It is only 5 blocks from my home, but I rarely ever go to the Pacific Asia Museum (PAM). With the Chinese Lunar New Year parade next weekend I decided to visit the museum as a kind of ‘warm-up’ and photograph the building, which is very beautiful and was orginally built as a private home. As a home it was quite large, as a museum, it is quite small.
Inside I found–at least in my opinion–the most astonishing work of Chinese art since the Terracotta Warriors: The Rent Collection Courtyard. PAM has in its permanent collection this small scale version of a work created in 1965 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution by art students in Sichuan where the work still exists.
Comissioned by Mao Zedong’s wife, the 114 figures were intended to depict the landowner’s exploitation of peasants under the old Chinese system–pre-Mao and the Communist Revolution. At PAM only 30 figures are exhibited.
The influence of the Russian Socialist Realism art movement is clear; there are no passive figures. The peasants are stooped and struggling. Landlord Liu and his henchmen are tall and arrogant. It was just the right message for the opening of the Cultural Revolution during which, sadly, so many ancient works were destroyed.
To help understand the significance of this work in the history of Chinese art: in 1999 the famed Chinese artist CAO Guo-Qiang won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial for creating his own version of the work. Unfortunately his version is no longer extant.
I also took a few photographs of other items in the PAM collection and the building itself. Here they are:
