Icon and Form: A Study on Iconic Images of Cultural Revolution in Contemporary Chinese Fine Art

도상과 형상: 중국현대미술에서 문혁의 도상이미지 연구

As the great catastrophe in the modern and contemporary history of China, the Cultural Revolution(CR) is an object, which must have sutured the past of darkness. At the same time it is a continuous event and also a scar of memory. In other words, for history is "a dialog between the past and the reality"(E.H.Kar), CR intervenes in the reality and, on the contrary, the reality recomposes CR. From this point of view, CR is a historical event, which so far is not ended, and it is an object of memory, which is still being composed at the moment. As the saying: "Poetry is greater than history"(Aristoteles), artistic works more intensively reflect the past. The works related to CR can not be an exception. And CR is endlessly exposed in the contemporary Chinese fine arts and the works of the contemporary Chinese artists-Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang and others are proved to be those who suffer from the trauma of CR and who feel no liberty from CR. For example, CR probably is a symbol showing the "identity" of the Chinese artists. And the diversity of the symbol is the experience and pattern of the dialog between artistic works and CR (i.e., intervention in reality). For example, with withering of grand-narrative and appearance of micro-narrative, the CR critical works of Guan Zhoudao were the root of the Chinese fine arts in the late 70s and early 80s. In the contemporary cultural situation, the literary works about CR actively analyzed the history (CR) from the personal point of views and explained in the way of monolog and micro-method led the 1990s' works. In this way they tried to recompose the history "randomly", like looking at reality with their own eyes. In this process, CR is continuously exposing new features and the real facts are appearing before us as unfamiliar phenomena. This is a way of combination and "reappearance" of contemporary arts and reality. In conclusion, the purpose of this article is to make it possible to see a section of the contemporary Chinese fine arts through the study of the icon image of CR and to analyze the way of fine arts recomposing the history and the intervening in the reality. In this sense, the author has entitled the article "Icon and Form". It means how to reshape (the present) the typically formed icon of the CR (the past).