Workshop and Research Project
Socialist Modernism is an international research cooperation and publication project which was launched in 2017. The purpose of this initiative is to examine the variety of creative styles and artistic practices in socialist China that go beyond the official prescription of socialist realism, and provide an alternative approach to the mainstream narrative of art history based on a simplistic, Cold War influenced East-West dichotomy: capitalist modernism v. socialist realism.
The proposed workshop, “Art Exchange and Modernism in Socialist China (1949-1979),” is the most recent of a series, building on two previous workshops, “Re-visiting Chinese Modernism” and “Realism or Modernism: Cold War Perspectives and Choices,” which were held in China in November 2018 and May 2019. This workshop will be held in Vancouver, and focuses on global exchanges among leftwing artists and their impacts on Chinese art during the most rigid period of socialist China. The workshop presentations will reveal the variety of intellectual origins and foreign influences in socialist modernism: from Romanian Artist Eurgene Popa, who taught in China in 1960, to the extensive artistic exchanges between China and Mexico in 1950s, to the art exhibitions organized by UK, Canada and Australia in China during the 1950s and 1970s. Together they present a complex art history in which alternative aesthetic inspiration was sought by artists, and discreet international artistic exchanges continued even in the isolated environment of Maoist China.
This project will not only help us to better understand the continuity and changes in modern Chinese art from 1920s to 1980s, but will also contribute new perspectives to recent scholarship on socialist modernism, which still tends to focus primarily on the architecture and arts of the former Eastern Bloc Europe.
