Although
the 1940s ended with the Communists' triumph in China in 1949 and the establishment
of the People's Republic of China, the decade was a time of "internal turmoil
and external invasion": Corruption of the Republican government, continuation
of the anti-Japanese war, followed soon afterward by the Second Civil War, in
1946. Overall, the picture was one of war, anger, and crime. As part of the
pursuit of modernity, now much more was demanded of art, which had to serve
the social needs of the political power structure. By the 1940s, Marxism had
become a major force, one that was extremely popular among intellectuals all
over the world, and one that would dominate China for the next half- century-a
total change of Chinese cultural structure. Efforts to bring Western ideals
and philosophy into the reconstruction of a new culture for the increasingly
powerful Communists marked China's entry into modern culture, as a Chinese version
of Soviet and Marxist culture. For the project of documenting contemporary Chinese
art, we consider the 1940s as its beginning: from Communism's establishment
in China to the gradual evolution of the Chinese Communists into a semi-capitalist
industrialist state. The core issue in contemporary China is: Accept or reject
the major foreign cultural force of Marxism?
