Shanghai, July 1921. In a city shaped by trade, foreign concessions and new ideas, a small group of delegates gathered for the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China. From that moment began a history that would become deeply intertwined with the making of modern China. Marking the 105th anniversary of the Party’s founding, Long Museum revisits this history through more than 80 groups of works created from the 1930s to the early 2000s. From Revolution to Nation-Building is more than a sequence of historical images: it offers a chance to explore how painting, printmaking, watercolour and sculpture helped shape the visual narrative of a country. The first section moves through uprisings, the Long March, the war against Japan, the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War. The second shifts perspective to the founding of the People’s Republic and the transformation of Chinese society, from factories and rural life to major construction projects and scenes of everyday life.
The exhibition is worth seeing precisely for this double perspective: beyond the events depicted, it reveals how art translated political ideals, collective memory and changing eras into images. Seen through the distinctive lens of a private collection, the exhibition also becomes a journey through the history of twentieth-century Chinese art.
