Artists face up to life under ‘mini-Mao’

Guan Yizhao, artist and curator, poses for a photograph at his home in Beijing, China

On the outskirts of Beijing, in a tiny, cement-framed house with rusty furniture and an unmade brick bed, artist and curator Guan Yizhao sits among partly unpacked suitcases, hoping for exile.
Until last June, when police shut down his gallery and seized his collection, Guan was a successful curator in the art space he opened in 2008 in the city’s trendy 798 Art District. His attempt to seek legal redress for the eviction failed.
“No lawyer dared take up my case,” said Guan, who relies on friends for financial help. “The security agents had told me: ‘If you stop displaying provocative artworks or posting that stuff on the Internet, and just mind your own business, nobody will touch you.’”
Guan, 48, a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, is one face of China’s efforts to control information in the country Xi Jinping took over as Communist Party chief in November 2012. The past 30 months have seen the harshest media censorship and crackdown on dissent in more than two decades.
Last October, Xi turned his attention to the world of art and literature. He invited 72 leading artists and authors to a symposium in Beijing, where he told them their role was to promote “socialist core values” so their works could guide the public to form “correct views” on history, statehood, race and culture.
Xi warned artists against becoming “slaves of the market” and decried the rise of plagiarism, and fast-food style consumption that appealed to “base instincts.”
The two-hour meeting had an eerie echo of a speech by former Chairman Mao Zedong at his revolutionary base in Yan’an in 1942. Mao believed art should serve a political purpose, and told about 100 artists and authors they should advance socialism and reflect the lives of peasants and workers. The talks formed the ideological foundation of China’s censorship.
Xi faces a different world than Mao in controlling information, said Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside. Even with the government able to block foreign websites and monitor and shut down local users’ accounts, Chinese netizens use social networks like WeChat to air grievances over corruption or mismanagement.
“Mao held daunting power over a populace that was much less educated and ‘connected’ than today’s,” he said. “Any artistic following of Xi today is only game-playing aimed at ladder-climbing or self-protection.”
The corralling of artists is one part of Xi’s effort to further centralize control and forge a strong sense of nationalism. The strengthening of ideology has been one of the priorities of his presidency, including a tighter grip on traditional media and the Internet, warning against the influence of “Western values” in universities and cracking down on rights lawyers, activists and liberal scholars.
In his speech to the artists, Xi said “the main melody” in the creative process should be patriotism and traditional culture.
“The real message today of ‘serve the people and socialism’ is follow rules that come from the top and don’t think for yourself,” said Link, who is also emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University. “Xi is trying to be a mini-Mao.”
State control over art has always existed, but Xi is more “blunt” in his approach, said Guan, who lived and painted in the late 1980s in Yuanmingyuan Artist Village in the west of Beijing – the kernel of the Chinese contemporary art movement.
Some artists have backed Xi’s reforms. In January, Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan publicly threw his support behind Xi’s anti-graft campaign, announcing his next book would focus on the perils of corrupt officials.
Still, Shen Yun, a Beijing-based ceramic and performance artist, said the “relative relaxation in creative space” under Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao has gone.
Xi’s speech has created “a long shadow under which everybody is as silent as a winter cicada,” said Shen, who has been detained by police at least five times since the 1980s. “You feel you need to hold your tongue, because voicing an opinion can be dangerous.” Ting Shi, Bloomberg