문화혁명기 이후의 중국의 사회주의 팝아트 (Socialist Pop After Cultural Revolution)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국미술이론학회
· 수록지 정보 : 미술이론과 현장 / 6호 / 27 ~ 50페이지
· 저자명 : 박세연

초록

This thesis examines contemporary Chinese painting after the Cultural
Revolution(1966-76), focusing upon so-called “Chinese Pop art,”which I termed as
“Socialist Pop art.”I considered the art of this period within the broader context of social
changes especially after the Tienanmen incident of 1989.
After the Cultural Revolution during which idolization of Chairman Mao was at its
peak, one of the major changes in communist China was that an anti-Mao wave was
generated in almost every social class. For example, novels that revealed the hardships
during the Cultural Revolution were published. Posters that openly criticized the Maoism
were also produced and displayed on the walls, and demand for democracy spurred
widespread activist movements among young generations. These broad social changes
were also reflected in art. A variety of art movements were introduced from the West to
China, and after a period of experimentation with the new imported styles, artists began to
apply the new artistic idiom to their works in order to visualize their own social and
political realities they lived in. It was a shift from earlier Socialist Realism to a new
expression either directly or indirectly, “Socialist Pop,”an amalgam of Socialist Realism
and Pop Art tradition.
After the 1989 crackdown of Tienanmen Square protest, when communist
government quelled with brutal measures the students, workers, and ordinary people who
rose for democracy, greater urge to protest the Deng Xiaoping regime emerged. This time
coincided with the gradual emergence of art using Pop Art vocabulary to satirize the social
reality, the Socialist Pop art, along with many other art forms all with avant-garde spirit.
One of the most frequent subjects of Chinese Pop art was visual images of Chairman
Mao and his Cultural Revolution, and new China that was saturated with capitalism,
which tainted the Chinese way of life with a Western way of consumerism and
commercialism. The reason for the popularity of Mao’s image was spurred by the “Mao
Craze”in the early 1990’s. People suddenly began to fall in a kind of nostalgia for the
past, and once again, Mao Zedong was idolized as an entity who can heal the problems of
modern China who had been marching towards their ultimate destination, the economic
development. But this time Chairman Mao was no more an idol but just a popular,
commercial product. He is no more an object of worship of almost religious nature but he
has become an iconography symbolizing the complex nature of present Chinese society.
During this process of depicting the social reality, Chinese artists are making the authority
and sanctity of Maoism ineffective.
Dealing with this new trend of contemporary Chinese art in view of “Socialist Pop
art”two manners of re-creating Pop art can be illustrated: one that incorporates the
propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution; the other borrows from Chinese traditional
popular imagery or mass media, such as photos taken during Mao era. What is worth
mentioning is that these posters and photos of the Cultural Revolution can be identified as
‘popular’media, as they were directed to educate the popular mass, thus combination of
this ingenuous pop media with Western Pop art can be fully justified as a genre unique to
China. Through this genre, we can discover a new chapter of the Chinese contemporary
painting and its society, as their Pop art can be considered as self-portraits true to their
present appearances.

영어초록

This thesis examines contemporary Chinese painting after the Cultural
Revolution(1966-76), focusing upon so-called “Chinese Pop art,”which I termed as
“Socialist Pop art.”I considered the art of this period within the broader context of social
changes especially after the Tienanmen incident of 1989.
After the Cultural Revolution during which idolization of Chairman Mao was at its
peak, one of the major changes in communist China was that an anti-Mao wave was
generated in almost every social class. For example, novels that revealed the hardships
during the Cultural Revolution were published. Posters that openly criticized the Maoism
were also produced and displayed on the walls, and demand for democracy spurred
widespread activist movements among young generations. These broad social changes
were also reflected in art. A variety of art movements were introduced from the West to
China, and after a period of experimentation with the new imported styles, artists began to
apply the new artistic idiom to their works in order to visualize their own social and
political realities they lived in. It was a shift from earlier Socialist Realism to a new
expression either directly or indirectly, “Socialist Pop,”an amalgam of Socialist Realism
and Pop Art tradition.
After the 1989 crackdown of Tienanmen Square protest, when communist
government quelled with brutal measures the students, workers, and ordinary people who
rose for democracy, greater urge to protest the Deng Xiaoping regime emerged. This time
coincided with the gradual emergence of art using Pop Art vocabulary to satirize the social
reality, the Socialist Pop art, along with many other art forms all with avant-garde spirit.
One of the most frequent subjects of Chinese Pop art was visual images of Chairman
Mao and his Cultural Revolution, and new China that was saturated with capitalism,
which tainted the Chinese way of life with a Western way of consumerism and
commercialism. The reason for the popularity of Mao’s image was spurred by the “Mao
Craze”in the early 1990’s. People suddenly began to fall in a kind of nostalgia for the
past, and once again, Mao Zedong was idolized as an entity who can heal the problems of
modern China who had been marching towards their ultimate destination, the economic
development. But this time Chairman Mao was no more an idol but just a popular,
commercial product. He is no more an object of worship of almost religious nature but he
has become an iconography symbolizing the complex nature of present Chinese society.
During this process of depicting the social reality, Chinese artists are making the authority
and sanctity of Maoism ineffective.
Dealing with this new trend of contemporary Chinese art in view of “Socialist Pop
art”two manners of re-creating Pop art can be illustrated: one that incorporates the
propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution; the other borrows from Chinese traditional
popular imagery or mass media, such as photos taken during Mao era. What is worth
mentioning is that these posters and photos of the Cultural Revolution can be identified as
‘popular’media, as they were directed to educate the popular mass, thus combination of
this ingenuous pop media with Western Pop art can be fully justified as a genre unique to
China. Through this genre, we can discover a new chapter of the Chinese contemporary
painting and its society, as their Pop art can be considered as self-portraits true to their
present appearances.

참고자료

· 없음