The farm for the rental income
The sculpture group Hof for the Lease Collection , consisting of more than 100 life-size figures ( Chinese 收租 院 Shouzuyuan ; English: Rent Collection Courtyard ) is one of the most important works of modern Chinese art history and is firmly anchored in the collective memory of China. In 1965 by teachers and graduates of the Sichuan University of the Arts in Chongqing as a site-specific installation on the former estate of the landowner Liu Wencai (1887–1949) ( Dizhu zhuangyuan chenlieguan ) in the Anren (安仁 镇) community of Dayi County in Chengdu City (capital of Province of Sichuan ), about 50 kilometers west of the city center, created the character group soon became a model artwork of the cultural revolution . In a dramatic sequence of scenes that brings together traditional Chinese, Soviet and Western elements, she depicts the merciless exploitation of the rural population by a wealthy landowner from the pre-communist era.
In addition to the group of sculptures made of dry clay in the memorial in the large community of Anren in the Dayi district, several copies and variants were made and exhibited throughout the country. One of these variants - realized with great effort from 1974–1978 as a mobile travel version made of copper-plated fiberglass - has been preserved to this day and has since been shown in the "Art Museum of the Sichuan University of the Arts" in Chongqing. In 2009 this version was first exhibited at the Shanghai Art Museum. In the same year, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presented art for millions as part of the exhibition . 100 sculptures from the Mao period the figure group for the first time in the west. As early as 1972 Harald Szeemann tried to show the group of sculptures at documenta 5 (1972) in Kassel , but this failed for political and financial reasons. Having him as head of the 1999 La Biennale di Venezia was yet again failed to show the sculptures in the unrealized USA living Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang one on the court Rent Collection recurrent work with which he the Golden Lion won . As a result, a conflict arose in China over the copyrights of the work, which became the starting point of a far-reaching debate about currently important questions about the position of the artist and the freedom of art in China today, as well as the relationship between the Chinese and Western art worlds. In recent times, the work has repeatedly been picked up by young Chinese artists and has found its way into the current discussions on contemporary art in China.
description
Historical development
The former landowner Liu Wencai (1887–1949) was considered to be one of the most colorful figures in Sichuan Province during the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). His father was a small landowner and liquor dealer. He himself got through the protection of influential family members to high administrative posts and had good relations with politics, administration and the military. He is also said to have had contacts with the underworld and with religiously influenced secret societies. He died in 1949 just before the Communist Party 's People's Liberation Army occupied Sichuan. Liu Wencai is said to have deceived his farmers so much that they were in permanent lease debt. In order to pay off these, they are said to have been forced to sell their own children, forcibly recruited into military service or driven from their homes. The artefacts of the Wencais reign that have been exhibited in the memorial to this day included bushels that were larger than the farmers' standard sheepels, so that the delivery quantities had to appear too small. Winnowing machines, which were set so strongly that good grain was blown out with the husk and thus the rent delivered further reduced, are shown as relics of feudal rule.
Since the 1950s, the propaganda of the Communist Party constructed Liu Wencai into the archetypal arch villain of the vanquished feudal society. Publications with canonized stories of his evil deeds were circulated across the country. Today it is difficult to assess the truthfulness of the stories handed down and it remains unclear which facts were embellished with propaganda.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the museum management of the memorial decided in mid-1964 to develop a new exhibition for the property, which was to commemorate the past feudal rule in dioramas. On behalf of the Ministry of Culture of the Province, Li Qisheng, a graduate of the Art Middle School of the Art Academy in Chongqing assigned to the memorial, developed a narrative process that uses the example of a family to illustrate the fraudulent course of lease income by the local landowner Liu Wencai in the time before the takeover by the Communist Party was supposed to represent 1949.
Property of the large landowner Liu Wencai
Landowner Liu Wencai's courtyard
Landowner Liu Wencai's courtyard
Landowner Liu Wencai's courtyard
Political dimension
The work was under the clear primacy of the political. First and foremost, the work of art should serve as an education for the class struggle. In addition, the artists took the demand that all social groups work selflessly for the good of the population on the basis of Mao Zedong's ideas and under the leadership of the Communist Party.
