Art

| General | Late Qing-Republican | PRC | Taiwan/Hong Kong | Avant-garde | Propaganda Art |
| Popular and Folk | Woodcut | Cartoons | Diaspora | Exhibitions and Catalogues |


General

Andrews, Julia F. “A Shelter from the Storm: Chinese Painting in a Cataclysmic Age (1930–1980).” In Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution, 1840–1979. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2000, 169–197.

Andrews, Julia F. and Kuiyi Shen. A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China. NY: Henry N. Abrams, 1998.

—–.  Art of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Andrews, Julia F., Claudia Brown, David E. Frasher, and Kuiy Shen. Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution, 1840-1979. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2000.

Chen Ruilin 陈瑞林. Ershi shiji zhuangshi yishu 20世纪装饰艺术 (20th century decorative arts). Shandong: Shandong meishu, 2001.

Chronologies.” From Inside Out: New Chinese Art. Asia Society website. [excellent chronology of events in contemporary PRC art]

Clark, John. “Problems of Modernity in Chinese Painting.” Oriental Art 32, 3 (1986): 270-283.

Clark, John, ed. Modernity in Asian Art. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1994.

—–, ed. Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium. Beijing: Sanlian, 2000.

Clarke, David. Modern Chinese Art. NY/HK: Oxford UP, 2000.

—–. China–Art–Modernity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.

[Abstract: provides a critical introduction to modern and contemporary Chinese art as a whole. It illuminates what is distinctive and significant about the rich range of art created during the tumultuous period of Chinese history from the end of Imperial rule to the present day. The story of Chinese art in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries is shown to be deeply intertwined with that of the country’s broader socio-political development, with art serving both as a tool for the creation of a new national culture and as a means for critiquing the forms that culture has taken.]

Cohen, Warren. East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Cook, James A, and Joshua Goldstein, Matthew Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer, eds.. Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-Present. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2014. [book website]

Crouch, Christopher, ed. Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010.

[Abstract: This book examines three overarching themes: Chinese modernity’s (sometimes ambivalent) relationship to tradition at the start of the twentieth century, the processes of economic reform started in the 1980s and their importance to both the eradication and rescue of traditional practices, and the ideological issue of cosmopolitanism and how it frames the older academic generation’s attitudes to globalisation. It is important to grasp the importance of these points as they have been an important part of the discourse surrounding contemporary Chinese visual culture. As readers progress through this book, it will become clear that the debates surrounding visual culture are not purely based on aesthetics–an understanding of the ideological issues surrounding the appearance of things as well as an understanding of the social circumstances that result in the making of traditional artifacts are as important as the way a traditional object may look.]

Hua, Shuo, ed. Across Time and Space: Re-visiting Twentieth-Century Chinese Oil Paintings. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2024.

[Abstract: In the early twentieth century, oil painting as a non-indigenous medium began to be taught in Chinese art academies. Since that time, it has become an important and increasingly popular portal, inviting artists to explore cross-cultural dynamics and experiment with individual creative expression. This selection of twentieth-century Chinese oil paintings from the UMAG collection sheds light on the art historical and cultural significance of the medium. Highlighting the versatile aspects of Chinese oil paintings across a diverse spectrum of themes, styles, techniques, time periods, and regional and local characteristics, this publication presents the depth and virtuosity of Chinese oil paintings, extending from intimate interior views to panoramic coastal landscapes. The collective and individual memories within urban scenes activate dialogues of painting practices across time, space, and cross-cultural and cross-media encounters. The selected works display and represent the various artistic styles and visual trends as well as the artists’ evolving perceptions and sensitivities about the changing face of twentieth-century China. The works on display have rarely been shown in public and include paintings by iconic masters and influential art educators including Liu Haisu (1896–1994) and Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010).]

Kao, Mayching, ed. Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.

—–. China’s Response to the West in Art. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1972.

Knight, Michael. Shanghai: Art of the City. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2010.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. An Index to Reproductions of Paintings by Twentieth-Century Chinese Artists. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998.

Li, Chutsing. Trends in Modern Chinese Painting. Ascona: Artisu Asiae, 1979.

Li, Xianting. “An Introduction to the History of Modern Chinese Art.” Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, NY: Oxford UP, 1994, 40-45.

Lu, Sheldon H. “Postmoderism and Cultural Identity in Chinese Art.” In Lu, ed., China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 141-72.

Noth, Juliane. Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2023.

[Abstract: Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world. Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.]

Nuridsany, Michel. China Art Now. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.

