{"id":15678,"date":"2021-07-08T17:14:08","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T17:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=15678"},"modified":"2021-07-08T17:15:16","modified_gmt":"2021-07-08T17:15:16","slug":"red-windows-on-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=15678","title":{"rendered":"Red Windows on the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From Art Journal<\/em> 80, no. 2 (Summer 2021)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Christine I. Ho. Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People\u2019s Republic of China<\/em><\/strong>. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 320 pp.; 85 color ills. $70<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Cover<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Several years ago, at his studio in Woodside, Queens, the global-contemporary artist Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) spoke frankly of his experiences as a young trainee at the high school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the early 1960s, just prior to the Cultural Revolution in China (1966\u201376). \u201cEveryone,\u201d Zhang stated, \u201cbut everyone<\/em> had to follow the teacher\u2019s instructions closely to master the style of socialist realism.\u201d As part of the usual practice, Zhang\u2019s class was tasked to reproduce precisely the forms and dimensions of a figural sculpture with brush and paint on paper. One day, a lunch break interrupted the exercise, and students ran off to the school canteen. \u201cBut when we returned to the classroom after lunch,\u201d Zhang recounted, \u201cnot a few of us had trouble discerning which painting was whose. You see, the paintings all looked alike.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memory of this anecdote permeated my reading of Christine I. Ho\u2019s marvelous Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People\u2019s Republic of China<\/em>, a book that takes on the formidable task of historicizing the pedagogical and philosophical processes through which artists negotiated both socialism and creative agency in the Mao era. Foregrounding the sketch in her exploration of mass arts (dazhong wenyi<\/em>, a term denoting the popularization of art for the masses), Ho contributes mightily to an emerging body of scholarship on modernism and modernity in a twentieth-century China that struggled to shape the postrevolutionary realities of implementing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cultural policy after 1949, both in and beyond the studio.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generally dated from the 1949 founding of the People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC) to the death of Mao Zedong (1893\u20131976), the Mao era in China has long posed a methodological and ideological problem for sustained examinations of modern and contemporary Chinese artworks. Whereas mere decades ago, university syllabi throughout North America and Western Europe often eschewed this \u201cthirty-year period\u201d in classes on modern Chinese literature and art\u2014from the reasoning that little to no art could<\/em> be produced under the extremity of Maoist revolutionary didacticism\u2014increased scholarly attention to the era now opens up exciting perspectives on twentieth-century Chinese and sinophone lived realities. This broadening of art historical scope also contributes to the cutting-edge work on late socialist or postsocialist contexts adjacent to modern and contemporary China, extending to Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, among other areas.3<\/a><\/sup> Ho, who acknowledges such transnational connections throughout Drawing from Life<\/em> (and explores specific case studies of socialist internationalism in chapter 6), formulates this longstanding problem with perspicacity. There is a need, she argues, to \u201capprehend socialist culture as generated through hybrid traditional and local references rather than as imposed irruption, as cosmopolitan and international in orientation rather than as closed isolation\u201d (12).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, a crucial shift has taken place since the late Cold War years in cultural scholarship on China, revealing greater willingness to contend with the phenomenology of mass arts; Ho\u2019s book is a direct reflection of this shift.[Additional recent publications of note include Yi Gu, Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020); Margaret Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Yang Wang, \u201cEnvisioning the Third World: Modern Art and Diplomacy in Maoist China,\u201d ARTMargins<\/em> 8, no. 2 (June 2019): 31\u201354; Denise Y. Ho, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao\u2019s China<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Lily Chumley, Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China<\/em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).] It was not uncommon for researchers of socialist visuality, not very long ago, to shy away from designating the objects under scrutiny as \u201cart,\u201d opting instead for the categories of cultural production, visual culture, or even the much derided category of propaganda. To this end, many of the groundbreaking examinations of Mao-era works produced over the past twenty years have treated posters, graphic design, cult images of Mao, and related forms. Still other studies prioritized hyperstylized art forms, including the yangbanxi<\/em> (\u201cmodel operas\u201d\/ballets) that were honed under the oversight of Mao\u2019s wife Jiang Qing (1914\u20131991) throughout the latter years of the Mao era in the Cultural Revolution.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ho\u2019s study, by contrast, conceives of mass arts in ways that prioritize the relatively less explored mediums and genres that evolved earlier in this thirty-year period, including easel painting, brush-and-ink painting, and monumental watercolor painting. Acknowledging that \u201cthe auratic associations of the fine arts \u2026 appear at odds with the socialist experience,\u201d Ho demonstrates in each chapter how such tensions \u201cbetween the elite, technical and bureaucratic associations with the fine arts and the popular address sought by revolutionary mass culture\u201d shaped a socialist fine art and socialist realism in China (13). Ho\u2019s work reflects, moreover, a criticality of approach and a methodological rigor that weaves historiography and multiple sets of secondary scholarship with close analyses of primary texts such as artist diaries, speeches, published manifestos, and the documentation of museum exhibitions in her examinations of artworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note the following from chapter 4, on the artist Li Xiongcai (1910\u20132001) and his adaptation of landscape painting that both documented and envisioned the socialist state\u2019s technological transformation of rural waterways in the 1950s: \u201cUnlike [Li\u2019s] sketchbooks, where impressions are scrawled in pencil with an immediacy conveyed through the most abbreviated of loopy contour lines, the preliminary sketches from surveying Zhanggong Dike range from polished painting to mnemonic notation. By tightly cropping each construction scene, he tracks a series of physically situated episodes in a crisp, confident hand, drawn with pliant brushes in sooty, undiluted ink\u201d (143\u201344). With granular precision, Ho interweaves visual analysis of the sketches, which functioned as the artist\u2019s on-the-spot notes, with historical accounts of the scene in question (in this case, Flood Prevention Station No. 1 in Hankou, Wuhan). In related passages not quoted here, narratives of dike construction planning from the late Qing (late nineteenth to early twentieth century) alongside journalistic accounts of flooding disasters from the early 1950s are also brought into consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter 1 alone carries 115 footnotes\u2014and this offers just one example of the author\u2019s meticulous engagement with original archival research as well as her generous attributions to existing scholarship. The first chapter\u2019s topic repays such a close-handed approach, exploring as it does the tensions through which intellectuals in China negotiated and eventually socialized European Beaux-Arts drawing pedagogy in the decades leading up to and beyond 1949. The eminent figure of Xu Beihong (1895\u20131953) offers a prime illustration of this trajectory, given Xu\u2019s training in Beaux-Arts education throughout the 1920s in France, Belgium, and Germany prior to his appointment in 1950 to head the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he laid the ground for adapting the pedagogical systems of the Soviet Union in China after 1949. Ho places this process in the context of both a translated and transnational educational field to historicize the concept of drawing in China as the origin of the plastic arts, through a \u201cconceptual grasp of the purpose of art-making,\u201d \u201ca foundational technique that was configured as a quasi-scientific means of viewing the world\u201d (25).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Draftsmanship, Ho points out, was central to mediating the artist\u2019s access to the objective material world. As cultural workers, artists were employed to mediate the actual through the observed (43). In this vein, chapter 2 considers the politically remolded subjects turned out from the studio in one of the most characteristic activities of the Mao era, that of mass mobilization to the countryside to undertake the (sometimes disputed) cultural labor of the outdoor sketching trip. Homing in on the historical instance of The Bloodstained Shirt<\/em> by Wang Shikuo (1911\u20131973), an uncompleted work from the late 1950s that depicts a scene of the peasantry amid the CCP\u2019s land reform movement (conducted 1949\u201353), Ho considers how Wang\u2019s participation in mass sketching evidences a process that \u201cinaugurated drawing as an independent genre,\u201d in part, through its multiple phases of draftsmanship (59). The son of a landholding peasant, Wang undertook Republican-era arts training in multiple cities, including Shanghai, prior to studying abroad in Japan. He ultimately relocated his efforts, like so many cosmopolitan artists and intellectuals of the time, to Yan\u2019an in the late 1930s.5<\/a><\/sup> A product of Yan\u2019an remolding, Wang was initiated into mass sketching and land-reform campaigns that dramatically reshaped his compositional process by the 1950s: \u201cGoing into life,\u201d writes Ho of Wang, \u201cwas a critical component for researching and envisioning the imagistic, entailing the accumulation of figural studies as well as superseding immediate perceptual impressions by continually reworking multiple impressions captured within sketches\u201d (89). The case of The Bloodstained Shirt<\/em> illuminates how Wang, through mass sketching, painstakingly sought to render visible (if not to inhabit) the peasant subjectivity upheld by CCP-led land reform; and yet, ultimately, the chapter calls into question the efficacy of the artist\u2019s particular realization of this politics of recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the struggle to bring to life peasant subjectivity is outlined in Wang\u2019s process of navigating and remolding political subjectivity, chapter 3 turns to the process of reforming guohua<\/em>, translated by Ho as brush-and-ink painting, through the mass sketch in the 1950s. A medium embodying the privilege of literatus social stature since the Song dynasty (960\u20131279), ink painting carried a \u201ccounterrevolutionary\u201d prestige that faced heavy interrogations in the early PRC years. Artistic mediums such as ink, much like the artists and intellectuals hailing from Shanghai or foreign training in Western Europe, required remolding under the auspices of state socialism. Li Keran (1907\u20131989) was a figure who negotiated the relevance of ink and brush for socialist realism by pushing against the medium\u2019s inward-looking reputation. Calling on a canonical master of the Yuan dynasty (1279\u20131368) and inheritor of the Song tradition, Huang Gongwang (1269\u20131354), as \u201ca nativist exemplar\u201d and a \u201chomegrown model for entering into life (shenru shenghuo<\/em>)\u201d (95), Li adapted the classical tradition of the brushstroke as a conduit to nature and the cosmos, demonstrating its immediacy for the politicized purposes of building the new state. To what extent, the chapter questions, could the indigenous function of brushtechnique from inherited classicism facilitate an inherent access point to \u201cthe real\u201d that was so privileged by socialist state educators and administrators in the 1950s and beyond?