Contemporary public art in China

the long version

More than ten thousand public artworks have been created in the People's Republic of China since its establishment in 1949. They range from the ubiquitous Chairman Mao statues, to immense monuments and murals commemorating revolutionary uprisings, to abstract pieces inspired by international artistic trends. Eighty-three of the most intriguing of these works are featured here by American sculptor John Young, who traveled to dozens of Chinese cities, photographing public artworks and interviewing artists and arts administrators. Young introduces us to examples of portrait art featuring political figures, such as the famous collaborative marble carving of Mao Zedong in the Memorial Hall at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and others that depict anonymous subjects, such as Situ Zhaoguang's playful sculpture - located on a Beijing traffic island amid busy streets - of a girl engrossed in reading a book, plugging her ears to the noise. China's rich ethnic culture is evident in works such as Yuan Yunsheng's mural at the Beijing airport, portraying the Dai people's Water Splashing Festival (whose nude bather was censored until recently and covered over by plywood). Folklore serves as the inspiration for works such as the collaborative granite sculpture Five Rams in Guangzhou, while historical figures and events from imperial China are the subjects of many works, such as Silk Road, a massive sculpture by Ma Gaihu and others marking the Chinese end of the ancient trade route. Many public artworks illustrate China's twentieth-century military struggles, including resistance to the Japanese invasion during World War II and the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists.