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VISUAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA: Paradigms and Shifts. By Xiaobing Tang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xii, 276pp. (Illustrations.) US$34.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-44637-3.
In this richly illustrated full-colour study, Xiaobing Tang chronicles the development of the visual culture that has been produced from the founding of the People's Republic of China (1949) to the (almost) present. As the author forcefully explains in the concluding chapter (250-258), devoted to an exhibition of Chinese woodcuts created between 2000 and 2010 that he curated in 2011 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, USA, his goal is to break through the simplistic way of seeing Chinese visual culture as either mind-numbing government propaganda or barricade-breaching dissident art. His main aims are to make clear that Chinese visual culture in itself is complex and recognizably Chinese (2), a "reflection of the turbulent history of revolution" (65), yet of global and historical importance; that its practitioners are no dupes employed by a non-democratic regime but deeply committed to taking part in and being part of "a 'cultural reorientation' in China's search for modernity" (26); and that Chinese cultural products should be evaluated and merited for their own qualities, in their own right, and not for what non-Chinese spectators might read into them, for whatever (political) reasons.
To accomplish these aims, the author looks at the creation, blossoming, and perseverance of the socialist visual culture that emerged as "a collective and deeply inspiring project in...