Oct 1, 1973 - Oct 20, 1973
China Art Gallery, Beijing

The Hu Xian Peasant Art Exhibition was held during the latter half of the Cultural Revolution, and was the most prominent exhibition of mass art shown in Mao Zedong-era China. Featuring artwork by eighty-seven peasants hailing from rural agricultural communes located about an hour outside of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in central China, the exhibition largely showcased paintings depicting scenes both bucolic and militant of collective agricultural labor. The exhibition traveled widely within China as well as internationally, showing at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Paris Biennale, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The artwork shown in the exhibition represent the apogee of the mass art movement in socialist China, an experimental program nation-wide in its scope to cultivate accomplished artists out of untrained amateurs laboring at the grassroots, such as peasants, factory workers, or rank-and-file soldiers. The exhibition played a formative role in cementing the aesthetics of mass art in socialist-era China. It also introduced a pedagogy for training mass artists that sought to displace fine arts practice from the urban fine art academy into the fields or factory floor.