1. Laing, Ellen, The Winking Owl: Art in the People's Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Andrews, Julia, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Silbergeld, Jerome with Jisui, Gong, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993).Google Scholar

2. See Kaiming, Liao, “Content good: form beautiful. Selected Works from the new farmers' painting,” Meishu, No. 9 (1998), pp. 6–8.Google Scholar

3. This issue is discussed in detail in the chapter “The politicisation of guohua,” in Andrews, , Painters and Politics, pp. 176–200.Google Scholar

4. Illustrated in ibid. Fig. 108.

5. The symposium, held in conjunction with the Second Shanghai Biennale, was sponsored by the Shanghai Art Museum and funded by the Annie Wong Art Foundation in Hong Kong.

6. His bitter experiences, when he was told to go home and study socialist realism and then come back and teach, are told in his biography by Mo, Chai, Yuan liao caihong (The Consummation of the Rainbow) (Beijing: People's Cultural Publishing House, 1997).Google Scholar

7. It must be emphasized, however, that pressure from Party hard-liners was never quite removed. The bedraggled but defiant eagles of Pan Tianshou's last years, for example, show his state of mind, while his early death in 1973 was the direct result of harassment by Jiang Qing and her supporters. His work was included posthumously in the notorious Black Painting Exhibition held in Beijing in February/March 1974.

8. Some of the art produced during those crucial days was belatedly reproduced in Meishu, Nos. 8–12 (1979).Google Scholar

9. See Sullivan, Michael, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), Plate 63.Google Scholar

10. See Tsong-zung, Zhang, The Stars: Ten Years (Hong Kong: Hanart Z, 1989)Google Scholar, which includes Geremie Barmé's critical overview “Arrière-pensée on an Avant-Garde.” When I asked Jiang Feng why the gallery had given space to the Stars, he said that the aim was to show the artists how mistaken they were, and that their show would be ignored by the public. In fact, it drew crowds, and 70% of the comments in the albums provided by the gallery were favourable.

11. Their work is discussed and illustrated in Meishu zuopin. No. 7 (Beijing, 1981)Google Scholar, and in Cohen, Joan Lebold, The New Chinese Painting 1949–1986 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), pp. 76–81.Google Scholar

12. For a number.of typical works, see Yongbai, Tao, 1700–1985: Oil Painting in China (Shanghai: Jiangsu Art Publishing House, 1988).Google Scholar

13. See Cohen, Joan Lebold, Yunnan: A Renaissance in Chinese Painting (Minneapolis: Fingerhut Group, 1988).Google Scholar

14. These were, so far as I know, never published in China, but one of them is reproduced in my Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, Plate 62.

15. See Ibid. Fig. 22.8.

16. Since the Tianshu has been exhibited in the West, it has acquired a number of new meanings; but that the original meaning and purpose of the work was, indirectly at least, political, was expressed in a letter from Xu Bing to me in September 1997, in which he wrote, “The Tian Shu was originally created out of an anxiety over the sense of loss I felt towards my culture and personal situation that prompted me to seek anwers to some meaningful questions.”

17. A good introduction to the now extensive literature on Xu Bing and Gu Wenda is Oscar Ho and T.Z. Zhang (Zhang Tsong-zung), Desire for Words: An Exhibition of Installation Works by Xu Bing and Gu Wenda (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1992).Google Scholar

18. On Huang Yongpin's Dadaist activities, see Doran, Valerie C. (ed.), China's New Art: Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 1993), pp. xvi and xciii, and Figs. 99 and 100.Google Scholar

19. See Shisheng, Tang and Wuyan, Gan (eds.), Works of the Chinese Nude Oils Exhibition (Guilin: Guangxi People's Publishing House, 1988).Google Scholar

20. Illustrated in Sullivan, , Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, Fig. 256.Google Scholar

21. Prize-winning works from this exhibition are reproduced in Meishu, Nos. 7, 8, 9, and 10 (1979), with a full list in No. 11.Google Scholar

22. See Xianting, Li, “Major trends in the development of contemporary Chinese art,”Google Scholar in Doran, , China's New Art, pp. x–xxii.Google Scholar

23. This is Li Xianting's label for a collection of works that included Xu Bing's Tianshu and Holy Scriptures in Braille, Gu Wenda's “Oedipus Refound Complex” series and the New Analysts Group's charts and mathematical formulae.

24. See Lin, Wang, “Installation and Chinese experience,” Meishu yanjiu (Art Research), No. 3 (1998), pp. 44–46.Google Scholar

25. If it is true that, as Hou Hanru put it, “Performance … is certainly the most direct way to express the real situation of human beings living in a culturally, politically and morally alienating society,” one may wonder why reactions are often so confused and hostile. See his “Beyond the cynical: China's Avant-Garde in the 1990s,” Art Asia Pacific, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1996), pp. 42–51.Google Scholar

26. See Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai: Shanghai Art Museum, 1996), Piales 104–106.Google Scholar

27. See “The faces of China's future,” Limn: Magazine of international Design, No. 2 (1998), pp. 12–23.Google Scholar This issue also contains two articles on post-1989 Chinese art: Egan, Charles, “The future of new Chinese art” (pp. 4–11)Google Scholar, and Erickson, Britta, “Made in China: is there a market for new Chinese art?” (pp. 24–30).Google Scholar

28. For an objective look at the Xin wenren hua, see Lago, Francesca dal, “New literati painting,” An Asia Pacific, No. 19 (1998), pp. 32–34.Google Scholar

29. “The faces of China's future,” p. 22.Google Scholar

30. See Jingzhong, Fan, Yiqiang, Cao, Zhuang, Huang and Shanchun, Van, “The pessimism in art of ours,” Meishu yanjiu. No. 1 (1997), pp. 19–21.Google Scholar