The Bayonet of the Era:
Left-Wing Fine Arts , Fine Arts in the Yan’an Guerrilla Base and in KMT-Controlled China
The Left-Wing League of Artists and the Woodcut Study Society - The Work of Lu Xun and Woodblock Groups - The Art of Yan’an - Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art - Cartoons in KMT Ruled Areas and the Work of the Third Department – Painters - Art of the Civil War Period
The Left-Wing League of Artists and the Woodcut Study Society
In 1927, the bourgeoisie of Shanghai helped Chiang Kai-shek successfully ‘purge’ the KMT of Communists, and the CPC found it easy to change direction and flee from the cities to the countryside where it was easier to hide and conduct political struggles. In 1931 the ‘September Eighteenth Incident’ saw Japanese troops rapidly overrun the three provinces of north-eastern China. In 1932, the ‘January Twenty-eighth Incident’ resulted in the KMT signing the ‘Songhu ceasefire’, and this plunged the entire Chinese nation into a crisis of grief and indignation. The KMT’s military encirclements and annihilations of the Communists hampered the ability of the Chinese people to resist effectively the Japanese invading armies, with the serious political consequence that many intellectuals switched from the liberalism in which they had been trained during the period of the new literature and art movement, to join up with young people upholding revolt and revolutionary idealism who saw the KMT’s conduct as reactionary and retrograde. With this change in ideology and emotions, many people sympathized politically with the Communist Party’s spirit of sacrifice.
In March 1930, Lu Xun, Shen Duanxian (Xia Yan), Yang Hansheng, Yu Dafu, Feng Naichao, Feng Xuefeng and Zheng Boqi, as well as Guo Moruo and Mao Dun who were at that time still abroad, established the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai, and the tasks of literature proposed by the League had a rich political coloring:
If the content of art is the human emotions, then our art must have as its content the emotions of the proletariat in these dark ‘medieval’ days of class society. Thus, our art will be opposed to the feudal classes and the bourgeoisie, as well as to the petty bourgeoisie which has ‘lost its social status’. We must help and serve the emergence of proletarian art.[1]
At the inaugural meeting of the Left-Wing League, ‘Marxist art theory and critical theory’ were clearly written into the resolutions of the meeting.
In July 1930, the Left-Wing League of Artists was formally set up and held its inaugural meeting in a building in Shanghai’s Huanlong Road (today’s Yandang Road) where the Left-Wing League of Writers held its Summer Literature and Art Study Classes.[2] The members participating in the meeting represented different organizations and groups: Eighteen Art Society, Shanghai Art Academy, Xinhua Art College, Shanghai Art University, White Goose Painting Society, Zhonghua Art University, etc. Zhang Tiao, a former member of the Eighteen Art Society, had been sent to direct and lead the meeting of the ‘Left-Wing League of Artists’ in his capacity as a member of the Communist Party of China’s underground Party organization, and the CPC exercised strict leadership over the Left-Wing League of Artists.[3]
The important groups within the Left-Wing League, namely the Epoch Art Society (also sometimes called the Epoch Art Club in English) and the Eighteen Art Society, were some of the groups active in the art movement of the 1920s. Initially, the passions of the members of these groups had been inspired by western thought and May Fourth ideas, but after the October Revolution in 1917, most young people committed to the nation’s destiny were all acquainted with the state of literature and art in the Soviet Union to various degrees, and when they thought deeply about art and reality as a whole they were naturally inclined to be influenced by left wing culture.
In February 1930, the young members of the Epoch Art Society invited Lu Xun to address the teachers and students of their school on issues concerning art. In one of these informal lectures on art Lu Xun hung a reproduction of Millet’s Gleaners up beside one of Zheng Mantuo’s calendar pin-up girl posters to the ‘raucous merriment’ of the audience. Xu Xingzhi later recalled the lecture:
This gentleman pointed out that young artists should be attentive that, firstly, they did not dazzle people with weirdness; secondly, they should pay attention to basics; and thirdly, they should expand their ideas and outlook. The artist should care about and pay attention to the current social situation, and use his brush to inform the masses about things of which they were not aware and of things that happen in society to which they do not pay attention. In general, the modern painter should paint social subject matter which the ancients did not regard as worth painting.[4]
The Eighteen Art Society was a student group founded in 1929 at the Hangzhou National Art Institute, and the group was so named because 1929 was the 18th year of the Republic. At first, the group was called the West Lake Eighteen Art Society, and in the spring of 1930 the group’s show titled the West Lake Eighteen Art Exhibition was well received as far away as Shanghai, but this exhibition was regarded as a sheer exercise in purism by those who were more radical. By May, the Eighteen Art Society split up, with one group retaining the name West Lake Eighteen Art Society although they were now regarded as conservative and unconcerned about society. In fact, in 1929 the social and political situation was already making many students anxious. The radical Eighteen Art Society members were well aware that in his early years Cai Yuanpei had upheld ‘the sanctity of labor’, but now the literature and thought of the Soviet proletariat was the common topic of discussion among this group of students. In the summer of 1930, Hu Yichuan, Yao Fu, Liu Mengying, and Liu Yiya, who were members of the Eighteen Art Society, went to Shanghai to take part in the Left-Wing League of Writers’ continuing Summer Literature and Art Study Class. They listened attentively to the reports related to political issues and, in this situation dominated by the KMT’s tyranny and terror, their political standpoint was inclined increasingly towards the CPC, so they later joined the Left-Wing League of Artists. In the winter of that year, according to Hu Yichuan, ‘a branch of the Communist Youth League was established at the National Hangzhou Art Academy.
In August 1931, Lu Xun set up a Woodcut Study Society for young Chinese, taking advantage of the opportunity provided by a visit to Shanghai by the Japanese woodcut artist Uchiyama Kakitsu (1900-1986), who was the younger brother of his friend who ran the Uchiyama Bookshop in Shanghai, Uchiyama Kanzō (1885-1989). Classes at what was called the Woodcut Study Society began on 17 August and ran until the 22nd, and the participants included Chen Guang, Chen Tiegeng, Jiang Feng, Huang Shanding, Li Xiushi, Gu Honggan, Zheng Qifan, Zhong Buqing, Yue Yijun, Miao Boran, Ni Huanzhi, Hu Zhongming, and Zheng Chuangu. According to Uchiyama Kakitsu, in his Collection of Early Chinese Woodcuts, this six-day course was no more than ‘a child’s primer in print-making’, but it proved very useful for the young people attending the course. After explaining the basics of making a draft, using the burins, making rubbings and using block colors on the first day, Uchiyama Kakitsu had them preparing work on the second day. Over the subsequent two days the students quickly switched to trying out the techniques of using color. Of the thirteen participants, eight were able to present fifteen works to their teacher as mementoes. During the lectures, Kollwitz’s Peasant War made a particularly deep impression on the group.
The establishment of the Left-Wing League of Artists played a role as a symbol and rallying point, and the ‘leftist’ surge of radicalism which began in 1930 impelled many young artists to participate in the struggle on the streets. They adhered to a more clear-cut political emphasis, arguing for example that ‘artists cannot be independent of the proletariat, and the coming together of the newly developing fine arts movement and the revolutionary movement of newly developing classes is the only path to success for the revolution, which will then open up the main road for the newly developing fine arts’. They distributed leaflets, put up slogans, participated in ‘impromptu gatherings’ and ‘held street demonstrations’. Generally speaking, they frequently participated in various activities deemed to be ‘rebellious acts’ banned by the authorities. This resulted in police searches, arrests and suppression. It was not long before the work of the Left-Wing League of Artists came to a halt.
The Work of Lu Xun and Woodblock Groups
The real achievement of the Left-Wing artists’ movement was the appearance of the newly developing wood-block print groups and of a large quantity of woodcut art works. In fact, the early new woodcut movement promoted by Lu Xun (1881-1936) was the most important part of the art history of the 1930s. The difference between the various woodcut groups emerging in different cities and the art activities of the 1920s was that most artists were now already directly using their art to express social passion and resistance. This reality makes Lu Xun’s statement in 1930 in his ‘Introductory Note to Selection of New Russian Paintings’ readily comprehensible: ‘Because of the needs of the revolution, encompassing propaganda, education, decoration and popularization, this age saw the dramatic development of the wood-block print, lithograph, illustrations, decorative painting and copper etching’. In his introductory note Lu Xun also reminded people: ‘In revolutionary times, the wood-block print is most widespread, because even in extremely pressing circumstances it can be produced quickly’.
From 1929 to 1930, Lu Xun published five illustrated art volumes under the imprimatur of the Morning Flower Society in what was called the Art Garden Morning Flower folio series: Anthology of Selected Modern Woodcut Works (Volumes 1 and 2), Selected Works of Kōji Fōkiya, Illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley and Selection of New Russian Paintings. These were the earliest introduction to almost all of these black and white art works in China, presenting works by artists from many countries, including England, the U.S.A., Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. In the introductions or prefatory articles for these albums, Lu Xun touched on questions such as the history of foreign painting and graphic art as well as the difference between modern and traditional prints, and issues of greater concern to young artists, such as how ‘the creative woodcut artist who does not imitate or reproduce but uses his knife to directly create [original works]’.[5]
In September 1930, Lu Xun published the young German printmaker Carl Meffert’s woodcut illustrations for Cement, the novel by the Soviet writer Fyodor Gladkov. Later, Lu Xun published a number of folios of illustrations or folio illustrated editions of literary works, including How the Steel Was Tempered, One Hundred Illustrations from Dead Souls, Konstantin Fedin’s Cities and Years, Soviet Print Masterpieces, Frans Masereel’s Die Passion eines Menschen, Collection of Käthe Kollwitz Wood-Block Prints, and Collection of Soviet Prints. These offered great influence and encouragement to those young people adrift in the artistic world and actual life. In January 1931, after learning that Rou Shi, a member of the Morning Flower Society, had been executed by the authorities together with several other young people, Lu Xun used Käthe Kollwitz’s woodcut of 1922 titled Sacrifice as a memorial expressing his grief and indignation.
In September 1932, three members of the Woodcut Study Society – Zhong Buqing, Zheng Qifan and Wang Shaoluo, initiated and organized the MK Woodcut Research Society at the Shanghai Art Academy and the group would continue until May 1934. They took their name MK from the initials of the transliteration of the Chinese for ‘woodcut’, i.e mu-ke. The main members of the group were Jin Fengsun, Huang Xinbo, Chen Puzhi, Yang Aizhu, Wang Ziping and Lu Fu. To a certain extent, this was a peripheral group of the CPC’s underground organization, and by accepting the leadership of the Left-Wing League of Artists the organization swelled to fifty or sixty members. The MK Woodcut Research Society’s fourth exhibition, held at the Shanghai Art Academy, was visited by Lu Xun and Uchiyama Kanzô, and by buying nine prints they offered students support.
