An art trend that emerged in China in the early 1980s and focused on the depiction of the countryside and ethnic minorities. It was initiated by young artists, who had been ‘sent down’ to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and looked back on the rugged life of the period with a degree of nostalgia. Sharing a humanist tendency with Scar Art, it sought to honour the ordinary heroes of daily life rather than the glorified characters of the Cultural Revolution. The ‘red, bright and shiny’ (hongguangliang) pictorial conventions of the Cultural Revolution were replaced in these paintings by the ‘small (small topics, particularly peasants), suffering (real suffering in a life of hardship and poverty) and old (the so-called backward society)’ (xiaokujiu) of the rural regions. The current peaked with the early works of Luo Zhongli and Chen Danqing.
