ (181), and with no reference to origins or relationships elsewhere. 96 In an interview for The Independent Magazine (UK), 28 August, 2010, 23 he says red’s use by French and Russian revolutionaries is merely a co-incidence. 224 revolutionary Russia and in Japan with its rising sun symbolism. Perhaps again it is the issue of scale.

The impact of folk or vernacular art is also relevant in Vietnam, where, alongside the overlay of Socialist Realism and the background of the French, popular woodcuts on paper have continued to be made (fig. 5.15). Albina Legostaeva has written on these folk woodcuts in the collection of the Russian Oriental Museum in Moscow, describing the prints of divinities, historic subjects and landscape with the most popular being fantastic animals and good luck scenes. She remarks that the “vivid artistic expression, demonstrativeness, amazing sense of colour, festivity and optimism make the woodcuts of Dong Ho one of the favourite arts of Vietnam”.97 They are small, linear, flat, full of human and rural detail, telling popular stories like the mouse’s wedding or general scenes of village life. A particular Vietnamese quality was the use of particular colours: for example, red for rulers, pink for harmony, all well-known to Vietnamese audiences.98

These folk woodcuts extended in mid-century to include propaganda works which, as in China, were used to promote literacy, with a strong educative purpose. The compositions are filled with forms, often people, but also with background buildings and at times stylised leafage. There is often limited illusionist depth, rather the scene filling the space of the paper with undifferentiated activities.99 The exhibition of Vietnamese Women’s Propaganda Art, held at the Musée Quai Branly in 2014, had a focus on women working in agriculture, showing ‘pigs and new varieties of rice’, ‘developing buffalo and beef production’, ‘raising pigs in flooded areas’, as well as images of American planes being brought down as a major focus (fig. 5.16).100 While these works are not in traditional woodcut, and the common adoption of lithography has changed their linear qualities to flatter areas of tone, there is still the small scale, human focus, and often decorative, flat element of the traditional relief prints.

The third area of local tradition to be discussed is what can be called ‘humanist’ art in (particularly) the Philippines and Indonesia: it is an art based on people, either literally in their human form, or through the actions and stories, or through the human responses of the audience by means of not only sight and intellect but the other senses of touch and engagement. It is a simple contrast with East Asia where an intellectual restraint

97 Legostaeva, 2012: 274. 98 Legostaeva, 2012: 279. 99 One example is Tranh Khac Go Viet Nam, published in Hanoi in 1978 where the majority of the 92 plates made from the 1950s to 1970s are woodcuts based on folk traditions stylistically, though with the subject-matter being in support of the socialist cause. 100 Propaganda, Les Femmes dans la Révolution; Vietnam 1954-1980, Musée Quai Branly, 24 June-28 September, 2014,visited by the author, 1 August 2014. The agricultural images were lithographs and the war images mostly silkscreen or stencil, and all dated in the 1970s. 225 predominated certainly in elite circles, and where, in making art itself, a highly refined control of the brush was the most esteemed traditional manner.

In the Philippines the practices of the Catholic church had overlaid local animist beliefs. It was a Catholic church in its dramatic Baroque Spanish form, redolent of the heavy stone, carved gilt and candle-light of centuries-old basillicas built throughout the archipelago, in the detailed, evocative and passionate descriptions of the clergy and their practices in the writing of José Rizal, as well as in the ornate, richly visualised combinations of human forms and religious symbols of long-established oil painting (fig.5.17). This contrasts with the lighter hand of French Christianity in Vietnam, and it endured some eight times longer. Filipino painting was both flamboyant and personable, with an enjoyment of extravagant gesture, rich colour, long narratives, a mix of the fanciful and the real, full of human figures. Pre-Hispanic forms are still seen in the spirit figures carved with muscular vigour which were translated into Christian figures, along with adaptations of two-dimensional religious imagery from Spain, often with visceral details of saintly agony and sinners burning in hell-fire emphasized with obvious relish, for example, around the feet of the eighteenth century St.Nicholas (fig. 5.18). The Catholic church had encouraged the creation of carved and gilded carriages for Madonnas and saints owned by leading families that are still paraded through the streets of the country at various festivals (fig. 5.19). These public parades added to that predilection of Filipinos for dramatic forms, and for what has been called the Asian baroque both literally and for its enjoyment of the spectacular and of the theatrical.101 It underscored the dramatic and visual power of the latter-day political works of the 1980s and 1990s. All present the vigorous painting of figures, in thick oil paint, richly coloured, glossy, often very large, dramatically lit with the theatrical chiaroscuro of the Iberian peninsula. It is these local formal and emotive characteristics of Filipino art underlying the political intensity of imagery descended from Socialist Realism that has made this period of art one of the most important of the century.

The human condition at the centre of Filipino art means that even at time of stress, in the mid- century War years, the focus is on personal experience, and when the artists turned to images from Communist sources there was an easy adaption of those theatrical, narrative elements. The imagery was of narrative political dramas, full of figures, theatrically lit, passionately conceived and painted, and pertinent to the events of the day, made in huge size in oil on canvas. The practice of making art in line with Soviet systems , notably in the formation of collectives and working in the public space, which again suited the collective, communal, personal side of Filipino culture.

101 An example of Filipino descriptions of this tradition is Coseteng, (1992: 172), describing the Filipino-baroque as of “exuberant forms of the native environment, a festive spirit, the fear of empty spaces and the use of highly decorative elements”.

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Visual culture in Indonesia does not take the highly dramatic form of the Philippines but it does have many links to ‘performance’. The special quality of the three War-period paintings included in Chapter 3 (see figs. 3.50, 3.51, and 3.52) is the personal experience of the artists, combined with aspects of the performative: Hendra’s passion for the theatrical gesture of the Javanese through the wayang, Sudjojono’s figures expressing anguish at the destruction of culture and loss of life, and Harijadi’s recreation of the desperate and often lonely journey of the soldier treading on the farmer as he deals with the new world. Hendra’s usage of the wayang is unique, but all employ a narrative that harks back to the bas-relief stories around them at Borobudur and Prambanan, with figures lit by changing light, moving over the surface of the buildings (fig. 5.20). There is a scale and drama in these works both in concept and physically that relates to these ancient epics.

Through recent decades Indonesian artists continued these local traditions, performing their works literally in the streets, amongst the people, as the Soviets had desired. From Heri Dono to Dadang Christanto to Taring Padi (see figs.4.29 to 4.36), they performed their art through street murals, poster art and public art displays, as well as using the expressive forms of the wayang in their imagery. Like the Filipinos, their emphasis has been on the people: those around them, actively telling stories, often of (and made through) communal experiences.

The visual quality of many Indonesian works that have a didactic role, particularly posters or murals, besides their brio, is their linearity: using black lines laid down with gusto for both frequently combined imagery and text. This linearity comes from various sources: the black outlines of the traditional writing with imagery on palm-leaf scripts; the more lively of the calligraphy of Islamic texts; the linear graphic flatness of the shadow puppets of the wayang, cavorting with angularity and vigour across their screen; a love of comics and visual stories – as well as from ‘political posters’ originally from Russia combining social messages with a strong visual presence.

An extension of this is the way that a new country – East Timor – has turned to similar modes to envisage political life there: the carvings of pre-Dutch and pre-Indonesian rule re-emerge in the left-wing woodcuts telling life of the time such as made through the Gembel Art Collective (see fig. 4.37).102 The rough energy of these works harks back to a different cultural ethos, seen in the wooden carved objects of totemic figures salvaged from years of trauma now in the Dili Museum.

102 See Williams, Bexley et al, 2007: 72. Ako, one of the Gembel collective says “we’ve realised that over time we can say something through our art and also learn about political processes”. 227

The last section of this chapter focuses on the history of egalitarianism and humour in Australian art. The speed of the official Australian art world taking up the idea of art being ‘for the people’ in the 1970s, as seen relating back originally to Russian influence, is based on the acceptance of and support for egalitarianism in Australia. This is reflected in the Australia Council’s proud words about its support for Community Arts practice. The idea of a ‘fair go’, a respect for all and a keen eye for mocking social pretention is held dear in Australian society. Added to this, in the Asian context, Australian society’s unusual capacity and desire to fund arts practice also makes this a particular ‘local’ expression.

I have discussed in another context the importance of one of Britain’s outstanding visual traditions - the political satire - and its influence on the art of the newly colonised land (fig. 5.21).103 The imagery of William Hogarth (1697-1764), Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), and the Gillray and Cruikshank families entertain because of their preposterous mockery of figures of esteem, a tradition still held dear in the political cartoons of Australia’s daily press. The decade of the 1970s in particular was an age of dissent and the Australian penchant for humour and critique saw a blossoming of talent still seen internationally as exceptional, and Australian. It was the time of Oz magazine, and its renowned trial; it saw the beginning of Circus Oz, an extraordinarily inventive new form of theatre: political, funny, irreverent, colourful and rude; it saw the beginning of the comedy movement in Melbourne, with The Last Laugh, then the Comedy Festival, now one of the most successful in the world; and it saw the development of various individual (irreverent and political) comedians known internationally from Barry Humphries to Tim Minchin. It meant when the artists took on the Socialist Realist imagery of the 1970s they did it with both finely tuned ears to satire and a public sophisticated about and accepting of such activities.

Whether through particular histories, diverse cultural attitudes or specific local artistic traditions, each society and its artists adopted and adapted Socialist Realism in accordance with their own societies and their own needs. It is in the successful alignment of these forces that the most memorable results of the impact of Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region are seen.

103 Carroll, 1989: 4-7. 228

Conclusion.

The conclusion of this research is that Soviet Socialist Realist art and practice had profound impact in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia, an impact previously unacknowledged for its artistic significance, or for its temporal or spatial spread. The literal scope of this study is unusual, but it was undertaken because I could bring my long experience of working in Asia and Australia to a topic not easily undertaken without this.

The research has resulted in a number of findings. The first argues that the impact of Soviet innovation on the practical organisation of the visual arts in the Asia Pacific region was profound. The thesis analyses Soviet arts organisational practices, identifying a number of effective and enduring strategies. They range from public support for artists groups, through a systematic agenda for publications, public meetings, and the development of museums and major exhibitions of art. Control was further exercised through training programs, and also support for artists’ less official societies, stipends and scholarships, as well as encouragement for particular art media, including prints and posters, public art, murals, sculpture and festivals. Ideological innovations of the Soviets which had significant impact in the management of the arts since their time has been analysed, including the focus on social classes and art, the importance of the promotion of art by non-professionals supported by the State, the related attention on regionalism, that is, art activity outside the main urban centres, and the promotion of art of the collective, often named in Soviet circles as brigade art. The thesis describes and compares the implementation of these practices throughout the Asia Pacific region. A revelation of this aspect of this research has been the open and enthusiastic communication between the Soviets and arts practitioners through much of the region.

The second finding is that art of Soviets, and later of the Soviet-inspired Chinese, had significant impact on that produced throughout the Asia Pacific region from the early years of the century until recent times. Comparisons of particular works of art have been made, as well as a contrast between social realism and Socialist Realism. The words of the Russians in creating the ideology of Socialist Realism has been discussed: ‘Socialist in Content, Realist in Style’, a phrase declared by Maxim Gorky and Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s, and later refined by artist Aleksandr Gerasimov, with the important qualification by Stalin acolyte Andrei Zhdanov saying “Romanticism is not alien to our literature [or art], a literature standing firmly

229 on a materialist basis, but ours is a romanticism of a new type, a revolutionary romanticism”. 1 The people who coined these terms, and those who used them, as the thesis demonstrates, very rarely stipulated or responded to exacting visual directives, with art within Socialist Realism’s ambit consequently having a wide variety of visual outcome.

The Soviet influence on art in China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia in the period after the late 1960s, in particular, has been argued to have significance for the outcomes in those places and in contemporary art more broadly. The thesis has followed the impact of the Russians both directly and through China to artists practising before the 1950s, then, with the Cold War, the ‘forgetting’ as Dadang Christanto has put it, of this reality before it re-emerged either overtly or covertly into practice in recent years.2 In China’s case the Cultural Revolution was a re-affirmation of Soviet ideology, before Chinese artists took the energy and imagery of this period to create the works of art that, in recent years, have engaged global art attention. In the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia acknowledgement of Communist direct impact has been muted, but the practice and the art emerging from this impact again are of remaining, international consequence.

A related finding is less surprising though previously unexplored across this region: that the local adaption of Soviet art in the outcomes in each place has been central for the success of this ideology and style. It has been demonstrated that this was due to local history as well as cultural attitudes, such as sympathy with communalism and the force of social cohesion, as well as the hold of different local traditions: from Chinese literati brush painting practice, to the importance of folk art, to the drama and narrative at the centre of Filipino and Indonesian culture, and to a sense of egalitarianism in Australia.

An Appendix to the thesis includes comparisons of the impact of Socialist Realism, as a significant external influence in the Asia Pacific region, with other ‘contenders’: the European Academy, the ‘isms’ of the early twentieth century, the impact from Latino sources, and from American abstraction. An evaluation is made of the influence of these styles.

The thesis has been argued under the aegis of the overarching question of this analysis: why, if this influence is so extensive and significant, has it not been acknowledged as part of ‘global’ art history? The Cold War with its ideological and geo-political struggle between Communism and capitalism has been argued as central. Soviet Socialist Realism was vilified by Western art historians, with these positions extended to art made in this mode in the Asia Pacific region.

1 See page 24, note 6. 2 See page 173. 230

Related to this has been the underlying issue of the ambivalent historical situation of Russia itself: is it of the East or West in this mix?

The thesis has examined how Socialist Realism as an art form in both Russia and the Asia- Pacific region has suffered through the selective application of Western art historical practice, Western art history’s superficial reception in the East, and local contexts further inhibiting a more generous appraisal of this phenomenon. Four methods or reasons through which this practice has occurred have been identified. The first method used to do this was by applying Western-driven connoisseurship, within the idea of ‘taste’ (and for Socialist Realism to be ‘bad taste’, that is, kitsch, ersatz). The second reason for exclusion was the hold of the rights of the individual artistic genius coming from Enlightenment ideas, hard to change for a Western frame of mind. Socialist Realism’s apparent disregard for individualistic creative processes and ownership meant the individual artist was expected to support the ideology and practices, even in principle, of the state. The third reason, with Socialist Realism’s focus on mass popularity, is the related discrediting of popular visual art, coming from the attitude of Western ‘high’ art being hostile to art aimed at the wider population. The fourth argument for excluding Socialist Realism has been the criticism of any role of the state in art’s creation, focused, in turn, on the paramount dictates of the state in Socialist Realism and its apparently deleterious effect on the quality of the work produced.

The thesis has further discussed the relevant local Asian context for art history as it is practised today, a practice codified in the West. The collection and analysis of archival data, of dates and titles and documentation, the agreed chronological sequence of styles and periods, the inevitability of traditions challenged, of change and development, and the acceptance of specialist terms to describe characteristics of visualisation, are all a foreign mode in Asia, with less meaning than many other cultural practices. The point has been frequently made that there was no word for ‘art’ in many Asian cultures – visual practice was part of more complex cultural activity. As the work of art is part of a larger cultural whole, so individual art historical analysis, often provided in an adversarial, comparative argument, is alien, often weakly applied, with loose use of terms, and with a small range of ‘facts’ repeated in each written tract. Allied with this is the wide-spread valuing of ‘face’ and the effort for artists and works of art not to be publically critiqued. Further, this period still has personal scars for many in Asia. It makes for many local barriers to re-evaluating an entrenched position.