In September 1932, members of the original Eighteen Art Society in Hangzhou – Wang Zhaomin, Yang Tansheng, Shen Fuwen, and Wang Zhanfei, were expelled from the Hangzhou Art Academy, but they maintained the hope of continuing to study and upholding the woodcut movement and, with the help of Wang Qingfang, an art teacher at the Beiping Art and Literature College Middle School, they transferred to study at Beiping University Art College. A month later, they set up the Beiping Woodcut Research Society, which ran from October 1932 until September 1933 in that northern city. Wang Zhaomin in his ‘The Eighteen Art Society and Myself’ recalled: ‘In 1933, following the advice of the Beiping Left-Wing League, I worked with the Cartoon Research Society to establish the Woodcut and Cartoon Research Society and held another woodcut and cartoon exhibition at the Art and Literature College Middle School’. This exhibition, held in April, was the subject of a commentary piece in Beiping Morning News (Beiping chenbao):
These prints all depict material drawn from real life and war scenes ... They express dissatisfaction with social injustices … In the darkness they show indignation about national affairs with compelling veracity and a highly distinctive quality.
Their strong political attitude soon attracted the attention of officialdom, and so in August, after their second exhibition (3-6 July 1933), many members of the Beiping Left-Wing League were arrested, shortly after which Shen Fuwen was arrested and Wang Zhaomin and Yang Tansheng were forced to flee for safety from Beiping, whereupon the research society was forced to cease activities. The activities of this group had encompassed north and south China, bringing the newly flourishing print movement to this northern metropolis.
‘The present task for artists is not to devote their energies to the abstractions of color and shape; the important thing is bringing the content of art closer to the masses’. This was the thinking expressed in the ‘Foreword’ to the album of work of the Wooden Bell Woodcut Research Society. This group was established in February 1933 by a number of staff of the Hangzhou Art Academy, including Hao Lichun (Li Qun), Ye Luo, Cao Bai (Liu Pingruo) and Xu Tiankai; later the membership rapidly swelled to more than forty. These young people brimming with a sense of social responsibility hoped that the newly developing woodcut would rouse the masses and sound the clarion call of progress. They insisted: ‘The intellectual class should contribute their all to the masses, providing them with guidance, raising their self-consciousness and finding them a path of survival in the resistance struggle’. During the exhibition, the woodcuts displayed by these young artists almost all reflected content expressing the lives and resistance of the lower orders. The succinct and clear content and the propaganda on behalf of proletarian art were seen as confrontational by the Kuomintang officials, and on the Double-Ten Festival in 1933 three core members of the society, Li Qun, Ye Luo and Cao Bai, were arrested and the society’s activities came to an end.
In December 1934, Lu Xun received a letter from Li Hua, a teacher at the Guangzhou Municipal School of Fine Arts, in which he learned that a modern wood-block print group had been established in the school on 19 June. Lu Xun wrote back: ‘I profoundly hope that the group which you gentlemen have founded serves as a pillar and a center for the development of the wood-block print’. As early as 1926, Li Hua (1907-1994) had been a teacher of western painting after graduating from the Guangzhou Municipal School of Fine Arts. In 1930, he went to study in Japan, but after the September Eighteenth Incident returned to China. Even though Lu Xun had not met Li Hua, he had praised highly Li’s wood-block prints, and his Roar, China (1935) was a richly expressive work which was one of the representative examples of the newly flourishing print art of this period. The Modern Print Society (June 1934 - July 1937), the full name of which was the Modern Creative Print Research Society, was set up by 27 people involved in print research, including Li Hua and his second year students in the western painting department - Lai Shaoji, Tang Yingwei, Zhang Ying, and Liu Lun. Perhaps the political situation in Guangzhou provided the conditions in which the research society was able to register fairly rich achievements in producing works, exhibiting and publishing. The group of young people systematically selected works and published eighteen volumes of Modern Prints. At the same time they initiated publication of Woodcut World, of which four issues appeared and which disseminated information about the woodcut movement and promoted academic research. Over the course of three years, they also edited and published monographs and collections of individual artists.
In 1936, when the Anti-Japanese War was about to break out on a full-scale, the Modern Print Society was able to maintain its print art activities. In July, following the national woodcut travelling exhibition of 1935, the Guangzhou Modern Print Society held the Second National Woodcut Travelling Exhibition.
Among all the art movements of the 20th century, the scale and influence of the newly developing wood-block print movement of the 1930s went far beyond that of all other groups and schools. Although in this period wood-block print artists in their ideas and activities were establishing connections of different degrees with the political tactics of the Communist Party of China, their resentment against the Kuomintang and their concern for the national plight into which it had plunged the country were spontaneous. The young people in this new era were extremely clear in their minds about what constituted justice and evil, and it was with a sense of dedicated sacrifice that they threw themselves into their artistic activities, like idealistic medieval monks sacrificing their lives in the pursuit of freedom and equality in the midst of a dark reality. Even if their tutor had passed away, these young people would not abandon their position of upholding the truth and resisting. In ‘Manifesto Announcing the Establishment of the Shanghai Woodcut Makers Association’, dated November 1936, they called on their comrades to ‘realize the will and testament of Lu Xun’, which was to ‘fight the darkness and brutality’ through promoting the Chinese woodcut movement.
In fact, the newly flourishing woodcut movement became a powerful weapon used by the CPC in its political struggle in areas ruled by the KMT, and the CPC won extensive sympathy and an ideological basis in the face-off with the Kuomintang government. Jiang Feng has described how, in the ‘reactionary’ years when the woodcut became synonymous with ‘revolution’, woodcut artists were ‘mostly Communist Party members, Communist Youth League members or Communist Party sympathizers’.[6] Thus, when the full-scale Anti-Japanese War broke out and the CPC once again obtained legitimacy, the great majority of artists filled with ideals and optimism rushed to Yan’an, and in this period their pursuit of democracy, freedom and equality demonstrated the extremely great hopes they held for the Communist Party of China.
The Art of Yan’an
The reality of Yan’an seemed to be genuinely encouraging. The American journalist and the author of Red Star over China, Edgar Snow travelled to the Yan’an Soviet in June 1936, and he left a record of all that he saw and heard on his journey as well as stories of the ordinary masses and the Red Army soldiers he encountered on the way. Snow’s writing created a utopian world in the minds of intellectuals imbued with a sense of national justice and humanistic sympathy.
After the Xi’an Incident, those young students following the guidance of Lu Xun and filled with a sense of justice and lofty ideals successively undertook the journey to Yan’an, the ‘holy city of youth’. Between May and August 1938 alone, the office of the Eighth Route Army in Xi’an was visited by more than 2288 persons in the groups of young students, artists and intellectuals flocking to Yan’an. Such ‘Left-Wing’ artists as Hu Yichuan, Jiang Feng, Wo Zha, Li Qun, Zhang Wang, Liu Xian, Chen Tiegeng, Lai Shaoji, and Ma Da would form the main component of the Yan’an art contingent.
The renowned Lu Xun Art Academy of Yan’an was established in compliance with a suggestion made by Mao Zedong after a performance of the modern drama Blood Sacrifice for Shanghai (Xue ji Shanghai) at the beginning of 1938.[7] The prolegomenon for the academy written by Sha Kefu and explaining why the academy had adopted Lu Xun’s name:
We decided to found this art institute, and adopted the name of China’s greatest writer, the late Mr. Lu Xun, not only to commemorate our great teacher but also to show that we wanted to advance with giant steps along the road which he had pioneered.[8]
The Lu Xun Art Academy’s educational policy had been undoubtedly approved by the Party’s Central Secretariat. The aim in establishing this art school had been to make literature and art, as well as writers and artists, tools and weapons in the CPC’s war of resistance against Japan and in their other political struggles. For the young people coming to Yan’an, the cartoon was an effective art form, and in the era of Lu Xun the cartoon played an effective role as ‘militant’ and ‘revolutionary’ satire. However, after artists went to Yan’an, did the targets of their militancy and revolutionary character include problems within the ranks of the revolution? At the beginning, artists believed that this was the case, and many artists in Yan’an used the cartoon to criticize and satirize unsavory phenomena, such as ‘subjectivism, dogmatism, stereotyped Party writing, love affairs, holding meetings, disregard for time, undisciplined discussions about freedom, self-importance, mischievousness, and cadres developing bad habits in study and work’. The cartoons shown in the exhibition held (15-17 February 1942) in the Yan’an soldier’s club by the artists Cai Ruohong, Zhang E, and Hua Junwu were works of this type. The artists even innocently published an article in Liberation Daily on 15 February titled ‘About the Satirical Exhibition’: ‘If someone looking in a mirror discovers some dirt on his face he should not complain about the mirror, but about himself and wash his face’. The more than 70 interesting cartoons in the show attracted big audiences, so the exhibition was extended and continued as a travelling exhibition in March. The exhibition was visited in spring by the leaders in Yan’an including Mao Zedong, Wang Jiaxiang, Ye Jianying, Lin Biao and the CPC philosopher Ai Siqi. In summer, when the three artists were met by Mao Zedong at his home known as the Date Garden (Zaoyuan), they all seemed to regret that the exhibition staged in spring had been a ‘mistake’ (cuowu). Mao Zedong cited Hua Junwu’s Trees Planted in 1939 as an example, warning the artist not to negate everything because of the existence of some limited problem. One should not coldly sneer at the people because of their shortcomings, and did not Lu Xun even refer to his satirical essays as ‘hot wind’ (refeng)?
The cartoon in Yan’an subsequently underwent a change in subject matter, and the target of the issues addressed could not be ‘internal’. Satire now had to target the ‘invaders, exploiters and oppressors’, and the main targets for exposure were Japanese imperialism and the Kuomintang.
