Between high and low: Modernism, continuity, and moral mission in Chinese printmaking practices, 1930--1945

Focusing on the role of print media, this dissertation discusses the ways in which political art in China functioned as a filter for the transmission of modernist practices from the 1920s and 1930s to the post-49 period. This continuity was possible because a commitment to social engagement was a constitutive part of the efforts of Chinese intellectuals to modernize culture, starting during the last decades of the 19th century and intensifying in the wake of the May 4th Movement. Such politicized modernization was initially channeled by the exposure to Marxist art and literary theory in the 1930s, but the reception of these ideas was characterized by the necessity of adapting Soviet ideological models to the reality of Chinese culture and society.; Through the engagement with these ideals of social activism the New Woodcut Movement was lunched in the mid-1930s in Shanghai and Canton under the promotion and supervision of writer Lu Xun. Yet its production, created in an urban environment, was still determined by the artistic training and modernist experimentations of this particular group and proved inadequate to appeal to a peasant audience after the artists moved to the rural areas of Northern China at the outbreak of the anti-Japanese War. Through the implementation of a pro-rural political discourse and the appropriation of folk visual practices, these modernist origins were therefore altered into a new political visual idiom, which adopted formal elements derived from folk heritage, but was regulated by the aesthetic and conceptual habituses associated with modernist art practices. The dissertation argues that political art created in Yan'an by artists previously trained in and familiar with modernism, is then something different from the forms of high Socialist Realism later adopted on a large scale in the post-1949 period, and that the visual language and the stylistic traits of its urban and rural roots have continued to influence the interpretation of 'Realism' in the People's Republic of China.