As a response to this, and in light of this being research most particularly on Asian art, I evaluated other non-Western methodologies increasingly being discussed in the region, from wider cultural alternatives put by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chen Kuan-hsing, Wang Hui, Nora

231

Taylor, Keith Moxey or Pankaj Mishra, to earlier Asian classificatory formulations for art, these latter including Inaga Shigemi’s refinement of the idea of ‘framelessness’ or fusing between literature and visual art and between nature and art in Japan, Wu Hung’s analysis of the liqi classification systems applied to ancient Chinese art based on their use in ritual, or Zhang Yanyuan’s Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties assessing art based on Confucian values such as filial piety.

Despite this exploration of ‘local’ alternatives, the methodology of the thesis remains quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of visual imagery and contextual material in a chronological sequence, that is, within the framework of Western art historical practice. Through this methodology, I have been able to analyse the literal and metaphorical interweaving of image and text, as well as the interweaving of art and politics. It is what has been written about this art by people who wanted so much to come from it, and the way their words echo through the images themselves that adds to the rewards of the area.

***

The thesis will end with a whimsical note, which seems appropriate after a century of art that reflected much turmoil, yearning, hopes and hopes dashed – by focusing on the image of Mao Zedong’s head and shoulders, slightly turned from full frontal view, and schematised into the black sihouette of his receding hairline, his features and his ‘Maoist’ collar.3 It was used by Chinese artists (with great care), and by the Red Guard; it is still used on the gate of the Forbidden City. It became a recognised visual icon of the twentieth century, starting in the West in the 1960s with images of protest,4 and leading to Andy Warhol’s iconic 1972 screenprint, a form that circled back to China with Yu Youhan’s (b. 1943) Untitled (Mao Marilyn) of 2005, of a pink coloured Mao with Marilyn Monroe’s face5 and Ai Wei Wei’s (b. 1957) self-portraits in the mode. Indonesian artist Sigit Santoso appropriated it for his Smiling President of 2008, all bow tie and gold teeth.6 Asialink used it for its Great Leap Forum in 2007.7 Shanghai Tang, the clothing company, exploits the Mao brand.8 Culinary author

3 Perhaps it is not whimsical enough. Various side bars in this thesis have referred to similar responses: page 124 note 42 lists the various Russians who, today, use similar images of Lenin as the leifmotif of their own work, furthering the 1980s’ and 1990s’ response referred to in note 604. The history of the Mao Zedong portrait in Tiananmen Square is described on page 125, note 46, and page 164, note 28, refers to Geremie Barmé’s writing on the 1990s cult of Mao. 4 For example, Jim Dine’s (b. 1935) Drag: Johnson and Mao, 1967, photo-etching, 86.8 x 121.7 cm British Museum. 5 See Roberts, 2012: 95. Warhol took his image of Mao from the frontispiece of his Little Red Book. 6 See http://www.asiaartcenter.org/_exhib_e/51/l/27.jpg 7 See Anthony Taylor’s remarks: http://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/405624/ATaylor.pdf. Other Australian examples include Azlan McLennan’s (b. 1975) Workers of the World Compete of 2007, with Nokia and the Capitalist Manifesto in the figure’s hands, to The Age Magazine, #4, of February 2005 which has a back cover advertisement for Bigpond.com music headlined ‘Join the Revolution’, replete with its ‘n’ s printed backwards, à la Russe. A more serious engagement, but also acknowledgement, was the exhibition in Sydney, in 2008, From Mao to Now which included many Australian artists. It was held at the Armory Gallery, Olympic Park, curated by Catherine Croll. Australian artists included Anja Wojak, Annette Bezor, Farrell and Parkin, George Gittoes, Greg Leong, Ian Howard, Laurens Tan, William Yang and Wilma Tabacco. 8 Schnapp, 2005: 156. 232

Fuchsia Dunlop employs it for her Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, resplendent in red with gold stars, Mao quotations and his schematised face throughout, though as she says, apart from her focus on his home province of Hunan and his love of chillies, the publication has nothing to do with the Communist leader.9

It can be said that because of the extremity of North Korea’s advocacy of Marxism-Leninism it has attracted various Western curators and scholars’ eyes and a ‘communist chic’ with North Korea at its centre is emerging. 10 The parodies of this include the ‘Pyongyang International Arts Festival’ in Kuala Lumpur 2008-10 which promised a “hansem [sic] dictator, hot chicks performing , MK-O Dong tiger missiles, anti-American love, Korean diplomats, celebrities, Chat-Roulette, karaoke, DMZ table and more!”11

Has the impact of the Russians in Asia become merely a brand, or can it be said becoming a brand is evidence of its visual potency?

9 Fuchsia Dunlop 2006. Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook; Recipes from Hunan Province. London: Ebury Press. Indeed, Dunlop writes that Chairman Mao “was famously rustic in his own eating habits, and had a lifelong distaste for refined or exotic food” (19). 10 See Foster-Carter and Hext, in Frank, 2010: 42. 11 Foster-Carter and Hext, in Frank, 2010: 44ff. 233

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China

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Vietnam

André-Pallois, Nadine, 1997. L’Indochine: Un Lieu d’Échange Cultural? Les peintres français et indochinois (fin xixe – xxe siècle). Paris: Presses de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient.

Artworks Vietnam Fine Arts Museum’s Collection (Tac Pham My Thuat, Suu Tap Cua Bao Tang My Thuat Viet Nam), 2002. ‘Introduction’, Cao Trong Theim, Director. Hanoi: Vietnam Fine Arts Museum.

Buchanan, Sherry, 2008. Mekong Diaries 1964-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture on Armed Forces and Revolutionary Wars, 1944-1994. 1994. Hanoi: Fine Arts Publishing House and People’s Army Publishing House.

Hantover, Jeffrey, 1991. Uncorked Soul; Contemporary Art from Vietnam. Hong Kong: Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd.

Harrison-Hall, Jessica, 2002. Vietnam Behind the Lines: Images from the War 1965-1975. London: The British Museum.

Heather, David and Sherry Buchanan, 2009. Vietnam Posters: The David Heather Collection. Munich, London, New York: Prestel.

Huynh, Boi Tran, 2005. Vietnamese Aesthetics from 1925 Onwards. Sydney, PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney.

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Legostaeva, Albina, 2012. ‘Dong Ho Folk Painting in the 20th Century: New Trendiness, New Themes’, in Izabela Kopania (ed.), South-East Asia; Studies in Art, Cultural Heritage and Artistic Relations with Europe. Warsaw-Torun: Polish Institute of World Art Studies and Tako Publishing House: 273-9.

Nghe thuat tao hinh Vietnam, 1975. Published by the Council of Plastic Arts, Hanoi and the Ministry of Culture, Hungary. Budapest: Kossuth Printing House.

Nguyen Khac Vien, 1987. Vietnam; A Long History. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Nguyen Quan, 1991. ‘Traditions and Acculturation’, in Jeffrey Hantover (ed.), Uncorked Soul; Contemporary Art from Vietnam. Hong Kong: Plum Blossoms, 9-17.

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Taylor, Nora A., 2004. Painters in Hanoi; An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Tran Khac Go, 1978. Viet Nam, Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Van Hoa.

Tran Van Can, Huu Ngoc and Vu Huyen, 1987. Vietnamese Contemporary Painters. Hanoi: Red River.

Trinh Cung, 2008. ‘Vietnamese Art During the War’, in Essays on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese Art. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum: 49-52.

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Japan:

Clark, John, 1993. ‘Surrealism in Japan’, in Surrealism; Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia: 204-13.

Ching Leo, 1998. ‘Yellow skin, white masks: Race, class, and identification in Japanese colonial discourse’, in Chen Kuan-hsing (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asian Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge: 65-86.

Culver, Annika A., 2013. Glorify The Empire; Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press.

Hirase Reita 2013. ‘War and Bronze Sculpture’, in Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa Mcdonald and Ming Tiampo (eds), Art and War in Japan and Its Empire 1931-1960. Leiden-Boston: Brill: 228-39.

In Search of a New Narrative of Postwar Japanese Art; Symposium Report, 2012. Tokyo: Japan Foundation.

Kaneko Maki, 2013. ‘Under the Banner of the New Order: Uchida Iwao’s Responses to the Asia-Pacific War and Japan’s Defeat’, in Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa Mcdonald, Ming Tiampo (eds), Art and War in Japan and Its Empire 1931-1960. Leiden-Boston: Brill: 190-207.

Kushner, Barak, 2006. The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Menzies, Jackie (ed.), 1988. Modern Boy Modern Girl; Modernity in Japanese Art 1910-1935. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Mizusawa Tsutomo, 1988, ‘When the Workers’ Song Ended’, in Jackie Menzies (ed.), Modern Boy Modern Girl; Modernity in Japanese Art 1910-1935. Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 94-107.

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Tsuruya Mayu, 2013. ‘Socialist Realism in the War Art of Imperial Japan’, in Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa Mcdonald, Ming Tiampo (eds), Art and War in Japan and Its Empire 1931-1960. Leiden- Boston: Brill, 58-77.

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Korea (North and South)

Bonner, Nicholas, 2009. ‘Mansudae Art Studio and art in North Korea (DPRK)’, in The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery: 106-13.

De Ceuster, Koen, 2010. ‘To Be an Artist in North Korea; Talent and Then Some More’, in Rüdiger Frank (ed.), Exploring North Korean Arts. Vienna: Universität Wien: 51-71.

Foster-Carter, Aidan, and Kate Hext, 2010. ‘DPRKrazy, Sexy, Cool: The Art of Engaging North Korea’, in Rüdiger Frank (ed.), Exploring North Korean Arts. Vienna: Universität Wien: 31-50.

Frank, Rüdiger, 2010. ‘The Political Economy of North Korean Arts’, in Rüdiger Frank (ed.), Exploring North Korean Arts. Vienna: Universität Wien: 9-30.

Gim Jonggil, 2015. ‘The Rogue Aesthetic Practice of Crossing the DMZ’, in Artlink, 35:4, December: 22.

Hariu Ichiro, 2000. ‘My Concept of Art and Human Rights’ in Kwangju Biennale 2000; Man + Space. Kwangju: Kwangju Biennale Foundation: 24-35.

Haufler, Marsha, 2010. ‘Mosaic Murals of North Korea’, in Rüdiger Frank (ed.), Exploring North Korean Arts. Vienna: Universität Wien: 241-75.

Hoffmann, Frank, 2010. ‘Brush, Ink, and Props: The Birth of Korean Painting’, in Rüdiger Frank (ed.), Exploring North Korean Arts. Vienna: Universität Wien: 145-80.

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Indonesia

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Thailand

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Australia

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India

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Pakistan

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Timor Leste

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Appendix: The most significant external influence on the art of the Asia Pacific region?

Is Socialist Realism the most influential art movement coming from outside Asia on Asian art, ever? Chapter 2 discussed the practice of Socialist Realism in the Asia Pacific region, and there remain many of the ideas developed under Socialist Realism - of collectivism, of access, of respect for various forms of visual art, and so on - in world art consciousness. Chapters 3 and 4 discussed the influence of Socialist Realism on the actual art of the region. Chapter 5 discussed the adoption and adaption of this style through local realities and responses.

The material in this Appendix takes a slightly different journey and is therefore separated from the main text. It compares the impact of Socialist Realism with its ‘rivals’ for this mantle of ‘most influential’ amongst the other significant ‘non-Asian’ art movements in Asian art history. It is a comparison that for many would be either odious, or, more commonly, criticised for its inherent essentialism. It does bear this cross. However, the comparisons are made because without them the question floats in a nebulous air. It is an attempt to give the question some structure.

It starts with some comments on internal Asian cross-cultural engagement, then analyses four ‘rival’ external movements or styles: the European Academy, the ‘isms’ of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe (Impressionism, Cubism et al), the pre-War Latino influence, and then post-War American abstract art. This last movement’s impact is analysed through three areas: the non-Islamic states of the Philippines, Australia and South Vietnam, Islamic Malaysia, Pakistan and Indonesia, and East Asian non-communist Korea and Japan. These choices equally invite contention: European informal abstraction, the ‘neo-avant-garde’ of the 1960s and 1970s, or post-modernism might also be included: these four ‘rivals’ here are the beginning of a discussion.

1. Internal Asian influences

Since the beginnings of trading and political engagement there has been a cross-current of art influence through the region now called Asia. Traders carried goods like metalware, textiles and ceramics that are found throughout the landmass and archipelagos and ideas as complex as religions spread across the region. European dominance of the sea channels continued the possibilities of intra-Asia personal engagement, as eighteenth-century descriptions of multi- 269 cultural populations of trading centres like Batavia attest, though with local art production put under new pressures through these outside political realities. Intra-Asian cultural engagement became rarer as the European ideas of the nation-state and particular colonial loyalties grew in dominance. Where there is intra-Asian engagement - as in the self-conscious Asian renaissance in Bengal in the early years of the twentieth-century - it was very unusual.1

One of the issues of this thesis is how the internal Asian links through the (anti-Western European colonial) forces of the Comintern were an alternative to these colonial fiefdoms and how art was both used and valued along these routes. Artists in Singapore, the Philippines and Australia for example knew of art in revolutionary China or Russia and valued it to a degree that has been rarely seen in any other scenario.

Nevertheless, this chapter‘s focus is on other external influences on Asian art, which will be discussed in roughly (Western) chronological order.

2. External influences

2.1 The European Academy and its style

The European art academy literally, ideologically and practically had a major impact on Asian art, and, with Abstract Expressionism, has the only other alternative ‘cap’ for the title of the ‘most influential’ external influence aside from Socialist Realism.

Academicism, originally from the Academy in Athens, promoted a code of rules or a doctrine, learnt under a systematic aesthetic, introducing the idea of a naturalistic realism and oil painting to Asia. In Western art history this broader nomenclature narrowed in the late nineteenth-century to denote a conservative realist art where study of literal ancient nude sculpture and a knowledge of and allusion to ancient texts and stories, combined with detailed depiction of the material world to become the sine qua non of official art society. If a definition of Academicism in art is seen as a system of rules articulated through an official structure (the academy, the art school, the art museum) then this overlay has continuing consequence in the East – as it has been internationally, including in the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. If it is seen as an artistic interpretation – a style produced - of the ‘academy’ in the nineteenth-century, then its impact is more circumspect. The argument then about specific style is on safer grounds.

1 See Carroll 2010: 73 ff. There is a large literature on the relationship between Japan and India at this time, Rustom Bharucha’s Another Asia: and Okakura Tenshin, 2006, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, being most useful. This period is the exception to isolated contact in the region until the end decades of the twenthieth century. 270

However, as we have seen, not only did Lenin, Stalin, Mao et al promote the idea of a structured art world, many of the elements of the Academy were reinterpreted into their new Socialist Realist art, including narrative with a high moral tone, made with highly polished skill: the compositions are imposing, the oil paint expertly applied, the dramatic capacity of artificial lighting well understood, the rendering of materials accomplished.

