The Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, initiated by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in an attempt to reduce the influence of China's intellectual elite on the country's institutions, has had lasting repercussions on Chinese art. It intensified the absolutist mind-set of Maoist Revolutionary Realism, which had dictated the content and style of Chinese art even before 1966 by requiring that artists "truthfully" depict the realities of socialist life in China. Interest in nonsocial, nonpolitical subjects was strictly forbidden, and, during the Cultural Revolution, what constituted truth was entirely for revolutionary forces to decide—the only reality artists could portray was one that had been thoroughly colored and distorted by political ideology.

Ironically, the same set of requirements that constricted artistic expression during the Cultural Revolution has had the opposite effect since; many artistic movements have flourished in reaction to the monotony of Revolutionary Realism. One of these, the Scar Art movement of the 1980s, was spearheaded by a group of intellectual painters who had been trained in Maoist art schools and then exiled to rural areas during the Cultural Revolution. In exile, these painters were for perhaps the first time confronted with the harsh realities of rural poverty and misery—aspects of life in China that their Maoist mentors would probably have preferred they ignore. As a result of these experiences, they developed a radically new approach to realism. Instead of depicting the version of reality sanctioned by the government, the Scar Art painters chose to represent the "scarred reality" they had seen during their exile. Their version of realist painting emphasized the day-to-day hardships of rural life. While the principles of Revolutionary Realism had insisted that artists choose public, monumental, and universal subjects, the Scar artists chose instead to focus on the private, the mundane, and the particular; where the principles of Revolutionary Realism had demanded that they depict contemporary Chinese society as outstanding or perfect, the Scar artists chose instead to portray the bleak realities of modernization.

As the 1980s progressed, the Scar artists' radical approach to realism became increasingly co-opted for political purposes, and as this political cast became stronger and more obvious, many artists abandoned the movement. Yet a preoccupation with rural life persisted, giving rise to a related development known as the Native Soil movement, which focused on the native landscape and embodied a growing nostalgia for the charms of peasant society in the face of modernization. Where the Scar artists had reacted to the ideological rigidity of the Cultural Revolution by emphasizing the damage inflicted by modernization, the Native Soil painters reacted instead by idealizing traditional peasant life. Unfortunately, in the end Native Soil painting was trivialized by a tendency to romanticize certain qualities of rural Chinese society in order to appeal to Western galleries and collectors.