Visual Culture Communist China

This course explores the relationship between ideology and visual culture in China, from the founding of the Communist Party in 1919, to Mao Zedong's prescriptions at the 1942 Yan'an Conference of Literature and Art, to art policy after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Readings and discussion will cover the range of adherence and resistance to the official party line by art workers. Topics include expressionism, socialist realism, peasant art, wound art, cynical realism, political pop, and the avant-garde, as seen in painting, sculpture, architecture, posters, advertising, video, performance, and the material culture of quotidian life.