Lu Xun (1881-1936) was a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary critic. He is an important figure in Chinese history because he introduced early forms of modern literature and art. He was born and raised in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, in the heart of Jiangnan. In 1919, he joined the New Cultural Movement in China and published several fictional novels that critiqued Chinese traditions and strongly advocated modernization. His writings proved to be immensely influential during the May Fourth Movement and inspired many left-wing activists. Lu Xun was also a talented amateur in the practice of design. He designed the covers of most of his writings and used woodcut print. He’s often times referred to as the father of the modern woodcut movement in China. Furthermore, he was patron for design artists and encouraged good functional designs. His aims in both literature and art prompted a new modernist movement that heavily influenced the nation of China.

Da Ma. “Lu Xun.” Woodcut print. 1940. National Gallery of Australia. Image Source: https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/detail.cfm?irn=114179

Citations:

Andrews, Julia Frances., Kuiyi Shen, and Jonathan D. Spence. A Century in Crisis : Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998.

Lee, Leo Ou-Fan. Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1985

Custer, Charles. “The Legacy and Works of Lu Xun.” ThoughtCo, Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/lu-xun-modern-chinese-literature-688105.

Hill, Michael Gibbs. “CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARY.” The Review of Politics, vol. 76, no. 2, 2014, pp. 317–319., www.jstor.org/stable/43670969. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020.

I decided to focus on the Chinese artist Chen Danqing.  Chen was born in August of 1953 in Shanghai, China, four years after the Communist victory over the Nationalists in October of 1949.  His life story is one of both joy yet sadness, as his family was separated due to his grandfather’s allegiance to the Nationalist cause and his ensuing escape to Taiwan.  Chen grew up in the metropolis of Shanghai, yet at the age of 17, he was sent to the countryside as a result of the Cultural Revolution’s effort to subject privileged city youth to the toil of the rural peasants.  This experience is often noted as a turning point in his life.  Following the closure of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Chen attended the China Central Academy of Fine Arts where he cultivated his passion for the Tibet Autonomous Region and the culture and arts which existed in the faraway western region.

After graduating, he moved to New York City where he helped develop the fledgling Native Soil Painting movement in the United States through his work on the Tibetan people.  He was strongly influenced by the works of Jean Francois Millet, a French realist who motivated Chen’s persistent work on Tibet.  While his time in the United States was quite important to his development as an artist, he describes his time there as depressing and difficult.  Before long, he returned to China and taught what he had learned in the West as a supervisor at Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design.  Thus began Chen’s robust opposition to the Chinese art education institution, criticizing English proficiency as a prerequisite to graduation.  He then left his position in an act of protest and gained national notoriety for his efforts.  Having lived through the rigidity of late-Mao China, the gradual liberalization of the Deng era, and the seemingly paradoxical era of Jiang and Hu in the late 20th and early 21st century, Chen has experienced the PRC at its moments of unrestrained liberalization and state-sponsored surveillance and suppression.

In the words of one of his students, “Chen has never been just a painter.  He is an intellectual with a social conscience” (Xu 2010).  He remains working in Beijing today as a private artist and an avid writer on society, politics, and of course, art.

This piece of artwork, Mother and Child, depicts a Tibetan family in traditional garb and in a traditional Tibetan home that resembles the climate on the Plateau quite accurately.  While the painting does not reference the turbulent relations between Beijing and Lhasa, there are clear distinctions drawn between the majority Han culture and the unique Tibetan culture which Chen so passionately pursues in his artwork.

Chen Danqing – Mother and Child. Oil on Paper. 1980.

Source: artnet.com (http://www.artnet.com/artists/chen-danqing/mother-and-child-a-ISkzD2GC9-G5FMOnyofIZQ2)

Works Cited

“Chen Danqing.” artnet. Accessed April 9, 2020. http://www.artnet.com/artists/chen-danqing/

Kaitlin, Solimine. “Tibet in the Artistic Imagination: An Interview with Chen Danqing.” The World of Chinese 2, no. 6 (2012): 28-33

Jun, X.  “Sit on the Sidelines of” Chen Danqing’s Anger.” Art and Design 2 (2010): 57.

For my project, I’ve elected to focus on various political posters, rather than a singular artist. The majority of the posters I will focus on will be from the Zedong period (1949-1978). I might delve into some posters shortly after the first economic reform (1978), but this would primarily just act to demonstrate the contrast between posters while under Mao and then Deng (Chow 2015).

In general, the style for these posters fall under the “western” category, which is somewhat ironic considering the aims of the Communist Party of China (which I aim to examine in my presentation). Some particular events that sparked these political posters; end of Chinese Civil War, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Square protests (this last one I might exclude). All of these events have significant political and cultural ramifications, helping to explain why artists of the time decided to voice their opinions after these events specifically.

For my image, I included a political poster from the Huntington Archive, which had an online exhibit titled “Picturing Power” that revolved solely around Chinese political posters (particularly the Mao era). This poster is titled “New Spring in Yan’an” and helps to further Mao’s goal of deification, as he is surrounded by the people in quite a nationalist style.

https://huntingtonarchive.org/Exhibitions/picturingPowerExhibit.php

Chow, Gregory C. China’s Economic Transformation. Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

Born in Shanghai, China in 1903, Guan Zilan became one of the most famous female artists in China in the 20th century. She was exposed to the world of art at a young age through her parents who were wealthy textile merchants. Guan went to school at the Shanghai Shenzhou Girls’ School before attending the China Art University where she studied western painting under the famous artist, Chen Baoyi. After graduating in 1927, Guan Zilan further pursued painting in Japan at the Tokyo Institute of Culture: Bunka Gakuin. It was in Japan that Guan was greatly influenced by western modern art, especially post-impressionism and, more notably, fauvism and in 1929, at the age of 26, Guan Zilan painted her most famous work, Portrait of Miss L. (shown below). As a female artist trained in western styles –a rare sight at the time– Guan became very popular in both Japan and China and was regarded as an embodiment of the “modern girl.” After her return to China in 1930, Guan became a professor at a Shanghai art college, where she continued to be very popular and was a leader among female artists until the start of the Cultural Revolution when she stopped painting.

Guan Zilan – Portrait of Miss L. Oil on Canvas. 1929.

Source: A Century in Crisis, Page 63 (Figure 62).

Works Referenced:

Andrews, Julia Frances., and Kuiyi Shen. “Art in the New Culture of the 1920s.” The Art of Modern China. Berkeley: U of California, 2012. 70-71.

Andrews, Julia Frances, and Kuiyi Shen. “The Lure of the West: Modern Chinese Oil Painting.” In A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China. Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998. 172-78.

Lü Peng. A History of Art in 20th Century China. Milano: Charta, 2010. 286-8.

Pickowicz, Paul G., Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang. Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 206-29.