II- What is the position of Chinese Revolutionary Art in the Chinese Cultural Heritage today ?

A) Definition of “Cultural Heritage”

The UNESCO defines the Cultural Heritage “as the entire corpus of material signs-either artistic or symbolic handed on by the past of each culture and, therefore, to the whole of humankind. As a constituent part of the affirmation and enrichment of cultural identities, the cultural heritage gives each particular place its recognizable features and is the storehouse of human experience”.

To reformulate this definition at the level of a Nation, cultural heritage is the memory of a common past. The nation have to be self-aware of this shared patrimony in order to define itself as regards to this common ground.

Cultural heritage defines the identity of a nation.

Are Chinese revolutionary arts part of the Chinese Cultural Heritage today ?

For the particular case of China, one could say that its traditionnal arts such as ink paintings, opera or ceramics are part, among many other things, to its cultural heritage. A chinese claims those arts as his personal culture.

One wonders in this study if the chinese arts expressed during the revolutionary period can be considered as part of the Chinese cultural heritage. This is a difficult question. Indeed those arts objectively belong to the Chinese history of art. But do Chineses consider those arts as part of their personal cultural identity?

Today, the relationship between Chineses & the revolutionary period is very ambiguous. The new generation behave sometimes as if nothing have ever happened. The memory of this period is fuzzy because some parts of it are always taboo or more simply, censored by the government.

To determine if Chinese revolutionary arts are today part of the Chinese cultural heritage we want to observed its influences on the chinese contemporary arts. If the today’s art have the imprint of revolutionary arts, then, one could say that chinese revolutionary arts are -at least uncounsciencly- part of the cultural heritage. If there are few remains of revolutionary arts today one could assess that it does not belong to the cultural heritage of the Chineses