Gender symbolism in the cultural code of Chinese socialist realism painting.

The subject of the study is the civilizational uniqueness of gender signs and symbols that are part of the archetypal structure of codes in Chinese culture at the level of ancient traditions and modern morphology, including the latest socialist doctrine. The constancy of the basic attributes of gender semiotics is expressed in all key areas of culture, including art and painting, which determined the goal and objectives of the research: to substantiate the iconographic images of the "male" and "female" in Chinese socialist realism through a connection with the ancient tradition of sanjiao, whose archetypes and symbols fix the cultic reverence for the "man-Father" as the head of the clan and the founder of the nation; to reveal the causes and consequences of the establishment of socialist realism in Chinese painting of the 20th-21st centuries; to overcome the narrow definition of "socialist realism" as an artistic method and recognize it as a specific manifestation in the culture of the PRC and the USSR of ideological faith in the optimistic future of the socialist society based on labor heroism, equality of men and women, social justice, and the absence of classes. The methodological toolkit of the study included a combination of methods and techniques of semiotic analysis of cultural texts, oral and written tradition, images of painting, and digital analogs of artistic visualization. Descriptive, historical, comparative, structural, and formal-logical methods were applied in combination with each other to provide a comprehensive understanding of socialist realism art. The research results yielded conclusions that are novel and relevant in the field of cultural and art theory: it has been proven that socialist realism in the PRC and the USSR was a type of culture with characteristic attributes of a system of collective values and a communist worldview that affirmed faith in the just future of the new type of person; the morphological structure of gender images in the paintings of realist artists from the "Great Leap Forward" period (1958-1960) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to the present has been identified; gender images in socialist realism paintings have been classified according to the archetypes of the Father-Man, the Sage, the Righteous, the Hero, the Mother-Woman, and the Young Beauty; social and political components of changes in the creation of the iconography of the "male" and "female" in the context of the established historical and cultural situation have been established, and a connection with archetypal structures of the cultural code has been justified. The conclusions obtained can be recommended for practical application in the fields of cultural theory and history, cultural semiotics, and realistic art.