Page 280 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

techniques to express their own experience. Much of this new art a
lacks individuality, but it is bright in colour, sometimes daring in
composition, and positive, if not overtly propagandist, in tone.
After a slight relaxation in 1972-73, when the archaeologicaljour-
nals reappeared after six years of silence, even tighter control of art
and culture was imposed by Chiang Ch'ing (Mmc. Mao) and the
Gang of Four.
During the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, artists
and sculptors tended to sink their individuality in anonymous
group projects such as The Rent Collection Courtyard, which, al-
though completed in 1965, was praised by the leaders of the Cul-
tural Revolution as a model and was widely copied. A dramatic ta-
bleau of life-size figures in clay plaster, this much-admired work
J IX Anonymous trim of vulpnin, Tht rc-crcatcs around the courtyard of a rapacious former landlord in
Szechwan a harrowing scene that had been only too familiar to the
Rent C.oSltttion Courtyard. Detail of a life-
size tableau in clay-plaster, in a former
landlord's mansion at Ta-yi. Sz«h wan local tenant-farmers before liberation.
1965.

Earlier editions of this book ended with the suggestion that the
storms of the years after 1949 were past and that Chinese civilisa-
tion had resumed its steady flow into the future. But it is now clear
that the storms were more violent and prolonged than had ap-
peared to the outside observer, begining with the wilting of the
deceptively liberal Hundred Flowers movement of 1957 and only
ending with the arrest of the Gang of Four in October of 1976—
period of almost twenty years during which artists who did not
conform were victimised with varying degrees of savagery. In the
early years after the Revolution of 1949 creative men and women
had generally responded to Mao's appeal to be unselfish, reject
elitism, and serve society. By 1976, however, that idealism had
long since evaporated. Cultural activities were under the control
of the Gang of Four, led by Mao's fanatical wife, Chiang Ch'ing,