ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two of the last foreign exhibitions to be held in the Mao period and one from the immediate post-Mao years: landscape exhibitions from Australia, Canada, and France held between 1975 and 1978. As cultural diplomacy exhibitions, they were all government-sponsored initiatives, and they fulfilled a clear instrumental diplomatic or political purpose at a time when China was seeking to rebuild relationships with Western countries after decades of isolation and hostility. Yet while these exhibitions were all professionally curated, including some of the best paintings representing their countries’ national artistic achievements, the reception and impact of the first two were heavily constrained by the rigid political and cultural context of their transitional time at the tail end of the ten-year Cultural Revolution.
By contrast, the blockbuster French exhibition was held at the beginning of the reform and opening-up era. Comparing these three exhibitions thus makes possible analysis of the under-researched topic of global artistic exchanges with socialist China during this period of transition, focusing on why landscape painting was chosen as the preferred theme at this historical juncture, and what kinds of “decadent capitalist artworks” were considered permissible to display when the socialist door gradually started to open.
