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Red Windows on the World

Several years ago, at his studio in Woodside, Queens, the global-contemporary artist Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) spoke frankly of his experiences as a young trainee at the high school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the early 1960s, just prior to the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76). “Everyone,” Zhang stated, “but everyone had to follow the teacher’s instructions closely to master the style of socialist realism.” As part of the usual practice, Zhang’s class was tasked to reproduce precisely the forms and dimensions of a figural sculpture with brush and paint on paper. One day, a lunch break interrupted the exercise, and students ran off to the school canteen. “But when we returned to the classroom after lunch,” Zhang recounted, “not a few of us had trouble discerning which painting was whose. You see, the paintings all looked alike.”1 Memory of this anecdote permeated my reading of Christine I. Ho’s marvelous Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China, a book that takes on the formidable task of historicizing the pedagogical and philosophical processes through which artists negotiated both socialism and creative agency in the Mao era. Foregrounding the sketch in her exploration of mass arts (dazhong wenyi, a term denoting the popularization of art for the masses), Ho contributes mightily to an emerging body of scholarship on modernism and modernity in a twentieth-century China that struggled to shape the postrevolutionary realities of implementing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cultural policy after 1949, both in and beyond the studio.2 Generally dated from the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the death of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the Mao era in China has long posed a methodological and ideological problem for sustained examinations of modern and contemporary Chinese artworks. Whereas mere decades ago, university syllabi throughout North America and Western Europe often eschewed this “thirty-year period” in classes on modern Chinese literature and art—from the reasoning that little to no art could be produced under the extremity of Maoist revolutionary didacticism—increased scholarly attention to the era now opens up exciting perspectives on twentieth-century Chinese and sinophone lived realities. This broadening of art historical scope also contributes to the cutting-edge work on late socialist or postsocialist contexts adjacent to modern and contemporary China, extending to Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, among other areas.3 Ho, who acknowledges such transnational connections throughout Drawing from Life (and explores specific case studies of socialist internationalism in chapter 6), formulates this longstanding problem with perspicacity. There is a need, she argues, to “apprehend socialist culture as generated through hybrid traditional and local references rather than as imposed irruption, as cosmopolitan and international in orientation rather than as closed isolation” (12). Indeed, a crucial shift has taken place since the late Cold War years in cultural scholarship on China, revealing greater willingness to contend with the phenomenology of mass arts; Ho’s book is a direct reflection of this shift.4 It was not uncommon for researchers of socialist visuality, not very long ago, to shy away from designating the objects under scrutiny as “art,” opting instead for the categories of cultural production, visual culture, or even the much derided category of propaganda. To this end, many of the groundbreaking examinations of Mao-era works produced over the past twenty years have treated posters, graphic design, cult images of Mao, and related forms. Still other studies prioritized hyperstylized art forms, including the yangbanxi (“model operas”/ballets) that were honed under the oversight of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing (1914–1991) throughout the latter years of the Mao era in the Cultural Revolution.5 Ho’s study, by contrast, conceives of mass arts in ways that prioritize the relatively less explored mediums and genres that evolved earlier in this thirty-year period, including easel painting, brush-and-ink painting, and monumental watercolor painting. Acknowledging that “the auratic associations