Red Art

                                                                  

China’s censors have this in common with Amazon and Google’s content-crawling robots: they take things too literally for their own purposes and can be thrown off by misdirection. So Amazon’s robots see “Benjamin Harris” and Amazon puts up an ad for a biography of “Benjamin Harris Brewster.”  Chinese censors will block anything that mentions “June 4” but entirely miss the same content if the reference is to “May 35.”

The great Chinese documentary film maker Hu Jie, is an artful dodger. His, and Ai Xiaoming’s, documentary Red Art is a devastating, sarcastic critique of current historical and artistic revisionism, of the murderous Red Guards who perpetrated outrages during the Cultural Revolution, and of their enablers, Chinese and Western. http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2010/09/chinas-great-firewall-of-silence.html

Hu could not have gotten away with this if his film were titled “Red Guard;” the censors would have noticed. But “Red Art?”  Chinese censors like Red Art. “Hu Jie, you may pass.” 

红色的艺术 (Red Art) and 红卫兵 (Red Guard) rhyme in Chinese.

The film opens with former Red Guard Li Tingtao proudly conducting a tour for the film makers of an exhibition of his “art” at the Guangdong Art Museum. There’s a photograph of a mammoth (30 meters by 10 meters, Li tells us) poster he and other Red Guards created during the Cultural Revolution. “It was influential nationwide,” Li proudly recalls but, “It’s been demolished since” (thus only the photograph).  Li then points himself out among the group of Red Guards standing in front of the poster in the photograph:

“This one’s me. A bit blurry. It’s been a while.”

Either Hu or Ai responds,

“It’s grown mold.”

OMG, “It’s grown mold”! 

This goes right over Li’s head:

“This was the assistant secretary of the CCP, Li continues, pointing. We followed instructions from them. They were all done according to orders. We painted whatever the party said. The subjects were decided by the Department of Propaganda of the CCP.”

Li narrates with a permanent smile on his face, like the Joker played by Jack Nicholson in Batman.

The film then cuts to Wang Huangsheng, Curator of the Guangdong Museum of Art, who looks like an Amish farmer:

“Looking at these works, we find ourselves a bit more rational than before…As for the content of these pieces, it’s quite a complicated phenomenon.”

When somebody says something is “quite a complicated phenomenon,” it’s a good bet it isn’t complicated at all, and there’s nothing complicated about this “art.” As Li Tingtao said, it is blatant propaganda, “done according to orders” of the Chinese Communist Party.

Wang continues:

“When we see these works, we really admire these young artists…They’re still bursting with a kind of creativity and realized the value of their youth."

Hu and Ai then overlay with period footage of struggle sessions to illustrate the “kind of creativity” the youth actually engaged in, with the Joker narrating again:

“At that time many teachers and famous painters were stripped of their authority.  The lives of many teachers were threatened…Professional artists were not even allowed to touch a paint brush.  Only us, the students, had access.”

It is at this point in the film that my friend and former Red Guard, Zhou Jineng, first appears, http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2010/09/my-dear-friend-i-have-just-finished.html, briefly explaining that one purpose of the propaganda was “appreciative…meant to glorify, or even deify Mao-thought.”  Hu and Ai then cut to an interview with Liu Chunhua to reinforce Zhou’s point. Liu Chunhua was creator of the defining piece of propaganda art of the Cultural Revolution, “Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan.”