The differences were that originally this art was made for an elite, that it was done by individuals of unique genius working under their own names, and that the subject matter reinforced the hierarchical status quo. It promoted the artist being above the worldly fray, making images of beauty, for beauty’s sake, not tainting his muse with the impurities of either the common person, or, worse, an overt political agenda. There was much argument in Asia over this, indeed on class lines, and usually supported by the Western colonial powers. It was art for art’s sake once removed, but powerful in the colonial, status-conscious environment that existed in many places. It is unsurprising the Russians and Mao were so keen to argue for its demise.

This nineteenth-century Academic view of art translated to an official art world with large exhibitions, large canvases, Art Societies with invited members, respected senior teaching posts, and a feeling of financial success, all of which was in vogue in Europe at the peak time of European hegemonic activities in the Asia Pacific region. The idea of the rule in art, manifested through this particular organisational structure in the West, led to the introduction of this formulation of Academic art en masse in the East.

It has had its critics. Thomas B. Hess made the argument to reconsider Academic art because of its unjust reputation as the “Bad Guy” of art in the face of the “Good Guys” of Impressionism et al.2 However, the teaching side of the literal academy, with its focus on reproducing the nude either through live models or sculptures led to a new focus on and skill with formal draughtsmanship previously unknown in Asia. The new idea of recreating with verisimilitude the illusion of fabric, skin, metal, earth, all laid out in scenes with the artifice of three-dimensional depth made possible by understanding and using atmospheric and mathematical perspective, reached the art world of Asia with a rush. The conquering of the new medium of oil on canvas, of using charcoal to sketch and then photography and the print media occurred at fast pace.

2 Hess, (1963) 1971: 2-3; see Thesis p. 47. 271

European artists of the post-Renaissance period had both travelled to various parts of Asia, including to China and India, from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth-centuries as well as increasingly to their colonial territories, and artworks had circulated in both canvas and engraved form. However, it was only with political and commercial hegemony that Academic practice had real impact on local artists, particularly (as the Soviets had realised) through creation and enforcement of a new arts infrastructure, at first the Arts Societies which hosted exhibitions with prizes attached, and then the art schools. The Arts Societies in colonial Asia were controlled by the Europeans, with visiting Western artists given precedence, but locals did begin to emulate the styles on view. In India J.P. Gangooly (1876-1953) painted landscapes full of atmospheric light and regularly won prizes at these exhibitions, often literally called Salons after the European model.3 In Indonesia the school of Mooie Indies (beautiful Indies) developed in the early twentieth-century with artists like Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878-1941) painting idealised but realistically rendered images of the Javanese countryside.4 With this change of art patronage came the change of artistic status – rising higher in society than was usual in most Asian cultures, and acquiring the standing of a named, individual creator.

The new European art school was where Western ideas about realism, naturalism, the focus on the human body, the idea of a history painting and the usage of new oil on canvas materials were all enforced. As I have previously written, it was the establishment of the institution itself as much as its teaching that was central to the way art was practised – providing a pivot for collective action and often revolution, as well as a basis for more conservative practices of patronage and financial support. While the nature of these schools varied according to who was establishing them – locals in Japan or colonial authorities in most other places – their place as respected centres of learning made them more influential, and respected, than other (introduced) institutions such as art galleries and museums.5 Even with criticism of Academic art from within this European hegemony, for example E.B. Havell in Calcutta promoting the ideals of William Morris, he did it within the known bounds of first the Art School in India and then the School of Arts and Crafts in London.6 Again these institutional models were used by those advocating Socialist Realism in due course – because of their effectiveness.

3 See Mitter, 2001: 175. He also lists early salon artists Pestonji Bomanji, Manchershaw Pithawalla and Annada Bagchi. 4 See for example his Mountain and Rice Field, c. 1930s, oil on canvas, 45 x 65 cm, plate 4 in Soul Ties; The Land and Her People; Art from Indonesia, Singapore Art Museum, 1999. 5 See Carroll, 2008 (a). Formal art schools on Western models, with hired staff, a cohort of students, a curriculum and a program of study, were established first in the Philippines in 1821 (Carroll, 2008 (a): 38), in Australia in 1859 (ibid. 40), in India in the 1850s - in Madras first in 1850, followed by Bombay in 1857, Baroda in 1887, and Calcutta in 1884 (see http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-design-education1.html, accessed 12 January 2015), in Lahore (India, current day Pakistan) in 1875 (Carroll, 2008 (a): 40), in Japan in the 1876 (ibid..33), in China in 1906 (ibid. 34), in Vietnam in 1913 (ibid. 38), in Siam in 1933 (ibid. 38), in Malaya/Singapore in 1937 (ibid.39), in Korea in 1946 (ibid.35), in Indonesia in 1947 (ibid. 39), in Dhaka (India, current day Bangladesh) in 1948 (ibid. 44), and in Laos in 1958 (ibid. 44). These dates give an unusual clarity to the political reality of each site at the time. 6 I have discussed this impact in Carroll, 2008 (a), articulating the difference of the English support for the hand-made in India – relating to Morris’ – and links to the ideology around the establishment of Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I compare this to the focus the uncolonised Japanese in particular had on the intellectual centres of Europe, which to them and others meant the art academies of Paris – where you learnt to paint and apply your own signature at the end. 272

The nexus between the schools and the colonial authorities led to these institutions often bearing the brunt of revolts against both authorities, but their established strength meant that they have weathered this and still to this day are central to most of the visual arts of their communities. However again the weft of this weaving is complex as the Russians and then Chinese also used this same system.

While the Western-educated viewer can be charmed to see full-blown Academic painting in Asian settings – like the born-to-rule imperial portrait of Malay States official Sir Frank Swettenham (in tropical white suit, languidly draped over the red and gold accoutrements of power) painted with all the élan of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) in 1904, on display in Singapore,7 or the rows of portraits in the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai,8 it is the works that used Academic tools to their own needs that remain relevant to local communities. In the nineteenth century Raden Saleh (1811-80) is important in Indonesia, (1857-99) and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855-1913) in the Philippines, Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901) in Australia, and, a little later, U Ba Nyan (1897-1945) in Burma,9 and O. Don Peris (1893-1975) in Malaya.10 Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) in India took his use of European Academic practice on a very wild ride indeed (fig. App.1). The question remains if any of these works have impact as art works outside their own contexts. Of all of them the most extraordinary is Ravi Varma – who was the most superficially influenced.11

It is notable these are all colonised cultures. Academic paintings as such were made in Japan, but the most famous is so because it is of a Japanese subject: Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon by Naojiro Harada (1863-99), painted in 1890, a huge canvas with the alabaster skinned goddess in fluttering dress riding the dragon above crashing waves (fig. App.2).12 Despite paintings like this, Academicism as a style never had the same hold in (non-Western colonised) North Asia -Japan, China or Korea - where each (led by Japan) took their own road with the new ideas from the West, as shall be seen.

7 On view at the National Museum of Singapore, June 2010. The information provided noted the brocade was made of ‘Malay silk’ and the globe he stands beside shows a segment of the Malay States. 8 Now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. 9 See his Self-Portrait, of 1937, in the studio, oil palette in hand, head raked with light in Carroll 2010: fig. 51. It remains on view in a small section of paintings in oil and watercolour at the National Museum of Myanmar. 10 See My Wife in her Wedding Dress of 1933, in Carroll, 2010: fig. 49, showing beautifully details white lace, veil and bouquet of the woman who stands against the classical columns and red draped background of a Van Dyck. 11 Ravi Varma translated the melodramatic narratives of traditional Indian temple sculpture and courtly painting into scenes rendered under Western-Academy formal and technical rule. However, their base in local iconography and how it was interpreted was the appeal to their Indian audiences, and still, today, their qualities are seen in film posters and works of artists like Navin Rawanchaikul (b. 1971). It is their local base that gives them cogency. 12 The argument can be made that contemporary Japanese artist Mariko Mori (b. 1967) has reinterpreted this painting in her own Kannon-image videos, an example being Pure Land, from the Esoteric Cosmos series, 1996–7 (in glass with photo interlayer on five panels, 305 x 610 x 2.2 cm), with the glass (or video) have the sleek surface that Harada achieves in his painting. Mori’s dexterity with modern media enables the invention of superhuman figures in the same way as the nineteenth century painter. 273

Academic art itself – apart from the infrastructure of the art school – has continued to have its adherents through the century, but few who rise to be central figures in the published or exhibition histories of each country.

The practice of life drawing and the usage of traditional Academic art techniques – particularly oil painting on canvas and some print techniques like etching – have continued through art school systems firmly anchored in such practices. As noted, the learnt skill in these techniques, so well taken up in China in the 1950s, has continued as an asset for contemporary Chinese artists able to turn this into the often outrageous comments on contemporary life that have made them the focus of international attention. As art schools in the Western world turned against the Academic Bad Guys, so these skills were dropped from the curriculum, an act at times, today, lamented.

2.2 Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism et al – the isms

The second contender is the styles that were the Western art world’s reactions to Academic art from end of the nineteenth-century to the mid-twentieth-century, including Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, and so on. The response to these in the East has been the focus of a number of exhibitions in recent years, particularly Cubism in Asia of 2005. Overtly, these styles had major impact in Asia, nuanced through the individual examples of (1853-90) and (1848-1903). The argument here again is that the influence of these styles was felt and there are many significant results, but they do not have the power of the work inspired by the original Russian model.

First, however, is comment on how this section is caught in the net of its own terminology. A lecture by Teng Baiye at the Shanghai Art Club in 1934 is indicative of the issue addressed by Lu Xun in his sardonic categorisation of ‘isms’ in Asia quoted in the Introduction. In his lecture titled ‘Expressionism in Chinese Art’ Teng contends that contemporary, and ancient, Chinese painting demonstrates a “powerful calligraphic expressionism”, a tradition still present in recent Chinese art described with this epithet.13 For Teng the word is synonymous with (age- old) energy rather than reflecting the realities of the specific European style – though many reading or listening to such a tract would be swayed to think it related to the latter. To add ‘realism’ and other Western terms which have been various translated according to initial cultural positions as well as the diverse cultures and times into which they have flowed, is endlessly unhelpful. The usage of the term ‘modernism’ in Asia, even more widely applied, is always an area of confusion. These terms are frequently used when the initial and core

13 Recorded by Birnie Danzker 2004: 66. 274 ideology of a movement is either unknown or misunderstood (which, it must be added, in itself is not problematic for the creation of new artwork, as Gauguin so ably demonstrated).14

More recent thoughtful commentators like Akira Tatehata have voiced concerns about the issue of the ‘isms’ in addressing Cubism. Tatehata in his Introduction to the catalogue and his Keynote Speech to the Symposium on Cubism in Asia at the Japan Foundation made a detailed analysis of these art styles and how they resonated in Asia:

Why Cubism? or Surrealism might be suggested as the best place to start… In the context of Asia, a consideration of these other styles [of Fauvism and Surrealism] might be expected to be the most fruitful approach. It is undeniable that Cubism had a more limited influence than the other styles. Fauvism and Surrealism eventually put down deep roots in Asia. From a certain point of view, it might be said that the characteristics of these styles resonated to some extent with the art traditions of various Asian regions. Cubism was a culminating point of Western modernism, defined by an extreme analytic rationality stripped of all lyrical feeling, so it was difficult to accept straightforwardly in the Asian milieu.15

Despite the wisdom of Tatehata’s words in general, the Westerner immediately ponders on his point about Cubism being the culminating point of Western modernism, a movement which many see equated with post-war abstraction. Cubism was chosen for the exhibition, paradoxically, writes Tatehata, because its influence was so limited and therefore more easily definable and demonstrable. However, the exhibition catalogue struggles to make the case for the efficacy of the project. What binds these works apart from jagged lines and planes, and is this enough? As Tatehata notes of the selection process “Ultimately, it was necessary to make intuitive judgments on the basis of the artist’s background and the overall ‘look’ of a painting.”16 John Clark, discussing this period in Japan, and Futurism’s importance, adds “Futurism was also a vague term whose real gloss might be ‘anti-realist avant-garde’: it included many kinds of style, from raw expressionism to decorative cubism, as well as dadaist concepts of technique and of the status of the world of art.”17

It can be argued that this desire for the new, including the revolutionary ideas of the power of youth and individualism in Europe, led to the focus on the art movements that seemed closest to these characteristics, rather than on the art movements themselves – a version of

14 He thought the postcard photographs he purchased in Paris in 1898 were of Cambodian dancers, not the Javanese that they were. It was not important to him. 15 Tatehata, 2005: 202. The exhibition was shown in Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore from August 2005 to April 2006. As Cubisme: l’autre rive; Résonances en Asie, it was shown in May- June 2007 at the Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris. 16 Tatehata, 2005: 203. 17 Clark, 1993: 205-6. 275 modernism by rupture. So when such artworks that are new, individualistic, and celebrating youth are made it is important not only to look at the style of choice but the process of adoption of such revolutionary ideas from the West. The leader of the modern art movement The Storm Society in China, Pang Xunqin (1906-85), studied in France from 1925 to 1930 and wrote later about his response to art there:

I admire Picasso among modern painters. I like some of his art works; some of them I don’t understand. Indeed I admire Picasso for his spirit of reform. In Paris, we cannot find another painter than Picasso who dares to change his style so boldly and constantly…18

Pang liked the idea of change and reform rather than the particular impetus for this.

Early in the last century, Liu Haisu in China and Tetsugoro Yorozu (1885-1927)in Japan made works that are extraordinary in their choice of subject – brave and provocative in cultures that censured such qualities. Liu’s Girl in a Fox Fur of 1919 (fig. App.3) has a young woman in a modern Western dress (audaciously) staring with great candour at the viewer and Yorozu’s Self Portrait with clouds (an overtly psychologically troubling image) and his Nude Beauty (fig. App.4) (where the figure slips down the picture plane as she boldly views her audience) both of 1912 are examples of the power of youthful protest to take up principles that critique their own society. Liu’s Girl is conventionally painted, using the Western frontal shoulder and head portrait format, with a painterly usage of oil paint especially for the fox fur, while Yorozu’s two paintings are much more experimental artistically.

But do they translate outside their homes and their place in local art history? Do they have the power to inspire outsiders who do understand the ‘ism’ part of their style? I have included all three in various texts and shown them to audiences outside their own countries, and always to little acclaim, despite my explanation of their importance within their own culture.19 This applies even more forcefully to works included in every recent Japanese art history text, which can seem to be more exemplars of Japanese learning in Paris than works resonating more broadly: these include Seiki Kuroda’s (1866-1924) soft-painted ‘impressionistic’ images of girls in kimonos of the 1890s (fig.App.5), Ryusei Kishida’s (1891-1929) and Ryuzaburo Umehara’s (1888-1986) ‘post-impressionistic’ landscapes, and Kaita Murayama’s (1896-1919) robust ‘expressionist’ strokes (if these terms can be so applied in this context).