The theoretical basis of their work was Mao Zedong's Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua (speeches during the discussion in Yan'an about literature and art), which they received intensively. The talks on literature and art took place in May 1942 in Yan'an, Shaanxi Province. Mao's speeches, which were later printed, contain his central art theoretical views, which should be binding for writers and visual artists for the next 30 years. The main points are the subjection of the arts to politics and their serving character for the masses. The arts should depict the “true circumstances”, the “new world” and its “true heroes”. In order to be able to meet these demands, the artists should live with the workers, farmers and soldiers and learn from them. The participation in collective work assignments in the country and the intensive contact with the rural population caused many artists to think about art and its audience. In line with Mao Zedong's idea, a large number of artistic works were created as the work of an artist collective. In fact, it wasn't until 2001 that a complete list of the names of the artists who were involved in the creation of the farm for the lease was published.
As sculptors, you had to struggle with the difficulty that sculpture never achieved the status of art in pre-modern China . Until the 20th century, only certain forms of non-mimetic painting and the art of writing were accorded a comparable status to European ideas of art. Sculptures as apparently realistic images did not appear in the art discourse of the educated elite. It was only when the neologism geijutsu (Chin. Meishu , dt. Fine arts ) was introduced from Japan in the 19th century that the European division of the arts into painting, architecture, sculpture and handicrafts as well as the system of art education based on it was adopted.
Nevertheless, the sculptors at the Sichuan University of the Arts in Chongqing had a thorough education in which classical and socially realistic European sculpture came together with Soviet elements and a special form of Chinese sculpture tradition.
Origin and context
The academy management sent the five-member graduating class from the Sichuan College of the Arts in 1965 with their teacher Wang Guanyi under the nominal leadership of his colleague Zhao Shutong to Anren. The working group was supplemented with alternating memberships by local assistants, so that at times it consisted of up to 20 people.
In Chongqing people had already thought about what material the work should be made of. The principle was: a lot, fast, good and cheap. For this reason, the decision was made to use dry clay, which was applied in several layers around a wooden and wire framework wrapped in straw and, if carefully processed, would be durable for several centuries.
On June 4, 1965, the sculptors arrived at the memorial and first visited the premises and some temples in the area to see more examples of dry clay sculptures. Visits to local farmers and former tenants who told them about the conditions in Liu Wencai's time were very important to the artists. The stories mingled with the previous knowledge of the sculptors about the figure of the landowner and formed an important basis for the development of the installation's content. The intensive exchange with the rural population and their references to detailed questions about clothing and equipment, which enabled an authentic representation, proved to be particularly fruitful.
In order to allow the microcosm of the old, semi-feudal society to emerge, people and scenes were integrated that were never part of the lease delivery in reality, but were intended to represent Liu Wencai's networking in politics, the military and the underworld. In addition to the landlord's administrators, bailiffs, workers and overseers, soldiers, county administrators, members of secret societies and gangsters, as well as Liu Wencai himself, who probably never entered this part of his property, appear in a central scene.
The story
The installation site is in the northeast corner of the property in the larger of the two courtyards (25 × 37 m), which served as a lease collection point before 1949. A short all-round roof forms an open gallery. The lease payment took place without precisely defined stations in the entire courtyard. There were six or seven worflers around whom the delivery took place. The installation as a narrative sequence of seven successive scenes, which in turn should consist of a series of groups of figures and individual figures, was set up below the gallery roof and left the inner courtyard free. Machines and tools such as worflers, custom-made sashes, brooms, furniture, wheelbarrows and other artefacts that were previously used in leasing were integrated into the work.
