MAJOR TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART
art reached a height of popularity during 1981 83. In The Path of Beauty (Meide lucheng, Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1981) the academic Li Zezhou made the point that art evolved from the representation of concrete forms to the expression of the abstract. This statement had a tremedous impact in the art world. As an editor of the authoritative official journal Art(Meishu) I noted the move towards abstract art and produced an issue of the journal devoted to the subject (Art, No. 1, 1983) This led, however, to my being purged during the Anti Spiritual Pollution Campaign later that year for maintaining a "bourgeois artistic standpoint." The abstract art produced in China in the early 1980s was the result of formalism; form and decoration were the wellsprings of these works. At least they indicated that artists had made a clean break with realism. The development of contemporary Chinese culture, however, is dependent upon shifts in values. Such a shift took place, for example, in the early 1980s. Following this change, experimentation with abstract art became little more than an empty gesture imitating Western models. After 1985, however, things changed. There were two distinct new developments in abstract art. The first of these was the appearance of works that took their inspiration from traditional Chinese painting, architecture and bronzes. This is evident in the paintings of Xiao Huixiang and Chen Xiangxun whose use of lines is influenced by the