Monthly Archive: June 2025

“Lead, zinc, copper, coal, gold, cadmium, silver, oil, tungsten, corundum, gasoline, nickel, marble, Glauber’s salt [and] phosphorites” flow from Kazakhstan through the “full arteries of railroads,” delivering its “industrial blood” across the Soviet Union “to feed the factories and plants,” before returning “in the shape of airplanes, tractors, excavators, automobiles [and] turbines.” This entry, under the heading “Socialist Metabolism,” appeared in an issue of the showcase journal USSR in Construction devoted to the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet Kazakhstan, cataloging the precious minerals, metals, rocks, and hydrocarbons extracted from the Central Asian republic to supply the expanding socialist industrial complex. In … Read more

This review essay focuses on recent publications that examine the art of former Soviet territories – the book Beginning in the Middle: Conversations on the Post-Soviet (2022), the reader As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories: Fragments for a Geopoetics of North Eurasia (2023), and the catalog Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023) of the eponymous exhibition –, aiming to understand how the three engage with postcolonial and the Anthropocene discourses. While Art in the Age of the Anthropocene offers an exemplary methodological approach by intertwining both perspectives through a thorough historical examination of … Read more

An entire mountain vanished in the 1950s in the Western Carpathians of Romania. Its uranium-rich rocks were transported by train to be processed into nuclear fuel in Sillamäe, in the former Soviet Union, now Estonia. Some were converted into nuclear warheads. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, those warheads were decommissioned and dismantled. Since 1995, the Megatons to Megawatts economic deal between Russia and the United States has transformed nuclear weapons into electricity, illuminating American homes with energy derived from Soviet warheads.This project traces a shared history of extraction, linking distant places and pasts through the … Read more

“When Thoughts Change, Brush and Ink Cannot Remain Unchanged” is an open letter by renowned ink painter Fu Baoshi after his 1960 sketching tour organized by the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy. This tour was a pivotal event in integrating traditional ink painting with Socialist cultural production, a response to the ideological demands of the Socialist state following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The article highlights the challenges faced by ink artists in adapting to new themes, particularly the depiction of industrial and agricultural subjects, as they navigated the tension between tradition and modernity. It also reveals the … Read more

An open letter by renowned ink painter Fu Baoshi after his 1960 sketching tour organized by the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy.

ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 134-141.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00418

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/134/131436/When-Thoughts-Change-Brush-and-Ink-Cannot-Remain