| Feng Zikai's essays and manhua, from their connotative implications, can be divided into two categories. One concerns human emotions with elegant taste, and the other is poignant with explicit or implicit criticism of social realities. As for his works on social realities, he not only touched upon the same topic of nationality as Lu Xun commented, expressed his sympathy for the low class and attack the Japanese invasion but also showed his attitude to modern technology and system, and urban life. In his works on modern technology and life, Feng Zikai, in describing the weaknesses of modern technology and social institution, disclosed the indifferences and uglinesses of humanity in modern civilization by looking into and criticizing some urban phenomena. Throughout the Chinese history of the 20th century, scientific and technological development and urbanization were seen as the symbols of social "progress". However, Feng Zikai held the position that modern civilization, due to its repression of humanity, did not convey a better favorable nature than traditional agriculture civilization and conversely brought about many vices and evils. Therefore, in his opinion, the approach to tackling social abuses and eliminating human indifference and ugliness was to take an art attitude to look at the realistic life. Such an attitude is characterized by the theory of insulation, which embodies the theme of his graceful essay writing. Feng Zikai, in reflecting the significance of modernity, adopted his theory of insulation to mediate his attitudes towards his creation of elegant and poignant works. He used his poignant essays to uncover social problems, transformed them with his art attitude of life and finally resolved them in his "casual" essays. That is to say, from the perspective of cultural logic, Feng Zikai's essays not only represent his reflection of modernity but also contain his cultural ideas of solving those problems, which has great cultural implications for contemporary society. |
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