In May 1942, on returning to Yan’an from the Yellow River frontline, the three artists, Zhuang Yan, Ma Da and Jiao Xinhe, staged a joint exhibition. The works of Zhuang Yan (1913-2002), the only artist in Yan’an who insisted on oil painting, were the relaxed depiction using simple composition and oil colors of the landscapes, rural scenes, cave dwellings and peasant customs witnessed during the Lu Xun Art Academy’s trip to the front line to provide moral support for the soldiers defending the Yellow River. However, the important thing was not the artist’s use of oil color, but in a situation in which Mao Zedong had alerted Yan’an artists to be unequivocal in their service to, and depiction of, their subject matter, the artistic interest of this type of expression derived from French modernism was incompatible with the new situation. Zhuang Yan was the editor of the illustrated folio Defend Yan’an, but his paintings were regarded as expressing a bucolic charm and as having a formalism that had no relationship with fighting at the front; Jiang Feng and Hu Man clearly pointed out that the exhibition revealed ‘erroneous tendencies’. Jiang Feng fervently criticized Zhuang Yan’s artistic thought, telling this painter still infatuated with the colors and forms of Matisse and Picasso: ‘It is a mistake in Yan’an to advocate openly this so-called modern painting which is divorced from life, removed from the people, distorts images, and which solely expends effort on artistic form’.[9]
Yan’an was only the center of the CPC revolutionary base areas. After the end of 1936, the development of base areas proceeded rapidly and, between September and November 1938, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the CPC called on everybody to go to the front in the War of Resistance against Japan. In winter 1938, the Lu Xun Art Academy Woodcut Work Team, led by Hu Yichuan and comprising Luo Gongliu, Yan Han, and Hua Shan (with the later addition of Chen Tiegeng and Yang Jun), crossed the Yellow River which had been blockaded by Japanese troops and arrived in the Taihang Mountain base area behind enemy lines. Constant Japanese artillery bombardment and the uncertainty of food and housing provided the basic work conditions for many literature and art workers. Hu Yichuan explained that the members of the woodcut work team hoped to become a ‘light cavalry team’, so that they could stage mobile exhibitions. However, these works were obviously far removed in their style and subject matter from the needs of the local audience, because ‘the masses like reading picture-story books with woodcuts and color printing that have a beginning and an end’.[10] This alerted these soldier-artists to produce works that directly reflected the realities of the war. At the same time as they were involved in the fighting, they also established the periodical Woodcuts behind Enemy Lines and woodcut workshops producing New Year illustration (nianhua), as the artists quickly grew familiar with the content which people liked and so created a large number of works the masses could understand. The Yan’an artists’ work began to cater to popular interest. Gradually, artists came to regard paintings as effective instruments of propaganda, and they even prepared one-off visual works as propaganda flyers which were distributed at night in the vicinity of enemy pillboxes in occupied areas, thereby communicating with the puppet armies using such readily understandable tactics.
The artist who created the work titled Working with the Japanese, but Hearts with the Han, Yan Han (1916-2011), was born into a poor family from Fu’an village, Donghai county, Jiangsu province. Yan Han passed the entrance examinations for the Hangzhou National Art College. In 1937, the full-scale Sino-Japanese war broke out. Yan Han began evacuating westwards with the art college along the Qiantang River. During his time in Guixi, Yan Han was greatly influenced by the novel How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky. After reaching Changsha, he heard a report delivered by Xu Teli, a member of the CPC’s Hunan Provincial Party Committee, and became focused on Yan’an. In November 1938, after completing three months study at the Lu Xun Academy, Yan Han joined the academy’s woodcut work team led by Hu Yichuan and went with them to the front-line in the War of Resistance against Japan in the Taihang Mountains, where he engaged in creating woodcuts with Hu Yichuan and Hua Shan. There Yan Han also perfected a new art form: the new nianhua (New Year picture). His early love of the Chinese theater had familiarized him with traditional artistic forms (yangshi), as well as laying the unconscious foundation for his later ‘new door god illustrations’ (xin menshen hua). His unique experience of the war, having accepted perilous military tasks, witnessed the deaths of companions, and endured arduous years of the enemy’s counter-insurgency operations and counter-offensives. All these experiences shaped his sensitivity and his works treating the subject matter of war were the result of personal experience. Moreover, the works titled Recounting Bitterness and Voting with Beans as Tallies, which he completed for the land reform movement in the winter of 1947, became classic woodcut works of this period.
At Spring Festival in 1940, the woodcut team members Hu Yichuan and Yang Jun put several thousand of the new nianhua on a stall at the country fair in Xiyingzhen, Xiangyuan county, and these proved so popular with the locals that every last one was sold. These works of art proved so popular that an order quickly went out to start distributing them in Chongqing. On 7 February, the deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army Peng Dehuai wrote a very supportive letter to the artists after receiving the new nianhua, praising the artists for having ‘made progress’ in popularizing their art.[11]
In 1942, the China Woodcut Research Society held a national woodcut exhibition in Chongqing and, under the conditions afforded by the cooperation during the War of Resistance between the KMT and CPC, Zhou Enlai probably also brought print works from Yan’an. The exhibition which attracted the attention of art circles and even literary circles in the KMT ruled areas included more than 50 works by Hi Yichuan, Jiang Feng, Wo Zha, Gu Yuan, Yan Han, Li Qun, Xia Feng, Luo Gongliu and Ma Da. Xu Beihong visited the exhibition, and in an article titled ‘The National Woodcut Exhibition’ published in Chongqing’s Xin Min Bao (18 October 1942) he expressed his own attitude through his appraisal of Gu Yuan: ‘At three o'clock on the afternoon of 15 October 1942, I discovered an unsurpassed talent in Chinese art circles, the great Communist Party artist Gu Yuan’. In the article Xu Beihong showered startlingly lavish praise on Gu Yuan’s Hoeing Weeds, which he described as ‘one of the most successful works in the modern history of art in China and I want to be able to be with city people when they appreciate this work’. In fact, Xu Beihong saw exquisite realist works in Yan’an rather than in the art of Chongqing, and the fact that the unusually difficult northern countryside could provide the conditions for producing such an interesting realist woodcut really surprised him. However, Xu Beihong lacked an understanding of the logic of the situation in Yan’an and did not realize that the effective realist methods of sketching that met with his approval would not be considered suitable for the local audience or meet the political needs in Yan’an. After May 1942, batches of Yan’an artists were sent down to learn from the people and the ‘careful, precise and calm realist style’ which Xu Beihong described gave way to pure and lively folk forms. Gu Yuan also rapidly changed his style. Despite this, Xu Beihong’s praise of Gu Yuan was greatly appreciated by the Yan’an artist.
The achievements in ‘art’, ‘fine arts’ and ‘painting’ that emerged from that unique war environment formed the most important symbol of this era. The CPC effectively organized many young artists who in the spirit of idealism and sacrifice wanted to dedicate themselves to the cause of national liberation and to dedicate their art to the War of Resistance. To a great extent, the art of the period of the War of Resistance under the CPC’s leadership was genuinely produced under artillery fire and with loss of life.
Li Qi later related his experience studying painting in Yan’an:
With no teachers, I had to stand behind the students at the Lu Xun Art Academy and watch them sketching. With no teaching materials, I had to always read the cartoons posted in exhibitions and wall newspapers at the Lu Xun Academy. I even made copies of the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao that hung in the academy’s auditorium. This was during 1939 and 1941, when at times there were performances by drama troupes at Qiao’ergou. Such opportunities were actually few, because the troupes were mostly touring and performing. In the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region with its widely scattered population we would often march all day and so there was little time for painting. As we marched we could study vocabulary. Before we set out in the morning, the head of our team would issue words of the day for us to learn, and some of us would fix these notes to the rucksack of the comrade in front, so that we could study as we marched. But, if we wanted to practice painting? It was difficult, because we only had ten minute breaks after walking every ten li in which to pick up sticks and draw pictures of our comrades resting beside us on the ground. Whenever we had lots of donkeys to carry the boxes with the costumes and props, the younger comrades not only did not need to carry their knapsacks, but could ride on the donkeys’ backs instead. The donkeys walked along steadily, and we would be able to sketch sitting on their backs. When riding and facing ahead, I sketched the line of men or donkeys advancing. When I rode facing backwards I sketched the oncoming column, and riding side-saddle I sketched the scenery in the distance.[12]
The experiences of many other artists studying painting in Yan’an were very similar to those of Li Qi and his description reveals the spiritual temper of the time so that we can share in the romantic feelings of the Yan’an artists. Their inner world was filled with ideals and a sense of justice and sacrifice, with the individual interests of most artists incorporated in the revolutionary undertaking. They believed their own commitment to be lofty and beautiful.
Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art
1942 was a difficult period in the Anti-Japanese War and, because of the opposition posed by the KMT army on the battlefield, the Communist Party in Yan’an launched an internal rectification to tighten conditions and to resolve contradictions and conflicts of the different factions with different ideas within the Party. In the spring of 1942 the long-lasting and decisive impact on literature and art of Mao Zedong’s literary and artistic theory embodied in Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (hereafter Talks) became part of the rectification movement of Yan’an, and with the ostensible aims of opposing subjectivism (dogmatism, empiricism), sectarianism and stereotyped Party writing, the real purpose of the rectification movement was to eliminate totally the internationalist forces and the influence of internal ‘empiricism’ within the Party represented by Wang Ming and to establish absolutist power within the center of the Party with Mao Zedong at the core, as well as a Party center in politics and ideology in which ‘Mao Zedong thought’ as Chinese Marxism provided the guiding thought for the entire Party.
Compared with those Chinese who had returned from the Soviet Union or were involved in the Chinese revolution within the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s view of the China question was, from the beginning, practical in specifics and tactics. His practice of revolution in the countryside on the basis of his Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan formed an obvious contrast to those ‘left’ and ‘right’ opportunists who wanted to seize power in several central cities in order to secure the victory of the revolution. The Zunyi Conference (January 1935) and subsequent meetings saw Mao Zedong enter the decision-making level of the political and military leadership so that he became the de facto military leader. In 1938, when the Soviet Union was embroiled in the storm of eliminating counterrevolutionaries, Wang Ming’s Soviet handler Mif was executed and so Wang Ming lost influence within the party. By October 1938 at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Party Congress Mao Zedong was already able to make the following speech:
To discuss Marxism without considering China’s characteristics is just abstract empty Marxism. Thereafter, in adapting Marxism to China it must express every manifestation of China’s characteristics. In other words, it must be applied in accordance with Chinese characteristics and this is an urgent task that must be understood and resolved by the entire Party. Foreign stereotyped writing must be eliminated, empty and abstract tunes must be sung less, and dogmatism must be laid to rest. All this must be replaced with a fresh and lively ‘Chinese manner’ (Zhongguo zuofeng) and ‘Chinese approach’ (Zhongguo qipai) which the Chinese people enjoy.
