Hellen Meng
Professor Ruseski
ENG 118st-01
1 November 2022
Politicized Art in Modern Era
With the development of the times, increasingly sophisticated digital painting technology has taken our society into a new era of art. Different from traditional artwork painted by brush on the canvas, digital paintings are painted on the computer and stored as an image, in other words, a group of data. This new form of art has become popular on the Internet and can easily be disseminated on social media by simply posting or reposting the images. On Weibo, the largest social media in China, there are thousands of digital paintings posted by artists and fans every day. Most of them are original art works or fan arts, but in April 2022, a digital painting of Wuheqilin, named Shanghai Can’t Fall was sent on the top of the stream. It depicted the serious pandemic in Shanghai, but in a form of describing medical workers fighting against the image of evil snakes. Accusing the people don’t follow the policies, traveling to other provinces and bring the virus into Shanghai, Wuheqilin’s painting triggered a heated discussion in China. This painting depicts the pandemic as a political event instead of a social event, which is consistent with the idea of Walter Benjamin, that in the modern era, the political exhibition value to advocate for the political standpoint of the government outweighs the cult value or ritual value of the original form of art.
Different from his original art theme about books and stories, Wuheqilin started to draw the artworks that have strong political overtones in recent years, which has given him a lot more attention from people and official media exposure. In recent decades, especially due to the effects of the pandemic, China has become more and more conservative. After experiencing a period of liberated art starting from the reform and opening-up in China, the art in the current period has been largely attached to politics. Benjamin points out that “Communism responds by politicizing art”, and I totally agree with this statement that communist politicians use art as a strong tool to express their political arguments. For example, in The Great Leap Forward, politicians used paintings to show the high-flown situation of the development in China, and one distinct feature of those paintings is over-exaggeration. In a famous painting in that era, a corn was drawn as big as a train to show the strong power of agriculture in China. This kind of art has a strong political standpoint of persuading the masses that all policies of the government are perfect and effective. The nature of communism requires one central government, which has absolute control over the people. As a result, art is also politicized in the form that politicians attach importance to the exhibition value of the art works to influence the masses, and the cult value has been weakened. Wuheqilin’s art doesn’t have any cult value inside, and the only purpose is to show that how our politics work and cater to the government’s standpoint.
The government and official media in China used the art work Shanghai Can’t Fall as a tool to advocate for the actions, like isolation, quarantine,and strict policies of traveling, against the pandemic by China. In this case, the cult value has been ignored since artists are not expressing their own aesthetic value of this painting but only focus on the political elements in it.This situation is consistent to Benjamin’s viewpoint that from a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. For example, official media in China, like guancha.cn and The Central Committee of the Communist Young League, have used several former paintings of Wuheqilin to accuse for the actions of the American Government about Taiwan issues etc. Those official medias are not posting his art because of the aesthetic value or cult value, but simply because his paintings are a powerful tool to attack the American government and make people inclined to the perspective against other countries and support the Chinese government.
Plenty of people’s viewpoints are shaped by this painting and other similar artworks used as propaganda. This painting is provocative and has a strong sense of nationalism to show that everything done by the Chinese government is correct. The value of Shanghai Can’t Fall is politicized, just like how they politicized the pandemic. The generally accepted nature of COVID-19 is an unfortunate social event experienced by all human beings. However, China has attached political significance to it. At the beginning of the pandemic, facing Delta, the strict policies in China have saved many lives. Although the fatality of the virus has declined, the Chinese government still sticks to its policies, advocating that they are doing the best over the world in fighting with COVID-19. However, the sacrifice of those policies is endured by every Chinese citizen, not the politicians. There have been voices that disagree with the strict policies and requiring open-up in China. At this point, the Chinese government needs to divert people’s discontent to other countries, like America. Those political paintings have an obvious political standpoint, and can readily shape the mind of the people by calling on nationalism and hostility against other countries——people are angry about the students and people coming back to China, who “bring the virus to our home”. Even more, some people believe that COVID-19 is a conspiracy of the American government and the virus was created by some American labs to bring to China, ignoring the equally bad situation the US experienced during the pandemic. Benjamin states that in Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations. Similarly in China, those artworks have created an illusion to control the thoughts of the masses and influence people’s individual understanding of the current social situation.
In a nutshell, it’s more and more common to politicize art and make the political exhibition value outweigh the original cult value of art in the modern era in China. If this situation doesn’t change, it will negatively affect people in two different aspects of artists and people. First, it will make the environment of the artists’ creation worse. Since the government and people are more focused on the exhibition value of the art works, artists may tend to leave cult value behind and try to exaggerate the exhibition value to attract more attention. Eventually, it may result in the homogenization of the art and the loss of creativity. Also, people will lose their ability to think critically about social events. Most people, especially teenagers, experience overexposure to the Internet nowadays. Like the statement of Benjamin that “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”(19) If the masses’ thoughts can be easily affected by those paintings posted by official media, they will become a person that can only think what the government wants people to think. Our society will lose the vitality and the new ideas used to transform the country into a better place. Taking all those aspects into consideration, I believe that for one thing, the government should leave more freedom to the art and have greater diversity when posing the art work, for another thing, people should do more critical thinking on what media posts instead of just taking the ideas without evaluating them.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.
Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 1-26.
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