Socialist Realism in Laos

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Languid, land-locked Laos, last frontier of the cold war, innocent victim of meddlesome neighbours and predatory super-powers, is an unlikely setting for the imperial twilight of an essentially European art form. And yet, here by the banks of the mighty Mekong and there by the stone-age burial urns of the Plain of Jars, long after its demise in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the school of art known as "Socialist Realism" is undergoing a very Laotian change.

Laos was just about the last country to join the "socialist camp". Soviet communism was established in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whilst Mao's East Wind had prevailed in China by 1949. By contrast, when the Lao People's Democratic Republic was set up in 1975, riding on the coat-tails of the neighbouring Vietnamese revolution, socialism in Europe and the Soviet Union was already in a state of terminal decline.

Over the next 15 years, a period leading to the break-up of the Soviet Empire and the de facto abandonment of Marxist economics in neighbouring China and Vietnam, Laos became the object of political competition between Vietnam and its Soviet allies on one hand, and the People's Republic of China on the other. During this difficult period most ordinary Lao people gazed wistfully across the Mekong at neighbouring Thailand, whilst keeping there heads down and trying hard not to alienate any of their "fraternal socialist allies".

Despite the gravity of the Sino-Soviet split, in at least one forum—the fine arts—there was no serious disagreement. Standards first set in the 1930s by Stalin were generally accepted across the socialist world, from Hanoi to Havana, and from Pyongyang to Phnom Penh. Those standards comprise the art form known as Socialist Realism, and from 1975 until very recently, the government of the Lao PDR adhered closely to the style. Today, however, the artistic world of Laos is in flux, and Socialist Realism in this land-locked Southeast Asian nation in its swan song.

The heroic style of painting first promoted by Stalin is rooted in the artistic traditions of late 19th century Russia. During the 1870s a group of Russian painters known as the Peredvizhniki, or 'Wanderers', deliberately rejected the classicism of the Russian Academy in favour of a new type of art that would 'serve the common man'. Over the next 40 years, their influence on Russian art forms was to be seminal.

Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, revolutionary art tended to be radical, emphasising idealised notions such as the withering away of the state and the law. Following the death of Lenin, however, in his bid to 'build socialism in one country', Stalin ordered a shift away from such fanciful doctrines towards a more traditional and conservative model.

The party's new line was promulgated in 1934. Under the culture of Stalinism, the acceptable face of art was to be traditional in form, aimed at the masses, laudatory of the party and generally optimistic. By 1939, as a result of these directives, Soviet cultural life was cast in a constricting mould which would eventually help to bring about the collapse of communism - restrictive in form, conservative in substance, and revolutionary only in name.

Meanwhile, in the dust-yellow hills of distant Yenan, the Chinese Communists were developing policies on literature and art designed to promote their cause in the bitter three-way struggle against the Japanese and the Kuomintang. The resultant party line was spelled out in May, 1942, with the publication of Mao Tse-tung's Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature. Mao's opinion was that revolutionary art was intended specifically for "the people"-that is, workers, peasants, and soldiers. Above all, he stressed that literature and art should eulogise 'the proletariat, the Communist Party and Socialism'. In sum, Mao wholeheartedly endorsed the artistic standards of Stalinism. As a consequence, when the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, Socialist Realism's rigid and restrictive style became an artistic straitjacket for a vast region stretching from the Adriatic to the South China Sea, dominating the cultural life of almost half mankind.

With Socialist Realism established as the sole legitimate art form in both the Soviet Union and China, it followed naturally that the genre was introduced first to North Vietnam after the French withdrawal of 1954, and then throughout the remainder of that country following the communist victory in 1975. The Laotian communists, or Pathet Lao-always strongly influenced by their Vietnamese "elder brothers"-had long applied Social Realist standards in their north-eastern base area provinces of Huaphan and Phongsali. Following the establishment of the Lao PDR in December, 1975, the familiar, highly-formalised style was extended to the rest of the country as a matter of course-as usual, brooking no rivalry.

In easy-going, agricultural, Buddhist Laos the results of this policy seemed particularly incongruous. Images of heroic peasants shooting down marauding US planes with AK47 assault rifles alternated with images of massively-muscled Laotian shock-workers building steel mills. Other unlikely images included, for example, Lao hill tribes demonstrating their unshakeable solidarity with Cuban forces in Angola.

In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, following the devastatingly swift collapse of communist power, Social Realism was abandoned almost overnight as people everywhere celebrated their newly-found cultural freedom. Some countries of the former Soviet Bloc-for example Hungary and the Czech Republic-even established museums to house especially lurid examples of totalitarian kitsch.

In cautious Laos, by contrast, change has been rather more gradual. Today militant images celebrating the anti-imperialist struggle have all but disappeared-except on the walls of the Museum of the Lao Revolutionary Army which is, in any case, generally closed to visitors. By contrast, hoardings celebrating the more pacific side of communist aspirations-mass inoculation campaigns, the construction of heavy industry and the ever-popular "bumper harvest"-still exist. A recent, telling change has been the introduction of two previously uncelebrated elements of Lao society, the monk and the businessman. In downtown Vientiane these formerly shunned figures have now joined those stalwarts of Lao Socialist Realism, the peasant, soldier and worker, in hoardings celebrating the achievements of the government. In the Lao PDR he writing is on the wall - and both Buddhism and Private Enterprise are back in style!

[View the slide show which accompanies this piece.]

Text copyright © Andrew Forbes / CPA 2002.

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