This exhibition is devoted to a world that few people know existed and that many find hard to believe did exist: the world of the Soviet hippie movement. Soviet hippies were part of the global counterculture of the 1960s and 70s: They wanted love and peace – and rock and roll. They maintained an elaborate network all across the Soviet Union. They experimented with homemade drugs. They studied Eastern mysticism and were looking for God. Yet they lived in a state which valued conformity above all else and mercilessly persecuted them for the way they looked and lived.

Ballet was part of the high drama of the “culture wars,” as the US and USSR jockeyed for position during the Cold War. The Soviet Union produced some of the greatest dancers the world has ever known, with the Bolshoi and Kirov companies as standard bearers. But there were also painful losses, such as the defections of star dancers Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov, and the stifling of dance innovation during a time of great creativity in the West. How did the culture wars fit into the larger context of Soviet and American ballet, and the place of dance in Soviet life?

Sun Mu, trained by the North Korean army as a propaganda artist, managed to escape in 1998 via China, Laos, and Thailand to South Korea. He uses the officially sanctioned painting style of socialist realism, inspired by propaganda posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, to create images filled with criticism and irony in the style of American Pop Art and Soviet Sots Art. This is the first exhibition of his work in the United States.