Art And Life

In the history of modern Chinese art,urban culture,mass media and design education are three issues interlocked to elaborate the relationship between art and life in modern society exemplified in the cover designs of nearly 500 magazines in 1934 known as “the Year of Magazine”.The so-called “Year of Magazine” was defined by the left-wing art and literature movement led by Lu Xun(1881-1936)and his followers in the 1934 and 1935 as an extension of print culture of modern era in comparison to that in the late Ming between 16 th and 17 th centuries and that in the late Qing between the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.The uniqueness of that new development of print culture lies in its wide range of readership among the urban consumers in metropolitan cities like Shanghai,Guangzhou,Beijing,including its connection to Tokyo,under the impact of design education in the Higher Education Arena.Even the Revitalization Movement of Traditional Chinese Painting in the early 1920 s Shanghai or Modernist Art Movement in the early 1930 s Shanghai,Guangzhou,and Tokyo could not be compared to the social influence of the “Year of Magazine”.Such an unprecedented cultural phenomenon represented the new trend of modern literature and art through the mass media,and the members of all social strata were engaged in the process as one of the most astonishing cultural indicators of the so-called “Golden Decade” of the Republican Era in China before the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.In this trend,art and life,or art for life's sake denotes that design of new life as the education of visual literacy organically embraces the ideas of Bauhaus,one of the most influential design schools of the modern world.The Bauhaus theory has been long misunderstood in the academia as a pure avant-garde movement or art for art's sake,which seemed to be irrelevant to the idea of art for life's sake.Such a misunderstanding has dominated in all research work of modern design in China.To avert errors as such,this study delves into the modern education in China,especially in the case of the National Art Academy in Hangzhou where the President Lin Fengmian(1900-1991)invited the German-trained designer Saito Kazo(1887-1955)as the professor of design in 1929.During his tenure in Hangzhou for a year,the significant progress had been made through Saito's comprehensive knowledge of Bauhaus and modern design in all aspects of life,including cover-design of magazine in the mass media,along with the practice that Saito established for the colleagues and students in Hangzhou and Shanghai in this applied art field.With the original Bauhaus masterpieces now in the collection of China Art Academy in 2011,concrete examples are available for us to analyze how everyday life in urban cultural environment had been modified and improved through the practice of Bauhaus School,no matter how remotely the impact that might be in the 1930 s China.The key issue here is to reexamine the higher art education of the time that covered both fine arts and applied arts in its curricula taught by the world-class foreign and Western-trained Chinese art educators.In short,even in a spectrum of all social classes,art students were exposed to the solid training in applied art to use art for making the better society.Under the influence of the modern design education in case of Saito Kazo during the Presidency of Lin Fengmian at the Natioanl Art Academy of Hangzhou,Chinese urban culture entered into a modern era that successfully illustrated how commercial art and fine art were integrated to show the internal connection between art and life,in contrast to Chinese print cultures in the past.It is this important yet long-neglected social dimension of modern history of art design that sheds new light on the discipline,or to put it more precisely,that applies the Marxist approach to deal with social history of art design.Like a metero appeared in the dark sky,“the Year of Magazine”,regardless of how transient it was,demonstrates its significant accomplishment in cover design to reach out as many readers as possible,mostly were the working class from the bottom of the social strata.Such an accomplishment becomes a highlight of “the Golden Decade” of the Republican Era,not only typical for enhancing our new interpretation of what Bauhaus School truly stands for in the society worldwide,but also inspiring for revealing the universal significance of Marxism in the study of the history of modern world art,whether in fine arts or in the applied arts.