Historical Context And Art Reception: Studies On The History Of Public Response To The Clay Statutes "Sh'ou Zu Yuan" And The Aesthetics It Reflects

In the contemporary Chinese art history, clay statutes "Sh'ou Zu Yuan" (rent collection courtyard) had been taken as a standard work of the revolutionary realism. As its coming out with the socialist educational campaigns, it was strongly political drumbeating, although with unparallel social influences. Since the beginning of the new period, its significance has been debated in the academic circles. This dissertation addresses the immanent relationships of art reception with its political environment, as well the whole social and cultural context through researching the different public responses in different periods of time to this work from the angle of art reception, which rethinks the relationship between politics and art, and attempts to explore some rules in public art reception from this new angle. Using an interdisciplinary method of connecting the reception aesthetics and contemporary social psychology-analyzing the documents used in contemporary social psychological research methods and social investigation, I visited the people concerned and the researchers, together with the two methods, to master the first-hand materials, and to make my independent judgment.This dissertation believes that the original clay statutes "Sh'ou Zu Yuan" had disregarded difference from the revised version from the early period of the "Cultural Revolution". The original clay statutes "Sh'ou Zu Yuan" was a complicated whole with many polyhedral contradictions- it absolutely includes not only the inclination of class struggle in terms of absolutes, but also the realistic and vivid art images reflecting the history before 1949, which was achieved in condensed and popular statue language. Because of its many characteristics and nature, the public interest had been changed with the changing historical contexts, i.e. the public interest focused on the preachy contents in the class struggle period, and the psychological distaste for it arose afterwards, and later on they found its values as art and cultural relics showing diversified tastes. These obvious changes in the public appreciation tastes mainly resulted from the changing pubic ideology with the social transitions, in which the political factors played a key role. The phenomenon of the clay statutes "Sh'ou Zu Yuan" demonstrates that the public always understand and receive art works according to their experience, and get a flexible psychological balance between their seeking novel taste and reminiscent moods.