Visual Culture Colloquium presents
Compelling Issues: Transnational Socialist Aesthetics in Chinese Printmaking, 1931-1945
NOVEMBER 10, 2020 4:30 pm
Register for this lecture here
This short presentation, followed by discussion, addresses the highly codified history of modern printmaking in early-twentieth-century China, revising it through analysis of the work of three artists: Li Hua (李樺, 1907-1994), Chen Yanqiao (陳煙橋, 1911-1970), and Jiang Feng (江豐, 1910-1983). The speaker’s book project, tentatively titled Compelling Issues: Transnational Socialist Aesthetics in Chinese Printmaking, 1931-1945, discusses how these artists’ works were in conversation with a much broader range of China’s print media than has heretofore been recognized, and further, identifies a transmedial “socialist aesthetic,” appearing in the prints made by these and other Chinese artists at this time. Finally, this work draws stylistic and thematic connections between the leftist image-making of Chinese artists and those working in other geographic locations during the first half of the twentieth century, highlighting the transnational nature of this socialist aesthetic. In so doing, this project aims to provide a fuller understanding of the complexity inherent in early twentieth-century visual modernism in China, and its connections to global modernisms at that time.
Elizabeth Emrich-Rougé received her doctorate from the History of Art and Visual Studies department at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2020. She specializes in twentieth-century art in China and shadow puppet theater and wayang-related artwork from early-twentieth-century Java. Her current research focuses on the connections between print publication-based art from the early twentieth century and politics, transmediality, and affect, along with the aesthetics of transnational leftist image-making. While a graduate student, she concurrently held the position of Curatorial Assistant at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell between 2005 and 2013, and the position of Curatorial Assistant for Asian Art from 2017 to 2018. Her second article, titled “Spilled Ink: Woodblock Print Artists and Lu Xun’s Literary and Theoretical Translations,” is included in the volume Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature, edited by Yifeng Sun and Chris Song, and was published through Routledge in Spring 2019.
Image Caption: Chen Yanqiao, “Pull (La),” (1932). Reproduced from Yanan Chen and Chaonan Chen, eds. Collected Works of Chen Yanqiao (Chen Yanqiao Hua Ji), (Beijing: Wenhua Yishu Chubanshe, 2015), 47.
