Li Hua, China, Roar!, 1936
Li Cunsong, She Has Been Working the Long Night Shift, c. 1947
Liang Yongtai, Drinking, c. 1937-48
Zhang Xiyai, Stories of the City, c.1937-48
Huang Yongyu, Wipe Out Those Thugs, c. 1947
Cai Dizhi, Fleeing Guilin by the North Station, 1945
Zhao Zongzao, Eternal Springtime, 1960
Li Huanmin, Tibetan Women – The Golden Road, 1963
Dong Jiansheng, Using the Pen as a Weapon to Denounce (Counter-Revolutionary) ‘Black’ Culture, 1967
Dong Jiansheng, January 1976, Memorial to Zhou Enlai, 1978
Xu Bing, Bustling Village on the Water, 1980
Zhao Zongzao, Land of Peng Lai, 1982
These twelve works come from Woodcuts in Modern China, 1937-2008, the catalog of an exhibit at Picker Art Gallery at Colgate. A blurb about the exhibit sums it up: “Chinese artists adapted the Western-style woodcut to create a pictorial language that resonated with the illiterate masses. They also created the beginnings of communist art in China and, in the most general sense, laid the foundation of modern Chinese art.”
An illustrated article at Just Seeds goes into the story of how expressionist styles made it to China in the 30s.
Previously:
The Great Northern Wasteland
Taking Tiger Mountain
The Autobiography of Poison Gas
