Topic > Art from the Forbidden City of Beijing - 1945

Through art, people can expose their ideas, their opposition to government rules and regulations in an unobtrusive way. Artists try to expose their revolutionary ideas and motivate people to fight against the government's cruel actions. The Chinese government's concept regarding art is that it must always serve the people, and the government is always ready to promote art by providing systematic education on new art. They always gave preference to revolutionary art, and non-revolutionary arts were banned at that time. There are different levels of art concepts in China which include modern art, religious art, commercial art, etc. Feudalism and landownership fall under religious art, and the concept of religious art is mainly superstitious. In China's revolutionary period, the government successfully managed to establish an art gallery in the western part of Beijing's Forbidden City. In the 1960s, China suffered a political and economic crisis. At that time the Chinese government forced artists to do something to overcome the crisis by developing new concepts of painting. During that period, new iconographic types such as "Sun Zixi, in front of Tiananmen" appeared in the art of socialist realists. Sun Zixi, In Front of Tiananmen, 1964, China is a painting on canvas, which has played a powerful role in creating an impact on the history of Chinese art. It is the pictorial representation of photography that several Chinese people stopped to photograph in front of Chairman Mao's portrait in Tiananmen Square, the main political center. This painting consists of three groups of people such as soldiers, workers and other people. The painting symbolizes the victory of socialist realism during the Maoist revolution...... middle of paper ...... observing this image you can clearly understand the situation of that port. One of the differences of this image compared to the image of "Sun Zixi, in front of Tiananmen" is that in the "port scene" image all the people are unhappy while in the other image all the people are happy. And the other distinction is that the picture of the harbor scene (from the Kwangju uprising) looks like it was drawn, but the picture "In front of Tiananmen" looks like a photograph. In the photo "In front of Tiananmen" the background scene and the image of people look very realistic, and the image is drawn in the way people pose in front of the camera. The picture "port scene" shows the cruelty of the government towards the public and the horrible conditions of the people in the port while the picture "In front of Tiananmen" shows the unity of all civilians, regardless of the rich and the poor.