Under Maoist rule, people’s identities were defined by the groups they belonged to, from family to commune to artists’ associations. Those who rebelled against the group, or were accused of siding with “enemy” groups such as landlords and imperialists, were ostracised or put to death.In the late 1970s, as communes were dismantled and political controls relaxed, attitudes to the individual also began to change. Contemporary artists and writers exalted once-deplored concepts like ziwo, the self, and ziyou, individual freedom, and explored them in their work. As economic liberalisation gathered pace, so did individualisation. The status quo of the 1950s and ’60s was turned upside-down: where people were once forced to cooperate, now they had to compete; where their future was decided by others, now it was in their own hands.

In COMMUNE, some of China’s best-known artists and brightest newcomers explore the tensions between individual and group, community and nation, collectivist past and chaotic present. Their works include tender affirmations of family love, meditations on loneliness and death, and evocations of private and public memory. They look at individuals alone, in marriage, at work, on society’s margins, and among the madding crowds. Will the liberation of a billion “little me”s diminish the “big me” that is China? The artists in COMMUNE suggest the opposite.