Zhang Daqian or also known as Chang Dai-chien was born May 10th, 1899 to a poor, artistic family in the Sichuan Province of China. He first became a very famous traditionalist painter and later on became known for his modern impressionist and expressionist works as a painter. He started painting at a young age with his first work coming at age twelve. This work was for a traveling fortune teller who wanted new diving cards and so he painted her new ones. Then, he went on to study.  He started learning about art in 1917 when he went to Kyoto to learn about buying textiles. After that he went to Shanghai to study. He studied two very famous artists by the name of Zeng Xi and Li Ruiqing. He also had an older brother who was a famous painter at the time that helped him learn. After learning in Shanghai he moved to Beijing and met more famous artists. He became friends with Pu Xinyu and collaborated with him. A famous saying came out of this, “Chang from the south, Pu from the north” as they both became renowned. In the 1930s he started to get noticed world wide. He was invited to France after his exhibited painting was bought by the French government. Then, he accepted a position to be a professor at the National Central University Art Department in Nanjing. Later on in that year in 1936 his portfolio was published in Shanghai and the following year it was held in the UK. He then started leading other artists in reproducing other artists’ works. But one of his biggest achievements was being invited to an exhibition in The Louvre and Musee Guimet in Paris where he met Picasso. Picasso was excited to meet him and asked for a critique of his own Chinese paintings. As he got older his eyesight started to decline and it led him to create a new style of his called splash color, or pocai style. This style combined abstract expressionism with traditional Chinese painting styles. 

Below is one of Zhang’s famous works “Alishan in Oblique Sunrise”

Andrews, Julia Frances. The Art of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.32156. EPUB.

Zhang Daqian, https://web.archive.org/web/20110427014113/http://www3.icm.gov.mo/gate/gb/www.icm.gov.mo/exhibition/daqian/BiographyE.asp.

Female photographer and mixed media artist, O Zhang, most famously known for her series of photographs: Daddy and I. She is trained in Photography and film, and also has experience in installation. Zhang was born in the city of Guangzhou, China on November 23, 1976. Forced to leave their home due to pressures of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Zhang and her family fled to the edge of Jishou, located in the Hunan Province. “In the countryside Zhang was exposed to and learned the language of ethnic minority groups like the Miao and the Tujia, and demonstrated her ability to adapt to situations where she was an “outsider”” (Karetzky, pg. 18). Zhang remembers her rural childhood as a peaceful and colorful one. These aesthetics are present in many of her works, but specifically her exhibition, Horizon, where she captures the innocence of female children in remote central China. Zhang is a graduate of Royal College of Art in London and Central Academy of Art in Beijing, since then she has been working and traveling between New York and Beijing.

O Zhang. “My Name is Zhang O.” Who Am I. Ed. Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky. New York: Chinese-American Arts Council, Inc., 2004. 18-19-20.

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City in the Fujian Province of China. He is a well-known Chinese pyrotechnical contemporary artist who started his career as a stage designer. This specific concentration helped him become comfortable with larger performance artworks pertaining to his style which utilizes gunpowder and explosives. Since the mid-1980s, Cai Guo-Qiang had been creating art events and projects that emphasize the cosmic laws of opposition between creation and destruction yin and yang. Cai Guo-Qiang continued to evolve the scale and form of these gunpowder works. Initially, he started by using explosive gunpowder on canvas, which eventually led him to develop his signature outdoor explosion events. A notable artwork made by Cai Guo-Qiang is the Sky Ladder which is a 1,650-foot-tall ladder, held aloft by a giant balloon and rigged with explosives. As the massive sculpture ignites, it creates a fiery vision that miraculously ascends to the heavens. He currently lives and works in New York City and New Jersey, however earlier in his career he mainly worked in Japan which helped him turn his conceptual ideas into reality.

Guo-Qiang, Cai, and Octavio Zaya. “Portfolio.” Grand Street, no. 67 (1999): 120–25.

