Forty years after China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution, this book revisits the visual and performing arts of the period – the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet. Probing deeply, it examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age. Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution offer new insights into works that have transcended their times.

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Scott Watson is Director/Curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

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Richard King owned Paragraph Bookstore in Montreal and is a former President of the Canadian Booksellers Association. His first novel, That Sleep of Death, was on the Gazette bestseller list for nine weeks. In his spare time, King does Bikram Yoga, runs with a group from the Westmount Running Room and volunteers in the Emergency Department at the Jewish General Hospital. He insists most of the characters in Accounting for Crime are fictitious.

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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

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

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