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Art has always been intertwined with politics; one can even say art is always political. In modern China, this statement is especially poignant. The relationship between art and politics has been at the core of art production in China in the past century, and a perennial preoccupation of those in power, including now. This course will therefore examine three major threads: the documents, dictums, and decrees by the artists and by the regimes concerning the nature, function, and practice of art and artists in the 20th century, for example, Mao’s famous Yan’an talk in 1942; artists’ response to and art’s participation in the important political events and historical moments, for example, the 1989 democracy movement; we will also examine the space of resistance, intervention, and alterity that art created in modern China, concerning topics of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ecocriticism, privacy, and questions of historiography. The period we examine will begin at the end of the 19th century when artists struggled with a crumbling empire facing the onslaught of modernity, to the present.