From the Publisher
“An essential background history of modern China. O’Dea captures the intellectual excitement of the bohemians of modern China while enriching her own understanding of Chinese history.” —Shelf Awareness (starred)
“A well-grounded survey of the incredible courage of Chinese artists since the first flowering of the late 1970s and subsequent crackdowns. An illuminating chronicle of several generations of resilient and beleaguered Chinese artists, with minibiographies, a helpful timeline, and extensive notes.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[O’Dea] makes geopolitical history accessible and engaging through the lives and experiences of such individual artists as Huang Rui and Guo Jian. O’Dea writes for readers new to art, offering straightforward descriptions of individual works, and new to Chinese history, explaining the nuts and bolts of crucial policies and protests. By focusing on how individuals experienced communism and resisted it, O’Dea succeeds in making history human.” —Booklist
The Australian
Beautifully crafted and immensely readable. Required reading for all those who seek to understand how China has stumbled repressively through the past 40 years and how its finest citizens have persisted in trying to imagine a better, freer China. O’Dea does not put a foot wrong. The soul of the book, however, breathes in her account of the lives and artistic endeavors of a range of people.
Thomas Keneally
Amidst all the chatter about China lies this rock of a book, a magnificent memoir and history from the very core of modern Chinese society. It's a wonderful thing where the essential book and the delightful book are, as in this case, the same thing. Let no one speak of China who has not read The Phoenix Years.
Paul Monk
O’Dea has done a great service by bringing together the disparate stories of her artists and showing how their creativity has been a constant struggle against regime repression. Their vision for China’s future should be ours.
Booklist
[O’Dea] makes geopolitical history accessible and engaging through the lives and experiences of such individual artists as Huang Rui and Guo Jian. O’Dea writes for readers new to art, offering straightforward descriptions of individual works, and new to Chinese history, explaining the nuts and bolts of crucial policies and protests. By focusing on how individuals experienced communism and resisted it, O’Dea succeeds in making history human.
Shelf Awareness (starred)
The Phoenix Years is an essential background history of modern China. O’Dea captures the intellectual excitement of the bohemians of modern China while enriching her own understanding of Chinese history.
author of Schindler's List Thomas Keneally
"Amidst all the chatter about China lies this rock of a book, a magnificent memoir and history from the very core of modern Chinese society. It's a wonderful thing where the essential book and the delightful book are, as in this case, the same thing. Let no one speak of China who has not read The Phoenix Years."
author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethin Paul Monk
"O’Dea has done a great service by bringing together the disparate stories of her artists and showing how their creativity has been a constant struggle against regime repression. Their vision for China’s future should be ours."
Booklist
[O’Dea] makes geopolitical history accessible and engaging through the lives and experiences of such individual artists as Huang Rui and Guo Jian. O’Dea writes for readers new to art, offering straightforward descriptions of individual works, and new to Chinese history, explaining the nuts and bolts of crucial policies and protests. By focusing on how individuals experienced communism and resisted it, O’Dea succeeds in making history human.
Kirkus Reviews
2017-08-21
A well-grounded survey of the incredible courage of Chinese artists since the first flowering of the late 1970s and subsequent crackdowns.O'Dea, an Australian journalist who has traveled to and lived in China during the past three decades and founded ArtInfo China, first befriended Chinese artists in the late 1980s and followed their tumultuous trajectory during the years since. Here, she chronicles the lives of nine people, moving from China's "great experiment in ‘opening up and reform' " in 1986, when the rehabilitated leader Deng Xiaoping, courted by the U.S. since meeting Jimmy Carter in 1979, first embarked on liberalizing reforms and artists embraced the whiff of freedom, through the tragedy of the crackdown after the Tiananmen Square revolution of 1989 and to the present embrace of forgetting and economic pragmatism. Before there was 1989, O'Dea reminds us, there was 1976, when an earlier drive for democratic action erupted in Tiananmen Square after the death of Mao Zedong, the earthquake of Tangshan, and the public mourning of the death of Premier Zhou Enlai. Many of the artists who exploded in personal expression in 1976 had been teenage Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution who were inculcated in stamping out "bourgeois liberalism" and terrorizing their teachers. Artists like Huang Rui and Mang Ke, as well as the artists calling themselves the "Stars," created a newsletter that was eventually shut down by Deng's regime. The author also looks at the effects of the Sino-Vietnamese War—not often discussed in China—and the "very heaven" conditions that fostered artistic freedom in the 1980s, as people began to pull themselves out of poverty. Like the death of Zhou in 1976, the death of reformer Hu Yaobang in April 1989 sparked widespread demonstrations, and the political consequences were dire, creating essentially another generation of forgetting. An illuminating chronicle of several generations of resilient and beleaguered Chinese artists, with minibiographies, a helpful timeline, and extensive notes.