18 Li Chao, 2005: 246. 19 See The Revolutionary Century (Carroll, 2010) and A Journey Through Asian Art (Snodger Media, 2014). To quantify this, I asked the audience of some 100 Gallery Guides (docents) of the National Gallery of Victoria (during a lecture on The Revolutionary Century, on 6 March 2012) if their first reaction to seeing these three images was that they were copies of European art: some 60% raised their hands. No doubt the reality was an ever higher percentage. 276

It was different in Vietnam. Impressionism has been an important movement internationally with adherents to this day and it spread its relaxed iconography, plein-air brushiness, and its delight with light, throughout the region. As has been argued here, the impact of this French movement, filtered through the later School of Paris, had its considerable effect in Vietnam, and it served as a ‘local’ antidote to the full-fledged Socialist Realism coming from Russia and China. It can be argued that the interest in this Vietnamese work is the outsiders’ sympathy for this charming Impressionist/French style overlain with images pertinent to the deeply felt issues of the resistance and war movement. Since Doi Moi, the subject matter has shed the political overlay, with the remaining sweet works well received by the new foreign commercial market.

Of the following ‘isms’, Paul Gauguin is the most frequently described as Post-Impressionist, but he had a particular resonance in Asia because of his non-European background, his life in Tahiti and his choice of subject-matter rather than any allegiance to this style.20 The Bombay Progressives were influenced by European ‘expressionism’ in their vigorous brush-strokes, thick paint and subjects of modern life, but these artists were small in number and gradually their influence was tempered by other forces.

Tatehata writes of the deepness of Fauvism and Surrealism’s impact in Asia, because they sympathised with local cultural traits, an example in Japan being the symbolic associations embedded in haiku and the long history of ghost-depictions, and in Indonesia the relationship between the unseen and seen world.21 Indeed, through this, some memorable works of art have been made, as the Surrealism: Revolution by Night exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1993 demonstrated. In this, the Japanese works (the only Asian images included) added to the impact of the whole precisely because they worked from their own cultural understandings. Harue Koga’s (1895-1933) Outdoor Makeup of 1929 shone with its spirit of freedom possible in modern Japan, with its young girl dancing with abandon on top of a high- rise building above a parachute-filled sky and sea, lit by a dramatic, piercing light. The ‘irrational’ spacing and the inclusion of fanciful elements relates to older Japanese visual traditions.22 Additionally through the creation of such works, it is important to remember that, as John Clark clearly argues, it was the anti-authoritarian quality of this style that was attractive to Japanese artists, and it was this position that eventually led to its censure from those same authorities intent on harnessing all focus towards the war effort of the 1930s and

20 See Carroll, 2011. 21 Clark, 2008: 204, and, in the video series A Journey Through Asian Art Indonesian artist Lucia Hartini (b.1959) speaks of her understanding of European Surrealism and its easy relationship with the magic of Javanese local belief: that the unseen is as real as the seen. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLcoKbhDLKc&feature=youtu.be, accessed 7 January, 2015. 22 An example, from the Yokohama Museum of Art, is Ground Cherries; Sudden Shower, a woodcut print of c. 1842, showing cherries and their leaves taking on human form and running for cover from the rain. 277 after. It is notable that these particular styles were not translated to Japan’s colonies in Korea and Taiwan, nor to China which was much under Japanese art-world influence, where such practices were all beyond official probity or artistic practice.

It is salient to note that the National Gallery of Australia exhibition was a rare early non- Japanese venture to include any Asian work at all in such a Western (and in this case Australian) focused project. It is extremely rare to find any reference to an Asian work which overtly reflects an ‘ism’ in a non-Asian exhibition or publication. In assessing the influence of these European schools’ influence, these local forces, interpretations and existing cultural understandings are all central – more central than any deep understanding and adaptation of the precise style itself.

2.3 The Latino influence

The Latino influence in Asia is of similar lesser impact with that of Impressionism, Post- impressionism and Cubism, but worthy of its own paragraph because it came from outside Western Europe and was valued for this alone. I have written about this previously,23 but this story remains little known or acknowledged.

The Mexican artists of the so-called Mexican Renaissance of the 1930s conceptually and in practice influenced Asian art with a sublime purity: it happened without intent, and unlike others who might be seen to be active in this manner, like Gauguin, they had no colonial framework in support of their impact either in providing a setting in which to produce their work, or a publishing network influential in their own colonial world. Artists in Asia identified with them: brown men, of a tightly and long-held colonised country, whose work reflected their complex colonial and pre-colonial history but also deemed of value beyond the restrictions of local reference. That their work reflected the international, political avant-garde certainly was important to their status and success, and this political intent reflected the interests of various artists in Asia striving for similar outcomes. Beyond this, the genius of Diego Rivera, recognised in his day but waning in acknowledgement since, is overt.

With the exception of Miguel Covarrubias (1904-57), the Mexicans did not express interest in their influence in Asia: art texts during the Mexican Renaissance’s heyday, and after, do not mention Asia, nor include Asian artists.24 The Tordesillas Line running north-south through the Pacific Ocean, overlain by the Pope in 1494, which separated the two halves of this vast ocean

23 Carroll, 2008 (b). 24 One example is Jacqueline Barnitz Twentieth-Century Art of Latin-America, 2011, Austin: University of Texas Press, including ‘Spain’ in the index with five artists named, and ‘influence of and on Mexico and Peru’, and so on, but nothing on the Philippines. 278 into different political zones, had been washed away during the following centuries by the mass traffic of the galleon trade from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila, but by the turn of the twentieth-century it was firmly back in psychological place. The Mexicans looked north and east to Europe and equally the impact of Mexico, particularly on the Philippines, was mediated via the United States. The particularities of Spanish colonialism in regards to the visual arts is worthy of further exploration, notably today. The Academy of San Fernando in Madrid holds no work by Filipino artists despite it being the site of academic desire for these young scions of empire, and neither does the main museum of twentieth-century art in Madrid, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.25 It is a notable extension of post post-colonial attitude and in marked contrast with the response given in the United States.

In Asia, Rivera’s work was known and is clearly represented in the work of the Filipino Triumvirate of Edades, Carlos (Botong) Francisco and Galo Ocampo (1913-85, fig. App.6). Edades had studied in the USA which enabled him to build a collection of books with reproductions of both European and Mexican muralist work, material not easily accessible in Manila. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma who wrote the monograph on Edades and knew him, says:

Edades opened up a whole new world for his protégés. In endless conversations and discussions, he increased their knowledge of art and art history; he placed at their disposal numerous books of his library on Western as well as Eastern art; and he deepened their appreciation of masters like Gauguin as well as the Mexican muralists.26

The work itself shows the extent of knowledge of the Mexicans’ imagery. The Capitol Theatre murals of 1935 were the beginning, with iconography focused on the Philippines’ progress towards self-government. The Rising Philippines was a central painting (fig. App.7), with images of Spanish influence on religion on the right, the industrialisation of the United States on the left, and, between, the Philippines emerging in a rush of triumph. A mural for the State Theatre with images depicting specifically Filipino ‘indigenous’ music (an Igorot woman beating a drum, a man playing a nose flute and floating figures of women), two for the Nakpil residence (one about the arts and the other about rice farming), and two for the Rufino family followed (one about Mother Nature and the other about a lion hunt), all commissioned through architect Juan Nakpil. Edades and his assistants painted more murals for President Quezon’s house and for Honorio Pobladar also in Manila, and two murals shown at the Golden

25 The only Mexican art on display in October 2011 at the Reina Sophia Museum was a small early landscape by Rivera tucked away in a back gallery; there were no works by a Filipino. 26 Kalaw-Ledesma, 1979: 70. 279

Gate San Francisco World Fair in 1939. In 1940, he painted a fresco for the Quezon Institute, a government hospital, showing the benefits of medicine and technology.

The Mexican works answered many of the needs of the Filipinos for a new way of structuring their art. Then there was the success of these Mexican works in one of the art centres of the world, the USA – the art centre of the world certainly to the Filipinos. As Kalaw-Ledesma writes “artists like Ocampo and Francisco asked themselves: if Mexico was capable of achieving this, couldn’t the Philippines do likewise?”27 Prior to this the Philippines had been in the grip of Academic realism, and from the introduction of Edades’ and his friends’ work, the battle began for the artistic future of the country. The young people followed Edades and the conservatives tried to maintain the Academic strands originally developed by the Spanish friars.

It is the example of the brown-skinned man that dominates. Again, as for the revolutionary Picasso to the Chinese, it is the precedent of other artists overthrowing their dominant culture rather than exact imitation that is important. That these three remain well known - as “the Philippines Triumvirate”- and in particular close to people’s hearts (fig. App.8) is witness to the importance of this movement.

2.4 American Abstract art

As is appropriate for a text on Socialist Realism, its antithesis of abstract art coming from Europe (to a lesser extent) and the USA (to a major extent) - most overtly Abstract Expressionism but also other movements like Conceptualism and - is the main alternative for the ‘most influential’ outside art movement in the Asia Pacific in the twentieth- century. Conceptualism was extremely important and globally significant but in Asia was focused on Japan where a real dialogue took place between artists there and those in the vanguard in Europe and America. The particular relationship of conceptualism in Japan and the USA is not analysed here as it is a major area on its own, and beyond the perhaps too overtly declaimed partition between Asia and the ‘outside’. Certainly the Japanese were major contributors to the world-wide thinking and activities around from the 1950s and particularly in the 1960s.

Abstract Expressionism, a tool of the Cold War, which had had many roots in Asian cultural understandings, on the other hand, was overtly exported by the Americans throughout the Asia Pacific region from the 1950s to the 1970s. It had significant impact, especially in

27 Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974: 111. 280 societies where the politics of the Cold War were at play, like the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya/Singapore, Pakistan, and Australia. As Jennifer Lindsay has written about Indonesia, an emerging nation looking for fresh models, the USA was promoting itself as the ‘new West’ in competition of the ‘new East’ promoted by China.28 It was promoted from America with travelling exhibitions, scholarships to the USA, publications, and general financial support.29 By 1956 the Museum of Modern Art in New York had organised thirty-three international exhibitions, 30 with, during the 1960s, Asia becoming a “particularly crucial area for the United States”. It was then that the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund was established as a “cultural exchange programme directed specifically towards Asia”.31 It is pertinent however that American art’s active influence was various in Asia: particularly keen in the Philippines, less so in Vietnam, and with a more complex hue in Australia.

Abstract Expressionism’s own roots are made slightly more complex by the involvement of some American artists in Asia, like Mark Tobey (1890-1976), Asian artists like Yoko Ono (b.1933) or Isamu Noguchi(1904-88) working in America, and the general pre-occupation of American artists with Asian culture (with Bert Winther-Tamaki seeing it as ‘a definitive feature of modern American art history’).32 It is nevertheless an American movement.33

A digression here for some words on abstraction itself in Asia in particular: it is often argued that Abstract Expressionism took hold not just because of real-politiks, but because the ideology of abstraction reached into many areas of thought close to various Asian cultures.34 In 1994 I curated an exhibition for the Adelaide Festival called Beyond the material world, with work by artists from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand who all reached into their own belief systems to find areas of emotion and idea that were based on

28 Lindsay, 2012: 14. 29 There is a growing bibliography on this issue, including Frances Stoner Saunders’ research of 1999, but with intermittent discussion over the decades, from Alfred Barr’s ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’(New York Times Magazine) of 1952, to Max Kozloff’s ‘American Painting During the Cold War’ (Artforum) May 1973 and Eva Cockcroft’s commentary, also in Artforum in 1974 (see Saunders, 1999, and Cockcroft, 1974). 30 Saunders, 1999: 268. 31 Cockcroft, 1974: 40. 32 Winther-Tamaki, 2011: 321. Winther-Tamaki quotes Mark Tobey saying that he knew in Japan and China that he would never be anything “but the Occidental that I am” (334). 33 This is not the place for a discussion of the impact of Asian art on this post–war Western generation, about which there is increasing acknowledgment as in J.J. Clarke’s Oriental Enlightenment and his notes on Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse in the 1950s and 60s (104), but it is of note that the ‘oriental’ culture experienced in reality was Japanese rather than Chinese or Korean (older traditions in themselves). The political situation in China and Korea made them out of bounds for any real exchanges, never mind the attraction of the energy and creativity emerging in Japan. Having said this is not the place for such a discussion, Jeffrey Wechsler (1997: 2) does makes an interesting case relating Abstract Expressionism to traditional Asian practice, citing a number of similar qualities: the gestural use of paint, the restricted colour, the calligraphic linearism, the flat space, the asymmetrical compositions, voids, and the acceptance of accidental effects. He describes eighth-century Chinese practice of making images from gestures, a quality continued by Gutai and Monoha artists in Japan (3). A more recent study has been Alexandra Munroe’s The Third Mind, an exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009, with a catalogue including Bert Winther-Tamaki’s ‘The Asian Dimensions of Postwar Abstract Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics’. Winther-Tamaki discusses the metaphysical speculation around Zen Buddhism and other religions as ways “for the understanding and representation of the spiritual and universal potential of abstract art” (145). 34 Huynh, 2010: 90, is among those that make this point about abstraction, though she makes it in relation to South Vietnam where the response was to early twentieth century European abstraction rather than that from America. 281 the immaterial, or the abstract.35 In 2013 I published an essay on the issue of Asian abstraction;36 for this I searched my bookshelf for a definition of ‘abstract’, and found two books (randomly acquired), both published in post-War New York: Frederick Gore’s Abstract Art, from Movements in Modern Art of 1951 and Michel Seuphor’s Abstract Painting, 50 years of accomplishment, from Kandinsky to the present, of 1964. No Asian artist is included. Seuphor describes “Our twentieth-century world” (meaning Europe and America), tracing the beginning of abstract art to 1912 and talks of the “destruction of the object and its reconstruction in a different way,” not a repudiation of the object but using it differently.37 It depends what is meant by ‘destruction of the object’ but the crucial point of much traditional Asian art is the rejection of the importance of the object or its representation. It is this same immaterial world which Gore acknowledges as central to the idea of abstraction, starting his book with a quotation from Plato, about the beauty of shapes which give “pleasure on their own, quite free from the itch of desire”.38 He could have equally (but does not) quoted Buddhist teaching, aiming to be ‘free from desire’ and focusing on the inner, unseen essentials of existence, often attained by looking to an inner source of power or energy, through meditation personally or through meditation of an art work. The great streams of Asian culture coming from Islam in the Middle East, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and Confucianism in China, all focus on transformation through engagement rather than the end result, and on personal reflection and action. As Ananda Coomaraswamy had written, abstraction and figuration are not binaries, a distinction not meaningful in much of Asian art. Abstract (or object-less) art in this context comes naturally, rather than being the reaction to the material that it embodied in Europe. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that Abstract Expressionism when promoted by the new political power in the region found areas of synergy in Asian artists’ hearts.