From 1939 onwards, Mao Zedong began to use the Stalinized Marxist model provided by History of the Soviet Communist (Bolshevik) Party as the blueprint for Sinifying Marxism. This work, which was published during Stalin’s purge of counter-revolutionaries, provided the model for Decision on the Resolution of Several Historical Problems of the Party which represented the CPC’s historical conclusion of the rectification movement of Yan’an. Obviously, in the course of adapting Marxism to China, Mao Zedong summarized the essence of what he believed to be the theory of ‘class struggle’ and ‘proletarian dictatorship’, which was famously expressed as ‘political power comes from inside the barrel of a gun’.[13]
In September 1941, Mao Zedong held an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPC, where he delivered an attack on the ‘left opportunism’ of the internationalist line of Wang Ming and Mao even dared to openly declare the Marxism of the internationalists to be false Marxism and to link the influence of their ‘subjective’ thinking to its ideological roots in Bukharin, Zinoviev and the others Stalin regarded as ‘enemies of the people’. This effectively and totally stripped Wang Ming and others of their ideological and political legitimacy within the CPC. The facts indicate that the Comintern lost control over the CPC and this thoroughly freed Mao Zedong’s Chinese Marxism. On 1 February 1942, Mao Zedong presented his speech titled ‘Rectification of Party Conduct, Style of Study and Writing Style’, also known as ‘Rectification of the Party Work Style’, at the opening ceremony for the Party School of the CPC Central Committee in Yan’an. Mao Zedong could now especially discuss the question of intellectuals, pointing out that many people were confused about the concept of the intellectual. Addressing the situation in Yan’an, Mao bluntly stated:
There are many intellectuals, and they believe they are very knowledgeable and they show off their knowledge, but they do not realize that this display is pernicious and harmful, hindering their advance. They should know one truth, which is that so many so-called intellectuals are among the most stupid of people when compared with the workers and peasants whose knowledge is sometimes greater than theirs.[14]
Mao Zedong went on to limit the range of ‘knowledge’, so that what he called knowledge comprised only the two doorways of ‘the struggle for production’ and ‘class struggle’, and all knowledge in the natural and social sciences had to be ‘crystallized’ and crammed through these two portals. Subsequently, those intellectuals in Yan’an found that they were all deficient in these two portals of knowledge, and so even the title of ‘intellectual’ lost its value. With respect to knowledge of ‘the struggle for production’, intellectuals were required to learn from the workers and peasants, and in their knowledge of ‘class struggle’, they were required to obey the direction of the Party in order to become ‘intellectuals’ worthy of the name, and ‘the only way to do this was to participate in real work and become a real worker; those engaged in theoretical work must study important real problems’.[15]
On 9 March 1942, Liberation Daily, whose chief editor was Bo Gu, published an article by Ding Ling titled ‘Thoughts on International Women’s Day [8 March]’. The literature and art column in the paper soon thereafter published a number of articles that created a political storm in the town of Yan’an with its population of more than 30,000: ‘Wild Lilies’ by Wang Shiwei; ‘On the Love and Patience of Comrades’ by Xiao Jun, ‘Understanding and Respecting Writers’ by Ai Qing; and, ‘It Is Still the Age of the Satirical Essay’ by Luo Feng. The articles by Ding Ling, Xiao Jun and Ai Qing all discussed how intellectuals in Yan’an had not won the position of respect they deserved, how there was a pervasive reverence for ‘the top leader’, how the lower levels of the leadership had a rude working attitude, relied on simplistic methods and were lacking in any democratic work-style, how feelings of friendliness and equality were lacking between comrades, and how the status of women needed improving. These phenomena seemed to be utterly different from how these writers imagined Yan’an to be before their arrival.
In ‘Wild Lilies’, published in the Liberation Daily of 23 March 1942, Wang Shiwei presented criticism of existing problems in Yan’an that was vivid and theoretically rich. He warned how the old system could appear in Yan’an through his analysis of the system implemented in Yan’an of having ‘five grades of diet and three colors for clothing’ and of the ideology and history of hierarchical systems. He exposed the ‘dark aspects’ of Yan’an society in the hope that people would pay attention to their harmfulness for the revolutionary cause. Wang Shiwei directly used the expression often cited by Mao Zedong that ‘heaven won’t fall down’ and he even warned that if we allow darkness to emerge and do not check its spread, ‘then heaven – the heaven of the revolutionary cause - will inevitably fall down’.
The articles by Wang Shiwei and others met with a sympathetic response from the intellectuals from literature and art circles who had come to Yan’an, especially those from the big cities. However, on 31 March 1942, Mao Zedong issued a warning at a forum discussing the revamping of Liberation Daily. On 5 April, Liberation Daily published an editorial drafted by Hu Qiaomu and titled ‘The Three Rectifications Must Be Correctly Implemented’ which singled out Wang Shiwei for ‘his erroneous views and erroneous methods, which not only provide no supplementary benefit for the rectifications but harm them’. On 13 April, the Central Youth Committee of the editorial board of the wall newspaper Light Cavalry Team published a preliminary self-criticism in Liberation Daily. Later, Wang Shiwei was accused of being ‘anti-Party’ and ‘anti-leadership’. After May, Fan Wenlan, Ai Qing, Zhou Yang, and Ding Ling all joined in the criticism of Wang Shiwei, who by June had become an ‘anti-Party element’, a ‘Trotskyite bandit’, and a ‘KMT spy’.
Because of the Wang Shiwei incident, Mao Zedong believed that the range of the rectification movement had to be expanded and that a thorough ‘rectification’ must be also waged in the field of literature and art. In other words, there must be a full-scale rectification implementing his adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to China in the battle-lines of politics, in the ideological sphere, and in literature and art.
There were three sessions of the forum in Yan’an bringing together literature and art workers. On 2 May 1942, Mao Zedong’s ‘introductory remarks’ raised and initiated the question of intellectuals, and he defined their tasks in this new historical period:
After the Anti-Japanese War broke out, increasing numbers of revolutionary writers and artists came to Yan’an and the various anti-Japanese base areas, and this was a very good thing. But on arriving in the base areas, they did not necessarily totally integrate with the masses of the people there. If we are to advance our revolutionary work, then we must effect this integration. We are meeting today, in order to make literature and art a functioning component in the whole revolutionary machine, and to make literature and art effective weapons in uniting and educating the people and in attacking and eliminating the enemy, in order to help the people join hand in hand in their struggle with the enemy.[16]
Mao Zedong reminded everyone that they must ‘stand on the side of the proletariat and the masses of the people’, and that Party members ‘must stand on the side of the Party’. Such a warning was intended to let all persons know that all past words and actions which had not been authorized and formally approved by the Party organization may have been erroneous, and could even constitute an incorrect stance. At the same time Yan’an was utterly different from Shanghai which was full of people of every description and it was not an area ruled by the KMT; the masses here belonged to simple structures, and ‘the audiences for literature and art works in the base areas were ‘workers, peasants, soldiers and revolutionary cadres’.
‘Since the targets of literary and artistic works are workers, peasants and soldiers and their cadres, the question arises of understanding them and being familiar with them’. But what was meant by ‘being familiar with them’? When discussing familiarity with the workers and peasants, Mao Zedong had this to say:
The workers and peasants are the cleanest people and, even though their hands are soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they are really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. That is what is meant by a change in feelings, a change from one class to another. If our writers and artists who come from the intelligentsia want their works to be well received by the masses, they must change and remold their thinking and their feelings. Without such a change, without such remolding, they can do nothing well and will be misfits.
Those young people who had been influenced by western ideological trends and who had read Western books in the 1920s and 1930s were very familiar with statements about human nature made since the May Fourth enlightenment movement and their lives and attitudes could not be simply divided into several ‘abstract human natures’ determined according to social class. The question that Mao Zedong emphasized was: If writers and artists want to become Marxist-Leninists, why are they still unclear about the basic concept of Marxism which is class struggle? He reminded them that even the ‘love’ between comrades must be analysed, and said that ‘in a class society there can be only class love’ and that there can be neither ‘love in the abstract’ nor ‘human nature in the abstract’.
Even though there was almost no industry in Yan’an, Mao Zedong, in accordance with the basic concepts of Marxism, defined the ‘masses of the people’ writers and artists must serve as follows:
Therefore, our literature and art are firstly for the workers, the class that leads the revolution. Secondly, they are for the peasants, the most numerous and most steadfast of our allies in the revolution. Thirdly, they are for the armed workers and peasants, namely, the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies and the other armed units of the people, which are the main forces of the revolutionary war. Fourthly, they are for the labouring masses of the urban petty bourgeoisie and for the petty-bourgeois intellectuals, both of whom are also our allies in the revolution and capable of long-term co-operation with us. These four kinds of people constitute the overwhelming majority of the Chinese nation, the broadest masses of the people.
In view of the fact that Mao Zedong immediately went on to criticize ‘the kingdom of petty-bourgeois intellectuals’, the fourth group could not in fact be included among ‘the masses of the people’.
In the second part of his ‘conclusion’, Mao Zedong touched on questions discussed by Yan’an writers and artists: On the concepts of ‘popularization’ (puji) and ‘elevation’ (tigao), Mao reminded people of the nature of ‘elevation’, when he wrote: ‘From what basis, then, are literature and art to be raised? From the basis of the feudal classes? From the basis of the bourgeoisie? From the basis of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals? No, not from any of these; only from the basis of the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers’. He said in conclusion: ‘Whether advanced or elementary, our literature and art are for the masses of the people, primarily for the workers, peasants and soldiers, and so it is for the use of workers, peasants and soldiers that we create’.
When touching upon the relations between the Party and literature and art, Mao Zedong more clearly used concepts of class analysis and political struggle, and concluded that literature and art must serve politics:
… when we say that literature and art are subordinate to politics, we mean class politics, the politics of the masses, not the politics of a few so-called statesmen. Politics, whether revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, is the struggle of class against class, not the activity of a few individuals. The revolutionary struggle on the ideological and artistic fronts must be subordinate to the political struggle because only through politics can class needs and the needs of the masses find expression in concentrated form.
Addressing literary and artistic criticism, Mao Zedong was proposing ‘political criteria’ and ‘artistic criteria’. On this question, Mao linked the demarcation of the political standpoint to artistic criteria, in order to demonstrate that ‘artistic criteria’ had no meaning.
