This paper aims to examine political expression in Chinese landscape paintings between 1949 and 1976, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ended after Mao Zedong’s death. Since the est...
This paper aims to examine political expression in Chinese landscape paintings between 1949 and 1976, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ended after Mao Zedong’s death. Since the establishment of the PRC, its government carried out a social reformation in diverse aspects in an effort to build a socialist state, including that of art according to the political situation.
Theoretical guidelines of the Republic’s art policy were based on the Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art led by Mao Zedong, which originated in 1942. It was mainly concerned with the idea that art should unite and educate the people and be served for the people. Mao Zedong defined art as a political instrument and asserted that politics should take precedence over art. He further suggested that socialist-realism should be the principle of art to be pursued. Based upon his theories, the government carried out a daring reform in general parts of art, including education, exhibition, publication, organization, etc., in order to perform the government’s policy in a systematic manner.
In the case of landscape painting, the central reformation concerned the application of the subject and style of socialist-realism to the traditional material and technique of Chinese painting, which was quite difficult to follow in many cases of literati paintings, unlike in the case of realistic oil paintings. With the new demands to follow, traditional painters combined the optimistic subjects that reflect the coming new era and realistic Western techniques.
Political expression in the landscape paintings of the PRC can be divided according to their subjects, political settings and objects, as it is a reflection of the current of time with major political events. Firstly, from the establishment of the PRC until 1958, around the time of the Great Leap Forward, there was a prevalence of propaganda paintings that promoted the construction of an idealistic socialist state. These landscape paintings included a kind of documentary landscape that depicted the process of public construction, a landscape that represented the people’s passion for building a socialist state, or a landscape that publicized the result of constructional projects. These were aimed at idealizing government’s policies to make people to pursue them, and also at overstating them to produce an effective result as it had been done with the Great Leap Forward by portraying it as a model of success. In the late 1950s and the early part of the 1960s, many landscape paintings were either based on the poems of Mao Zedong or depicted places that are historically important in relation to Mao Zedong’s life or communist revolution. This was to emphasize that Mao Zedong, the second man since the failure of the Great Leap Forward, was the central figure in the Communist Revolution and the leading figure of the Long March, in order to consolidate his position in the Party by raising his legitimacy and also to raise the memories of the Long March. In many of these landscapes intentionally used red which was the symbol of Communist Party and the Revolution. Lastly, landscape paintings were produced that idealized an optimistic Chinese utopia during the period of the Cultural Revolution. As the Revolutionary Romanticism which exaggerates optimistic sides was emphasized by Mao Zedong, these landscapes depicted the changes of the land by Mao’s revolutionary constructions and beautified the lives of the people living in the transformed nature.
Political landscape painting between 1949 and 1976 is significant in that it is a distinctive genre that retains the traditional technique and material while accommodating socialist art and maintaining the unique characteristics of Chinese paintings, yet reflecting the demands of time.