The Power of Art
Art
as Political Stratagem in China
China’s cultural history is not only one of richness and novelty, but also one of turbulence and strife. A radical power shift in the 20th Century led to utilization of the art world as a medium of political strategy that would become monumental in more ways than one. Quests for power and legitimacy governed much of the direction of China’s cultural development, and the resulting artistic creations captured it in exquisite detail as a timeline of struggles and triumphs.
Prior to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the majority of the population of China struggled under the oppression of the ruling feudal society. The greedy imperialists and landlords, who comprised only three to four percent of the population, owned almost four-fifths of the land on which the peasants worked. The landlords lived off of the rent extorted from the peasants and demanded as much as 80% of their crop, driving many of the peasants into starvation. They exploited the working class with heavy taxes and oppressed them at the expense of their own labor. What little grain the peasants were able to pay was never sufficient enough to sustain them.
The Rent Collection Courtyard is a classic example of the frustration and desperation of the oppressed laborers in the actual courtyard of former despotic landlord Liu Wen-tsai. Displayed in six scenes, life-size clay human figures recount the story of a people driven to the brink of revolution. The anguished faces, ravaged bodies and piercing eyes tell of an existence too unbearable to withstand. Finally, in 1949, the feudal society was completely overthrown under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao established the People’s Republic of China and began a reformation that would suspend all earlier ways of thinking and impart a single theme of socialism and power of the people. Mao found a way to enforce his objectives when he initiated a cultural revolution whose aim it was to achieve cultural purification. The movement made Chinese culture, including the art world, a mode of education for the advancement of socialism and fresh perceptions.
From the time Mao established the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, the People’s Republic of China, propagated by Mao’s Red Guards, set about to purge China of all intellectual and imperialist philosophies. Leaflets promoting Communism and postings of supposed counterrevolutionaries were scattered throughout the country. The Red Guards looted and set fire to the homes of alleged anti-socialists and tortured and executed former politicians, teachers and missionaries across the nation. The violence of the Red Guards reeled so far out of control that the law ceased to exist and any previous civil authority was forced to yield to their radical numbers.
The Cultural Revolution succeeded in stifling many of the Chinese artistic styles previously in place including Buddhist, Daoist, and Western art. Mao believed that art should be strictly for the service and appeal of the working people, a principle known as Maoist art. In The Rent Collection Courtyard, Mao’s recruited artists gave the peasants representation and voice where before they had none. Mao wanted the work to put a face to the cruelty of capitalism and the suffering of the working people prior to the socialist revolution. Thus, artistic expression in the Maoist era became not one of the artist, but one of a political agenda for, arguably, an equally sadistic society in which roles of the intellectuals and common people were reversed.
The political, moral, and artistic significance of the Rent Collection Courtyard makes it one of the most monumental works in Chinese history. The significance of its creation stretches beyond the boundaries of modern artistic style and technique and into the world of power struggles, moral conflict, and the constant pursuit of perfection. While the principle of Maoist art will eternally be debatable, Mao clearly demonstrated the power of art and its ability to arise hope and controversy from the masses.
Bibliography
Foreign Languages Press. Rent
collection courtyard: sculptures of oppression
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Cheek, Timothy. Mao
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Long Bow Group. Stages of History. 2003.
Morning Sun. 9 Dec. 2004.
<http://www.morningsun.org/stages/rent_courtyard_intro.html>