Newsweek: "Collective Identity" Exhibit at the University of Hong Kong

The Revolution Lives
Memories of China's Cultural Revolution have forged some of its most provacative contemporary art.

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By Alexandra A. Seno
Newsweek

Sept. 3, 2007 issue - Today’s China was forged with revolt, revolution, blood and dreams. Paramount to understanding the future direction of the country and its hyperactive contemporary art scene is the appreciation of the byways the nation has traveled. Those under 50–which would be most Chinese—only know of the turbulent ten years from 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, to 1976, when Mao Zedong died, as other people’s memories: film clips, pictures, propaganda posters, paintings.

Yet that decade has become the most compelling narrative running through the mainland’s cultural scene today. "Collective Identity: From the Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art" is a delightfully provocative exhibit that's showing now—until Sept. 2—at the University of Hong Kong. Organized and curated by Jiang Jiehong of the United Kingdom's UCE Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, it's one of these great little shows to be experienced only in Hong Kong: it's sophisticated, nuanced, uncensored and a reflective discussion about China. It explores the Cultural Revolution’s profound power over the present by juxtaposing vintage black and white news pictures with a video, paintings, and fine art photography from the last 10 years or so.

In a multitude of ways, the Cultural Revolution–not to be confused with the economically disasterous Great Leap Forward which came before it—was the last major hurrah for Mao and his personal brand of communism. He made a high art out of sloganeering and his own image into a mythic symbol. Across the country, he galvanized citizens into what the University museum's curator, Tina Pang Yee-wan, calls “mass assemblies electrified with the giddy hysteria of revolution.” At these large gatherings, a nation was born again.

The show-stopper of "Collective Identity" is a wall-sized Li Songsong oil-on-aluminium work from 2006, “The Art of Manufacturing News,” in which a figure suggesting former president Jiang Zemin reviews troops from his car as the press immortalizes the moment from another vehicle. The scene resembles a photograph of a major government happening except that Li rendered sections by using separate panels, applying distinct brushstrokes and shades to each area. It is as if different camera lenses used different color filters. Aside from the officially sanctioned version, how many interpretations are there, how many layers making up historical fact? In China’s art, the revolution lives.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.