Correction Appended

It is 1963, just three years before the start of the Cultural Revolution: Everyone you know sports a Chairman Mao portrait badge, and red slogans confront you (literally and figuratively) as you walk down the street, proclaiming “crush the old world,” and “Chairman Mao will live forever in our hearts.” Your family is forcefully pointed towards the countryside and told they will be re-educated, will become farmers. You learn Mao Zedong Thought from the “little red book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao.

20 years later your nation is remembering the hardship of the 1960s and the Great Leap Forward. The art is no longer red, and many of the people you once knew have died from illness, persecution and starvation. Anything good that might have come out of the revolution is, for the moment, forgotten, though Chairman Mao has not left your hearts.

OK. I do not know if the above portraits effectively capture the mood of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath in China. I was not there, nor have I been to China. But these are the impressions I have pulled from the Johnson Museum’s exhibition The Art of China’s Cultural Revolution. The collection is comprised of a number of paintings and cultural artifacts donated to the museum by Wan and Andrew Kim, as well as some on temporary loan from two Cornell professors.

The exhibit room itself is quite spartan — plain walls, dim lights, no adornments besides the art displayed, each with plenty of space to itself. The room seems to serve a three-fold purpose for the observer: First, it recalls the asceticism that characterized the revolution. Second, it makes the red that pervades so many of the pieces jump immediately to the forefront — a touchy subject for Americans who remember the Red Scare, and presumably for the Chinese as well, who remember this critical point in their nation’s history, fondly or not. Finally, the bareness of the room remains neutral, thus forcing the observer to make of the art what he / she will — there are no clues about what to think.

The exhibition mostly consists of paintings, but there is also an extensive collection of “Mao portrait badges,” red badges picturing Mao in profile, as a solider, a sage, a politician or a farmer. Several billion badges were created during the revolution, then recalled in 1969 due to a shortage of aluminum and a fear of consumer excess. The badges are a potent reminder of the prominence Chairman Mao claimed during the revolution — many of the badges display places or events important to him, others spell out tenets of Mao Zedong thought and every single one pictures Mao at the center as the Red Sun. Chairman Mao and his thought penetrated many intimate corners of everyday life during the revolution, and a “Mao box” of such buttons in the exhibit recalls this idol worship. He is omnipresent.

The paintings are nearly all laudatory of Chairman Mao and his revolution, and most date from the actual revolution, though some come from the 1990s as well. The clearly propagandic pieces feature Mao in the center, always serene, dignified and amicable, always pictured as the sun, or looking at the sun. Red is pervasive, generally overwhelming background images, whether crowds of people or vast fields, which all fade into seas of red. Again, they feature events and places import to the Chairman.

A number are less clearly red, but just as clearly aimed at a specific audience of young people, featuring schoolchildren and adolescents studying hard, grins on their faces, red ties around their necks. Xu Wenhua’s “Rules for Primary School” pictures just such a schoolboy. In the background is a depiction of a child’s blackboard drawing in which a young smiling girl is aided by a friendly Guard. Both wear red ties. If the “chalkboard” drawing is the boy’s, then the target audience can assume they are meant to look with respect and benevolence on such friendly, helpful Guard members, who wear they same red ties that they do.

Another piece jumps out immediately: a traditional Chinese ink painting, called a quoha, the only such piece in the room. The painting uses the traditional colors and medium of Chinese painting, black and blue inks and rice paper. Pan Tianshou, the artist, was known for his desire to retain the individualism of Chinese art in the face of Westernization. Still, the most immediately discernible feature of the piece is a march of red sails — ships of the Red Army sailing to war.

A number of the works are quite different, and reflect the melancholy nostalgia of the late ’70s and ’80s, a time during which the Chinese people looked back on an undertaking that has been called by some an unmitigated disaster. Two jumped out at me. First was a piece by Zhang Mingji, which depicts a Warhol-style repetition of Mao’s face in six blue windowpanes, one of which is cracked. The piece simultaneously acknowledges the eminence of Mao and questions it. The cracked window shows that the artist believes Mao’s methods did not always work. The colors, far from the bright and shining red of the revolution are muted blues and blacks, bringing to mind sadness and injury.

The second is Zhang Hongtu’s “Metal Mao,” which features a rice paper cut-out of Mao’s famous profile on a background of metal. Mao’s face is not shown —but, as in all the pieces, he is still unmistakable.

The Art of China’s Cultural Revolution is on display in the Johnson Museum of Art through Sunday, Oct. 11. Admission is free.

The original article incorrectly cited the year of China’s Cultural Revolution as beginning in 1963. In fact, the Cultural Revolution did not begin until 1966. The Sun regrets this error.