Table of Contents

Introduction: Vibrant Images of a Turbulent Decade / Richard King and Jan Walls

Part 1: Artists and the State

1 The Art of the Cultural Revolution / Julia F. Andrews

2 Summoning Confucius: Inside Shi Lu’s Imagination / Shelley Drake Hawks

Part 2: Artists Remember: Two Memoirs

3 Brushes Are Weapons: An Art School and Its Artists / Shengtian Zheng

4 When We Were Young: Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages / Gu Xiong

Part 3: Meanings Then and Now

5 The Rent Collection Courtyard, Past and Present / Britta Erickson

6 Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity / Ralph Croizier

Part 4: Beyond the Visual Arts

7 Model Theatrical Works and the Remodelling of the Cultural Revolution / Paul Clark

8 Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women / Bai Di

9 Fantasies of Battle: Making the Militant Hero Prominent / Richard King

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Promotional Information

A decoding of the rhetoric of China’s turbulent decade, a time of both brutal iconoclasm and radical experimentation in the arts, that offers new insights into works that have transcended their times.

About the Author

Richard King is Professor of Chinese studies at the University of Victoria, teaching Chinese literature and film, Asian popular culture, research methods, and Chinese language.

Reviews

In this national convulsion the arts played a strikingly large role, a process described with great care in Art in Turmoil.
*“A new level of art criticism,” National Post, June 15, 2010*

This is a brilliant, thorough study of art created during the disastrous decade in China’s modern history. The recent flood of publications on China’s contemporary art scene make this book on the immediately preceding period necessary reading because of the polar opposite forces that brought the two periods into play.… Essential.
*CHOICE*

This volume compellingly illustrates that the artistic products of the CR period were anything but “artless, sterile, without depth, without truth, and without reality” (189). Moreover, present-day artistic producers and their works, as well as society at large, continue to be influenced by them.
*The China Beat*

The level of scholarship throughout is high, with extensive reading in Chinese-language primary and secondary sources combined with personal experience. It is recommended reading for all students of contemporary Chinese culture and society.
*Pacific Affairs, Vol 84, No 3*