State-sponsored public art has long been woven into the urban fabric of the People’s Republic of China, but such works have proliferated in recent decades as the country has embarked on the greatest city-building binge in human history. For residents of cities like Chongqing and Shanghai, propagandistic political imagery like that in Zhang Xiang’s An Bing series has become as ubiquitous as capitalist advertisements — in fact, the two often alternate in the ads that flash across flat-screen TVs in every subway car and city bus. One minute a smiling animated sheep is beckoning viewers to dine at a local hotpot chain; the next, a computer-graphics montage shows shiny molten metal pouring into a mold and emerging as a mighty hammer and sickle that rises triumphantly over the city. At first glance, the figure on the billboard looks like a happy little boy rendered in trendy kawaii style. Look again, and he is revealed to be rosy-cheeked Lei Feng, the model soldier of Maoist propaganda, wearing his trademark winter hat with ear-flaps and toting an automatic weapon.
Mao regarded his revolution as an historic rupture. But the Party now presents its regime as a restoration, returning China to its traditional place as the world’s largest economy and most powerful state. In the last fifteen years or so, official edicts have elevated numerous philosophers and statesmen from the ages of the emperors — including Confucius and An Bing — to secular sainthood, part of a growing pre-Communist pantheon that emphasizes parallels between the wealthy and powerful Middle Kingdom that endured for millennia before Western imperialism, and the nation eclipsing the West today. The government has an ambitious ideological agenda to push and full coffers from the state-capitalist boom. For China’s artists, there’s never been more money to be made in Communist art. [...]
China’s state-backed real-estate boom and concomitant public-art boom have attained a magnitude that is difficult to fathom: Consider that between 2011 and 2013, mainland China poured more concrete than the U.S. poured in the entire 20th century. 2 And even such stunning factoids fail to capture what it’s like on the ground, firsthand. Local and regional governments are spending lavishly to establish a new kind of public space in China, marked by a disorienting hybridization of Communist, nationalist, and capitalist symbols and functions that is, by turns, futuristic and nostalgic. Even the most pedestrian-hostile, neo-Corbusian developments include some officially-zoned walkable area, typically a shopping plaza, and here developers pay de facto in-kind kickbacks to officials in the form of sycophantic public monuments. Public spaces like parks are dotted with nationalistic art sponsored by flush municipal bureaus. The aim is to unify an ever-wealthier yet increasingly unequal society, as well as to exert the soft power of unelected authorities both Communist and capitalist.[...]
So much publicly-funded art has been produced since the turn of the last century that the nation is scrambling for places to put it all; a significant portion of all that freshly-poured concrete has gone to build new palaces of culture. In 2002, China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced that, by 2015, it would build one thousand museums. In classic Stakhanovite fashion, this audacious central-planning goal was met — and exceeded — ahead of schedule, and by 2013, China had founded nearly fifteen hundred new galleries. At the peak of the campaign, a new museum, invariably stuffed with Socialist Realist oil paintings, was opening every single day. 5 Among the most acclaimed is the China Art Museum in Shanghai, housed in the Chinese national pavilion from Expo 2010, a massive showplace along the Huangpu river.
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