Mao Zedong was extremely clear about the particularity of literature and art, clear about those importance of the particularity accorded to literature and art by those intellectuals he was addressing, and he was even absolutely clear about relatively independent artistic questions. However, he demanded that those he was addressing consider the following:
But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second. The bourgeoisie always shuts out proletarian literature and art, however great their artistic merit. The proletariat must similarly distinguish among the literary and art works of past ages and determine its attitude to these people and whether or not they had any progressive significance historically. Some works which, politically, are downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more reactionary their content and the higher their artistic quality, the more poisonous they are to the people and the more necessary it is to reject them. A common characteristic of the literature and art of all exploiting classes in their period of decline is the contradiction between their reactionary political content and their artistic form. What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form. Works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically. Therefore, we oppose both the tendency to produce works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the ‘poster and slogan style’ (biaoyu-kouhao-shi) which is correct in political viewpoint but lacking in artistic power. On questions of literature and art we must wage a struggle on two fronts.
Finally, Mao Zedong answered all the questions brought together during the ‘investigative study’ made before the Forum. On the question of the theory of human nature, he told those in attendance: ‘Class society can only have the human nature of a particular class and there is no human nature that transcends classes’. In addition, ‘there is no love or hatred in the world without reason or cause. As for the so-called love of humanity, there has been no such all-inclusive love since humanity was divided into classes’. He told them that ‘exposure’ and ‘critique’ were selective, and one must have a correct class stance. ‘Living under the rule of the dark forces and deprived of freedom of speech, Lu Xun used burning satire and freezing irony, cast in the form of essays, to do battle; in this he was entirely correct’, ‘but in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region and the anti-Japanese base areas behind the enemy lines, where democracy and freedom are granted in full to the revolutionary writers and artists and withheld only from the counter-revolutionaries, the style of the essay should not simply be like that of Lu Xun’. Mao Zedong consciously avoided problems raised if they did not relate to the proletariat but emerged during the rule of the Party of the proletariat in Yan’an.
After Mao Zedong had referred to what he believed to be the problems in the literature and art field in Yan’an, he said:
In the circumstances it is our job to jolt these ‘comrades’ and tell them sharply, ‘That won't work! The proletariat cannot accommodate itself to you; to yield to you would actually be to yield to the big landlord class and the big bourgeoisie and to run the risk of undermining our Party and our country’. Whom then must we yield to? We can mould the Party and the world only in the image of the proletarian vanguard. We hope our comrades in literary and art circles will realize the seriousness of this great debate and join actively in this struggle, so that every comrade may become sound and our entire ranks may become truly united and consolidated ideologically and organizationally.
Now, Mao, by invoking as comrades those who have raised opinions, was virtually consigning them to the ranks of the reactionary ‘big landlords and big bourgeoisie’ whose opinions ‘threaten the survival of the Party and the nation’. This being the case, it is easy to imagine how many intellectuals suffered as victims of the political struggles in the rectification movement.
The Talks mark the establishment of Mao Zedong’s literary and artistic theory, and the beginning of the CPC’s ‘Party literature and art’. Henceforth, the targets, positions, views and methods served by literature and art would all necessarily be subject to inspection and authorization by various ranks of literature and art officials of the Party. In such a system, serving the workers, peasants and soldiers would become a justification that none could refuse, because once one’s work was considered to have a problem in stance and a mistake in attitude, then not only would one’s literary and artistic creation be criticized, but the person of the writer or artist was also at risk. Politics were supreme, but in order to know ultimately what kind of politics writers and artists must serve had to be determined by the Party leadership and the life of nearly every writer and artist depended on such decisions.
The conclusion of the rectification signaled the formation of Mao Zedong Thought, and at the Seventh Party Conference in 1945, Mao Zedong Thought was endorsed as the guiding thought and action policy. His theory on art and literature became the theoretical basis of the entire Party and the entire literary and art world under the leadership of the Party. This politically-led philosophy of literature and art remained the only principle that could be followed and the only effective dogma until 1976, and it was the instrument through which the leadership and authorities in different periods controlled the right to speech and waged political struggle in the field of literature and art. The clear message in Talks that literature and art were merely a tool or instrument was so powerful that a passage in that work became the credo of Chinese writers and artists for decades to come:
In the world today all culture, all literature and all art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.[17]
The ‘salvation’ movement at the end of the rectification movement led to cruel political struggle among teachers and students at the Lu Xun Art Academy. An accusation of being ‘a spy’ resulted in a universal sense of anxiety. The artists began to realize that political struggle was harsh, and resulted in a psychology of fear surrounding future political movements; they gradually ceased to be political skeptics and began to develop habits and political attitudes to work in the direction indicated by the Party, even though such ‘habits’ and ‘attitudes’ could not save them from political crises in the different political movements that were to come later.
Cartoons in KMT Ruled Areas and the Work of the Third Department
At the beginning of the War of Resistance, the cartoon played a timely role in reporting and agitation. In July 1937, the Shanghai Cartoonists Association for National Salvation was established with the artistic aim of ‘preparing for a cartoon battle to the death with the Japanese invaders, in anticipation of a united front being established for the war …, and of final victory being won in the war of resistance against the Japanese invaders’. In August the First National Salvation Cartoon Propaganda Team of the Shanghai Circles Propaganda Committee for Resistance behind Enemy Lines was established. The team leader was Ye Qianyu and his deputy was Zhang Leping; many artists would participate in the work of the association. In September, the team set out, preparing anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons in the course of their journey, hoping that people would appreciate the meaning of the War of Resistance and national salvation. In Nanjing, they staged an ‘Exhibition of War of Resistance Cartoons’, which was visited by several tens of thousands for its reporting on the war. They continued to create and prepare propaganda even during Japanese bombardments. They encouraged the soldiers fighting at the front and organized local cartoon circles to take up the mission of preparing propaganda for the resistance.
In June 1938, the ‘Cartoon Propaganda Team’ divided into two groups – one led by Zhang Leping and one by Te Wei. In autumn, the two groups joined up in Changsha, and then hurried on to Guilin together, where they staged the Travelling Exhibition of Cartoons Resisting the Enemy. Because of the convenience for printing, wood-cut cartoons resulted in the publication of the journal Cartoons and Woodcuts, the newspaper supplement Monthly Selection of Cartoons and Woodcuts and Tri-monthly Periodical of Cartoons and Woodcuts. The team established a cartoon training class which invigorated their work, and Zhang Leping’s team set up a Cartoon Research Class in Guilin, as well as ‘wartime painting training classes’ and ‘lectures on cartoons and woodcuts’, which succeeded in training many cartoonists at this difficult time. Te Wei’s team reached Chongqing at the beginning of 1940. An Exhibition of the Cartoon League was subsequently held in Chongqing, where it was the largest and most influential exhibition at the time, and the participants included Zhang Guangyu, Ye Qianyu, Ding Cong, Liao Bingxiong, Shen Tongheng, Te Wei, Yu Suoya, and Zhang Wenyuan. After the Southern Anhui Incident in January 1941, the cartoon propaganda team broke up because of a lack of funding. Over three years the members of the National Salvation Cartoon Propaganda Team had succeeded in producing almost a thousand works for their cause.
In the cartoon movement addressing the theme of national salvation there was a parallel line of development focusing on realistic revelation and, for the populace experiencing hardships in the rear areas, these subjects directly related to their lives. Zhang Guangyu and Ding Cong became representatives of this type of cartoonist.
Zhang Guangyu (1900-1964) drew on Western painters for his technique and approach. In his early years he worked in a painting studio which produced stage props, and in the 1920s he became one of the leaders of the cartoon movement in Shanghai. The war forced Zhang Guangyu to flee Shanghai for Hong Kong, and before the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese in 1942, he worked in the local film industry. In 1944, after a time in the Zhanjiang area of Guangdong which would have been difficult, Zhang Guangyu arrived in Chongqing. In this city under Kuomintang control, Zhang completed his famous satirical picture-story book A Cartoon Journey to the West, which depicted a society wracked by turbulence and economic collapse, and in which rhetoric about ‘democracy’ was so much showy cant; this was a world in which there were no democratic kingdoms and dictatorships prevailed.
Ding Cong (b.1916) was one of Zhang Guangyu’s earliest students, and he seems to have been a cartoonist by instinct, but his optimistic spirit and healthy temperament ensured that he had his fair share of suffering. In the early 1930s, Zhang Guangyu proposed that Ding Cong go by the signature Xiao Ding, which he used thereafter. When he attended Liu Haisu’s art college, he drew cartoons together with Zhang Guangyu and Ye Qianyu. In 1936, Ding Cong became a member of the editorial department of the magazine The Good Companion. In 1942 he went to Chengdu in the KMT-controlled hinterland and there he mixed in theatre and art circles. During this time he was engaged in painting and went to outlying areas of Sichuan to paint in the field. When he returned to Chengdu and showed people the sketches of people from his field trip, his friends were impressed. In 1944 his reputation was established with a major work called Present Faces. Ding Cong presented an almost diametrically different perspective on social problems under KMT rule; if in the previous year his exhibition in Beiping of Pictures of Refugees suggested the crimes of the Japanese invaders, then Present Faces was a scroll work that targeted the Kuomintang government.
At the beginning of the war, many figures in cultural and artistic circles withdrew to Wuhan. Guo Moruo, in his Song of the Floodwaters, described how ‘those cultural people who moved inland, apart from the few who went to Yan’an, more or less all congregated in Wuhan. Not only did they come from Shanghai, but also Beiping-Tianjin, the Northeast and other places, with the result that Wuhan became a second Shanghai’. [18]
Many artists went to work in the KMT government military commission’s Third Department, which was headed by Guo Moruo. The Third Department was a KMT organization, but, during the second period of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the political department of which Zhou Enlai was vice-minister also became a base through which the Communist Party of China was able to expand its influence during the War of Resistance. The Communist Party utilized the Third Department to organize rapidly its forces in literature and art, and those cultural forms with on-the-spot influence such as drama and music all became effective tools for propagating resistance to Japan.
The teams of the fine arts division of the Third Department were strong, and the artists working in the Third Department included Ni Yide, Feng Fasi, Li Keran, Zhou Duo, Duan Pingyou, Wang Shikuo, Luo Gongliu, Tang Yihe, Li Qun, Lai Shaoji, Wang Qi, Ding Zhengxian, and Lu Hongji. The work of these painters in that organization during the war was mainly providing propaganda for the war of resistance in Wuhan, underscoring the role of painters as soldiers or propagandists. The painters even collectively created an enormous mural titled National Resistance, which was displayed outside Wuhan’s historical landmark, Yellow Crane Tower; the production of this work was drafted by Wang Shikuo and Zhou Duo, directed personally by Tian Han and actually painted through the collective efforts of Feng Fasi, Wang Shikuo, Zhou Lingzhao, and Gong Mengxian.