The installation of a total of 114 figures in Anren extends over 97 meters. There are 82 men, 32 women, including 17 old people, 18 children and a dog. 96 figures represent a good character and 18 a bad character. There are also 52 tools and devices. The narrative was originally divided into four and later seven scenes by the artists. The dramaturgy of the story runs from the arrival of the farmers in the yard with subsequent control of the quality of the grain and repeated winnowing, through fruitless complaints from the farmers to the climax of the confrontation with the landowner Liu Wencai. After reprisals are depicted, the story ends with a group of peasants who, determined to resist, leave the farm.
In detail, the scenes developed the following narrative structure: The first scene : Delivering the rent (jiao zu) shows the arrival of the farmers in the yard. Prominent figures are the old woman with a stick, the old man with a wheelbarrow, the old couple with the heavy sack and the exhausted mother with a child by the hand and an infant on her back. A young woman, who sits waiting on her carrying bar, forms the transition to the second scene : Controlling the rent (yan zu). At the same time, this guides the viewer's gaze across the first corner of the composition to the narrow western side of the courtyard. In the center of the second scene is a steward with one foot on the trampled grain basket of a farmer lying on the ground in front of it. A number of farmers watch angrily, but do not dare to intervene. The third scene is closely connected to these figures : The Worfler (fengsu), which in some publications has also been combined with the second scene. You can see two winnowing machines that are operated by powerful shakers and that harass and threaten several farmers. The figures of a mother with her child, trying in vain to move a heavy grain basket, form the transition to the fourth scene and across the second corner of the courtyard to the north wall. The design of the fourth scene : Too Much Demanded (guotou) is grouped around an administrator who is casually sitting on a chair and who, protected by a member of a secret society, listens indifferently to the complaints and complaints of the farmers. The fifth scene begins immediately behind him : the settlement (suanzhang), which is the negative climax of the composition. In it, Liu Wencai backs away from a farmer lying on the ground, who points accusingly at him. Two men hold a strong young farmer who wants to pounce on the landlord. A few more farmers watch the scene, whose body language suggests that they too won't hold back much longer. Immediately afterwards, the sixth scene : The extorted lease (bizu), represents reprisals that indebted farmers had to endure. A mother is separated from her infant and dragged inside the property through the north gate to serve as Liu Wencai's wet nurse. A blind old man is holding the receipt for his granddaughter that he had to sell. In front of a prison gate that creates the transition to the east wall, two girls are waiting for their locked mother and two bailiffs are carrying a dead man away. Soldiers lead a young man who is tied up next to the prison for military service. His wife lies helpless on the ground. The groups of figures with the wet nurse and the kidnapping of the peasant pressed for service are modifications of the stories of wet nurse Luo Erniang and activist Leng Yueying. Full of anger and hate, several young, strong men from the final scene, the seventh scene : Flames of Anger (nuohuo) stare across. One can only be held back by his mother with great difficulty. Some farmers discuss while they leave the farm and look back at the landlord. The look and demeanor make it clear that the next time they will not come with their lease.
Interpretation and significance
Art-historical research has a very ambivalent view of the group of sculptures, which is unique in the history of Chinese art. A differentiated view shows that the group of young sculptors brought together five elements that previously had little contact: a combination of the formal language of classical and classical-modern European with that of Soviet, socialist-realistic sculpture. At the same time, the folk art technique of Chinese dry clay sculptures and a special way of Buddhist and secular stone carving of the Song dynasty found their way into the artistic language of forms.
In terms of content, they developed a narrative structure that transformed the formerly real process of the annual rent of the farmers of the Dayi district into a convincing and entirely fictional sequence of sensibly arranged individual scenes. To this end, they interwoven the contents of the stories about Liu Wencai as determined by the Communist Party's propaganda with the narratives of local farmers, and subtly manipulated the installation's space and staff. Last but not least, they succeeded in creating an acceptance for the genre of sculpture that had hitherto been unattainable in Chinese art history and a position equivalent to painting. With the farm for the rental income, a completely new form of contemporary Chinese art emerged.