—–. “The Uses of China in Avant-Garde Art: Beyond Orientalism.” In Lu, ed., China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 173-92.

Silbergeld, Jerome. Mind-Landscapes: The Paintings of C.C. Wang. Seattle: Univesity of Washington Press, 1987.

Sullivan, Michael. Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: UCP, 1959.

—–. Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley: UCP, 1996.

—–. Twentieth Century Chinese Painting: Tradition and Innovation. HK: Urban Council, 1995.

—–. Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Tang, Xiaobing. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

Teo, Phyllis. Rewriting Modernism: Three Women Artists in Twentieth-Century Chna: Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016.

[AbstractRewriting Modernism offers a fresh reading of modernism from the perspective of three women artists – Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen – who were professionally active at different stages in China’s political history. Analysing Chinese works largely unknown in the English-language literature to date, Phyllis Teo investigates how the artists negotiated their identities in circumstances that made their status as women living in twentieth-century China particularly distinct. Providing relevant narratives and historical events, the book seeks to understand how the conventional perception of gender in Chinese society can be shown to be at work in the visual arts. Its juxtaposition of artists of different generations thus constitutes a deliberate attempt to create new opportunities for comparative studies of female artists in China, and to produce a dynamic reading of modern Chinese art from a different perspective.]

Zhongguo xiandai meishu quanji 中国现代美术全集  (A complete collection of modern Chinese fine arts). 10 vols. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu, 1997. [one of the best anthologies of works of modern art]Yiu, Josh. Writing Modern Chinese Art: Historiographic Explorations. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2009.

Zhu Boxiong 朱伯雄 and Chen Ruilin 陈瑞林. Zhongguo xi hua wushi nian, 1898-1949 中国西画五十年  (Fifty years of Chinese Western-style painting 1898-1949) Beijing: Renmin meishu, 1989.

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Late Qing/Republican Art

Andrews, Julia F. “Traditional Chinese Painting in an Age of Revolution, 1911-1937.” In Chinese Painting and the Twentieth Century: Creative in the Aftermath of Tradition, pp.579-595. Hangzhou: Zhejiang Art Press, 1997.

Andrews, Julia F. and Kuiyi Shen. “Traditionalism as a Modern Stance: The Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 1 (Spring 1999): 1-30.

—–. “The Japanese Impact on the Republican Art World: The Construction of Chinese Art History as a Modern Field.” Twentieth-Century China 32, 1 (Nov. 2006).

—–. “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

The Art of the Gao Brothers of the Lingnan School. HK: Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995.

The Art of Xu Beihong. HK: Urban Council, 1988.

Barme, Geremie. An Artist Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1978). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Bartholomen, Terese Tse, Mayching Kao, and So Kam Ng Lee. The Charming Cicada Studio: Masterworks by Chao Shao-an. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1997.

Brown, Claudia, and Ju-hsi Chou. Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire, 1796-1911. Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992.

Cahill, James. “The Shanghai School of Later Chinese Painting.” In Mayching Kao, ed., Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting. NY: Oxford UP, 1988.

Chan, Pedith. “The Institutionalization and Legitimatization of Guohua Art Societies in Republican Shanghai.” Modern China 39 (2013): 541-570.

[Abstract: This article examines guohua societies established in Republican Shanghai to show how the young generation of artists appropriated discursive practices to institutionalize and legitimatize guohua in the face of political and cultural upheaval. In the early Republican period, artistic practices underwent significant change as a result of major changes in the larger cultural and social context: the blooming of new media, the reform of the educational system, and the rise of urban culture. This article explores various aspects of guohua societies within a sociocultural context: the structure, the societal activities, the membership, and the attitudes toward art practice. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of artistic field, it argues that the transformation in the attitude toward guohua as well as the practice of art in general in modern China is not merely the result of the Western impact but a major consideration of the rules of the artistic field.]

—–. The Making of a Modern Art World: The Institutionalisation and Legitimisation of Guohua in Republican China. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

[AbstractThe Making of A Modern Art World explores the artistic institutions and discursive practices prevailing in Republican Shanghai, aiming to reconstruct the operational logic and the stratified hierarchy of Shanghai’s art world. Using guohua as the point of entry, this book interrogates the discourse both of guohua itself, and the wider discourse of Chinese modernism in the visual arts. In the light of the sociological definition of ‘art world’, this book contextualizes guohua through focusing on the modes of production and consumption of painting in Shanghai, examining newly adopted modern artistic practices, namely, art associations, periodicals, art colleges, exhibitions, and the art market.]

