Full Frontal: Contemporary Asian Artists from the Logan Collection

exhibition catalog for The Denver Art Museum / The Logan Collection Vail

Essays by Kent Logan, Ronald Otsuka, Tom Whitten

From Tom Whitten’s essay:
December 1978 was the turning point in China’s recent history. That month’s plenary session of the Communist Party Central Committee passed Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping’s proposal to abandon “class struggle” as the party’s main objective, replacing it with “socialist modernization,” a more acceptable moniker for economic development. From the chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution, China was on the road to reform. Few would then have imagined that it would end the twentieth century confident of world superpower status not far into the twenty-first....
Opening up economically also led to a new level of intellectual and artistic foment. With the media trumpeting the success of reforms in the economic sector, it was increasingly apparent that a change indirection was unlikely, and intellectuals and artists soon began to lose the fears that had been installed into them during the Mao years.

84 pages
7.75 x 8.75 inches