What is perhaps also unsurprising, given identity politics, is that there is little acknowledgement of the wide-spread impact of Abstract Expressionism in Asia as a holistic movement or area for notice. Many texts on Asian art of the period will list exhibitions of Eastern art to be shown in America (and elsewhere) for example, but never an exposé of what was to be seen of American art in Asia.39 For Americans, the loss of subtlety in addressing this has made them shy also to trumpet the wide-spread impact of their work. However, it is

35 The exhibition at the 1994 Adelaide Festival included Santiago Bose (Philippines), Toshikatsu Endo (Japan, b. 1950), Heri Dono (Indonesia), Soun-gui Kim (Korea, b. 1946), Lü Shengzhong (China, b. 1952), Montien Boonma (Thailand 1953-2000), Shim Moon- Seup (Korea, b. 1942) and Roberto Villanueva (Philippines 1947-95). The catalogue (Carroll, 1994: 11-4) included ‘Stories of the Metaphysical’ by commentators in Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines. 36 The essay follows the ideas in the exhibition and its catalogue, but with artists such as Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), Shozo Shimamoto (1928-2013) and Imran Qureshi (b. 1972), see Carroll, 2013. 37 Seuphor, 1964: 10. 38 Gore, 1951: 5. 39 An example is the American-based text edited by American Joseph Fischer Modern Indonesian Art, of 1990, for an exhibition to be shown in Texas, California, Washington and Hawaii. An essay by Kusnadi ‘The Larger Meaning of Modern ’ (42-47) annotates all the Indonesian exhibitions shown internationally post war (see 46). 282 surprising to realise the precise impact of politics even here. The sites where Abstract Expressionism, as a style, reached deeply were – mostly - in those places closest to American hegemony.

It was in the Philippines, Australia, Pakistan and Malaysia that artists most overtly and widely took up the style of this American movement, overturning previously-entrenched art- establishment realist norms. These seem a strange group of countries to list, explained by real- politiks of the Philippines and its on-going relation with its past colonial master, Australia in the thrall of American culture generally post-War, Pakistan searching for a non-figurative style in sympathy with its Islamic foundation, and Malaysia being courted by Western powers to hold the sway of the Chinese Communists, as well as, as in Pakistan, finding non-figurative imagery that sat well with their new local cultural imperatives. South Vietnam is an exception, despite being under American military rule, not submitting to US visual art hegemony as their fellows in the North had similarly acted with Chinese and Russian models.

In Japan and South Korea, post-War, American occupation and military presence were very obvious. So it is relevant again to assess American cultural hegemony in the visual arts in these two countries as the following paragraphs outline.40 Of course, the Communist states of China and North Vietnam and North Korea eschewed such work, as did the decidedly narrative and anti-American artists of India.

a. The Philippines, Australia and South Vietnam – the non-Islamic acolytes

Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, first president of the Art Association of the Philippines, formed in 1948, has recorded the influence of the Americans in Manila at the time. The pre-War power and the avenging military force during the War itself remained in close contact with its former colony post-War. Kalaw-Ledesma’s narrative of the founding of the AAP includes continuous reference to American advisors, visiting artists and financial support, as well as a description of the reaction of the Americans to counter the Russian post-war “cultural offensive” by sending its own “cultural emissaries on international tours”, and having “cultural attaches from the American Embassy” going out of their way “to befriend artists and writers”, mingling with them, “calling them by their first names and attending exhibits and poetry readings.”41

40 This is not an encyclopaedic coverage of abstraction or the impact of American art in Asia. But Taiwan should be noted here – part of the American sphere, but coming out of years of Japanese colonialism and then military dictatorship, neither of which encouraged ‘new’ art. John Clark has written about this period in Taiwan in ‘Aspects of Taibei Modernism in the 1980s’ in Caroline Turner (ed.),Tradition and Change; Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, 1993, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press: 147- 58, noting it was not until the 1980s that ‘abstract’ styles started to emerge. 41 Kalaw-Ledesma 1974: 66. References to American relations pepper this book: Artist Lily Harmon (9), businessman C.M. Hoskins (10), the influence of Rockefeller grants (35), Anita Magsaysay Ho (1914-2012) returning from studying at the Cranbrook Academy (42), American publishing and editing rights of the key history of Philippines to that date (54) and the list of artists who founded 283

Scholarships were made available for Filipinos to study in the USA,42 various American artists travelled to Manila, information on the latest American art was available at the Embassy library and taught in the universities; and exhibitions of American art came to Manila.43 It was in the Philippines that Abstract Expressionism had its most effective response in the region.

How was this work evaluated outside its own context in the Philippines? Two members of this school, Napoleon Abueva (b.1930) and José Joya (1931-95), were chosen with great fanfare to represent the Philippines at the 1964 Venice Biennale, one of Joya’s paintings being Granadean Arabesque (fig. App.9). The heartfelt desire for recognition is clear in the report of this event in recent Filipino art history (1992):

The choice of Joya to represent the Philippines at the 1964 Venice Biennial represents a high peak in the rise of Modern Art in this country. His participation in that world- class art competition, enjoying the official blessings of the Philippine government, left no doubt that modernism on this side of the Pacific Rim had triumphed. Though he showed his best and strongest work, Joya won no prizes in that fiercely competitive biennial.44

There is an earlier report of this experience, remarkable for its candor, written in 1974 by Kalaw-Ledesma, the ardent supporter of Filipino art:

And how did the Filipino artists fare in this all-important exhibition? The general impression was that our entries were lost in a sea of similar works, each working within the same school of abstract thought. Our entries did not have originality, a distinctive quality. Joya, for example, may have been an outstanding painter in this country, but in the Venice Biennale he was just one out of many, for there were

the new art school at the University of the Philippines in the 1950s included Filipino staff with degrees from Cranbrook Academy, Yale and Harvard (59) and a full chapter on the Philippine-American Cultural Foundation ‘Crisis’(102ff). 42 Abstract artist Constancio Bernardo (1913-2003) studied with at Yale University (Reyes, 1992: 164); Lee Aguinaldo (1933-2007) modelled his 1957 work on Jackson Pollock (Reyes, 1992: 165); José Joya studied at Cranbrook Academy 1956-7 (Coseteng, 1992: 188); Ang Kiukok (1931-2005) travelled to the USA in 1965 (Coseteng, 1992: 209); (b.1926) studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1949-50 (Reyes, 1989: 44); Nena Saguil (1914-98) studied at the School of American Arts in Paris in 1954 (Reyes, 1989: 29); Anita Magsaysay-Ho studied at the Art Students’ League in New York and at the Cranbrook Academy (Reyes, 1989: 45); Leonidas V. Benesa studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard (Reyes, 1989: 63). These were years of overseas study for Filipinos, but they are notable for those who studied in the USA. A number had studied in Spain (especially those with family links), but this reduced as time went on. 43 Kalaw-Ledesma 1974: 66, writes “For the first time, Filipino art lovers and artists were able to view at close range original works by artists like Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callagnan [sic] and Maurice Graves, names previously encountered only in books. Filipinos studied these works, looked at the way the Americans solved their plastic problems and concluded that their responses were similar to ours. / Close on the heels of the exhibits, American artists and varied cultural representatives start to visit the Philippines. They included mosaicist Roberta Sneideman (who taught Elizabeth Chan), Pat Brooks, Jack Brian, Dong King-man, Howard Worner and Neil G. Welliver.” 44 Torres, 1992: 167-8. The 2015 Venice Biennale is a rare recent instance of Filipino representation at a similar major international exhibition. 284

hundreds of paintings from all over the world. Our works had merit, but they did not attract the necessary attention.45

In 1971 the Philippines again made the considerable effort to send similar Abstract Expressionist works to two other international biennales – in Paris and Sao Paolo - but again were disappointed by the result. Indeed, following this, they decided the logistics of so “much time, money and effort… can be used instead for developing art at home.”46 A telling story of the Paris display is by Arturo Luz, writing in the Manila Chronicle, that:

… all of the works which did not correspond to specific categories, such as Hyper- Realism or Conceptual, were grouped together into one large, poorly planned section called Option 4. The (Filipino) entries of Abdulmari Imao, Rodolfo Gan, Efren Zaragosa and one of Eduardo Castrillo’s landed in this category.47

Abstraction in Australia was an important movement, as it was in the Philippines in its time. American art had been seen most famously in Two Decades of American Painting, shown in Melbourne and Sydney after a tour starting in Tokyo, followed by Kyoto and New Delhi, through 1966 and 1967. The size and colour of its ninety-eight works were astounding to the Australian audience.48 The National Gallery of Victoria acquired Helen Frankenthaler’s (1928- 2011) Cape (Provincetown) of 1964 (reproduced in the Two Decades catalogue and proudly included in its own World of Art collection book of 1974),49 as well as a Josef Albers’ (1888- 1976) Homage to the Square of 1966, and the Art Gallery of NSW purchased Morris Louis’ (1912-62) of 1957 and another Albers’ Homage to the Square: early fusion also of 1966, all from this exhibition. The galleries recognised that the physical presence of these works was needed for an audience only previously with access to the images in books.50 Clement Greenberg lectured at the Power Institute in Sydney in 1968. New York artists Christo (b.1935) and Richard Stankiewicz (1922-83) worked in Sydney, and leading Australians like Sydney Ball (b. 1933) went to study in the USA rather than Europe in 1973, an action deemed radical at the time, but all making for a mood of great receptivity for American art (see fig. App.10). From such a base the collecting regime of the new Australian National Gallery, aided by expatriate critic Robert Hughes, rushed to purchase at publicly astonishing prices examples of the huge

45 Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974: 68. 46 Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974: 70. These words are by Marciano Galang (b. 1945) one of the participating artists in Paris. 47 Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974: 69. 48 Of the colour plates, 23 (Gottlieb, 228 x 213cm), 14 (Frankenthaler, 278 x 237cm),98 (Warhol, 91 x 60cm x 6), 49 (Lichtenstein, 121 x 91cm), 62 (Noland 248 x 248cm), 45 (de Kooning, 172 x 147cm), 67, 6 (D’Arcangelo, 177 x 205cm), 17 (Gorky, 91 x 121cm), 59 (Newman, 180 x 83cm). All are abstract except for the Warhol, the Lichtenstein and arguably, the de Kooning. This author as a teenager saw the exhibition and still remembers the shock of seeing the size of these works and their physical power. 49 Ursula Hoff, 1974. The National Gallery of Victoria. London: World of Art: 59. 50Later, in 1987, ’s large bronze Standing Figure of 1969 (cast 1984) was acquired and dominated for many years the forecourt of the Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne. 285 new wonderful canvases.51 The actual size of the American works was an attraction for their purchase to fill the Gallery’s cavernous building under construction, with a shopping list approved by the official Acquisitions Committee in 1973 specifying Willem de Kooning (1904- 97), Frankenthaler, Ad Reinhardt (1913-67), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Milton Resnick (1917-2004), Mark Rothko (1903-70) and Jackson Pollock (as well as (1840- 1926), (1869-1954), Juan Miró (1893-1983), Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) and Auguste Rodin).52 Director James Mollison’s first overseas trip, in 1972, was to New York and from this, in the same year, the Gallery acquired de Kooning’s July 4th 1957 and Morris Louis’ Beta Nu of 1960. Pollock’s Blue Poles, painted in 1952, became the central piece, with a further substantial collection of this school built up around it.53 Australia was the only country of the region with the will and interest in the trajectory of American art and the funds and institutions able to collect it during the 1960s and 1970s.54 The Japanese and Koreans put their own funds into acquiring such work after the 1980s when new art museums with huge halls able to display these works began to be built.55 There is an additional example of this institutional impact, argued by Charles Green and Heather Barker in 2011, that a major outcome of the Two Decades exhibition in Australia, and its attendant travel of gallery personnel, was the willingness to stage the provocative Australian exhibition The Field at the

51 Lloyd and Desmond, 1992: 4. 52 Lloyd and Desmond, 1992: 8. This is an action reminiscent of the need to fill the new National Museum of China in the 1950s. 53 Abstract American paintings and sculptures acquired at this time included: purchased 1972: Arshile Gorky (1904-48) Untitled, 1944, 49 x 75 cm; Morris Louis Beta Nu, 1960, 259 x 701 cm; purchased 1973: Jackson Pollock Blue Poles, 1952, 212 x 489 cm; Arshile Gorky Plumage landscape, 1947 96.5 x 129.5 cm; Helen Frankenthaler Other generations, 1957, 174 x 177 cm; Robert Mangold (b.1937) ½ manila curved area, 1966, 183 x 183 cm; purchased 1974: Willem de Kooning Woman V, 1952-3, 154 x 114cm; Morris Louis , 1959, 253.5 x 336.5 cm; purchased 1975: Donald Judd Untitled 1974, 101 x 736 x 101 cm (of brass boxes); Robert Morris (b.1931) Untitled 1969, 284 x 363 x 111 cm (of felt); purchased 1977: Robert Smithson (1938-73) Rocks and mirror square II, 1971, 36 x 22 x 220 cm; Dan Flavin Monument to V. Tatlin, 1966-9, 274 x 71 x 11 cm; Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) Orange white, 1964-5, 310 x 244.7 cm; purchased 1978: Clyfford Still (1904-80), 1952 no.2, 1952, 299 x 268 cm; David Smith (1906-65) 25 Planes, 1958, 350 x 169 x 40 cm; purchased 1979: Robert Morris Slab, 1973, various dimensions. A little later, in 1981, two Mark Rothko works, Multiform of 1948 (155 x 118 cm) and 1957 #20, of 1957 (233 x 193 cm), were acquired, the same year Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square of 1964 (122 x 122 cm) entered the collection. Most are of enormous size, as noted above. 54 Ron Radford, recent Director of the National Gallery of Australia, writes in the Introduction to The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Collection Highlights, in 2014: 10, that “the Gallery’s American collection is renowned as one of the finest outside the United States. Major works from the first phase in the 1940s include key works by Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, (1911-2010) Lee Krasner (1908-84) and Jackson Pollock. Some of the Gallery’s most important American works date from the 1950s…”and he lists de Kooning, Rothko, Still and Pollock works. 55 A key example in Korea is the major independent art museum, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. Its collection guidebook, published in 2012, includes an essay (np) “Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; The Realization of a New Paradigm” crediting Ra Hee Hong Lee, Director from 1995, as starting to “collect Korean modern art as well as contemporary international art, with the clear mission of acquiring works of the highest qualities” with work reproduced by Arshile Gorky Study for Agony 1947, Willem de Kooning Untitled 1947, Mark Rothko Four Reds, 1957, Cy Twombly (1928-2011) Untitled 1968, Frank Stella (b.1936) Black Adder 1965, Andy Warhol Forty-five Gold Marilyns 1979, David Smith Three Circles and Planes 1959, and Donald Judd Untitled 1989. They were proudly on display in the new museum opened in 2004. The list is uncannily similar to the work collected in Australia two decades earlier. In Japan, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, has a collection starting in the 1920s, but it was only since the 1980s that it has sought to acquire “contemporary works of non-Japanese origin… in a historically comprehensive way…to augment the collection in these weak areas”, as noted in Selected Works from Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, published in 1995:.5. This museum also built a huge new building opened in 1995 and it too needed large works to fill its walls. Again this 1995 publication includes reproductions of Morris Louis’ Green by Gold, 1958, Mark Rothko’s Black Area in Red 1958, Kenneth Noland’s Virginia Site 1959, Robert Rauschenberg’s Overcast 1 1962, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe 1967, Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923-97) Girl with Hair Ribbon 1965, Tom Wesselmann’s (1931-2004) Bathtub Collage #2 1963, Frank Stella’s Quathlamba 1961, Ellsworth Kelly’s Red Yellow Blue 1965, Brice Marden’s (b.1938) Moon 1 1977, Robert Mangold’s X Painting I (Red) 1980, Jim Dine’s (b.1935) Romancing in Late Winter 1981, Dan Flavin’s Monument to V.Tatlin, Donald Judd’s Untitled No.306 1973, Robert Smithson’s Corner Piece (Cayuga Salt Mine Project) 1969, and so on. All are American and all are large, and again, uncannily similar to Australia’s list as well as works collected contemporaneously in Seoul. 286

