Art Reboot

103 18 def ining chinese art in a globali sed world The export of western art and ideas has left a legacy of confusion in China. Politically, the failing Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was left smarting from repeated humiliation from the 1840s into the early twentieth century. With its collapse in 1911, China slipped into a century of aesthetic self-flagellation as wave after wave of art teachers and institutions belittled their own highly sophisticated tradition of ink painting and reached instead for western ideas and media. In China in the first half of the twentieth century you could barely teach art without a beret and a bow tie. Since 1949 there have been two main waves of so-called revo- lutionary art. Under Mao Zedong, a highly sophisticated, fully emancipated artistic tradition was reduced to political servitude. Mao dictated that art must serve the people and the communist revolution. As ever, those artists who were encouraged to par- ticipate, rather than discouraged as politically subversive, pro- duced some inspiring works despite the constraints, creating an intriguing if often rather kitsch body of works. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 he quickly promoted the belief that individual greed and economic disparity were good. This freed Chinese artists in two ways: by opening up the country to