Generally speaking, it is difficult to pinpoint a specific artist that created propaganda posters in China during this time because many artists were not given credit for their work. Art was seen as a public service, and propaganda posters were government messages that were mass produced and highly profitable, so it seemed as though these pieces of art (called xuanchuanhua) were just generally coming out of the government instead of an individual. Contests were held at a nationwide level to select certain propaganda prints for the year.The mass production of these removed the personal and individuality of the artist out of the final product.  So, instead of identifying a specific artist for these propaganda posters, it will be easier to decipher this unique form of art through a theme, such as the representation of women during this era through these posters. The purpose of these xuanchuanhua were to relate and speak to the largest portion of society: the peasants, the workers, and the middle class. Women made up a large portion of those classes, and were encouraged to help the nation in their efforts just as much as men. In this particular example, “Long Live Chairman Mao”, is showcasing a celebration of the 1959 May Day Parade. This artist (one of few that was famous for specifically creating propaganda posters), Ha Qiongwen, needed to create an optimistic print in the wake of the “disastrous” failures of the Great Leap Forward, and so chose bright colors and a woman carrying a joyful child on her shoulder. This is the first of many examples where we see propaganda posters using a woman’s to uplift the community and being a pillar of support for the country.

History, in part, is based on the understanding of why certain events, individuals, and symbols are chosen to be memorialized.  Hua Tianyou was one of the many individuals who was involved with the creation of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, which is showcased in Tiananmen Square.  Born in 1902, Tianyou taught art and music before beginning his studies in sculpting in 1930.  Three years later, as Japan began to act aggressively toward China, he moved to France where he continued his work at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

Image courtesy of https://www.viator.com/Beijing-attractions/Monument-to-the-Peoples-Heroes/d321-a18684.

Monuments are where a collective memory can be formed and without references to those who have died, it is argued that their actions will be forgotten.  Following decades of civil wars, outside aggression, and the rebirth of a nation, there was a need for the CCP to showcase the revolutionary actions that individuals went through to secure then-modern China.  Therefore, possibly taking inspiration from symbols that displayed collective memories in France while understanding the importance of architecture being “socialist in content, national in form,” the Monument to the People’s Heroes showed the correct way to remember the past while providing further authenticity to the CCP.

Citations: 

Michael Sullivan, Modern Chinese Artists, A Biographical Dictionary, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 57.

 Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 235, 243.

 Maria Tagangaeva, “Socialist in Content, National in Form: The Making of Soviet National Art and the Case of Buryatia,” Nationalities Papers, Vol.45 (2017), 393.

Li Keran was a pronounced Chinese artist of the 20th century and influential educator at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts. Most of his works entailed landscape paintings that contained a mixed of ancient and contemporary styles. Li attended the Shanghai Art College where he was inspired greatly by a professor who’s ideals involved blending Eastern and Western art styles to create a new style of art in Chinese paintings. Li then was admitted to the Hangzhou National Art College where he studied drawing and oil painting. A few years later he then became a member of the Yiba Art Society, a leftist art organization. Li was present when Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Li lived through the Sino-Japanese War, and during the period after began to create works by the use of an imaginative splashed ink technique. Li’s work became more recognized as he was proposed, and accepted, an invitation to join the faculty at the Beijing National Art College. Soon after he was acclaimed to be the most important painter in the post-Qianlonxg-Jiaqing period by his mentors, Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong. After 1954, Li spent a lot of his time drawing from nature, and had the idea that the initial step towards a reconstruction of Chinese painting would be from drawing. Through his ability to blend in Western elements, Li was said to be remembered more as a pioneer rather than a traditionalist or reformist, in 20th century Chinese art.

Mountain Village (1985), ink and color on paper and scroll

Citations:

“Li Keran.” Li Keran Paintings | Chinese Art Gallery | China Online Museum, http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/painting-li-keran.php.