National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, showing a further brave new world of contemporary art, but this time locally made.56

This should present a picture of clear American influence, intended as part of its plan for international cultural impact. The story is made murky however by Green and Barker’s salient point that the first flurry of this American movement in Australia, the Two Decades exhibition, had only happened because Australians pushed for it, and paid for it, with the Americans having to be cajoled into agreeing.57

Most importantly, what was the impact on Australian art and artists themselves? Green and Barker quote a leading curator of the time, (Australian but variously New York-based) John Stringer, discussing the effect of the show:

While the more informed were generally impressed and very supportive of the exhibition, far more significantly, the young found they had an unprecedented opportunity to pass judgment on the entire preceding generation of painters. Though not without admiration, the vanguard quickly concurred that abstract expressionism had already run its course. It was equally apparent that the abrasive commercialism of pop art was being eclipsed by the more disciplined, cool, pure and restrained formalism of minimal art.58

In other words, the American abstract (if not minimalist) wave in Australia, particularly the late 1960s tour of Two Decades was too late, and the bubble in Australian art itself (if not for its public institutions) had burst and local artists had, for the most part, moved on.59 The extension of the question of who responded was, first, if these works still resonate in Australia, and, second, if they are of particular note beyond the very local history they epitomized? The argument that it freed artists to think about non-representation and of the potential of seeing beyond verisimilitude remains true, but do the Australian works remain in our imaginations, or, like the Filipino paintings, say little beyond this local impact? This question is complex and beyond more than a cursory response here, but, looking at institutional assessments now, the

56 Green and 2013: np. 57 Green and Barker, (2011) 2013: np. This should be taken within the context however that the exhibition’s original tour to Japan and India had been initiated by the Americans. 58 Green and Barker, (2011) 2013: np, quoting John Stringer, later published in Charles Green (ed.), Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968- 2002, National Gallery of Victoria, 2002: 18. Green and Barker write that the works ‘belonged to the recent but rapidly receding past, they were ultimately irrelevant to the creation or diffusion of new art’. 59 The New York movement did attract artists like Sydney Ball, as well as Robert Hunter (1947-2014) and Robert Jacks (1943-2014). Bert Winther-Tamaki in the Guggenheim Museum 2009 exhibition The Third Mind’s catalogue discusses the work of Yvonne Audette (b.1930), heavily informed by New York work and Asian calligraphy, noting the exhibition of her work held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2007 (153). an interview published in Art + Australia, 2016, 53.1, 103 (‘This is Not an Exhibition: William Wright’ 100-7) curator William Wright, on being asked “What was the climate in Australia like in 1967 for abstract painting?” replied “There was a healthy ‘cargo cult’of abstraction; many didn’t quite know what it was but, as Australians do, they were making brave attempts…”. 287 answers are (surprisingly) ambivalent. Creating Australia, 200 Years of Art 1788-1988, the official bicentennial exhibition and publication, of 1988, a mere twenty years since Two Decades and only a dozen since the spate of NGA purchases, includes ‘twentieth century art’ in three sections, of Nature, Culture and The Individual, and within these chosen ‘icons’ are no abstract paintings and only one sculpture: Robert Klippel’s (1920-2001) Opus 247 Metal construction, made in 1965-8.60 The National Gallery of Australia’s website in 2015 in its section on Abstraction in Australia includes Abstract Expressionism as a general influence but then cites four artists (Ian Fairweather (1891-1974), Tony Tuckson (1921-73), John Olsen (b.1928) and Godfrey Miller (1893-1964)) with no reference to any specific impact from this movement.61 More recently a local re-assessment of this movement has emerged, with exhibitions like Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia, held at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art from August-November 2012, including Jacks, as well as Mikala Dwyer (b.1959), Gail Hastings (b.1965) and Nigel Lendon and Americans Donald Judd (1928-94) and Dan Flavin (1933-96).The less there is to see the more important it is to look was held at the Ian Potter Museum also in Melbourne from June to September 2014. While this is of relevance here, it could still be maintained this movement is not seen with the same enthusiasm today as – at the opposite extreme – the contemporary Chinese work coming out of Socialist Realism.

For this period of collecting in Australia, so impressive at the time, time seems to have moved on. Those many large American works in Canberra are rarely, today, on display. The video highlights of thirty-nine works from the whole collection, in 2015, includes only the Pollock Blue Poles from its group of American pieces, though curator Christine Dixon does call it ‘perhaps the most famous in Australian history’.62

The third centre included here is South Vietnam, with a minor role, but of note because it was so clearly an American political if not cultural acolyte. Jeffrey Hantover in his 1991 book Uncorked Soul, Contemporary Art from Vietnam remarks on the art scene in Saigon prior to 1975:

In the 1950s the centre of the Western art world shifted from Paris to New York, but for the South Vietnamese, who had little opportunity to see American paintings, the artistic loadstar remained Paris. The Americans, Trinh Cung recalls, did not bring

60 Creating Australia, 200 Years of Art 1788-1988, 1988, published Sydney: The Australian Bicentennial Authority, ed. Daniel Thomas: 218-9. Klippel had worked in the USA but the authors writing on his work, Bettina and Desmond MacAulay, note his debt is to the early European abstractionists, Picasso, Moore and Gaudier-Brzeska. 61 http://nga.gov.au/COLLECTIONS/AUSTRALIA/GALLERY.cfm?DisplayGal=5B, (accessed 4 February, 2015). 62 http://nga.gov.au/video (accessed 4 February, 2015). 288

American art to Vietnam. “We knew of famous American artists like Pollock and O’Keefe” he says, “but they were too far away.63

Hantover notes the cheap publications about French art readily available in southern Vietnam at the time. If anything, the early twentieth-century French remained as inspiration, including some knowledge of abstraction, but not, as noted, from America.64 Boi Tran Huynh-Beattie, writing in 2010, compares the foreign art available in Saigon through European embassies which was “instrumental in providing this inspiration” compared with American work only available through Art in America magazines.65 She writes that Abstract Expressionism was “not used by the United States for political propaganda and had little influence on Vietnamese artists.”66 Through the years since the 1960s, the allegiance to a Western cultural view remained enforced in southern minds in principle and even today, writing about the very real Cold War art world split in this small country brings still-strong emotions to the fore.67

The abstract, non-political art of southern Vietnam is still seen in commercial galleries, but it has never attracted an audience outside the country. Today, Vietnamese artists in the south as well as the north are as involved with socially-focused subject-matter as any in world .68

b. Islamic Pakistan, Malaysia - and Indonesia

The story of art in Asia where Islam has had a major role especially in the making of new political states post World War II reflects both this home-grown pressure to respond to the ‘non-figurative’ in nation-building imagery, as well as a response to the acknowledged power

63 Hantover, 1991: 23. South Vietnam was a war zone until 1975, and then taken over by the North, so official exhibitions of international artists are few. In 1962 the Directorate of Fine Arts Education of the Department of National Education held a first (and only) International Fine Arts Exhibition in Saigon, including work from America, France, Italy and Germany. Exhibitions were held in galleries run by the Alliance Francaise and others, and, says Hantover, 1991: 22, “young South Vietnamese artists were invited to exhibit their work in international exhibitions in South America, North Africa, Japan, America and Europe”. It can be noted however, perhaps as proof of the state of international critical evaluation of Vietnamese work at the time that the first official invitation for a Vietnamese artist to participate in a major international exhibition was for the first Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane in 1993. 64 Hantover, 1991:23. He quotes Trinh Cung describing the art scene and images in Saigon prior to 1975 in a 1962 book on contemporary Vietnamese art: “There are the requisite cloying domestic scenes, a few maudlin maidens of Modigliani mien, but what is striking in retrospect, given their almost complete absence from the present day Ho Chi Minh City art scene, is the number of abstract works: Ta Ty’s geometric abstractions, Ngo Viet Thu’s Futurist–inspired Atomic City and Speed, Dang Hoai Nam’s explosion of lines and colour. In the oil of Dinh Cuong and Van Den…identifiable objects lose sharp definition under thick impasto, almost floating free into pure abstraction.” Susie Koay (1966: 77) notes Nguyen Trung (b.1940) spending time in Paris and turning to abstraction, as did Tran Van Thao, and Nguyen Than (b.1948). This publication reproduces Nguyen Than’s Lunch of 1994 (fig.61), a fully-fledged (and large, 162 x 260 cm), but in terms of ‘world-dating’ very late abstraction. It is now in the Singapore Art Museum. 65 Huynh-Beattie, 2010: 95. 66 Huynh-Beattie, 2010: 95. She compares music which did have a successful impact. This author also was a judge of Miss South Vietnam in 1990, in Saigon, a truly American-influenced affair with girls in swimsuits, high heels, big hair, and wide smiles. 67 Trinh Cung finishes his (translated) chapter in the book Essays on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese Art: “The war consequences to the art of South Vietnam was very heavy, it did not only make a modern art castle on the way to complete collapse but at the same time abolish the will of freedom, independence in creation of artists in the South of Vietnam. This was a red mark to the government but was the lid of the coffin for art” (see Trinh 2008: 52). He writes how his own work had been burnt in the first days after the surrender of Saigon by a collector in fear of reprisal (52). 68 The exhibition of Vietnamese work at the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial over twenty-five years bears testament to this trend. 289 of America and its new abstractionist iconography. Abstraction became a major part of the art in the decades post World War II in Pakistan and Malaysia, and is still a reality today.

Pakistan was founded in 1947 based on its Islamic belief. Malaysia responded to the local issue of Chinese economic dominance with a pressure on artists to represent the tenets of the Faith.69 While many artists in both places ignored this, enough of caliber did respond to the ideology to make it a significant part of the recent past in Asia. There have been some responses in Indonesia to the abstraction of Islam and the pull of the Americans, but the mainstream of Indonesian art is so strongly antipathetic to this that this has been marginal, though worthy of comment here nevertheless.

Prior to the founding of the Pakistani state, artists in that place had worked in a variety of styles, from traditional Mughal paintings to Western-style academic oils, to village folk work. The growth of calligraphic art in Pakistan was one local outcome of the pressure from official Islam. Major artists were encouraged to incorporate calligraphy in their work, particularly notable being Shakir Ali’s (1914-75) and Sadequain’s (1923-87) work in the Lahore Public Library in 1966.70 Others followed, and the practice is reproduced in texts on Pakistani art.71 Two are included in the 1997 book on the fifty years of art in the country by academics Salima Hashmi and Quddus Mirza. 72 However, in this text,roughly one-third (twenty-one) are purely ‘abstract’ images, ranging from tight, highly constructed compositions to the generously brushed swathe of colour more in line with Abstract Expressionism - indicating the breadth of impact of Western abstraction on Pakistan, either from the UK and Europe or from America.73

The specific influence of American art is intriguing. There is a cliché of Pakistani art history that Marcella C. Sirhandi puts in this way: that Karachi artist Ismail Gulgee (1926-2007) embarked “on the most daring artistic experiment since partition” when he met American artist Elaine Hamilton (1920-2010), in 1960, and saw her New York school art, which “overwhelmed the art community”, and him (see fig. App.11).74 Gulgee “traded his realistic portraits of foreign nobility and Pakistani aristocrats, for the freely splashed, paint-dripped canvases of his newly found mentor. Within a few years his non-figurative dabs of paint

69 The National Cultural Congress of 1971 declared Malay and Islam as the basis of national culture. 70 The zenith for this art was reached in the 1970s with the Islamic Summit held in Lahore in 1974 including a calligraphy competition and in 1976 a calligraphy symposium and exhibition in Karachi (see Sirhandi, 1997: 21). After the military coup of Zia- ul-Haq in 1977 the Islamic cause gained even greater weight, discussed by Salima Hashmi in 2005 (169 in particular), with calligraphy marked as “an appropriate genre for promoting cultural identity”. 71 Shakir Ali and Sadequain were notable for their Beit ul Qu’ran mural almost totally of calligraphic writing, in the Punjab Public Library in Lahore. Others who included calligraphy are Hanif Ramay (1941-2000, Hashmi, 1997: 36), Ahmed Khan (b. 1939, Mirza, 1997: 48-9; Hassan 1991: 117), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (Mirza, 1997: 154-5; Hassan 1991: 117), Iqbal Jafree (b. 1939, Hassan, 1991: 115), and A.J. Shemza (1928-1985, Hashmi, 1997: 21; Hassan, 1991: 67). Araeen, in Mirza 1997: 125, himself drew two Ethnic Drawings, in 1982, of faces made of calligraphic loops. 72 Hashmi, 1997 and Mirza, 1997. 73 Salima Hashmi calls Zubaida Agha the “doyen of Pakistani abstraction” (1997: 22) and her influences were, after the 1940s, from France and the UK. Sirhandi, 1997: 20, notes that even calligraphy of A.J. Shemza was influenced not by Islam but by . 74 Sirhandi, 1997: 20. 290 evolved into calligraphic inspired works of art – bold, colourful and glittery”.75 Every history of Pakistani art includes this information. Hamilton’s exhibition is always quoted, but it is alone as the one example of American abstract expressionism that the Pakistani artists saw locally. She was a significant American artist, exhibiting in a number of Venice Biennales, but there is never a whisper that the American government was behind this in any text. She exhibited at the Pakistan Arts Council, and had been attracted to Pakistan for its access to mountaineering sites, a sport in which she was involved. Despite the close association of Pakistan and the US from early in the 1950s there are few other references to cultural exchange.76 The tour of the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1958, which included Pakistan and Bangladesh amongst a number of other countries of the region, stands out, as does the building of a new American Embassy in Karachi in 1960, a modernist work by that reflects the flat, gestural nature of the new abstraction.77 However, few artists went to the USA to study, unlike the ubiquity of study in the UK. Was this just selective reporting? Or was the American government, in this case and at this time, casual about its cultural diplomacy in Pakistan?