The reception: media, audience and artists
Even before the exhibition opened in 1965, high-ranking representatives of the cultural bureaucracy visited the exhibition. A short time afterwards, there was intense media coverage. During the ongoing work, the first articles were published in regional and national daily newspapers. In 1966 a 35-minute documentary and a record were released. The farm for the rental income achieved national fame within a few weeks.
Within a few days of the opening, more than 20,000 people saw the exhibition. Moving scenes must have played. Visitors cried in the exhibition, others tried to beat up guards and bailiffs. Many farmers felt reminded of their lives before the "liberation", when the upper class could rule undisturbed. Some of the visitor groups were organized - schools, factories and military units visited the exhibition as closed collectives - but many people felt a real need to see the figures, so that they often took long walks on themselves. Yiku sitian meetings were held in the courtyard, at which old people talked about the hardships of life in the old society and the improved living conditions under socialism.
As a result, the idea arose to show the exhibition in other places in the country and especially in Beijing , whereupon a copy of 40 sculptures was made. Together with large-format photo posters of the original work, it was shown in the National Gallery in Beijing from December 24, 1965. Again the response was overwhelming. There was no end to the flood of articles, the audience reactions were moving and just as dramatic as in Anren. Many people waited all night in the sub-Siberian cold to get a ticket. By March 1966, half a million visitors had visited the exhibition. Since the rush of visitors brought the National Gallery to the limits of its capacity, the exhibition had to move to a location that was better able to cope with the rush of the masses. The choice fell on the Imperial Palace.
Popularity during the Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution began in May 1966 . Initially, the management of the Imperial Palace Museum in Beijing decided to exhibit not just parts, but a complete copy. However, the revolutionary criticism found the suffering and desperate faces of many peasants to be unrevolutionary and, above all, caused the final scene to be transformed into a class struggle. The exhibition in Beijing opened on October 1, 1966 and ran with great success until mid-1968. When the exhibition finally had to close in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, over 2 million people in Beijing alone had seen the courtyard. The figures were destroyed in the early 1970s.
During the Beijing exhibition, the Chinese Foreign Ministry had received several inquiries from friendly countries that wanted to exhibit the figures as well. Since China only had relations with Albania and North Vietnam due to the internal political turmoil, it was decided to produce a version for both countries. A version consisting of a total of 99 figures was made that hardly looked like the original. The Albanian leader Enver Hoxha was so enthusiastic about the work that Albania kept the group and North Vietnam had to be content with a few sculptures and a few photos.
In the meantime, a new genre had emerged in Chinese sculpture with the creation of revolutionary groups of figures. In 1966 the installation was declared a model work of art, on which the entire production of visual artists had to be oriented. Often from a local initiative, copies of the courtyard and works inspired by them were made across the country - mostly very free. Further motifs were the suffering of the miners, the mine workers, the factory workers, the orphans, the love of the Red Guards for Mao Zedong and, as it were, as a climax and conclusion, the work The Hate of the Serfs from 1976, in which the joy of the Tibetans at their liberation of serfdom by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. As far as we know today, none of the works has been preserved.
A permanent copy
Due to the overwhelming reactions from the public and the media and numerous loan requests from the Chinese provinces and abroad, the provincial government wanted to make a permanent and transportable copy that would enable location-independent exhibitions. Under the direction of Li Shaoyan, one of the earliest sponsors of the project and in collaboration with over 50 professional and amateur sculptors, students and workers - including Wang Guanyi and Zhao Shutong - it was concluded that the group of sculptures was as true to the original as possible and not in revolutionary revision should be reproduced.
With the fiberglass copy, the artists created an independent work of art. The atmosphere of the earthy, rural, location and topic-appropriate as well as the great impact of the overall composition of the work from 1965, which resulted from the specifics of the fixed installation, the medium of dry clay and the installation at the historical location of the leasehold, embodied with its unity of topic, Medium and implementation the socio-political side of the work. The many qualitative changes to the details of individual figures in the fiberglass frame give them a much greater individual effect than the models in Anren. The sculptors now had the time to produce the figures in a quality that they could not achieve ten years earlier because of the deadline pressure. In addition, the sculptural dimension of the work design was emphasized by the careful adaptation to the changed spatial situation. The drastic act of transmedialization from dry clay to plastic led to a de- and recontextualization that corresponded to the changed artistic, social and political framework conditions at the time of its creation and the now very changed context of the display and installation of the mobile copy.
