Summary: The Avant Garde’s Challenge to Official Art by Minglu, Gao, and Julia Andrews
China has changed immensely in the period that has been witnessed in the post-Mao era. During the Mao-era, there was little or no room for any developments to take place under the imposed cultural realms that weighed heavily on urbanization. It is based on this backdrop that Gao Minglu and Julia F. Andrews explore the urban spaces in contemporary China. They draw into the various forms of Avant-Garde art and how it has continually mirrored changes in modern Chinese society. Avant-garde refers to an art movement of the 19th century that is regarded to be innovative and out of the box due to the artists’ ability to be radical. Artists of the Avant-garde are said to have met with controversy and resistance because they chose to challenge existing ideas, processes, and norms of art. I was drawn to the use of personal insights by the authors to bring to light the dimensions of sometimes misconstrued Chinese tradition in the urban aspect. There is a range of explanations on avant-garde art and the challenging of official art as related to realist painting.
Art in the avant-garde form is not a development of the old official style that was already in existence but can be correlated with realism. Thus, there is the explanation of the preceding type of painting, that is, realist painting. Minglu and Andrews write, “One of the fundamental tenets of Chinese art theory since 1949 has been that art and artists should provide political service to the nation. Most of the periods have witnessed more than one formal style, or variations of an official style” (223). Furthermore, realism in painting draws its cultural and technical links from the Soviet Union, whose educational system was emulated in China. The influence ran so deep in the Chinese forms of art that buy the 1950s, Soviet and Russian models of art were the epitomes of tastes of the bourgeoisie. The standard way of illustration comprised of figurative and realistic patriotic subjects. They were as a result of the underlying forces of nationalism. For instance, the heroic soldiers such as Mao Zedong were depicted as having fierce facial expressions. There was movement from pictures that used the black and white form of painting to the inclusion of dabs of color in oil on canvas. It is an official art that is accredited as part of the inciting of a cultural revolution in China. Therefore, paintings by Avant-garde artists done during the Cultural Revolution were mostly defiant of foreign influences and generally inspired by traditional forms of Chinese art. I think that it was vital that the paintings during the Cultural Revolution were to be a symbol of the community that the people of China were expecting to achieve.
The avant-garde artistic movement is a complete diversion from official art. As mentioned earlier, artists of this movement were defiant and looked towards the creation of their form of art that is unprecedented. Thus artistic expression of the avant-garde has no links with the official formation of art. Andrews and Minglu write, “The avant-garde movement differs from the realist movement in several significant ways. It has no links with the official art of the Cultural Revolution and was developed in opposition to official styles” (234). Besides, the artist of the Avant-garde movement was primarily concerned with critical recognition rather than commercial purposes. There was a promotion of human freedom and additional freedom in the creative process more than anything else. Freedom was part of the defiance from the official forms of art. However, over time, there was the commercialization of the avant-garde art pieces. At first, there was a long-standing belief that there was no relationship between the commercial properties and artistic concepts of art. Nevertheless, the avant-garde developed in a context of official and commercial domination of the art world, and there some artists used the binding properties of both concepts for their purposes(Andrews and Minglu 234). However, the authors point out that it is these fundamental interactions of the commercial and artistic properties of art that threaten the initial cause that the founders aimed to achieve. That is, there is little power to avant-garde artists if they conform to the characteristics of other forms of art that are slowly official and commercialized.