TAIPEI, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei In the 1990s and 2000s, as capitalism was tearing through Chinese society like never before, a populist wave welled up for the old days of Chairman Mao. For many, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) were suddenly washed over by a nostalgia for the egalitarianism and collectivism of communist life. In Chinese contemporary art circles, similar ideas were being explored by a group of friends—artists Song Dong, Xiao Yu, Liu Jianhua, Hong Hao and the critic and art dealer Leng Lin—who called their movement Polit-Sheer-Form. In practice, they appropriated the cultural structures of the Chinese Communist Party—its propaganda images, meeting rooms, emblems, social organization and collective actions—and applied them tongue-in-cheek to create installations, videos, performances and relational forms.
The Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO), as…