This book discusses the collection, display and reception of the visual culture of the Cultural Revolution in British museums. Treating museum representations as image-makers for the nation, Amy Jane Barnes considers the ways China and Chineseness have been imagined in Britain and situates such popular images in the context of the two nations' historical, political and cultural exchanges. Among her primary sources are interviews and correspondences with curators and scholars, contemporary written documents, newspaper reports, and exhibition catalogues. These are used to analyse a number of exhibitions and collections of Cultural Revolution era visual artefacts in Britain from the 1970s to 2008.
Defining the book's scope, method and keywords, the Introduction explains its epistemological framework as “social constructionism,” which emphasizes the role of history and culture on knowledge. At stake are not just the aesthetic qualities of the art objects, but also the culture of perception, everyday practices, and social meaning. Organized chronologically, each chapter begins with a historical overview of Sino-British interaction, from the Opium War to the 2008 Olympics, before continuing to discuss specific museum collections and displays. Though possibly helpful to readers without any background in modern Chinese history, these primers of major political events and cultural movements are heavily derivative of secondary scholarship and seem somewhat superfluous given the book's highly specialized topic and target audience.
Chapter two, a “prehistory” of Sino-British contact until the 1960s, shows how British visions of China over the centuries have been rooted in material goods like silk, porcelain and tea, as well as Orientalist fantasies of China as both virtuous and barbarous. As later chapters suggest, such alternating Sinophilia and Sinophobia also set the tone for European imaginations of China for the last 50 years. Chapters three to five chronicle the decade of the Cultural Revolution and its impact on Chinese visual culture as well as contemporaneous perceptions of China in Britain. Especially interesting here are the largely sympathetic portrayals of the Cultural Revolution by Westerners at the time. For them, Maoist China presented a happy alternative to their own capitalist and materialist societies. Student activists of 1968 and anti-Vietnam War protestors used Mao badges and Little Red Books as symbols of their own Leftist political beliefs. The reestablishment of diplomatic ties between China and Western countries further initiated a “Seventies Sinomania,” when delegations of “revolutionary tourists” brought back first-hand accounts of their China trips with carefully orchestrated itineraries. They painted utopian images of an egalitarian and harmonious land consistent with the propaganda disseminated by the Chinese government. In Britain, such positive images culminated in a 1976 exhibition of peasant paintings from Hu County that highlighted the successful collectivization of the Chinese countryside.
Continuing into the post-Mao era, the second half of the book, chapters six to nine, considers Cultural Revolution visual culture in three London-based museum collections – the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the British Museum, and the University of Westminster. The end of the Cultural Revolution brought an end to the idealization of Maoist China, since Western observers were freer to travel and see a darker Chinese reality. The 1989 Tiananmen massacre as well as popular English-language victim memoirs such as Jung Chang's Wild Swans further reinforced dystopian narratives of the Cultural Revolution. From the 1990s to the 2000s, Barnes shows, two contrasting views of China as economic superpower and human rights violator sustained a growing fascination with the country and informed the display and reception of its visual culture in Britain.
British museums began collecting Cultural Revolution era ceramics, textiles, Mao badges, posters and other ephemera just as Mao memorabilia was being purged in China. These Cultural Revolution objects later appeared in such exhibitions as Design and the State (1992, V&A, a cross-cultural exploration of the state's influence on artistic production); Icons of Revolution (2008, British Museum, tracing the history of Maoist iconography and its contemporary appropriations) and Picturing Power: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (1999, University of Westminster, on the dominant visual discourse of revolution along with its diverse aesthetic and lived experiences). Apart from extensive descriptions of these exhibitions, the book includes an interesting discussion of the consumption of communist iconography since 1989 as ironic or nostalgic kitsch, stripped of its original ideological connotations. Barnes considers such commodification “an ethical grey-area” that “defangs a tyrant by turning him into kitsch.” Concern with the ethics of representation – also in terms of how Western museums should exhibit China – runs through other sections of the book, though I would have liked to see the author flesh out the problem some more and propose solutions beyond reiterating Edward Said's Orientalism thesis.
With its detailed case studies of Maoist artefacts in British museums, this book contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the visual culture of the Cultural Revolution with an interesting transnational perspective. Given its narrow coverage of just three London-based collections and historical contextualization derivative of existing scholarship, however, the gist of this monograph could also have worked well as one or two articles suitable for inclusion in a syllabus on contemporary Chinese visual culture.
