1980s
The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of the early 1980s was soon replaced by
a series of economic reforms that are considered the second revolution; these
reforms brought a change in China in all aspects, particularly in the fields
of art and culture. Through a government-designed, comprehensive economic modernization
and organizational reform program, China's energy was revitalized, bringing
wealth and opportunities, as well as corruption and social disorder. Corruption
and social disorder then became the focus of much of the avant-garde art that
emerged during this period, blending images from the Cultural Revolution with
subtle references to current social issues and problems. Freed from earlier
political restraints, avant-gardism flourished throughout the arts-literature
dance, music, visual art, art theory, and film-becoming a phenomenon soon to
be called "the '85 Movement"-the launching pad for contemporary Chinese art
in the next decades. The decade of the 1980s lowered its curtain after two major
events: the first national scale avant-garde art exhibition in January of 1989,
which was closed shortly after its opening, and the 1989 student movement in
Tiananmen Square.