Crafting Friendship

Craft exhibitions were one of the major forms of cultural and economic exchange among socialist countries, a key feature of friendship exchanges that mapped Cold War alliances at mid-century. This essay examines the implications of craft exhibitions exported between China and her ‘brother’ nations, especially in Eastern Europe. Export exhibitions enabled the circulation of objects, craftspeople, and students, and trod a grey zone between art and industry, mutual cultural appreciation, and mutual economic dependency. Promoting craft as the epitome of socialist culture's diversity also questioned Soviet hegemony over the forms associated with high state culture, opening the way for other routes of formal experimentation and abstraction. Mapping craft exhibitions underscores how the socialist valorization of the ‘folk’ was not solely an enterprise of national identity, but construed as part of a crafted internationalism.