The Works：Art during and post Cultural Revolution, Ceramic artist, Zoe Coughlan, Gao Xingjian's "Lay

May 16th marks the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution. The campaign launched by Mao Zedong put China into a decade long chaos One of the main message of the campaign is to purge against counter-revolutionary schemers who conspired to overthrown the Communist Party with a “dictatorship of the bourgeoise”. Other than the ordinary citizens that got caught during the political upheaval, academics, intellectuals and artists were particularly denounced and persecuted to eliminate their “bourgeoise thoughts”. The campaign was marked by an unparalleled array of socialist art guided by “Mao Zedong Thought” and spearheaded by the army which consisted of propaganda posters, staged plays and other art that portrayed the personality cult of Mao.
Last week, we featured local artist Stephen Wong who likes landscape sketching and painting of nature. British artist, Zoe Coughlan, who now calls Hong Kong her home is also inspired by our landscape, focusing on the urban and architectural side.
During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese writer, painter and playwright Gao Xingjian burnt all of his early works to avoid being denounced. He was sent to the countryside for “re-education”. But he continued to write in secret and buried his writings in the ground. He wrote about his experience of the turmoil in his novel “One Man’s Bible”. A few of his books and plays were banned in China even after the end of the revolution. He left China in 1987 and seek political asylum in France and granted citizenship in 1998. He started painting, combining abstraction with Chinese ink. In 2000, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his book, “Soul Mountain”. Now showing at Alisan Fine Arts till the 25th June as part of Le French May, “Layers of Light Ink in Mind” is his latest exhibition in Hong Kong.
Formed in 2014, local woodwind quintet Viva Pipers’s introduces the wind family of instrument of music ranging from folk songs, classical music, film scores to cartoon melodies. They are here talking to Ben.