This thirteen volume work presents the first comprehensive study of underground culture during China's Cultural Revolution, focusing on the Wuming (No Name) painting collective that formed spontaneously in the early 1970s during the darkest years of the Cultural Revolution and its coercive aftermath. For nearly a decade, these artists met regularly to paint, discuss literature and philosophy, resisting orthodoxy and indoctrination through persistent creation of alternative identities. They produced thousands of paintings and held three underground exhibitions in 1974, 1979 and 1981, marking a distinctive counter-culture that has long been obscured. To date there has been no archive, catalogue, or textual data available to historians and art scholars. Each of these bilingual books provides a catalogue of major works and autobiographical essays by individual artists, augmented with a variety of primary historical materials. These volumes open up an important new area of research for modern Chinese art history and cultural studies of Chinese modernity and avant garde resistance to state oppression.--Aihe Wang was a member of the Wuming group and is an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong.--"In both quality of reproduction and pertinence of accompanying explanations, these volumes provide valuable documentation and fill an important gap in evidence available internationally regarding art production in China during the final years of the Cultural Revolution.

Without question, they are extremely important source material for cultural historians, art historians and political historians worldwide. The work of these artists still stands up aesthetically, occupying an important place in the history of 20th century Chinese art." -Lothar von Falkenhausen, UCLA--"After their long isolation 1949-1976, Chinese artists had largely lost touch with the outside world. The No Name artists shared a pioneering role in pushing Chinese art beyond the borders of socialist realism. Their unwavering idealism and independence of spirit paved the way for the emergence in the mid-1980s of the new wave art movement. This is an essential addition to the bibliography of modern Chinese art." -Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego-.