National And National Image - A Study Of Fine Arts In The Seventeen Years (1949-1966)

The research on fine arts, nationals and the national image shaping is the new field of fine arts research. This thesis puts the relationship between arts and national image shaping as well as the relationship between political propaganda and artwork creation into the specific historical context so as to check the process of fine art involving in the construction of the images of nationals and the whole nation. The thesis also explores the reconstruction, debate and the transformation of art itself. It focuses on the history on a macro scale, but it also pays attention to the details and variety of history.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter 1: This part puts the events which include the Communist Party of China’s ideological remoulding campaign of the artists, unification of the creation ideas, as well as the establishment of the organization structure into the context of ideological remoulding in the early stage of the new nation in order to assess the effect of integration and conformity through the ideological remoulding.Chapter 2: This part deals with the ideological remoulding approaches of unifying the creation ideas,integrating the fundamental skills, forbidding ironic cartoons and shaping the image of the new China in a unified way. Chapter 3: This part is about the formation and utilization of mobilization through arts, which is mainly about using artworks as the mobilization for Korean War and several other political campaigns. Chapter 4: This part analyzes the iconography of the images of farmers, women, scenery in 17 years(from 1949-1966) to check out the involvement of arts in shaping images and scenery which aimed at publicity and education, arousing people’s emotional identification with the image of socialist country.The major research approaches include: iconography,philology, visual art semeiology, interviewing and research on the history of new culture.This thesis put different kinds of artwork together : New Year Paintings, Posters;Piture-story book, traditional Chinese painting, oil painting, printing, sculpturing, line drawing and sketching, and expand the research from those artworks to the outside of fine arts,setting them into a specific historical context and examining the relationship between fine arts and national image shaping in 17 years. The thesis not only focuses on some specific art works in terms of their changing styles, painting contents and meanings in this 17 years,but also checks out the historical background, process and reason for its successes and failures about the involvement of arts in shaping the national images and the visual practice of arts under the guidance of then ideology.