06/08/2026
🗄️Digital Archive Highlight
Highlights from the Zheng Shengtian Archive and his “Research on Chinese Art in the Socialist Period 社會主義時期中國藝術之研究”. Born in 1938, Zheng Shengtian came of age alongside the People’s Republic of China. He began his art education in Shanghai in 1949, the same year the PRC was founded, and later studied and taught at the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA) in Hangzhou. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Zheng was appointed head of the Oil Painting and International Departments at ZAFA, where he mentored many of Chinese early avant-garde artists.
Maoist China has often been characterized as culturally monolithic, cut off from the West and defined by rigid adherence to narrowly proscribed rules. But the collection of rare exhibition catalogs and art publications in Zheng’s Archive complicates that storyline. Contrary to common knowledge, in the 1950s and 1960s China hosted many international art exhibitions that introduced many artistic traditions from a wide variety of countries around the world, albeit excluding the United States. These exhibitions and related publications included print making from Cuba and Mexico, images of cave murals from India and Korea, landscape painting from Australia, and craft traditions from Italy and Chile.
The range of these publications not only reflects the breadth of international cultural exchange between China and the outside world at that time, but they also provide evidence of the contemporary debate, before the Cultural Revolution that lasted from 1966-1976, around what constitutes national and socialist art forms in the early years of the Maoist regime.
Image selection and text by Digital Archive Fellows @11.2ideas , expanded and edited by Jane DeBevoise.
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