Aesthetic politics of the folk <i>avant-garde</i> art movement in Chinese wartime communist Yan’an

Following the distinction of ‘historical avant-gardes’ and ‘neo- avant-gardes’ drawn by Peter Bürger and the conception of ‘postsocialist avant-gardes ’ from Aleš Erjavec, Chinese scholars have recently claimed that the fourth paradigm of avant-gardes emerged in communist Yan’an in the 1940s. These avant-gardes , shaped under the interpretation of art in Mao's Yan’an Talk as well as in a militarily autonomous space, were endowed with the capacity of harmonizing avant-gardism with popular culture, aesthetics with politics, proletarian utopianism with national experience through the mediation of ‘folk forms’ by which peasants and workers were encouraged to be the primary creators of arts such as woodcuts and Yangko operas. Challenging against the elitist tendency of dadaism and surrealism, artists, as organic intelligentsias in Yan’an, sought their way to fulfil Lautréamont's dream of ‘poetry for all’ within the context of ‘rural China,’ which constitutes in some senses the historical legacy of aesthetic revolutions in modern China.