Art’s Public Lives: Sculpture in China After 1949.

Abstract

This dissertation considers through sculpture how after the Communist Revolution in 1949 the official line in China for art to serve “the people,” or renmin, sought to institutionalize a new value system in the arts. Specifically, how did the idea of "the people" shape artistic practice and how did the artist through his or her artwork will the concept of "the people" into being? What was the role of sculpture in mobilizing the masses around the idea of “the people”? The case studies of three important sculptural projects--Monument to the People’s Heroes (1952-1958), the Sichuan Sculpture Exhibition (1964), and Rent Collection Courtyard (1965)--reveal the actual challenge of shaping into concrete form an idea on which the Chinese state grounded its own sense of nation. By focusing on how sculpture was interacting with its audience rather than what is being represented, this study asserts the centrality of sculptural aesthetics involving three-dimensional scale, materiality, and process in engaging the viewer with the politics of postwar socialist China. Sculpture’s significance under the leadership of Mao Zedong lies not only in how sculpture functioned as a visual and tangible national symbol to assert a certain definition of “the people,” but also in how it posited a new kind of people, or humanism, for the world during the rise of international Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s. By way of rigorous visual analysis, archival research, and personal interviews, this study also reveals the uneven development of cultural production on the ground versus the state’s absolute vision, which included tasking artists in early Communist China to create a new culture for a new nation.