Page 22 - Studio International - January February 1975

Artists art and culture things are changing
China may give the appearance of
being a country where art policy is
fixed by the government once and for
all. But this is not so. In the field of
all the time, new ideas are fighting
against old ones, and the result is
not decided.
Certainly China has a policy towards
her artists. Professional artists are
supported by the state. In the case of
painters, for example, their materials are
supplied free. They live, not from selling
their paintings, but from a salary given
usually for work in some cultural
organization. Unlike our own system,
Spare-time
emphasis is placed on the political and
social importance of cultural work in
general, not on the making and breaking
of individual careers. If a dancer or an
acrobat, for example, has an accident and
can't perform any longer, she will transfer
to other work such as writing.
But the nature of art in China is not
decided by these policies, and perhaps not
even by the professional artists
themselves, but by the great mass-
movements, especially the Cultural
Revolution. The Cultural Revolution
began a general demystification of the
different branches of culture —
philosophy, science, art. They began to
cease to be the domain of a few
professionals. Their principles were
taken out and examined by everybody
and tested in practice. Philosophy, for
example, was directly applied to
agricultural, medical and other problems.
Peasants would apply the Marxist theory
of contradictions to the growth of their
BRETT C hina's
cereal crop and see it flourish. A doctor in
a Tientsin hospital told me how he
approached the problem of mending
broken limbs by examining the
contradiction between mobilizing and
immobilizing the patient. He reduced the
healing period by one third. Increasing
numbers of workers, peasants and
soldiers began to take up different art
forms in their spare time — painting,
writing, dance, theatre, acrobatics and so
on. For the majority it was a new
unknown.
During and since the Cultural
Revolution professional painters, like
other intellectuals, came under criticism
for their isolation, their ignorance of the
lives of the majority of people. Many went
to work for a year or more on the land or
in factories, a process that still continues.
Today a landscape painter, a man
Guy art, will not only know how to transplant
trained in the great traditions of Chinese
rice or operate a steel press, but will also
have made real friends among the workers
and peasants.
However, in the practice of their art
their problems are not easy. The
majority of professional artists want,
through their art, to 'serve the people',
to participate in building socialism.
But specifically in artistic terms,
how ? To depict the new China,
the classical landscape style has
been sensitively adapted by many
painters. Now a great loop of high-
tension cable links the mist-wrapped
peaks, a dam nestles in a high mountain
gorge. Their paintings are models of the
grace and skill with which technology
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