On 16 April, shortly after the establishment of the Third Department on 1 April 1938, the Wuhan Union of Woodcut Artists, a nationwide organization dedicated to the wood-block print, was set up. At the opening on 1 May of the ‘May First Labor Day Woodcut Exhibition’, the union set up the preparatory committee for the China National Association of Woodcut Circles for Resisting the Enemy. On 12 June 1938, the National Woodcut Exhibition of the War of Resistance opened, at the same time as the establishment of the China National Association of Woodcut Circles for Resisting the Enemy was announced. On 12 June 1938, the National Woodcut Exhibition of the War of Resistance opened, at the same time as the establishment of the China National Association of Woodcut Circles for Resisting the Enemy was announced. On the board of the association were such prominent figures as Cai Yuanpei, Feng Yuxiang, Pan Zinian, and Tian Han. Through their efforts over nearly a decade, those young people devoted to woodcut art and hoping to use woodcuts to reflect the country’s harsh realities had their own legal art organization, and at a time when they were compelled to unite with the forces of national salvation across the country they developed teams, set up organizations, held training classes, and extended the woodcut movement in each area.
In April 1939, the China National Association of Woodcut Circles for Resisting the Enemy staged its Third Exhibition of National War of Resistance Woodcuts, with more than 100 painters participating and more than 570 works on display. Audiences could see printed matter from the liberated areas at this exhibition. Because of problems created by the bombing, a lack of sufficient funding, and difficulties with the exhibition venue, compounded by rumors that the Kuomintang authorities intended to ban the organization, the China National Association of Woodcut Circles for Resisting the Enemy moved in July 1939 from Chongqing to Guilin, where on 19 October it staged the Woodcut Exhibition Commemorating the Third Anniversary of Lu Xun’s Death. In October 1940, the association held its tenth anniversary exhibition. Soon after the Southern Anhui Incident in 1941, the association in Guangxi was shut down by the Kuomintang’s headquarters in Guangxi, and in March of the same year, the association moved back to Chongqing. In March 1941, the Kuomintang issued a directive ordering the dissolution of more than 40 cultural and art bodies including the China National Association of Woodcut Circles for Resisting the Enemy.
In order to continue the activities of the now proscribed woodcut association, woodcut artists believed there was a need to set up an organization to sustain the work of the association. To evade the KMT’s political inspections, they no longer used the word ‘association’ but chose instead to style themselves a ‘research society’, a tactic designed to circumvent sensitive political issues. On 3 January 1942, the Chinese Woodcut Research Society was formally established in the second-floor meeting room of the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association in Chongqing, with a permanent board of directors comprising Wang Qi (general affairs), Liu Tiehua (publishing), Ding Zhengxian (exhibitions) Luo Qingzhen (research), and Shao Hengqiu (supplies). However, the Chinese Woodcut Research Society at this time maintained close ties with Yan’an through the Xinhua Daily and the Eighth Route Army Office in Chongqing.
Painters
In the period of the War of Resistance, the art which was perhaps most in accord with Hong Yiran’s call for the unity of ‘War of Resistance content’ (kangzhanhua) and ‘Westernized’ technique was not to be found among the endlessly debating painters in Chongqing, but in the work of the lone painter in Beiping, Jiang Zhaohe. On 29 October 1943, an audience gathered in Beiping in the audience hall of the Imperial Ancestral Temple (today’s Working People’s Cultural Palace in Beijing) to see this artist’s Displaced Persons, which at the time of the exhibition was called Grouped Images. This work was painted in accordance with the principles of teaching introduced by Xu Beihong, with realism used to depict the individual characters and the realist work completed using Chinese traditional painting materials. Because the work directly expressed real suffering and issues, the exhibition was shut down by Japanese military police in the course of its first day. The theme of this work very clearly revealed, as realistically as possible, the tragedy of homelessness and death that the war brought to the Chinese people. No painter as versed as Jiang Zhaohe in traditional calligraphy and painting had so resolutely attempted a work resembling a photographic record using traditional calligraphy and painting tools, and Jiang Zhaohe seemed to be a striking concrete example among the many Chinese-style paintings that were ‘reformed’ or ‘Western’ in their approach.
As fighting in the war grew fiercer, there were still artists engaged in constructive creative work. Chen Zhifo (1896-1962), a graduate of the industrial art and design department of the Tokyo Fine Arts School in Japan, became a pioneer in the field of modern industrial art. In 1923, he returned to China after graduation filled with the aspiration of taking up a position he had been promised before leaving China at the Hangzhou Industrial Arts College, but because the head of the school had changed, his plan of establishing an industrial art and design department came to naught. Soon afterwards, he took up teaching at the Shanghai Oriental Art College, where he was able to teach design. Soon, he established the Fashion Design Hall. In 1925, Chen Zhifo took up the post of professor at Shanghai Art University, and worked as a cover designer for Eastern Miscellany and a number of other periodicals and books. In 1930, after Chen Zhifo was unsuccessful in obtaining a post in the Institute of Education under Nanjing Central University as he had originally planned, he accepted an invitation to work at Shanghai Art Academy. In the following year, he took up a teaching position in the art department of Central University and while teaching there he wrote The ABC of Design Methods, Design Teaching Materials, Middle School Design Materials, and Design Preparation Methods, as well as An Outline of Western Fine Arts and Anatomy for Artists. While these might seem to be very mundane lectures on design for Westerners, Chinese regarded them as brand-new knowledge, because they had absolutely no understanding of modern design. Traditional decoration and pattern making were long regarded as a part of Chinese people’s lives, but publishing material on modern design concepts was a completely new undertaking. Chen Zhifo was an artist who understood and believed in the charm and value of traditional art, but he was well aware of inherent problems. He knew that simply ‘following and adhering to past practices’, ‘imitating antiques’ and ‘manufacturing objects in a slipshod way’ had resulted in the backwardness of contemporary Chinese fine arts and crafts, and his ideal was rejuvenating the Chinese tradition and salvaging the ancient artistic life through new forms. In 1934, Chen Zhifo began to experiment with using heavy color ink in Chinese flower and bird gongbi paintings, and when he exhibited these paintings at the first exhibition of the China Fine Arts Association in September they were popularly successful.
In March 1942, Chen Zhifo held his first one-man exhibition and that was also a success. Chen Zhifo was familiar with traditional painting, and he was particularly sensitive to the flower and bird paintings of the Five Dynasties artists Xu Xi and Huang Quan. Thus, using traditional flower and bird painting as a basis, he carefully drew on the visual decorative approach and the color style of Japanese painting and, at the same time, in his paintings he retained an air of nobility and restrained simplicity (danbo). Chen Zhifo’s thorough grounding in the basic skills of traditional painting can be clearly seen, but at the same time his works were also influenced by the heavy colors used in the new style of Chinese gongbi painting. Chen Zhifo was attempting to innovate very carefully by experimenting constantly using supplementary skills and techniques, and he invariably obtained interesting visual results.
In the wartime environment, the discussion about the issues of ‘national forms’ and ‘popularization’ impelled artists to focus interest on reality and the people. In the 1940s, Wu Zuoren, Chang Shuhong, and Dong Xiwen were among the earliest artists to begin experimenting with ‘sinification’ and ‘ethnicization’ (minzuhua).
The ancestral home of Wu Zuoren (1908-1997) was admitted to the fine arts department of the private Shanghai Art University in 1927. His ideas were influenced by Tian Han, who offered foreign literature classes in the department of literature of that university, was a dramatist who regarded art as a living weapon and who was very familiar with Western literature. Wu Zuoren’s sketches became known to Xu Beihong when Xu came to the school to lecture.[19] In March 1930 Wu Zuoren went to France together with Lü Xiaguang. Wu Zuoren studied very diligently in France and was especially keen on oil painting. After spending a month studying at the Paris Fine Arts School he transferred to the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where Professor Alfred Bastien had his classmates learn from this Chinese student. Wu Zuoren believed that ‘if Mr. Xu Beihong had given me my foundation in sketching, then Professor Bastien gave me my foundation in oil painting’.[20] In the autumn of 1935, he took up a teaching position in the art department of Central University. In October 1937, Wu Zuoren withdrew with the school to Chongqing, and in 1938 after the Kuomintang army scored a victory in the campaign at Tai’erzhuang, Wu Zuoren and other young teachers hoped to go to the front to find out about war. Encouraged by Xu Beihong, they went to the Third Department in Wuhan to find Tian Han and consult with him about doing paintings on the battlefield. Under the direction of Chen Siyuan of the staff department of the Military Commission, Wu Zuoren was part of a team of five, which also included Chen Xiaonan, Sun Zhongwei, Lin Jialü (Xia Lin), and Sha Jitong and which went to the front and actually painted on the battlefield. They visited the troop positions, entered the trenches, and observed the hospital for the wounded and the refugee camp. They collected a large quantity of first-hand material.
The ongoing war, the stifling society, and personal tragedy all impelled Wu Zuoren to flee the city and head to the western border lands to paint. Wu Zuoren left for Lanzhou in Gansu in April 1943, where he met Situ Qiao, Guan Shanyue, and the chancellor of Central University, Luo Jialun. In Qinghai he experienced the daily lives of the lamas, observed the craftsmanship and the process of producing thangka paintings and witnessed festive scenes on the grasslands of herdsmen singing and dancing. In Dunhuang, with the assistance of Joseph Needham and Rewi Alley and with Chang Shuhong’s organization, he studied and copied mural paintings. In October he returned to Chengdu, and in June of the following year he travelled to the Kangding area, returning to Chengdu a second time in February 1945. These two dramatic western trips were an unforgettable experience from which Wu Zuoren greatly benefited. In May, he held an Exhibition of Paintings of Wu Zuoren’s Travels. The important works from that trip completed by Wu Zuoren included Sacrifice in Qinghai, Yushu, Dusk on the Plateau, Qinghai Market, In the Lamasery and many sketches, watercolors, and copies of Dunhuang murals. On the basis of sketches he made during his western journey, he completed, in 1945 and 1946 respectively, the influential works Wula: Record of a Scene When Travelling in Qinghai in 1945 and Woman Carrying Water. In December 1945, he held his Retrospective Exhibition of Wu Zuoren’s Paintings in Chongqing, and in May of the following year in Shanghai held Exhibition of Wu Zuoren’s Paintings of Borderland Travels.
