After Mao died in 1976, the first group of avant-garde artists to step forward named themselves the “Stars,” as a rebuttal to what the member Ma Desheng called the “drab uniformity” of what had come before, as a way “to emphasize our individuality.” When their first exhibition was excluded from the national museum in 1979, they hung their work on the fence outside and staged a march beneath the slogan “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom.” For much of the nineties, authorities arrested performance artists for appearing in the nude, shut down experimental shows, and bulldozed
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