Chau, Angie. “Defining the Modern Wenren and the Role of the White Female Body in Modern Chinese Literature and Art.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 1  (Spring 2017): 1-54.

Chou, Ju-hsi, ed., Art at the Close of China’s Empire. Phoebus, Occasional Papers in Art History, 8. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1998.

Chu, Christina, ed. Homage to Tradition: Huang Binhong, 1865-1955. Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1995.

Clarke, David. “Cross-Cultural Dialogue and Artistic Innovation: Teng Baiye and Mark Tobey.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 84-103.

Clunas, Craig. “Chinese Art and Chinese Artists in France, 1924-25.” Arts Asiatiques 44 (1989): 100-106.

Cohn, William. “Contemporary Chinese Painting: On the Exhibition at the Prussian Academy of the Arts, Berlin 1934).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 112-17.

Croizier, Ralph. “Post-Impressionists in Pre-War Shanghai: The Juelanshe (Storm Society) and the Fate of Modernism in Republican China.” In Jonathan Clark, ed., Modernity in Asian Art. Broadway, NSW, Australia : Wild Peony, 1993, 135-54.

—–. Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) school of painting, 1906-1951. Berkeley: UCP, 1988.

Dansker, Jo-Anne Birnie. “Shanghai Modern.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 18-71.

Danzker, Jo-Anne Birnie and Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005.

Edwards, Louise. Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020.

[Abstract: In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew upon a centuries-old tradition of books featuring illustrations of women who embodied virtue, desirability, and Chinese cultural values, and changes in it reveal the foundational value shifts that would bring forth a democratic citizenry in the post-imperial era. The illustrations presented ordinary readers with tantalizing visions of the modern lifestyles that were imagined to accompany Republican China’s new civic consciousness. Citizens of Beauty is the first book to explore the One Hundred Illustrated Beauties in order to compare social ideals during China’s shift from imperial to Republican times. The book contextualizes the social and political significance of the aestheticized female body in a rapidly changing genre, showing how progressive commercial artists used images of women to promote a vision of Chinese modernity that was democratic, mobile, autonomous, and free from the crippling hierarchies and cultural norms of old China.]

Ellsworth, Robert Hatfield. Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 1800-1950. 3 vols. NY: Random House, 1986.

Erickson, Britta. “Uncommon Themes and Uncommon Subject Matters in Ren Xiong’s Album after Poems by Yao Xie.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Erickson, Britta with J. May Lee Barrett, eds. Modern Ink: The Art of Xugu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.

Farrer, Anne. Wu Guanzhong: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Painter. London: British Museum, 1992.

Fu, Shen. Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1991.

—–. “Huang Binhong’s Shanghai Period Landscape Paintings and His Late Floral Works.” Orientations 18, 9 (Sept. 1987): 66-78.

Geng, Yan. “A New Earthly Paradise: Appropriation and Politics in Li Keran’s Representation of Beihai Park.” Archives of Asian Art 64, 1 (2014): 75-92.

Green, Frederik H. “Painted in Oil, Composed in Ink: Late-Qing Ekphrastic Poetry and the Encounter with Western-Style Painting.” In Yifeng Sun and Chris Song, eds., Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature. London: Routledge, 2019, 7-29.

Guo, Yanlong, intro/tr. “Negotiating Colonial Visuality: Gao Chengxian’s Reminiscence of the Manchukuo Arts Exhibitions.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Jan. 2020).

Hay, Jonathan. “Painting and the Built Environment in Late-Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” In Kearn, Maxwell K. and Judith Smith eds., Chinese Art: Modern Expressions. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001, 78-116.

—–. “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” In Ju-hsi Chou, ed., Art at the Close of China’s Empire. Phoebus, Occasional Papers in Art History, 8. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1998, 134-88.

Hironobu, Kohara. “The Reform Movement in Chinese Painting of the Early 20th Century.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology. Taipei: Academica Sinica, 1981, 449- 64.

Huntington, Rania. “The Weird in the Newspaper.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 341-97. [deals mostly with the Dianshizhai huabao]

Janicot, Eric. “La Peinture Chinoise Moderne un Art a L’Ecoute de l’Occident (1919-1948).” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 107, 6 (May-June 1986): 217-220.

Ju, Jane C. 2003. “The Palace Museum as Representation of Culture: Exhibitions and Canons of Chinese Art History.” In Ko-wu Huang ed., When Images Speak: Visual Representation and Cultural Mapping in Modern China. Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, jindai shi yanjiusuo, 477-507.

