Blog - China's Withholding Artwork

2008-08-28 13:00:01

From the NY Times
China Won’t Lend Artworks to Asia Society Exhibition

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Published: August 20, 2008

China has reversed its decision to lend Asia Society nearly 100 objects from Chinese museums for an exhibition that focuses
on revolutionary Chinese art from the 1950s through the ’70s, scheduled
to open on Sept. 5 in Manhattan, the society’s president said.



Wang Huaiqing
"Long Live Gutian Spirit" (1967, a woodblock portrait by Wang Huaiqing.




The Chinese Ministry of
Culture had originally agreed to allow the society to borrow works for
the show, “Art and China’s Revolution,” promoted as among the first
comprehensive exhibitions devoted to that era and one that will examine
the effects of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution on artists and art production in China.
Despite
the Chinese government’s decision, Asia Society has decided to proceed
with the show by seeking loans from private collectors.
The
approach of the Olympics seemed to have been the deal breaker.
“Initially, they said, ‘Any loans you want; no problem,’ ” said
Vishakha N. Desai, the society’s president. “The closer it got to the
Olympics, they changed their policy.”
“It has more to do with
China’s desire and aspiration to be seen in a new light,” Ms. Desai
added. “This is a time for celebration. They don’t want to be reminded
of a difficult past.”
“To some extent, it’s better,” she said. “We don’t want ever to be seen as being sanctioned by the government.”
Asia Society was informed of the ministry’s decision in January, but
tried over the last several months to convince the Chinese government
to reconsider. “We were working to get at least some of them,” said
Melissa Chiu, the society’s museum director and a leading authority on
Chinese contemporary art. “It’s now apparent that they won’t come. We
had to think long and hard about whether to proceed. We made the
decision to go forward.”
When the ministry refused to lend the
artworks, Ms. Chiu said, she appealed for help to China’s consulate
general in New York. “They said they would see what they could do, but
we should see about postponing the show until after the Olympics,” she
recalled. “I said we couldn’t do that.”
Zhong Laizhao, China’s
cultural consul, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had not
suggested that Asia Society delay its show, but had advised Ms. Chiu to
deal with China directly. “How can I help her?” he asked. “I really
don’t know this case.”
The legacy of Mao is complicated, Asia
Society officials say, and the Cultural Revolution remains a taboo
topic, along with what some refer to as the three T’s: Tibet, Tiananmen
Square and Taiwan.
The exhibition, which will run through Jan.
11, covers the three decades after the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949. It will include large-scale oil paintings,
ink paintings, sculptures, drawings, artist sketchbooks, woodblock
prints, posters and objects from everyday life, many never before shown
in the United States.
Ms. Chiu organized the exhibition with
Zheng Shengtian, who was an artist and teacher at the Zhejiang Academy
of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) during the period covered
by the show. Critical of the Red Guards for their violence and
destruction of cultural artifacts in 1966, Mr. Zheng was imprisoned in
a detention center on campus, called a cowshed, where he and other
established artists and teachers were forced to participate in
self-criticism sessions.
“Even though this is a period many
would prefer to forget, it is nevertheless one that produced a visual
culture that continues to permeate contemporary Chinese art,” Mr. Zheng
said in a news release.
One section of the exhibition addresses
artists who went against the prevailing style, including Pan Tianshou,
Lin Fengmian, Zhao Yannian, Li Keran and Shi Lu, some of whom were
persecuted and called “black artists.”
The show also includes
works by a younger generation of contemporary artists, like Xu Bing,
Chen Danqing and Zhang Hongtu, who attribute many of their artistic
influences to their years spent in the countryside as part of their
“re-education.”
Mao started the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to
purge China of its bourgeoise elements and to advance class struggle.
The revolution also represented Mao’s effort to regain control of the
Communist Party from his rivals Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping after the Great Leap Forward. The conflict eventually devolved into a
decade-long period of power struggles and political instability.
During
the revolution, art was often used as propaganda to deliver a political
message to a mass audience. Older artists sometimes adopted
revolutionary themes; many others had their works destroyed and were
persecuted. At the same time, some younger artists aspired to have
their paintings become “model works,” mass-produced in posters and
newspapers. The Asia Society exhibition seeks to capture the varied
artistic ramifications of this political turmoil.
“It is a
project that you couldn’t stage in China,” Ms. Chiu said. “It sheds
light on a period of time that is now seeming to be forgotten.”


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