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Hardcover $46.95 (9781501773181) Joining a growing number of publications that have sought to reexamine China’s socialist legacy, two new books examine the ways in which contemporary art practice and discourse reengaged the social and political commitments of the Maoist period (1949–76). Balancing three chapters focused on artists and their art practices with two chapters focused on the analysis of art criticism, Lee introduces readers to a key group—artist and activist Huang Rui who founded the Stars Art Group, artist and critic Wu Guanzhong, artist Qu Leilei, and critic Liu Zaifu—who sees art practice as a continuation of socialism’s commitments to the transformation of social consciousness. Focusing on the social and political significance of the Stars’ activities rather than their works’ visual qualities, Lee analyzes the ways in which the group’s exhibition techniques “reproduced and repurposed strategies of collective action and grassroots organization established during the Mao-era campaigns after 1949” in order to “push against the government’s promotion of a slow historical amnesia that represses collective memory” (17). Examining the “minjian avant-garde,” which she defines as “art that uses the material, demographic, and territorial marginality of minjian as a means to critique, revitalize, and transform itself, and, at the same time, to engage and bring changes to the minjian it encounters,” Tan puts critical pressure on the contradictions between these dual and often competing goals (4).