The painter Chang Shuhong was a close friend of Wu Zuoren. At an early date, on the banks of the Seine in Paris he met the French scholar Paul Pelliot engaged in producing a catalog of photographs he had taken in the Dunhuang Grottoes, and later Chang saw Tang dynasty paintings on silk in the Musée Guimet, and this startling surprise triggered his deep desire to look back at traditional art.
Chang Shuhong (1904-1994) was born in Hangxian (Hangzhou) in Zhejiang Province. In June 1927, Chang Shuhong received a government scholarship to study in France. Chang Shuhong’s achievements during his period there were envied by many other Chinese students, and from 1930 to 1935 he constantly won school and salon prizes. In 1933, Chang Shuhong, out of a sense of mission in creating new art, wrote ‘The Past Mistakes and Future Prospects of the Chinese New Art Movement’, which was published in 1934 in issue no.8 of volume 2 of the journal Monsoon, and in it he critically looked back on Chinese new art of the previous two decades and expressed his own introspection on the emulation of Western art that had been initiated in the Chinese art world in the 1930s.
The views expressed in this article were different from the usual articles taking either a traditionalist, Western or modernist position. He cited Edmond de Goncourt’s formulation that ‘the truth of all art is observation, feeling and expression’. Chang Shuhong’s artistic position was based on realist painting, but he yearned for an art which was more in accord with ‘the soul of New China’.
In fact, Chang Suhong’s concept of ‘academic painting’ (xueyuan-zhuyi huihua) underwent a change after his return to China. This did not mean that he was now directly influenced by his new environment, because his works of the 1930s and 1940s already revealed his sensitive reaction to an inner call for a new artistic language triggered by the post-impressionist, fauvist and expressionist works he had seen in France. In 1938, the National Art College and the Hangzhou Art College were amalgamated, and Chang Shuhong found himself embroiled in unbearable personnel conflicts. In 1940, another student strike broke out at the National Art College, and the head of the college, Lü Fengzi, dismissed Chang Shuhong, who later went on take up a post on the committee of the Fine Arts Education Commission under the Ministry of Education, on which he served concurrently as secretary with Zhang Daofan. During this period he completed many paintings. In 1942, thanks to the efforts and support of Liang Sicheng, Yu Youren, and Gao Yihan, Chang Shuhong became engaged in preparatory work for the establishment of the National Dunhuang Art Research Institute, and at the end of the year, he arrived in Lanzhou. In March of the following year, he travelled by camel to Dunhuang, where began the rescue work on the art of Dunhuang which was to be his life work’s greatest contribution.
The artistic career of Dong Xiwen (1914-1973) interestingly spanned two different eras and two different periods of ‘ethnicized art’ (minzuhua yishu), without his own art having been placed in conflict. Dong Xiwen studied at the Suzhou Art Academy directed by Yan Wenliang (1932), the National Hangzhou Art College directed by Lin Fengmian (1934), and the Shanghai Art Academy directed by Liu Haisu (1936). In autumn 1939, Dong Xiwen evacuated with the Hangzhou Art College to Kunming. The school subsequently recommended him to go to the French Fine Arts College in Hanoi where he received instruction from French painters, but because of the war, he returned to China after half a year. He took up a two-year posting as an editor with the Guizhou Provincial Cooperative Committee, where he read Das Kapital and works by Lu Xun. In October 1942, Dong Xiwen completed in Chongqing his painting Miao Girl Going to Market, Dong Xiwen’s ‘ethnic’ memory of life in Guizhou and his observation of the Miao ethnic group. Following the dictates of his heart, Dong Xiwen travelled with his wife to Dunhuang in July 1943, where he copied mural paintings, and during his two and a half years there he was often helped by Chang Shuhong. His experience of Dunhuang brought about a fundamental change in the subject matter and style of his painting, and in Grazing in the Qilian Mountains completed in 1943 and in Kazak Shepherdess completed several years later in 1948, we see lands and customs different from those or urban or Western works. It was these new environments and traces of cultural history that provided the provided the painter with the possibility of a more direct self-questioning. In Miao Girl Going to Market the painter had already accepted line work in oil painting. In Kazak Shepherdess, Dong Xiwen was already using very free planar composition and abbreviated decorative language, and in any case he had acquired the possibilities of expressing a ‘Chinese mood’ (Zhongguo feng) using oils which was a skill which he acquired during his painstaking copying of murals in Dunhuang. After 1949, Dong Xiwen further developed his understanding of China’s western regions.
Other painters living in KMT-ruled areas during the War of Resistance worth mentioning were Feng Fasi, Sun Zongwei, Ai Zhongxin, Li Ruinian, Hu Shanyu, and Huang Xianzhi. A work completed by Feng Fasi in 1942 titled Catching Lice provides a vivid record of wartime life at that time.
Art of the Civil War Period
In August 1945, people initially imagined that peace had arrived with the end of the war. The eight-year-long War of Resistance concluded and, like all their compatriots, artists enjoyed the happiness which would unfortunately prove to be transient. However, Chongqing in the second half of 1945 saw the Kuomintang and Communists in a new face-off in which they were second-guessing each other and preparing the stage for fresh conflict. On 15 December of that year, the US President issued a statement on his government’s China policy, which demanded that the political powers confer to establish an Anglo-American style of coalition government in China. After a year of negotiations led by Zhou Enlai between the KMT and the CPC delegations, the meetings ended in all-round conflict. Given the impact of the war, the national economy continued to be in an extremely damaged state, while the corruption and inability of the Kuomintang government bodies aroused widespread discontent. In May 1947, demonstrations opposing hunger and the civil war broke out in all parts of the country, while the CPC utilized the student strikes to stage a trial of strength with the KMT in the areas under KMT rule.
In April 1946, the Chinese Woodcut Research Society moved from Chongqing to Shanghai, and many artists were again gathering in this important city. Some of the original names of organizations began to undergo subtle changes, with the various organizations formulaically titled ‘China National Association of XXX Circles for Resisting the Enemy’ changing their names to the post-war title ‘China National XX Associations’. In line with such changes, the China Woodcut Research Society, which for political reasons had been less provocatively titled, on 4 June similarly adopted the new title of the China National Woodcut Association, but this move also seemed to be part of a strategic plan for literature and art organizations being pursued under the aegis of the leadership of the Communist Party, and on 18 September it opened the Exhibition of Eight Years of War of Resistance Woodcuts. The exhibition included 897 works (black-and-white woodcuts, colored woodcuts and woodcut picture-story book illustrations) by 113 artists from both the liberated and KMT-ruled areas. The exhibition also included a comprehensive display of historical materials including various publications, stationery, photographs and tools documenting 15 years of the new print movement. At this time, Guo Moruo had already become the avant-garde representative of the CPC in the cultural and academic fields, and after visiting the exhibition he briefed woodcut artists on their future tasks: ‘China is like a hard block of wood waiting for everyone to cut away the depression, despair, indignation and struggle of the masses, so that we can move from the blackness to the brightness. Seeing these woodcuts made over the past eight years emboldens and comforts us in the knowledge that China finally has a future and her people will be liberated. Let everyone take up their knives and carve away at this stubborn wooden block!’
The Communist Party of China never ceased to clamor for democracy and ‘constitutional government based on New Democracy’, and for the majority of people suffering from the Kuomintang government’s corruption the CPC undoubtedly represented hope. On 24 April 1945, Mao Zedong in his essay ‘On Coalition Government’, proposed on behalf of the Communist Party of China, that after the defeat of the Japanese invaders, ‘it will be necessary to convene a national assembly on a broad democratic basis and set up a formally constituted democratic government, which will also have the nature of a coalition with wide representation of people from all parties and groups or without any party affiliation, and which will lead the liberated people of the entire country in the construction of an independent, free, democratic, united, prosperous and powerful New China’. The ‘people of the entire country’, including artists, had great expectations. However, the breakdown of negotiations between the Kuomintang and the Communists led to the outbreak of civil war, so that China continued to be under ‘a shroud of war, famine, death and terror’. Many woodcut artists stood on the side of the Communist Party, unanimously supporting the CPC’s position and being perfectly willing to accept the leadership and direction of the CPC. They did not believe that the ‘democracy’ of the KMT was real democracy; ‘woodcut workers need to distinguish the true from the false with all the keenness of a woodcutting burin, and they must expose the face of bogus democracy with their blades’.[21]
In less than five years of civil war, war, social turmoil, and the complexity of the political situation all meant that the woodblock print retained its pre-eminence as an art form. The print was propelled to serve as ‘shock troops in the angry tide of resistance to the civil war, so that woodcuts opposed to the civil war appeared in Shanghai and Hangzhou, exhibitions of woodcuts travelled through the small towns of Zhejiang, and woodcuts appeared in publications throughout the country: these prints rallied people to struggle for democracy, oppose famine, and resist oppression, spread the call of the people, emphasized justice, and led the broad masses, especially warmly embracing students’.[22] Li Hua, in his article ‘The Woodcut Movement within the Student Movement in Kuomintang-ruled Areas’ published in 1949, described how in that period, in which espionage was rife, disappearances were frequent, and arbitrary police arrests and searches interrupted contacts between students and the external world, working woodcut artists needed to remain underground. Working uninterruptedly day and night, they printed leaflets and propaganda posters for students to distribute on the streets. A number of the woodcut prints they produced made a deep impact in their day, including: Demand Food from the Cannons, The Officials Are Fat and the People Are Thin, You Bastard, Overthrowing the War Mongers, The People Suffer, While Officials Get Rich, The People Have the Freedom to Petition, and Unity Is Strength. The woodcut played a continuous propaganda and agitation role in the student movement over the subsequent two years.
The civil war seriously impacted on people’s daily lives, and the student strikes taking place in Beijing and Shanghai in March 1947 provided artists with the opportunity to participate in political struggle. In the major cities under KMT rule demonstrations opposed to the civil war, famine conditions and persecution, or fighting for democracy attracted many print makers to the ranks of the student movement, which they supported through their wood-block prints and cartoons, at the same time as they trained many students in propaganda art. In May 1947, coordinated student demonstrations in the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Hangzhou and Suzhou calling for action to address the educational crisis marked the climax of the student movement controlled by the CPC. On 20 May, students in Shanghai were attacked by KMT military police agents in what would be called the May Twentieth Massacre. Woodblock artists distributed propaganda posters of this event which were distributed through student organizations as leaflets on urban streets and alleys. During the student unrest in Shanghai, agitprop wood-block prints were rapidly disseminated as far away as Beiping. From 1947 to 1948, the National Woodcut Association held spring and autumn National Woodcut Exhibitions each year, the first of which took place in Hong Kong and the others in Shanghai. The fourth exhibition was a travelling show which began in Shanghai but then went on to university campuses in a number of southern cities, because the organizers were attempting to make their political standpoint more influential among young audiences. In 1949, the war between the KMT and the CPC entered its final stage, and the National Woodcut Association was unable to go ahead with a fifth exhibition.