Kao, Mayching. “The Beginning of the Western-style Painting Movement in Relationship to Reforms in Education in Early Twentieth-Century China.” New Asia Academic Bulletin 4 (1983): 373-97.

Khullar, Sonal. “Parallel Tracks: Pan Yuliang and Amrita Sher-Gil in Paris.” In Carolien Stotle and Yoshiyuke Kikuchi, eds., Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017, 73-102.

Koon, Yeewan. A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Early 19th Century Guangdong. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014.

Kuo, Jason C. Innovation within Tradition: The Painting of Huang Pin-hung. HK: Hanart Gallery; Williamstown: Williams College, 1989.

Kuo, Jason C. ed. Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Lai, T. C. Ch’i Pai-shih. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978.

—–. Huang Binhong (1864-1995). Hong Kong: Swindon Book Co., 1980.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

—–. “Art Deco and Modernist Art in Chinese Calendar Posters.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Shanghai Manhua, the Neo-Sensationist School of Literature, and Scenes of Urban Life.” MCLC Resource Center (Sept. 2010).

Lang, Shaojun. “The Precusors of Modern Chinese Art.” Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 46-49.

Lee, Jack S. C. “Some Problems in Studying the Identity of Lamqua.” Besides, vol. 2 (1999): 127-150.

Liao, Jingwen. Xu Beihong: Life of a Master Painter. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1987.

Lin, Fengmian. “A Letter to China’s Artistic Community (1927).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 371-73.

Lin Su-Hsing. Feng Zikai’s Art and the Kaiming Book Company: Art for the People in Early Twentieth Century China. Ph. D. diss. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2003.

Liu, Haisu. “Promoting Chinese Art (1935).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 378.

Lu, Fusheng. “Huang Binhong and Pan Tianshou.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 126-51.

Lum, Ken. “Aesthetic Education in Republican China: A Convergence of Ideals.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 216-33.

Ma Guoliang马国亮. Liangyou yijiu: Yi jia huabao yu yige shidai 良友忆旧 : 一家画报与一个时代 (Memories of Companion: a pictorial and an age). Taipei: Cheng Chung Book, 2001.

MacRitchie, Lewis. “Report on Wartime Painting in China.” Pacific Art Review 4 (1945-1946): 47-55.

“Manifesto of the Art Movement Society (1929).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 373.

Noth, Juliane. Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2023.

[Abstract: Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world. Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.]

Pan, Lynn. Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars. San Francisco: Long River Press, 2008.

[Abstract: From the 1920s to the 1940s, no place was more modern than Shanghai: a veritable playground amid a sea of Asian and European influences; an urban population clamoring for all that was new and Western, but whose aesthetic sensibilities remained profoundly Chinese. In this rich social and cultural history of Shanghai’s art and culture, Lynn Pan guides the reader through the myriad world inhabited by commercial and underground artists and designers, performers, architects, decorators, patrons, as well as politicians, generals, and crime bosses. What emerges is a singular portrait of a city and its art-its life blood, in an era that continues to capture the imagination of art lovers and cultural critics today.]

Pang, Xunqin. “My Memories: Visit to Berlin.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 254-59.

Roberts, Claire. “Tradition and Modernity: The Life and Art of Pan Tianshou, 1897-1971.” East Asian History 15-16 (1998): 67-96.

—–. Friendship in Art: Fou Leu and Huang Binhong. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: This book documents in letters, photos, and paintings a special friendship between two highly creative individuals who helped shape Chinese culture in the twentieth century—the revered traditional painter Huang Binhong (1865–1955) and the young, cosmopolitan critic and translator Fou Lei (1908–66). As one of China’s oldest and most distinguished artists in the 1940s and 1950s, Huang Binhong was committed to artistic continuity and reinvigoration of brush-and-ink painting. Fou Lei was a child of the New Culture Movement which repudiated many literati traditions, but reached out to Huang Binhong to discuss the possibilities for contemporary Chinese art amid the tides of war and Communist dictates of socialist realism as the guiding priority for cultural workers. Both were cultural mediators and translators of ideas and cultural expressions. Both had deep appreciation of the common origins of calligraphy and painting, rendering complex feelings with brush and ink. Their intimate artistic conversations over more than a decade depict their alienation and uncertainty amid China’s turbulent cultural politics.]

—–. “Metal and Stone, Brush and Ink: Word as Source in the Art of Huang Binhong.” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary Internationa Studies 9, 3 (2012).

Ruan Rongchun and Hu Guanghua. A History of Art in Republican China (in Chinese). Chengdu: Sichuan Art Press, 1991.

