Painting pictures of a new China

BEIJING - Red Flag-waving Chinese soldiers, muscle-bound peasants, nudes, dancing girls and women soldiers, and scores of Mao pictures, sculptures and photographs. Whatever would the Great Helmsman have thought?

China's Cultural Revolution, which began 40 years ago this month, is a theme running through this year's Dashanzi International Arts Festival in Beijing. A lot of the work confronts some of the horror of those 10 years of Communist mania which saw thousands of intellectuals and artists attacked and humiliated.

The Communist Party are still in power of course. In the run-up to the festival, which began on Saturday, the Culture Ministry removed more than 20 paintings with political content.

Around 500,000 people are expected to visit the festival at Factory 798, which has the semi-official status of being "illegal, but tolerated".

Few of the thousands of viewers who crowded the streets between the factories of the festival area seemed to notice an overtly hostile environment. And there are plenty of challenging pieces left on display at more than 80 galleries and studios in the festival, which has become the prime date in China's contemporary art calendar.

In one gallery, a member of the Red Detachment of Women dances with the Statue of Liberty wearing Marilyn Monroe's dress. People sip espressos as Mao looks on from an portrait.

While Mao's excesses are officially frowned upon, his portrait still hangs outside the Forbidden City and many of the exhibits at the festival are about how people are coming to terms with the years of the Cultural Revolution.

Dashanzi came about after a group of artists rented out a former munitions factory in 2002 and set up galleries and workshops. It has thrived ever since, despite occasional nods of disapproval from the powers-that-be.

The wrecker's ball is never far away, but the area consistently earns reprieves from developers eager to build more skyscrapers on the site.

Art in China is fiercely tribal and regionally divided. While Shanghai, the glistening financial metropolis, has shiny galleries of contemporary art to match, Beijing, the grungier capital, houses its artists in colonies in disused factories and villages.

As contemporary art is still a relatively new idea in China, only finding its feet after the Cultural Revolution, Beijing artists are still trying to forge some kind of identity.

As the dominant icon of the Communist era in China, Mao still features strongly in the imagery.

"The Cultural Revolution was a special time, it never happened anywhere else, it was unique, and it figures in both the young and older artists' work," said one artist.

The rise in interest in Chinese contemporary art has gone hand-in-hand with the rise in the economy, which led to the development of "Political Pop" and "Cynical Realism" art.

One major Cynical Realist is Zhang Xiaogang, born in 1958 and once considered too politically questionable to be shown in China. Zhang's "Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120" from 1998 sold for US$840,000 last month in New York, the highest price paid for a painting by a living Chinese artist.

Not everyone is happy with the exhibition.

"All this Mao and Cultural Revolution stuff, the artists are just doing what the foreigners want to see," says one art student.

- INDEPENDENT