Xiaobing Tang's study of visual culture in contemporary China examines “socialist visual culture” as the central theme in the period from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to the present. Historically, socialist visual culture is a project created in the 1950s, the period of “high socialism” (“socialist collectivization and construction”) in China (p. 10). Conceptually, it helps us to understand the relationship between the visual and social transformation, the intense visual experience of high socialism, the “aggressive visual language and practices” (p. 11) during the Cultural Revolution, and its historical legacy and cultural identity after the 1990s. Methodologically, Tang approaches the topic through both a historical analysis of carefully selected visual culture forms and a critical examination of dominant paradigms of viewing socialist visual culture in North America.

The field of visual culture studies covers a wide range of forms, such as paintings, posters, billboards, pictorials, newspapers, illustrations, photographs, cinema, theater, architectural designs, and public monuments and public places. Rather than offering a systematic survey, Tang focuses on prints, paintings, and cinema. Specifically, Tang offers a sustained analysis of prints: their creation as a dominant form of visual culture throughout the socialist period (especially the 1950s and 1960s), the challenges faced by printmakers in the context of the art market, and innovations by the recent generation of printmaking artists. Not only does printmaking show the ways in which art became integrated into Chinese socialism and socialist practices (chapter 1), but it also becomes a visual culture form that constantly negotiates between contemporary art as a business and as a political discourse (chapter 6 and conclusion).

Tang's discussion of paintings is an in-depth analysis of two artists and their works: Wang Shikuo (1911–73) and Wang Guangyi (1957–). The detailed discussion of Wang Shikuo's famous historical painting The Bloodstained Shirt (xueyi) (1959) demonstrates a solid historical understanding of the ways in which artists engaged in socialist practices, especially class struggles (chapter 2). Meanwhile, Wang Guangyi's work, especially his Great Criticism series, shows how contemporary artists critically address socialist visual experience as cultural identity and historical legacy (rather than political ideology or doctrine) (chapter 4).

Besides printmaking and paintings, Tang also examines “New China” cinema and contemporary mainstream blockbuster cinema. The former focuses on four films that represent rural women (from the 1950s to the 1990s): Li Shuangshuang (Lu Ren, 1962), In the Wild Mountains (Yan Xueshu, 1985), Women from the Lake Scented Souls (Xie Fei, 1992), and Ermo (Zhou Xiaowen, 1994) (chapter 3). Meanwhile, Tang's discussion of mainstream cinema mainly deals with the receptions of the film The Founding of a Republic (Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin, 2009) in North America (chapter 5).

Tang's historical analysis of visual culture is intended as a critique of two prevalent narratives in Western perceptions of China. The discussion of prints and printmaking is offered as an alternative to the dominant narrative portraying China's development in recent decades as mainly brought about “by the enabling hand of the market and global capital, from political fanaticism and economic egalitarianism to an embrace of entrepreneurialism, greater individual freedom and increasing access to Western products and values” (pp. 7–8). Moreover, in his critique of the discourse of “China today as held together forcibly by a bankrupt authoritarianism, with economic development as the last and dubious resort of legitimation of the existing order” (p. 7), Tang effectively challenges a “dissidence hypothesis” that “presupposes any expression of criticism voiced in China to amount to an act of political dissidence subversive, and therefore intolerable to the repressive regime” (p. 178). The examples of paintings and cinema in particular produce a more complicated picture of visual culture in contemporary China.

While Tang's study is a major contribution to the field of Chinese visual culture studies through its historical and critical analysis of visual culture associated with Chinese socialism, it also opens up conversations about visual culture and contemporary art in China. For example, Wang Shikuo's The Bloodstained Shirt is a classic artwork in the sense that its influences are both artistic and political. Tang mentions Cheng Chonglin's A Snowy Day in 1968 (1979) and Cao Yong's The Bloodstained Shirt, Revised Edition (2007), each corresponding to a particular moment of social change. Among the appropriations of Wang's painting that are not mentioned by Tang, for example, are Ma Han's From the Bloodstained Shirt to the White Shirt (2002), a performance connected to a workshop of teaching children about drawing, an event included in the Long March Project, and a series of socially engaged art events curated by Lu Jie. Such a sequence of art activities calls for further examinations of socially engaged visual culture in contemporary China.