A relevant discussion has been raised by UK-based artist and writer Rasheed Araeen, arguing that Islamic calligraphy is oppositional to Abstract Expressionism, writing it is “contemplative, which is opposite of the gestural angst of … The meeting of Islamic calligraphy and action painting is like a meeting of two opposing forces; they cannot be fused without going through a confrontation out of which must emerge a synthesis.”78 This is where words about art movements confuse rather than clarify, as much Abstract Expressionism is about contemplation, and meditation, and the urge to find a depth of personal meaning within the immaterial, as is the case for Islamic calligraphy or a sense of Islamic abstraction. Araeen, referring to Gulgee’s work, says such a synthesis is not reached, as any reference to calligraphy is an “illusion”.79 One Pakistani writer who would think this has not been reached more generally is Ijaz ul Hassan, writing in Painting in Pakistan in 1991: “Abstract art in Pakistan is expressive of an overall economic and cultural dependence on the west” and is similar to the colonial attitude of expecting copying rather than to express their “individual experience”.80 Despite abstraction still being practised in Pakistan, today, twenty years after the fifty-year anniversary text noted above, the majority of curatorial and critical responses both internally and internationally - through invitational exhibitions, biennales and touring projects - are

75 Sirhandi, 1997: 20. Hashmi, 1997: 38, calls Gulgee a “star in the firmament of Pakistani art”. It is no surprise that this ‘international’ style so taken up by Gulgee gained hold in the port city of Karachi rather than the more traditional Mughal centre of Lahore. Others in this mode include Bashir Mirza (1941-2000) also in Karachi (see Hassan 1991, 97-100), Muhammad Kibria (1929- 2011, see Hassan, 1991: 113-4) and Kamil Khan Mumtaz (see Hassan 1991: 118). 76 Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941-99), another leading artist of the country, had studied in the USA in the late 1980s and his shaped canvases variously followed, says Sirhandi (1997: 24) “the current fashion with American avant-garde painters of New York” but these are small and passing comments only. 77 See: http://curbed.com/archives/2015/07/02/constructing-americas-image-the-modernist-embassies-of-the-cold-war.php (accessed 15 September, 2015). 78 Araeen, 2008. 79 Araeen, 2008. 80 Hassan, 1991: 103. 291 focused on figurative work (often based on locally-inspired Mughal traditions) with reference to neither Russian nor American imagery.

A similar history can be seen in Malaysia, although the links to the USA are in fact more overt. An extension of Ismail Zain’s remarks noted in Chapter 1 about the importance of this American art are texts on Malaysian art written in the 1980s and 1990s which almost always acknowledge the influence of Abstract Expressionism. Eminent artist (and then Director of the National Gallery) Syed Ahmad Jamal (1929-2011,fig. App. 12) wrote in 1988 (including, it should be noted, various abstract artists under his rubric, and making an unusual link with colonial watercolours):

The Merdeka artists of the fifties and sixties subscribed mainly to the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism. The immediacy and mystical quality of the mainstream art of the 1960s appealed particularly to the Malaysian temperament, sensitivity, and cultural heritage. With the tradition of calligraphy, they found in that idiom the ideal means of expression. Malaysian artists developed a rapport with the bold gestures of Kline, Soulages, Hartung, Mathiew, Sugai and the delicate cryptic gestures of Zou- wuki…. Abstract Expressionism (and Action Painting), the mainstream force in the sixties, was a catharsis, a direct form of release. Abstract Expressionism was not in reality a borrowed idiom. It was a natural development from the loose atmospherics of the early watercolors of Malaysia. 81

Critic T.K. Sabapathy, in 1996, writes of Jamal “unabashedly” yoking independence with wondrous realms, “universal in appeal” for artists, a position Jamal “maintained consistently”.82

Again, as in Pakistan, the colonial experience meant many Malaysian artists turned first to the UK and its European neighbours and later to the USA initially for teachers and then travel and training. It is notable that the lack of official exhibition space (until the opening of a new National Art Gallery in the 1980s) prevented much display of exhibitions of overseas art and even then most foreign work shown was from other Asian countries.83 However, a number of influential Malaysian artists of the last three decades had studied in the USA, Suleiman Esa

81 Jamal, 1988: np 82 Sabapathy, 1996: 35. 83 See Jamal, 1988: np. An exhibition of British art was shown in 1986 that included Peter Blake (b. 1932), Patrick Caulfield (1936- 2005), Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), Patrick Heron (1920-99), David Hockney (b. 1937), Allen Jones (b. 1937) and Bridget Riley (b. 1931). 292

(b.1941), Chew Teng Beng (b. 1938), Wong Hoy Cheong (b.1960),84 Hasnul Jamal Saidon (b.1965) and Fauzan Omar (b. 1951) among them, and information on the American style was well known.

The question is how Malaysian artists adapted the strains of local ‘abstraction’ - whether Islamic ideology, or Chinese calligraphy or traditional patterning – with western Abstraction, and how important was it. Many artists did work in this received Western mode – Jamal’s words were influential.85 However, Malaysians today are keen to argue for its localization,86 and, certainly, well known ‘abstract’ artists like Fauzan Omar and Suleiman Esa clearly show nativist traditions from East Malaysia for the former and from mystical religious thinking for the latter, beyond what they would have seen and imbibed in the USA, and this work remains of interest outside Malaysia. As in Pakistan, it is increasingly clear that the art that interests most international critics and curators draws on these local influences, whether from East Malaysia, or from immigrant stories, or from, indeed, Islamic iconography.87

Indonesia has, like India, taken its own independent political course in post-colonial times, plus the size of the archipelago and the lack of facilities for showing major exhibitions, even in Jakarta, has meant that American art was known in the urban centres but did not have the same impact as in other countries discussed. Equally, Islamic art has struggled to take the hearts and minds of the energized art-world that was so politically motivated from the 1970s.

However, the tentacles of the Cold War stretched to Java where the general comment is that the European/Western focused art school established in Bandung in 1947 became the site of the art-for-art’s sake individualist - and soon abstractionist - focus, and the politically charged school established two years later in Yogyakarta turned to local, communal sensibilities. Virginia Hooker has written that Ahmad Sadali (1924-87, fig. App. 13), the ‘founder’ of abstraction in Indonesia, was painting during the 1950s and so “seems earlier than the main impact from the US. However Sadali had been in the US in the 1950s so the US connection

84 As has been said, this thesis is not encyclopaedic in intention. If it was, Wong’s involvement with socialism and his work for the People’s Justice Party would be included more overtly.Turner and Webb (2016, 41) discuss his interest in this socio-political stream. 85 In the National Art Gallery exhibition of 1988 (see Jamal, 1988) works by Chew Teng Beng (no.6), Chen Sun Chung (b. 1935, no.10), Yusuf Ghani (b. 1950, no.14), Ibrahim Hussein (1936-2009, no.16), Syed Ahmad Jamal (no. 18), Abdul Latiff Mohidin (b. 1938, no.25), Fauzan Omar (no.28), Anuar Rashid (b. 1958, no. 31), Sharifah Fatimah Syed Zubir (b. 1948, no. 33), Ahmad Khalid Yusof (1934-97, no. 41) all show elements related to abstraction at least is some respects coming from the West. Even in 2012 Malaysian artist Eric Quah still calls himself an ‘abstract expressionist’, see http://artradarjournal.com/2012/01/04/malaysian- abstract-expressionist-eric-quahs-penang-retrospective (accessed 20 February, 2015). 86 Academics like Sarena Abdullah (2013) are focused on arguing that Abstract Expressionism was accepted, adapted and transformed into local culture though the artists’ response to specific subject matter, both of literal landscape and of Islamic sources, particularly texts. 87 An example is the selection of Malaysian work for the Asia Pacific Triennial over the last twenty years: APT 1 included two abstract artists (including Esa, and also Chew Teng Beng, who had studied in Michigan from 1967-72 as is noted above) and four figurative artists; APT 2 included one abstract artist (Fauzan Omar) and four figurative ones; APT 3 one abstract and two figurative; none in APT 4, and all recent APTs have just included (fewer and fewer in total) figurative artists (see catalogues 1993-13). 293 might still have been very influential.”88 Srihadi Soedarsono (b. 1931), the most famous abstract artist of the period, associated with the Bandung school, had gone to Ohio State University in 1960, with, as Amir Sidharta says, “America and Abstract Expressionism…the natural destinations” for his development.89 A.D. Pirous (b.1932), as Hooker writes “Indonesia’s most famous exponent of Islamic art”, had studied in America on a two-year Rockefeller Fellowship in 1969, and seen the Islamic collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art to which he responded as if it was “part of my own body”.90 He could not have ignored the Abstract Expressionism around him, at its height during his stay, which lent its size and colour to the background of his textual works.

In the Philippines, Malaysia, and Pakistan the locally-published art books of the modern era all pay attention to this style, demonstrating its ubiquity and how dearly it was adopted.91 Foreign art histories of these countries, ambivalent at best about the work at its most extreme nexus to the New York school (and where it has not translated into local tropes), tend to pass over it.

c. Japan and Korea

The Japanese and Korean cultural worlds, with overt US presence from immediate post-War times to 1951 in Japan and in Korea through the 1950s struggled to emerge after wartime trauma, though the mantra of the day, especially in Japan, was to turn towards a new, youthful, confronting world. The Americans were sending exhibitions to each; however, the artists of both places saw more in common with the intellectual conceptual abstraction of Europe, of individuals like Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) and movements like Art Informel, rather than with America.

European Art Informel in Korea was studied with great interest from the 1950s, though the argument even here is that a style similar to Art Informel emerged in Korea based on local rather than overseas impetus.92 The post-War ‘abstract’ movement in Korea has been ably

88 Virginia Hooker, noted Malaysian scholar, email to author, 29 March 2013. 89 Sidharta, 1999: 49. 90 Hooker, 2013: 68. 91 An example is the major text ART Philippines, 1992, which devotes much space to the abstract works, and argues that “minimalism liberated the Filipino artist from the ornamental excesses of his essentially baroque sensibility” (Reyes, 1992: 258). 92 Woo Hyesoo, ‘Preface’ Postwar Abstract Art in Korea and the West, 2000, Seoul: Ho Am Art Gallery: 17, 20-21. Woo clarifies that the purpose of the exhibition, for which this publication was made, was to analyse the impact of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism in Europe and America after the Second World War and on Korean painters following the Korean War “approximately a decade afterwards”, focused on 1957-8 in Korea as a turning point. He argues that Korean art of the 1960s was more influenced by Art Informel because of its inherent gloominess, coming from experiences of the War, than the American more buoyant work. He also acknowledges the debate in Korea “that Korean Informel had no connection to the artistic currents of the time and only accidently shows a relationship with Western trends…while another view, quite critically, sees only the servility or the imitative nature of Korean art in relation to the West”. Roe Jae-ryung quotes artist Park Seo-bo denying having been influenced by foreign art modes, talking about the difficulty of access to foreign material during the 1950s. Park was, writes Roe, “shown an article written by the French art critic Michel Tapié in the Japanese publication Mizue and it was only then that he realised that what he and a couple of artist friends were doing was also being done in Europe under the name of Informel”(see Roe Jae-ryung, 2001: 34). 294 documented by the Ho-Am Art Gallery, part of the Samsung group, in its exhibition Postwar Abstract Art in Korea and the West: Passion and Expression, held in Seoul in 2000, with Kim Youngna clarifying the elision of the word ‘informel’ for anything modern and abstract, including work that is closer to Abstract Expressionism.93 She raises the issue of local Art Informel, writing “Informel was not simply an uncritical acceptance of Western art, but a selective one, involving the rediscovery of our own cultural roots. In contrast to this, it is of note that Pop Art that was born in the context of mass consumer society after Abstract Expressionism in America had virtually no influence on Korea.”94 Kim cites the avenues Koreans had to see such work in the early days, including an Exhibition of American Art Students in 1956, an exchange with Minnesota in 1958, and the 1957 exhibition American Modern Painters and Sculptors, which included work by Tobey and Morris Graves (1910-2001), as well as access to American magazines. By the early 1960s artists were travelling to America, including Choi Wuk-kyung (1940-85), Chun Sung-woo (b.1934) and Lee Soo-jai (b.1933), and returning with “direct influence of American Abstract Expressionism” but this work, during the 1960s became repetitive and lost its “sense of liveliness”.95 This preamble to ‘abstraction’ in Korea and the argument for the influence of indeed either the Americans or the Europeans on the art there is given because it now becomes more complex - around the word ‘abstraction’. Kim Youngna is among Koreans who do not see the next school of art in Korea, an important one growing from the 1970s and still much admired, called Monochrome, or Dansaekhwa, as abstract. She sees it - as Rothko said his paintings were not abstract – as full of subject around matter and spirituality, investigating the natural world.96

In Korea the paintings made in this style of Dansaekhwa are of significance, turning back to the spare aesthetic of an old Confucian visualisation of the world, all reduced to monochrome pigmentation, and often with a focus on the process of making work – pushing paint through from the back for example, an act in accordance with Buddhhist rituals (fig. App.14). Kim Yi- soon, in Artlink 2015, describes the spirituality and emotion of this movement, in contrast to Western abstraction.97 Yoon Jin Sup sees the Korean work as an “invitation of the dead” or calling back the spirit to the present.98 To a foreigner steeped in Western ways they seem a result of American abstraction (they are large, and on canvas),99 but this is not convincingly

93 Kim Youngna, 2000: 40. 94 Kim Youngna, 2000: 43. 95 Kim Youngna, 2000: 41. She transcribes Lee Soo-jai as Lee Su-je. 96 Kim Youngna, 2000: 44. Lee Yil wrote of artist Shim Moon-Seup’s work in the Adelaide Installations exhibition of 1994: “The wood in his sculptures retains its natural essence; it lives a life formed of its own accord. We are able to experience, to conjecture, the providence of nature in the work’s inherent life”: see Adelaide Installations, Adelaide Festival 1994: 38. 97 Kim Yi-soon, 2015, ‘A short guide to modern and contemporary art in Korea’ in Artlink, 35:4, 14. Kim writes this work was a contrast to “the Western style of flat surface perceived as too mechanical and cold” and that the Koreans put “great emphasis on repeated strokes of the paint on canvas, considering this to be a process of emptying out worldly desires and capturing the heart”. 98 Yoon Jin Sup, 2015, ‘The world of Dansaekhwa; Spirit, tactility and performance’ in Artlink, 35: 4, 38. He describes the “moral and physical training of Taoism and Buddhism” reflected in the work (39). 99 Curator Ahn Soyeon has described parallels of “the abstract expressionist methods of expressing existential angst via bodily gestures and the notion of ilpil hwiji (dashing off with one stroke of the brush) of East Asian calligraphy” (see Carroll, 2010, 131), 295 true.100 A Korean growing up in this milieu who took his ideas to Japan was Lee U-fan (b.1936), becoming founder of the Mono-ha movement of the 1960s and continuing to describe this same idea of a universe in which man is insignificant, the importance of materials, and the passing of all things in his work.101

As noted, the Japanese had closer sympathetic - and real - links to the new European conceptual art than to the American big abstract painting school.102 They valued ‘anti-matter’, the energy of the spirit within the artist and his or her action, the ‘presence of absence’ and a different valuing of objects in space. Despite the large American personnel numbers post-War in Japan, exchanges being held with the Sogetsu Art Center, the touring of Two Decades of American Art in 1968, and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and John D Rockefeller III who initiated cultural engagement projects visiting, the style of Abstract Expressionism itself hardly impinged.103 The large abstract canvases of the New York school were not emulated.104

***

The central argument of this Appendix is that none of these non-Asian styles – European Academicism; the isms of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism et al; the Latino influence from Central America; and North American abstraction – had an impact on Asian art equal to Socialist Realism. Such a statement is difficult to quantify, but through analysis of the internal impact of each of these other styles, the internal and external evaluation of this in each place, and their longevity, relevance and import today, the depth and strength of Socialist but this goes back to the relationships that Pollock et al had themselves with East Asian calligraphy, and thought. Indeed Helen Frankenthaler said her work with colour was its interaction into the surface of the canvas: that she made works drawn of colour rather than in colour (see After Mountain and Sea; Frankenthaler 1956-1959, 1998, Guggenheim: 21). Barnett Newman’s (1905- 70) large works enable the audience to step into them. Irving Sandler in ‘The Will to Renewal’ in Two Decades of American Painting, 1967, np, writes “Rothko, Still and Newman simplify and enlarge their formats to intensify the impact of colour. The huge size of their canvases also creates an environment, a special space that physically isolates the spectator from his usual surroundings.” 100 Indeed, Roe Jae-ryung writes of the success of the Korean Artists: 5 Variations on White exhibition held in Tokyo in 1975, leading to Japanese art critics acknowledging such works as “a fresh new wave of modern abstraction in the Far East” as a “uniquely native Korean variant of minimalism” see Roe Jae-ryung 2001: 39. 101 As recorded by this author in A Journey Through Asian Art, episode 8, Raw Materials, 2014, http://youtu.be/BCr48pJxjzg. 102 See Kim Youngna, 2000: 38-9. She cites the Salon de Mai in 1951 in Tokyo, the World: Today’ Art Exhibition in 1956 and the visit of Michel Tapié (1909-87), Sam Francis (1923-94), Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) to Japan in 1957. 103 Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still’s work had been seen in Tokyo as early as 1951 and Willem de Kooning and Adolph Gottlieb by 1956 (see Kim Youngna, 2000: 38). See the previous description of the much later collecting of large Abstract Expressionist and other American works by the public museums, in that case by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. 104 A discussion about the “ambivalent relationship” between Japan and the USA is recorded in 2012 In Search of a New Narrative of Postwar Japanese Art, between curators Katsuo Suzuki and Yuji Maeyama recalling 1970s exchanges, including noting the early publishing of Susan Sontag’s books (95), but it does not include any reference to Abstract Expressionism or any other American movement impacting on Japanese visual art.