At the same time, the ranks of the Communist artists were growing. The outline land reform legislation passed in October 1947 won peasant support for the CPC, and the CPC policy during the Anti-Japanese War of retaining landlord’s holdings and reducing rent and interest saw them also confiscate landlord’s holdings and distribute them to the peasants. This undoubtedly attracted even more CPC supporters. Therefore, works with subject matter depicting attacks on landlord’s estates, capturing landlords and subjecting them to criticism and beatings were loved by peasants. Important works treating such subject matter included: Yan Han’s colored woodcuts Troops Marching towards the Feudal Bastion, sometimes also titled The Shut Door, Settling Accounts with the Landlord, Recounting Suffering and Interrogation; Gu Yuan’s Burning Land Deeds, Digging up Valuables, Taking Weapons and Issuing Land Certificates; Mo Pu’s Liquidation; Shi Lu’s Overthrowing Feudalism; and, Niu Wen’s Measuring up Land.
The 1940s was the period when the CPC called on the Chinese people to strive for democracy from the KMT, and various facets of democratic life in the liberated areas came to be regarded as inspiring proof that ‘there were brief clear skies in the liberated areas’. This was the political response to the confiscation of landlord property. After 1945, we see many vivid works on these themes. Shi Lu’s Democratic Consultation and Yan Han’s Voting with Beans as Tallies have vivid plotting and narrative. The latter work made a deep impression on many young artists, and this was not merely because of its artistic form, but also because of its politics and spirit.
From the late autumn of 1948 until spring 1949, the entire Chinese political situation became very clear. Mao Zedong no longer needed to be at all conciliatory towards Chiang Kai-shek and in April 1949 he called on the PLA to ‘use their remaining courage to pursue the hard-pressed enemy while refraining from behaving like overlords’. The intellectuals, writers and artists in KMT-ruled districts now began to make their final choice between the KMT and CPC. Xu Beihong rejected the KMT demand to accompany them to Nanjing. He accepted the suggestion of Tian Han to await the arrival of the CPC in Beiping.
On the morning of 25 May, Pang Xunqin found that Shanghai had been liberated. That evening, he ‘gathered some people together to paint portraits of Chairman Mao and Commander-in-chief Zhu, and they hung them at the front of the Da Shijie Building, and others were hung outside the International Hotel. A group of 43 people jointly took a pledge declaring support for the Communist Party and the PLA.[23]
On 2 July, the CPC organized its first meeting of literature and art representatives in Beiping, and Guo Moruo delivered a general report titled ‘Strive Hard to Construct a People’s Literature and Art for the New China’. In June during the preparatory stages of the conference, he said frenziedly as though imitating the tone of Mao Zedong: ‘Our brilliant military victory has eliminated our tangible enemies in the main, but our invisible enemies, which are the two millennia-old feudal thought, the ideology of the compradors of the previous century and longer, and the fascism of the past twenty or thirty years, must all be utterly eliminated from the battleground of culture. … Our forces must take up their pens and keep step with the army who took up their guns!’[24] On the same day, the conference held an Exhibition of National Artistic Work. This comprehensive art exhibition included several hundred oil paintings, traditional Chinese paintings, sculptures, cartoons, picture-story books and prints from districts ruled by the KMT and liberated areas. Of the 150 prints in the exhibition, the themes were varied and free. On 21 July, the China National Art Workers Association, later renamed the Chinese Artists Association, was established in Beiping’s Zhongshan Park. Xu Beihong, previously chairman of the KMT government’s China Fine Arts Association was elected chairman of the artists’ organization of the new regime. Forty-one artists were appointed to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’s National Committee, including Jiang Feng, Ye Qianyu, Li Qun, Cai Ruohong, Li Hua and Gu Yuan. At this meeting, Zhou Yang, familiar to most urban intellectuals and artists, issued the following call on behalf of the party:
To create rich ideological works, writers and artists must first study politics, Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and various present basic policies.[25]
At the beginning of August, Zhou Yang on behalf of the Central Committee of the CPC assigned Jiang Feng, Liu Kaiqu, Pang Xunqin, Yan Han, and Mo Pu to the Hangzhou Art School which had been originally established by Cai Yuanpei, the Kuomintang’s elder statesman. In Beiping, Xu Beihong represented the National Art College, when he took up the office of its president on 1 April 1950 and it was rapidly renamed the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
In September, the members of Hong Kong’s Renjian Huahui, including Zhang Guangyu, Yang Taiyang, Yang Qiuren, Wang Qi, Hong Yiran, Lei Yu, Liao Bingxiong, Liang Yongtai, and Mai Fei painted a 30m high and 10m wide portrait of Mao Zedong, to express the idea that the Chinese people had stood up. On 21 September, Mao made a similar proclamation in his opening speech at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference: ‘The Chinese people who account for one quarter of humanity have now stood up!’
NOTES:
[1] Ref: Tang Tao, A Brief History of Modern Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi jianbian), People’s Literature Publishing House, 1984, p.23. Original citations from Mengya yuekan, 1:4, April 1930.
[2] There is a divergence of opinion regarding the date of establishment. See: Xu Xingzhi, ‘Before and after the establishment of the Left-Wing League of Artists’ (Zuoyi Meishujia Lianmeng chengli qianhou), in Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., Fifty Years of the Chinese New Print Movement (Zhongguo xinxing banhua yundong wushi nian), Shenyang: Liaoning Fine Arts Publishing Press, 1981.
[3] Xu Xingzhi in his 1980 article ‘Before and after the establishment of the Left-Wing League of Artists’ wrote: ‘Before Xia Yan had arrived to attend the meeting he had already announced that henceforth the work of the Left-Wing League of Artists would temporarily be led by the Left-Wing League of Writers and designated Yu Hai as the contact person between the two leagues. Henceforth, the Left-Wing League of Artists was led by the Party, its activities were all conducted under Party leadership and the development and expansion of the league were directed by the Party. See: Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., op. cit., p.132.
[4] Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., op. cit., p.125.
[5] See: Selection of Modern Woodcuts (Jindai muke xuanji), vol.1, ‘Brief introduction’ (Xiaoyin).
[6] Jiang Feng, ‘Lu Xun and the Eighteen Art Society’, first published in the 1st and 2nd issues of 1979 of Fine Arts (Meishu), and later included in Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., op.cit, p.196.
[7] See: Wang Peiyuan, Storms in the Lu Xun Art Academy in Yan’an (Yan’an Lu Yi fengyun lu), Guangxi Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2004.
[8] Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., op. cit., p.25.
[9] Jiang Feng, ‘Gleanings of warmth: Notes on fine arts activities in Yan’an and the feelings these arouse’ (Wengu shiling: Yan’an meishu huodong sanji ji you ci suo gan), The Yan’an Years (Yan’an suiyue), Shaanxi People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1985, p.124.
[10] Hu Yichuan, ‘Remembering the work of the Lu Xun Art Academy’s Woodcut Work Group behind the enemy lines’ (Huiyi Lu Yi Muke Gongzuo Tuan zai di hou) (1961), in Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., Fifty Years of the Chinese New Print Movement (Zhongguo xinxing banhua yundong wushi nian), Shenyang: Liaoning Fine Arts Publishing Press, 1981, p.297.
[11] Xinhua Ribao (North China edition), 8 February 1940.
[12] Li Qi, ‘Child soldiers in Yan’an study painting’ (Yan’an xiaogui xuehua), in Ai Ke’en ed., Memoirs of Literature and Art in Yan’an (Yan’an wenyi huiyi lu), Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1992, pp.388-389.
[13] Mao Zedong, ‘Reform our study’ (Gaizao women de xuexi), Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong xuanji), vol.3, People’s Publishing House, 1953, p.817.
[14] Mao Zedong, ‘Rectify the Party’s work style’ (Zhengdun dang de zuofeng), Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong xuanji), vol.3, People’s Publishing House, 1953, pp.837-838.
[15] Ibid., p.839.
[16] Mao Zedong, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong xuanji), vol.3, People’s Publishing House, p.870. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
[17] Lenin in ‘Party organization and Party literature’ wrote: ‘Overthrow non-Party writers! Overthrow superman writers! The enterprise of literature should be a part of the enterprise of the proletariat and become unified and magnificent. It should be a cog and screw in the machine of social democracy operated by the vanguard of the consciousness of the entire working class’. Ref: Beijing Shifan Daxue Wenyi Lilun Zu ed., Reference Materials for Studying Literature and Art Theory (Wenyi lilun xuexi cankao ziliao) (internal document), Gaodeng Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1956, p.136.
By 1949, Mao Zedong felt extremely confident in addressing American imperialism on behalf of ‘the people’: ‘Dear sirs, you are right, this is how we are. For several decades the Chinese people have accumulated every experience and call on us to exercise the people’s democratic dictatorship or the people’s democratic tyrant, which is one and the same, in order to wrest the right of speech from the reactionaries, because only the people have the right of speech’.
[18] Guo Moruo, Song of the Floodwaters (Hongbo qu), Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 1979, p.95.
[19] Later Xu Beihong even wanted to work together with Wang Linyi to complete ‘Tian Heng and his five hundred retainers’ (Tian Heng wubai shi). See: Wu Zuoren, ‘Leisurely memoirs’ (Manyi), in Selected Writings of Wu Zuoren (Wu Zuoren wenxuan), Hefei: Anhui Fine Arts Publishing House, 1988.
[20] Wu Zuoren, ibid., 1988, p.413.
[21] Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., op. cit., p.408.
[22] Li Hua, ‘The woodcut movement within the student movement in KMT-controlled areas’ (Guomindang tongzhiqu xueyun Zhong de muke yundong), originally published in the Progress Daily of 4 July 1949, in Li Hua, Li Shusheng and Ma Ke ed., op. cit., p.412.
[23] Pang Xunqin, The Road I Travelled (Jiushi zheyang zouguolai de), Sanlian Shudian, 2005, p.241.
[24] Commemorating the All- China Conference of Representatives of Literary and Art Workers (Zhonghua Quanguo Wenxue Yishu Gongzuozhe Daibiao Dahui jinian wenji), 1950, p.379.
[25] Ibid., p.91.