EALC Lecture Series: Territorial Sovereignty and Socialist Landscape Paintings
Laikwan Pang, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
This presentation is a chapter of Pang’s forthcoming book One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty (Stanford University Press, April 2024). In this chapter, Pang discusses how the national landscape was presented in a new state-sponsored genre of modern ink brush paintings in Socialist China. These works were invested with heavy political, aesthetic, and economic values, and they reveal the mutual appropriation between the socialist nation-building and traditional Confucian and Daoist aesthetics. Artists were subjected to intense political scrutiny, although some also gained political capital by producing works to support the state ideology.