ABSTRACT
Since 1985, the phrase "going to the world" has reverberated with increasing intensity in Chinese art and cultural circles. Proponents of the modernist movement in China, or "art's new tide," argue that such cosmopolitanism does not imply loss of national character, but rather that national character is what makes possible a genuine Chinese contribution to world art and culture. The May Fourth era had been marked by cosmopolitanism and a desperate thirst for things new and foreign. The art, arid the article on it, illustrated one particular subtheme in 1988's vogue for the ugly: the interest in ethnic art, particularly from Guizhou. In 1988 it was the harsher, cruder, more powerful material, such as the uniquely gruesome regional opera masks from Guizhou, that attracted attention among Chinese artists. By late 1988 commentators were speaking of the "Red Sorghum Phenomenon"—a controversial art work upon which the Party refused to pass authoritative judgment.