Ruan, Xing. “Accidental Affinities: American Beaux-Arts in Twentieth-Century Chinese Architectural Education and Practice.” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, 1 (Mar. 2002): 30-47.

Shanghai Lens on the New(s) 1: Dianshizhai Pictorial (1884-1898). Essay by Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Rebecca Nedostup; and Image Gallery. MIT Visualizing Culture website.

Shen, Kuiyi. “Patronage and the Beginning of a Modern Art World in Late Qing Shanghai.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Shih, Shu-mei. “Shanghai Women of 1939: Visuality and the Limits of Feminine Modernity.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Shui, Tianzhong. “Sino-German Artisitc Exchange: Its Cultural and Psychological Contexts.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 104-11.

Siu, Funkee. “Wang Zhen, a Master of the Shanghai Painting School.” Besides, vol. 2 (1999): 79-102.

Song, Gang. “A Paradox In-Between: The Dianshizhai Pictorial and Late 19th Century Chinese Literature.” The International Journal of the Humanities 2, 1 (n.d.):

Sullivan, Michael. “Recollections of Art and Artists in Wartime Chengdu.” The Register of the Spencer Museum of Art 6, 3 (1986): 6-19.

—–. “Reminiscences of Pang Xunqin (1946).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 248-53.

Sun, Shirley. Lu Xun and the Chinese Woodcut Movement, 1929-1935. Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1974.

Tang Xiaobing. Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde; The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkley: University of California Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by James Flath]

Teo, Phyllis. Rewriting Modernism: Three Women Artists in Twentieth-Century Chna: Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016.

[AbstractRewriting Modernism offers a fresh reading of modernism from the perspective of three women artists – Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen – who were professionally active at different stages in China’s political history. Analysing Chinese works largely unknown in the English-language literature to date, Phyllis Teo investigates how the artists negotiated their identities in circumstances that made their status as women living in twentieth-century China particularly distinct. Providing relevant narratives and historical events, the book seeks to understand how the conventional perception of gender in Chinese society can be shown to be at work in the visual arts. Its juxtaposition of artists of different generations thus constitutes a deliberate attempt to create new opportunities for comparative studies of female artists in China, and to produce a dynamic reading of modern Chinese art from a different perspective.]

University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong. Picturing Cathay Maritime and Cultural Images of the China Trade. Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery The University of Hong Kong. 2003.

Vainker, Shelagh. “Modern Chinese Painting in London, 1935.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 118-23.

Von Spee, Clarissa. Wu Hufan: A Twentieth Century Art Connoisseur in Shanghai. Berlin: Reimer, 2008.

Waara, Caroline Lynne. Arts and Life: Public and Private Culture in Chinese Art Periodicals, 1912-1937. Ph. d. diss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994.

—–. “Invention, Industry, Art: The Commercialization of Culture in Republican Art Magazines.” Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commerical Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 61-90.

—–. “The Bare Truth: Nudes, Sex, and the Modernization Project in Shanghai Pictorials.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Walden, Lauren. Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2024.

[Abstract: Surrealism in China initially gained a foothold in Shanghai’s former French concession during the early 1930s, disseminated by returning Chinese students who had directly encountered the movement in Paris and Tokyo. Shanghai surrealism adopted a dialectical form, resonating with the modus operandi of the Parisian movement as well as China’s traditional belief system of Daoism. Reconciling the thought of Freud and Marx, Surrealism subsumed the multiple contradictions that divided Republican Shanghai, East and West, colonial and cosmopolitan, ancient and modern, navigating the porous boundaries that separate dream and reality. Shanghai surrealists were not rigid followers of their Parisian counterparts. Indeed, they commingled Surrealist techniques with elements of traditional Chinese iconography. Rather than revolving around a centralized group with a leader, Shanghai Surrealism was a much more diffuse entity, disseminated across copious different periodicals, avant-garde groups, and the entire gamut of political ideology, ranging from Nationalist party supporters to Communist sympathizers. Ultimately, the pervasive presence of Surrealism in Shanghai can be attributed to a wide range of factors: a yearning for national renewal, the stagnancy of the guohua genre, anticolonial protest, the rise of Western individualism, circumnavigating censorship and experimentation in search of a unique artistic voice.]

Wang, Eugene Y. “Perceptions of Change, Changes of Perception–West Lake as Contested Site/Sight in the Wake of the 1911 Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 73-122.

