Serial Visions of Socialist Construction

Art History Pubic Seminar

Serial Visions of Socialist Construction: Li Fenglan, Lianhuanhua, and the Metatexts of Mass Art

Date: 15 January 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 1pm-2pm
Venue: CPD-2.42, Centennial Campus, HKU
Format: in-person only, first come first served, walk-ins welcome

Guest speaker: Dr. Angie C. Baecker (Research Assistant Professor, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

This talk will examine serial comics, or lianhuanhua, inked by amateur artist-laborers during the socialist period in the People’s Republic of China. Although the majority of published serial comics were drawn by artists employed by state-run publishing houses, some were drawn collectively by mass artists as a direct corollary of their productive labor, with local art centers often organizing agricultural workers to draw cartoon panels depicting the very infrastructure drives that they had been mobilized to work on. Serial comics drawn by amateur artists thus provide occasion to consider the entanglement of artistic and productive labor within the mass art movement in socialist China. Through close readings of lianhuanhua drawn by non-professional artists, this presentation argues that the seriality of imagery in mass produced serial comics reflected changed concepts of narrative and temporality under the conditions of socialist construction.