Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art

Since the early 20th century attitudes toward modernization have increasingly centered on spatial hierarchies manifested not only in the built environment, but also through China's arts and culture such as through the growing nationalist interest in its ancient sculptural sites. Through tracing the new emphasis on the monumental in various interpretations of sculpture of the past as well as the present up to the 1950s, this talk examines the motivations for invoking monumentality in modern China and its role in envisioning a new mass viewer in the young Communist nation.