Wong, Aida Yuen. “A New Life of Literati Painting in the Early Twentieth Century: Eastern Art and Modernity, a Transcultural Narrative?” Artibus Asiae 2 (2000): 297-326.

—–. Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2006.

[Abstract: In Parting the Mists, Aida Yuen Wong makes a convincing argument that the forging of a national tradition in modern China was frequently pursued in association with rather than in rejection of Japan. The focus of her book is on Japan’s integral role in the invention of “national-style painting,” or guohua, in early-twentieth-century China]

Wu, Lawrence. “Kang Youwei and the Westernization of Modern Chinese Art.” Orientations 21, 3 (March 1990): 46-53.

Wue, Roberta. Making the Artist: Ren Bonian (1840-1895) and Portraits of the Shanghai Art World. Ph.d. diss. NY: New York University, 2001.

—–. “The Profits of Philanthropy: Relief Aid, Shenbao, and the Art World in Later Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” Late Imperial China 25, 1 (June 2004): 187-211.

—–. “Deliberate Looks: Ren Bonian’s 1888 Album of Women.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

—–. Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.

[Abstract: The growth of Shanghai in the late nineteenth century gave rise to an exciting new art world in which a flourishing market in popular art became a highly visible part of the treaty port’s commercialized culture. Art Worlds examines the relationship between the city’s visual artists and their urban audiences. Through a discussion of images ranging from fashionable painted fans to lithograph-illustrated magazines, the book explores how popular art intersected with broader cultural trends. It also investigates the multiple roles played by the modern Chinese artist as image-maker, entrepreneur, celebrity and urban sojourner. Focusing on industrially produced images, mass advertisements and other hitherto neglected sources, the book offers a new interpretation of late Qing visual culture at a watershed moment in the history of modern Chinese art. Art Worlds will be of interest to scholars of art history and to anyone with an interest in the cultural history of modern China.]

Xia, Xiaohong and Chen Pingyuan. “1884, May 8: In Lithographic Journals, Text and Image Flourish on the Same Page.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 125-33.

Xu, Beihong. “I Am Bewildered (1929).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 373-74.

Xu, Hong. “Early 20th-Century Women Painters in Shanghai.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 200-14.

Xu, Jiang. “The ‘Misreading’ of Life.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 72-83. [mostly on Lin Fengmian]

Xu, Zhimo. “I Am Bewildered Too–A Letter to Xu Beihong (1929).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 374-77.

Yang, Taiyang. “The Storm Society–Interview.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 242-47.

Yeh, Catherine Vance. “Creating the Urban Beauty: The Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrations.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 397-447.

Yeh, Wen-hsin. “Progressive Journalism and Shanghai?s Petty Urbanites Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Enterprise, 1926-1945.” In Shanghai Sojourners, eds. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh. Berkeley: University of California, 1992, 186-238.

Zhang, Yingjin. “The Corporeality of Erotic Imagination: A Study of Pictorials and Cartoons in Republican China.” John A. Lent, ed., In Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 121-136.

—–. “Artwork, Commodity, Event: Representations of the Female Body in Modern Chinese Pictorials.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.

Zheng, Jane. “A Local Response to the National Ideal: Aesthetic Education in the Shanghai Art School (1913-1937).” Art Criticism 22, 1 (2007): 29-56.

—–. “A New Ladder Leading to Celebrity: The Shanghai Art School and the Modern Mechanism of Artistic Celebrity (1913-1937).” Art Criticism 22, 1 (2007): 1-28.

—–. “The Shanghai Fine Arts College: Art Education and Modern Women Artists in the 1920s and 1930s.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 1 (Spring 2007): 192-235.

—–. “The Shanghai Fine Arts College and Modern Artists in the Public Space.” East Asian History 32/33 (2008): 217-230.

—–. “Private Tutorial Art Schools in the Shanghai Market Economy: The Shanghai Art School, 1913–1919.” Modern China 35 (2009): 313-343.

—–. “Transplanting Literati Painting into the Modern Art School System: The Guohua Education at the Shanghai Fine Arts College, 1924-1937.” Studies in Art Education 52, 1 (2010): 34-54.

—–. The Modernization of Chinese Art: The Shanghai Art College, 1913-1937. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016.

[Abstract: The Shanghai Art College was one of the most important art schools in Republican China. This is the first academic study written on the early history of the College. It makes a major contribution to the history of aesthetic education in China, Shanghai in particular. The book presents a new approach to how people understand the modernization of Chinese art, and the significance and consequences of modernity in the Shanghai art world of the period 1913-1937. The author proposes new theoretical models to explain the interactions between multiple levels of social structures and artists, with a special emphasis on the role of art education institutions in transforming artists, artworks and the development of artistic fields.]