When the work on the travel variant made of copper-coated fiberglass was finally finished in early 1978, the political and social framework had changed fundamentally. Mao Zedong had been dead for two years and the education of the revolutionary masses for permanent class struggle was no longer a priority. The court did not seem to fit the times lately. The Art Academy in Chongqing nevertheless published a splendid illustrated book and placed the copy in their museum. The expected loan inquiries did not materialize and it was quiet around the farm for the lease for the time being.
The participating artists embarked on different artistic paths in the following years, but remained connected to the court throughout their lives. Wang Guanyi became a professor at the Sichuan Arts College in Chongqing and maintained an extensive archive on the court's history. Zhao Shutong worked as a freelance artist and tried to distance himself from this early work in his career. As one of the largest private collectors of Chinese folk art, he remained closely linked to the basic idea of the court. Li Qisheng ran a small sculpting studio in Chengdu and made small-format bronze copies of individual figures from the installation, which he sold in his studio.
Continuity in change
With the end of the Cultural Revolution, the public's interest in the Class War Museum in Anren declined sharply and the view of the property changed, which was declared a protected cultural asset of the Sichuan Province in 1980 ( Sichuan sheng wenwu baohu danwei ) and in 1996 a national cultural monument ( Quanguo zhongdian wenwu danwei ) was appointed. Today, the focus is no longer on the supposedly dissolute lifestyle of a depraved exploiter, but on an outstanding architectural monument of supraregional importance. The former Liu family estate (Liushi zhuangyuan), as the museum is now called, is a popular and much promoted travel destination.
Regardless of this, Liu Wencai was considered an arch villain in China long after the Cultural Revolution, whose image should not be shaken. When the Sichuan writer Xiao Shu published his book The True Story of Liu Wencai ( Liu Wencai zhenxiang ) in 1999, which paints a positive image of Liu that deviates significantly from the official version, it was immediately withdrawn from the market upon strong intervention. And when the Hong Kong television station Phoenix TV broadcast a positive television portrait of Liu in 2003, the program could not be repeated. Today there is an extensive discussion on Chinese internet forums about who Liu Wencai really was. The television film, which was banned four years ago, can be seen online on the video portal of the largest Chinese Internet provider, Sina.com, and Xiao Shu published a new, freely available book about Liu Wencai.
The fact that the lease income farm has a radiance that goes far beyond all other contemporary Chinese works of art is due to the great artistic intensity of the work. In its more than 40-year history, the court has encouraged contemporary artists to work on lease payments that sparked heated controversies inside and outside of China, it caused legal discussions, is kitsched up as trinkets or used by authors as a hook for social science publications.
In June 2009, the first exhibition of fiberglass copies outside the Sichuan University of the Arts in Chongqing since the 1970s came to an end in Shanghai. Following this show, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main showed the group of sculptures for the first time in Western Europe from September 2009 for 4 months under the exhibition title “Art for millions. 100 sculptures from the Mao period ”.
Individual evidence
literature
- Esther Schlicht, Max Hollein : Art for Millions: 100 sculptures from the Mao period . Catalog book for the exhibition in Frankfurt 09/24/2009 - 01/03/2010 Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Munich: Hirmer, 2009. ISBN 3-7774-2231-2
- Sandra Danicke: Mao / power / history . In: art 09/2009, pp. 68–71
Web links
- Interactive panoramic view of the group of sculptures , Makley Image Archive at Reed College (English)
- Art for millions. 100 sculptures from the Mao period . Exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
- Information on the exhibition site in Anren (en.)