Wang Zheng: I am Wang Zheng, Professor of Women's Studies and the History at the University
of Michigan.
This paper-cut art form has been in China for long, long, long time.
It's one of the major art forms in Chinese folk art.
And the main artists, historically and so far, have been women.
And very touching stories of how women in villages have been taking on this art forms
and the villagers were asked for the artists who cut some paper-cuts for special occasions.
Wedding, the child-birth, Chinese new year, these local women artists by producing this
kind of artwork which is very important apart of village's art life, cultural life.
They gained a tremendous prestige in the community life.
As far as we know this set was collected by Professor Michel Oksenberg.
My feeling is that he might have collected it when he was studying Chinese Politics.
He was a political scientist in Hong Kong during a cultural evolution.
Because this set was made between 1970 and 1971, and then when he left it here, left
the University of Michigan he donated this to Center for Chinese Studies.
So it has been there in the story to a long time.
Just recently, Center for Chinese Studies staff Carol found that she asked me to take
a look, to see, and I was stunned by this discovery because I found it's highly valuable.
What struck me as extremity valuable is that this paper-cut set has 15 images total.
The 15 images is very coherent historical narrative of the cultural revolution.
Of course this narrative is constructed or was constructed by the artists of that time.
What caught my attention is, first of all it's the completeness; second is, the producer.
It is not by -- it is produced center academy of arts.
This one produced by an art institute in Foshan in Guangdong province.
Foshan was a small town at the time, now it's a city far away from Beijing.
So it's not like something authorized or commanded by party leadership.
So that means this large art set was kind of spontaneously produced by the local artists.
They were young budding artists.
So it's to understand how they understood the cultural evolution at the time, and I
am also in the process trying to identify those surviving artists to interview, to really
understand their actual historical process of producing this.
Cultural evolution is a very controversial subject.
The contemporary historians or scholar definition of it is that this is a period that Chairman
Mao tried to fight against the bureaucracies of his party.
So he relied on Red Guards, young students outside forces to fight against party leaders.
This set includes all the major events in the cultural evolution.
It started with the title page.
Title said, Long live the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and it has a red flag and the
title is on the flag with Mao's image on the flag, and then there is the Tiananmen Square.
The first one is named as the Inception of the Cultural Resolution, tells us how important
the cultural front is to the cultural revolution.
The other one is, this image that has a flag carried by young students, they are on the
long march and this is also quite a major event of the time.
All the young students were mobilized, they were called on by Mao to visit all the revolutionary
sites during that time, schools were stopped.
So the students were encouraged to learn from the society from history.
So a lot of students were on the road.
There are also the events critiquing the bourgeois intellectuals.
Mao and his wife, they identified the targets to condemn.
Then it ends with Chairman Mao's thoughts, Long live Chairman Mao's thoughts and the
Chairman Mao's thoughts' impact.
The global impact, the whole set has been digitized and it's stored in the Digital Library
Production Service at the University Library.