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proceeding from chapter 4, the book\u2019s second part, encompassing the remaining four chapters and epilogue, takes the examination to several historical instances of mass campaigns and sketching tours from the mid-1950s up to 1960. Such tours and campaigns of mass sketching, as relayed in chapter 4, entailed transmedial explorations of painting as well as ink and watercolor notations\u2014 which competed with the increasing use of photography and film on hydraulic engineering sites\u2014with the aim of recalibrating the organization and ultimate union of artists\u2019 mental and manual labor. Chapter 5, dedicated to the oil sketches produced by Dong Xiwen (1914\u20131973) during his tour of southwest China in 1955, examines the artist\u2019s efforts to reconcile the lingering specters of Beaux-Arts pedagogical practices that continued to reside in mass sketching. Chapter 6 recounts the exercises in international diplomacy and cultural exchange undertaken by Li Keran and Guan Liang (1900\u20131986) in East Germany in 1957, as well as the trips of Fu Baoshi (1904\u20131965) to Czechoslovakia and Romania in the same year. Chapter 7 explores the transformation of socialist realism into the unique \u201ccombination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism\u201d that, on the one hand, served as a hallmark of an administrative turn away from Soviet socialist realist pedagogy and, on the other, presaged the radical extremity of creative practices to come. Each chapter in part 2 of Drawing from Life<\/em> builds upon the momentum of the book\u2019s first three chapters to set up a narrative of temporal\u2014if not teleological\u2014evolution, guiding readers to a \u201cpenultimate\u201d conclusion, a moment just prior to the point at which \u201cthe landscape of new China became washed with crimson\u201d by the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 (240).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As evidenced above, and despite the titular emphasis on sketching, Ho\u2019s book is not a medium-specific study. Rather, Ho treats mass art that evolved over several decades of the twentieth century through the lens and praxis of mass sketching as a collective public act in socialist China. For specialists and students alike, Drawing from Life<\/em> offers both essential and sophisticated conceptual understandings of the categories of mass art that promise to enrich a multitude of medium-specific examinations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, Drawing from Life<\/em> raises broad questions as to what makes modernity possible in twentieth-century Chinese socialism. Through her disciplinary rigor and methodological innovations, Ho shows how socialist realism, as a hallmark of Chinese modernity, offered artists unparalleled opportunities to locate and redefine forms of self-realization. Socialist realism also facilitated artists\u2019 realizations of the rationality of modern nationhood as the ultimate site of political subjectivity. Consequently, the subjects of Ho\u2019s book wield fascinating forms of historical agency through creative and intellectual practices that hinge on a specific engagement with the world, as well as the ability to mass disseminate that engagement well beyond the eyes and ears of an abstract state apparatus. What does it mean, ultimately, to conceive of socialist art both within and without the realism, where realism is understood in and through a dynamic process of direct engagement with the material world? Ho states that such art is not purely about style, genre, or painterly technique but also and most crucially about agency that depends on the means of rendering both \u201clegible and visible\u201d the representational politics of socialism (243). In historicizing the institutionalization and evolution of mass sketching in socialist China, Ho executes the incredible work of exposing the unevenness of socialist realism\u2019s mediums, its disputes, and its transnational negotiations. To a considerable degree, these debates and negotiations continue to resonate in the present day, as new global histories of postwar art proceed to peel back the layers of what has, thus far, been left off the records of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Jennifer Dorothy Lee<\/strong> is assistant professor of East Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee\u2019s first book manuscript, \u201cAnxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China (1978\u20131985),\u201d is currently under review. Lee\u2019s next research project will take up social histories of art in mid-twentieth-century Taiwan and Hong Kong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n
<\/div>
  1. Zhang Hongtu, interview with the author, August 4, 2012, Queens, New York; and Zhang Hongtu, email messages to the author, November 23 and 28, 2020. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. The periodization that deems the seventeen years after 1949 as the \u201cpostrevolutionary\u201d People\u2019s Republic of China comes from Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China\u2019s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries (1949\u20131966)<\/em>, trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Examples to note: Erin Y. Huang, Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); J\u00e9r\u00f4me Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945\u20131989)<\/em> (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016); and Nora Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art<\/em> (Honolulu: University of Hawai\u2018i Press, 2004). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. Notable examples include Xiaobing Tang, Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Richard King, ed., Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966\u201376<\/em> (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). These are presaged by groundbreaking studies conducted by Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People\u2019s Republic of China, 1949\u20131979<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), as well as Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People\u2019s Republic of China<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. A training ground established after the Long March (1934\u201335), Yan\u2019an served as the wartime CCP base prior to the 1949 victory. More crucially, Yan\u2019an served as the legendary primal scene for Mao\u2019s lectures to newly arrived writers and artists, urging these urban intellectuals to \u201cgo into the countryside,\u201d \u201cgo among the masses,\u201d and \u201cundergo a long and even painful process of remolding.\u201d See Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong), \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,\u201d in Selected Works<\/em>, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Jennifer Dorothy Lee reviews Drawing from Life<\/em> by Christine I. Ho<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":15676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1597,1594,1595,1596],"class_list":["post-15678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal","tag-chineseart","tag-christineiho","tag-jenniferdorothylee","tag-massarts",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}