Zheng, Shengtian. “Waves Lashed the Bund from the West: Shanghai’s Art Scene in the 1930s.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 174-99.

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PRC: General

Andrews, Julia F. Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

—–. “Black Cat and White Cat: Chinese Art and the Politics of Deng Xiaoping.” In Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists. Guest Curator, Kuiyi Shen. Buffalo: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2000, 19-29.

—–. “The Art of the Cultural Revolution.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Andrews, Julia F. and Kuiyi Shen. “The New Chinese Woman and Lifestyle Magazines in the Late 1990s.” In Perry Link et al., ed. Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, 137-162.

Andrews, Julia F. and Minglu Gao, ed., Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile. Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1993.

“Art of the Chinese Diaspora.” Special issue of Art and AsiaPacific 1, 2 (1994).

Barme, Geremie. “Artful Marketing.” Persimmon: Asian Literature, Arts, and Culture 1, 1 (Spring 2000): 18-25.

Cahill, James. New Dimensions in Chinese Ink Painting: Works from the Collection of John and Alice Z. Berninghausen. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992.

Chang, Arnold. Painting in the People’s Republic of China. Boulder: Westview, 1980.

Chang, Tsong-Zung, Yan Shanchun, Graeme Murray. Reckoning With the Past: Contemporary Chinese Painting. Art Publishers, 1997.

Chang, Tsong-Zung. China’s New Art, Post-1989/With a Retrospective from 1979-1989. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994.

Charle, Suzanne. “Defying Catastrophe: Artist, Writer, and Musician Mu Xin.” Persimmon 3, 1 (Spring 2002): 70-75.

Chiu, Melissa. Art and China’s Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. [Inconjunction with Asia Society exhibition]

Chou, Yuting. “The Floating Body in the Art of Fang Lijun: An Artist’s Comment on the Human Condition in Post-Cultural Revolution China.” China Information 13, 2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1998): 85-114

Clark, John. “Problems of Modernity in Chinese Painting.” Oriental Art 32 (Autumn 1986): 270-83.

—–. “Postmodernism and Recent Expressionist Chinese Oil Painting.” Asian Studies Review 15, 2 (November 1991).

—–. “Official Reactions to Modern Art in China Since the Beijing Massacre.” Pacific Affairs 65, 3 (1992): 334-48.

—–. “Realism in Revolutionary Chinese Painting.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia (July 1991).

Cohen, Joan. The New Chinese Painting 1949-1986. NY: Harry N Abrams, 1987.

Croizier, Ralph, ed. “Painting and the Arts.” In China?s Cultural Legacy and Communism. NY: Praeger, 1970.

—–, ed. “Policy Toward the Cultural Legacy.” In China?s Cultural Legacy and Communism. NY: Praeger, 1970.

—–. “‘Going to the World’: Art and Culture on the Cosmopolitan Tide.” China Briefing (1989).

—–. “Art and Society in Modern China: A Review Article.” Journal of Asian Studies 49, 3 (Aug. 1990): 587-602.

—–. “Qu Yuan and the Artists: Ancient Symbols and Modern Politics in the Post-Mao Era.” In Jonathan Unger, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, 124-50.

—–. “Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Denton, Kirk A. “Visual Memory and the Construction of a Revolutionary Past: Paintings from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 203-35.

Dijk, Hans van. “Painting in China After the Cultural Revolution: Style Developments and Theoretical Debates, Part II: 1985-1991.” China Information 6, 4 (Spring 1992): 1-18.

Dijk, van Hans and Andreas Schmid. “The Fine Arts after the Cultural Revolution: Stylistic Development and Culture Debate.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 14-39.

Erickson, Britta. “The Rent Collection Courtyard, Past and Present.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Forward, Roy. “Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists.” Shanghai Art Gallery, 2006.

Friedman, Edward. “Democracy and ‘Mao Fever.'” Journal of Contemporary China 6 (Summer 1994): 84-95.

Galikowski, Maria. Art and Politics in China, 1949-1984. HK: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1998.

Gao Minglu. “From the Local Context to the International Context: An Essay on the Critique of Art and Culture.” In The First Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art: 1996-97. HK: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1996, 23-29.

Geng, Yan. Mao’s Images: Artists and China’s 1949 Transition. Weisbaden: J. B. Metzler, 2018.

