Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China
By Christine I. Ho
University of California Press, 2020.
Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.
Christine I. Ho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Reviews
“Drawing From Life is a brilliantly original and richly textured account of the complex changes that swept through China’s art world in the years following the establishment of the new government in 1949. This eye-opening book filled with discoveries moves the state of scholarship on art in the People’s Republic of China decisively forward.”—Julia F. Andrews, Distinguished University Professor of the History of Art, The Ohio State University
“By examining complicated debates that swirled around the ubiquitous artistic practice of sketching, Christine Ho lays out a new narrative about the conflicts, contradictions, and compromises that created China’s modern art world. The book goes far deeper into the artistic practices and theory of the early PRC than any publications by previous scholars and heralds a novel and compelling way of approaching the art world of Mao-period China.”—Kuiyi Shen, Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism, University of California, San Diego
“This lucid account brings a refreshingly intercultural perspective to bear on the essential but mostly overlooked subject of drawing in the People’s Republic of China.”—Shelagh Vainker, Associate Professor of Chinese Art, University of Oxford