296

Realism remains, a situation as surprising and sometimes hard to acknowledge as this is for a Westerner steeped in one side of the Cold War.

297

Index of artists Castiglione, Giuseppe (1688-1766) Castillo, Orlando (b. 1947) Abedin, Zainul (1914-76) Caulfield, Patrick (1936-2005) Abueva, Napoleon (b. 1930) Chagall, Marc (1887-1985) Adipurnomo, Nindityo (b. 1961) Chakravorty, Ramendranath (1902-55) Adlivankin, Samuil Y. (1897-1966) Chen Daqing (1936-77) Affandi (1907-90) Chen Sun Chung (b. 1935) Aguinaldo, Lee (1933-2007) Chen Wen Hsi (1906-91) Ai-Mitsu (1907-46) Chen Yifei (1946-2005) Ai Zhongxin (1915-2003) Chen Zhen (1955-2000) Albers, Josef (1888-1976) Chen Zunsan (b. 1929) Ali, Shakir (1914-75) Chen, Georgette (1907-93) Alibasjah, Rusli (1916-2005) Cheong Soo Pieng (1917-83) Alvarado, Nunelucio, (b.1950) Chew Teng Beng (b. 1938) Ang Kiukok (1931-2005) Chistyakov, Pavel P. (1832-1919) Annigoni, Pietro (1910-88) Choi Wuk-kyung (1940-85) Antonov, Fedor V. (1904-90) Chong Yongman (1938-99) Apotik Komik (est. 1997) Choo Keng Kwang (b. 1931) Aquilizan, Alfredo and Isabel (b. 1962 and1965) Chowdhury, Deviprosad Roy (1899-1975) Arahmaiani (b. 1961) Christanto, Dadang (b. 1957) Arellano, Agnes (b. 1949) Christo (b. 1935) Ash, Gobardhan (1907-96) Chua Mia Tee (b. 1931) Avilov, Mikhail I. (1882-1954) Chuah Thean Teng (1912-2008) (U) Ba Nyan (1897-1945) Chun Sung-woo (b.1934) Ba Tuong Co, Charlie (b. 1960) Bai Yiluo (b. 1968) Counihan, Noel (1913-86) Baij, Ramkinkar (1906-80) Covarrubias, Miguel (1904-57) Ball, Sydney (b. 1933) Cuizon, Noel (b. 1962) Bartolome, Herber (b. 1948) D., S. Teddy (1970-2016) Baselitz, Georg (b. 1938) Dalena, Danilo (b. 1942) (The) Beggarstaff Brothers (1894-9) Darmawan, Ade (b. 1974) Bendi, I Wayan (b. 1950) De Asis, Papo (b. 1949) Bergner, Yosl (b. 1920) de Kooning, Willem (1904-97) Bernardo, Constancio (1913-2003) Deineka, Aleksandr A. (1899-1969) Bhattacharya, Chittaprosad (1915-78) Delotavo, Antipas (b. 1954) Blake, Peter (b. 1932) Denisov, Viktor N. known as Deni (1893-1946) Bonyong Munni Ardhi (b. 1946) Deng Shu (b. 1929) Boonma, Montien (1953-2000) Dey, Mukul (1895-1989) Borlongan, Elmer (b. 1967) Diego, Demetrio (1909-88) Bose, Biswarup (b. c. 1910) Ding Mou-long Bose, Nandalal (1882-1966) Dine, Jim (b. 1935) Bose, Santiago (1949-2002) Dinh Ru (b. 1937) Bourgeois, Louise (1911-2010) Doloricon, Leonilo (b.1957) Brodsky, Isaak I. (1884-1939) Domingo, Damian (1796-1834) Bubnov, Aleksandr P. (1908-64) Dong Xiwen (1914-73) Bui Xuan Phai (1920-88) Dong Zuzhao Burn, Ian (1939-93) Dono, Heri (b. 1960) Bulatov, Erik (b. 1933) Du Jie (b. 1968) Buzacott, Nutter (1905-76) Dubuffet, Jean (1901-85) Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957) Dullah (1919-96) Cai Liang (1932-95) Duong Dang Can (b. 1928) Cai Ruohong (1910-2002) Dwyer, Mikala (b.1959) Cajipe-Endaya, Imelda (b. 1949) Dyson, Ambrose (1876-1913) Cao Chunsheng (b. 1960) Dyson, (Edward) Ambrose (1908-52) Castaneda, Dominador (1904-67) Echeistov, Georgy A. (1897-1946)

298

Edades, Victorio (1895-1985) He Jie (b. 1977) Efanov, Vasili P. (1900-78) He Kongde (b. 1925) Ely, Bonita (b.1946) He Youzhi (b. 1922) Endo Toshikatsu (b. 1950) Heron, Patrick (1920-99) Emjaroan, Pratuang (b. 1935) Hidalgo, Félix Resurrección (1855-1913) Esa, Suleiman (b. 1941) Hockney, David (b. 1937) Evseev, Sergei A. (1882-1955) Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) Fairweather, Ian (1891-1974) Hodler, Ferdinand (1853-1918) Fajardo, Brenda (b.1940) Hogarth, William (1697-1764) Fang Lijun (b. 1963) Hogg, Geoff (b. 1950) Favorsky, Vladimir A. (1886-1964) Hore, Somnath (1921-2006) Feng Chen Hou Yimin (b. 1930) Fernandez, Edgar (b. 1955) Hua Tianyou (1902-86) Flavin, Dan (1933-96) Huang Huacheng (b. 1986) Flores, Karen (b. 1966) Huang Xinbo (1916-80) Fontana, Lucio (1899-1968) Hunter, Robert (1947-2014) Francis, Sam (1923-94) Husain, M.F. (1915-2011) Francisco, Carlos (Botong) (1912-69) Husein, Saleh (b. 1982) Frankenthaler, Helen (1928-2011) Hussain, Ibrahim (1936-2009) Fu Baoshi (1904-65) Huy Oanh (b. 1937) Fujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) Hyland, Frederick Galang, Marciano (b. 1945) Iacovleff, Alexandre Y. (1887-1938) Gangooly, J.P. (1876-1953) Inguimberty, Joseph (1896-1971) Gao Quan (b. 1936) Ioganson, Boris V. (1893-1973) Garibay, Emmanuel (b. 1962) Ishigaki Eitaro (1893-1958) Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903) Jaasma, Mella (b. 1960) Gembel Art Collective (est. 2003) Jacks, Robert (1943-2014) Gerasimov, Aleksandr M. (1881-1963) Jafree, Iqbal (b. 1939) Ghani, Yusuf (b. 1950) Jamal, Syed Ahmad (1929-2011) Glazunov, Ilya (b. 1939) Jiang Feng (1910-82) Goncharova, Natalia S. (1881-1962) Jiang Zhaohe (1904-86) Gorky, Arshile (1904-48) Jin Shangyi (b. 1934) Gottlieb, Adolph (1903-74) Jin Zhiyuan (1930-84) Graves, Morris (1910-2001) Jones, Allen (b. 1937) Gu Wenda (b. 1955) Joya, José (1931-95) Gu Yuan (1919-96) Judd, Donald (1928-94) Guan Shanyue (1912-2000) Julien, Isaac (b. 1960) Gujral, Satish (b. 1925) Justiniani, Mark (b. 1966) Gulgee, Ismail (1926-2007) Kabakov, Ilya (b. 1933) Gunawan, Hendra (1918-83) Kandinsky, Vasily V. (1866-1944) Gupta, Manindra Bhushan (1898-1968) Kapoor, Anish (b. 1954) Gurvich, Iosif M. (1907-93) Kar, Surendranath (1892-1970) Ha Chong-hyun (b. 1935) Katsman, Evgeny A. (1890-1976) Hahan (Uji Handoko Eko Saputro) (b. 1983) Kelly, Ellsworth (1923-2015) Hamilton, Elaine (1920-2010) Kerton, Sudjana (1922-94) Hamilton, Richard (1922-2011) Khan, Ahmed (b. 1939) Hara, Eddie (b. 1957) Kibria, Mohammad (1929-2011) Harada Naojiro (1863-99) Kim Kwan-ho (1890-1959) Hardi (b. 1951) Kim Soun-gui (b. 1946) Hardy, Dudley (1867-1922) Kishida, Ryusei (1891-1929) Hariyanto, Hedi (b. 1962) Kitaoka Fumio (1918-2007) Harsono, F.X. (b. 1949) Klindukhov, Nikolai N. (b. 1916) Hartini, Lucia (b. 1959) Klippel, Robert (1920-2001) Hassell, John (1868-1948) Kluge, Alex (b. 1932) Hastings, Gail (b.1965) Koeh Sia Yong (b. 1938)

299

Koga Harue (1895-1933) Luna, Juan (1857-99) Kollwitz, Käthe (1867-1945) Luo Gongliu (1916-2004) Komar, Vitaly A. (b. 1943) and Aleksandr D. Luz, Arturo (b.1926) Melamid (b. 1945) McMahon, Marie (b. 1953) Konyonkov, Sergei T. (1874-1971) Ma Changli (b. 1931) Koretsky, Viktor B. (1909-98) Mackinolty, Chips (b.1954) Korzhev-Chuvelev, Geliy (1925-2012) Magsaysay Ho, Anita (1914-2012) Kosolapov, Alexander (b. 1943) Maksimov, Konstantin M. (1913-93) Krasner, Lee (1908-84) Malevich, Kazimir S. (1879-1935) Kravchenko, Aleksei I. (1889-1940) Malyutin, Ivan A. (1891/9-1932) (The) Kukryniksy (est. 1924) Mangold, Robert (b.1937) Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924) Manizer, Matvei G. (1891-1966) Kurniawan, Agung (b. 1968) Manizer, Otto M. (b.1929) Larionov, Mikhail F. (1881-1964) Manrique, Al (b. 1949) Leang Seckon (b. 1974) Mantofani, Rudi (b. 1973) Le Duan (1907-86) Marden, Brice (b. 1938) Le Huy Mien (1873-1943) Masriadi, I Nyoman (b. 1973) Le Huy Tiep (b. 1951) Mathieu, Georges (1921-2012) Le Lam (b. 1931) Matisse, Henri (1869-1954) Le Pho (1907-2001) Maughan, Jack (1897-1980) Le Thanh Duc (1925-2004) McClintock, Rem (1901-69) Le Thanh Minh (b. 1954) McLennan, Azlan (b. 1975) Leano, Antonio (b. 1963) Miao Xiaochun (b. 1964) Lebedev, Vladimir V. (1891-1967) Miller, Godfrey (1893-1964) Lee Boon Wang (b.1934) Milliss, Ian (b. 1950) Lee Soo-eok Minh Phuong Lee Soo-jai (b.1933) Mirna, Nanik (1952-2010) Leete, Alfred (1882-1933) Miró, Juan (1893-1983) Lendon, Nigel (b. 1944) Mirza, Bashir (1941-2000) Li Hua (1907-94) Mitrokhin, Dmitry I. (1883-1973) Li Qi (1928-2009) Miyamoto Saburo (1905-74) Li Qun (1912-2012) Moffatt, Tracey (b. 1960) Li Shan (b. 1944) Moelyono (b. 1957) Li Shiqing (b. 1908) Mohidin, Abdul Latiff (b. 1938) Li Songsong (b. 1973) Monet, Claude (1840-1926) Li Tianxiang (b. 1928) Moon Hak-jin (b. 1924) Lichtenstein, Roy (1923-97) Moor, Dmitri (Dmitri S. Orlov 1883-1946) Lim Hak Tai (1893-1963) Mori, Mariko (b. 1967) Lim Yew Kuan (b. 1928) Morovov, Aleksandr N. Lin Fengmian (1900-91) Morris, Robert (b.1931) Lin Gang (b. 1925) Morris, William (1834-96) Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961) Mukherjee, B.B. (1904-80) Lin Yong (b. 1942) Mukhina, Vera I. (1889-1953) Lissitzky, El (Lazar Markovich) (1890-1941) Murayama Kaita (1896-1919) Lissitzky-Küppers, Sophie (1891-1978) My Trinh Liu Chunhua (b. 1944) Mylnikov, Andrei A. (1919-2012) Liu Ding (b. 1976) Nagata Isshu (1903-88) Liu Haisu (1896-1994) Nakhova, Irina (b. 1955) Liu Kaiqu (1904-93) Nalbandyan, Dmitri A. (1906-93) Liu Kang (1911-2004) Newman, Barnett (1905-70) Liu Wenxi (b. 1933) Newmarch, Ann (b.1945) Lorenzo, Diosdado (1906-83) Ngantung, Henk (1921-91) Louis, Morris (1912-62) Ngo Manh Lau Lü Shengzhong (b. 1952) Nguyen Bich Lu Yifan (b. 1967) Nguyen Cong Do (b. 1930)

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: CARROLL, ALISON

Title: An examination of the significance of Soviet Socialist Realist art and practice in the Asia Pacific region

Date: 2016

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/129832

File Description: Redacted version

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