[Abstract: Yan Geng examines Mao’s image from the perspective of its producers, focusing on four artists, chosen for both the diverse media they worked in and their diverse backgrounds. The book suggests an alternative perspective on the making of propaganda not only as a politically themed representation but also as an expression of artists’ subjectivities and their roles as pivotal agents in the transition of modern Chinese art history. Mao’s Image: Artists and China’s 1949 Transition demonstrates how artists portrayed Mao as the nation’s leader during the early People’s Republic and what such images reveal about Chinese artists’ experience during the Communist takeover of the country.]

Gu, Xiong. “When We Were Young: Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Guo Tong and Karen Smith. The Carved Image in China 1932-1992. Trs. Smith and Pi Li. Beijing: The CourtYard Gallery, 1998.

Hawkes, Shelley Drake. “Summoning Confucius: Inside Shi Lu’s Imagination.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.

—–. The Art of Resistance: Painting by Candlelight in Mao’s China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.

[AbstractThe Art of Resistance surveys the lives of seven painters-Ding Cong (1916-2009), Feng Zikai (1898-1975), Li Keran (1907-89), Li Kuchan (1898-1983), Huang Yongyu (b. 1924), Pan Tianshou (1897-1971), and Shi Lu (1919-82)-during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a time when they were considered counterrevolutionary and were forbidden to paint. Drawing on interviews with the artists and their families and on materials collected during her visits to China, Shelley Drake Hawks examines their painting styles, political outlooks, and life experiences. These fiercely independent artists took advantage of moments of low surveillance to secretly “paint by candlelight.” In doing so, they created symbolically charged art that is open to multiple interpretations. The wit, courage, and compassion of these painters will inspire respect for the deep emotional and spiritual resonance of Chinese art.

Hua, Junwu, ed. Contemporary Chinese Painting. Beijing: New World Press, 1984.

Johnson, Thomas and Kathinka Fürst. “Praying for Blue Skies: Artistic Representations of Air Pollution in China.” Modern China 47, 1 (Jan. 2021).

Kang, Ha-Ku, ed. Modern Chinese Painting. Japan Publications, 1984.

King, Richard, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.

Kong, Shuyu, Julia F. Andrews, and Shengtian Zheng, eds. Art and Modernism in Socialist China: Unexplored International Encounters, 1949-1979. Routledge, 2024.

[Abstract: The first book examining the art history of China’s socialist period from the perspective of modernism, modernity, and global interactions. The majority of chapters are based on newly available archival materials and fresh critical frameworks/concepts. By shifting the frame of interpretation from socialist realism to socialist modernity, this study reveals the plurality of the historical process of developing modernity in China, the autonomy of artistic agency, and the complexity of an art world conditioned, yet not completely confined, by its surrounding political and ideological apparatus. The unexpected global exchanges examined by many of the authors in this study and the divergent approaches, topics, and genres they present add new sources and insights to this research field, revealing an art history that is heterogeneous, pluralistic, and multi-layered. TOC: Introduction, by Julia F. Andrews. Part One: Art Exchanges: 1. Chile, China, Cuba, a Mural and Beyond, by Shengtian Zheng; 2. Realism or Modernism?: Exhibitions of Sesshū and Sino–Japanese Artistic Exchanges in the 1950s, by Yanfei Yin; 3. An Unpublicized Graduation Exhibition in 1962: Misalignments Impacting the Romanian Painting Class in China, by Nan Ma; 4. A Short-Lived Challenge to Socialist Realism: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Other British Artists in a Little Known 1960 Exhibition in China, by Yuning Teng; 5. “So Are They Good Artists?” Context and Asymmetry in Postwar Sino–Italian Artistic Exchanges, by Yang Wang; 6. The Politics of Landscape Painting: Three International Art Exhibitions in 1970s China, by Shuyu Kong. Part Two: Alternative Practices: 7. “Creating A New Era in the Twentieth Century”: Huang Binhong (1865–1955) and Modern Art during the Cold War, by Zaixin Hong; 8. Tan Huamu’s Pictorial Diaries in the Era of the New China, by Tao Cai; 9. A Battle between Two Paths of Art?: Huang Xinbo and Modernism during his Hong Kong Period, by Bin Hu; 10. The Moving Image: Ye Qianyu, Dance and Socialist Modernity in Art, by Claire Roberts; 11. Decorative Pictures: Zhang Ding and Chinese Modernism in the 1960s, by Xueshan Wu; 12. The Romanian Oil Painting Training Class and Modernist Undercurrents in Chinese Art Education of the Socialist Period, by Juliane Noth. