Before the Order of Art in Republican China

Before the Order of Art in Republican China

Date: 30 September 2013 (Monday)
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Room 4.04, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus

y thesis focuses on early Republican art in China and on a group of student artists returning from Japan in the 1910s and 1920s. These artists received training in western style painting, which at this time offered a range of instructions based on European tradition. One of the areas of interest with this group is how they applied their training to areas that were not determined by media or style, but to areas such as design and photography. On the one hand, the flexibility of the artists to move between “fine arts” and “popular arts” may reflect Japanese practices that were more fluid, but I will also argue that part of this was becuase the ieda of what was modern and the role of the modern artist was as not defined by the more rigid categorization that begun in the 1930s. The way these artists transferred their “fine arts” practices to print media like newspaper and magazines shows that they saw these new mediums as exciting platforms for experimenattions as well as for serving the public and the political power of art. This presentation, based on my current research, will use the case studies of Li Shutong and The Pacific Times, and Cen Boyi and The Republican Times to demonstrate how artists adapted their “fine arts” training to the design of Shanghai newspaper.

Speaker: Alice Wong (PhD Candidate, Department of Fine Arts, HKU)