I was in Fukuoka, Japan this weekend and I went to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. There's an artist from china named Fen Mengbo who made a series of paintings that deal with his home country of China presented as status screens from 8/16-bit era RPG video games. You can see references to peasants, workers, soldiers, and some of the famous leaders of China mostly dealing with the time of The Great Leap Forward. I was able to take some pics but I wasn't able to use a flash so some of the pics are a bit blurry.
Cool to see someone creating original works using an 8bit/16bit style. I see to many people who make 8bit style paintings, and just reproduce character from popular games like Mario or Final Fantasy. You can hardly tell the difference between most the artists, since all of their paintings are almost identical.
Not bad, but still propaganda. Seriously, "The Great Leap Forward"? that was a dissaster, only overshadowed by the genocide that the "cultural revolution" was. I'm not chinese, but I do know history and looking at this is like seeing art glorifying hitler...
Most of the art I've seen on exhibit dealing with the Great Leap Forward are from artists who are showing their displeasure with Mao or the government in general, at least from most of the modern painters. Granted, the only Chinese art I've seen has been here in Japan so I can't say I have any real depth of knowledge on the subject. I saw the paintings above as yet another comical representation of what China's leaders hold so dear.
In china you would be thrown in jail or worst if you dared to mock any of the communist party's leaders or ideas. So I doubt theres more in the "people's country"...
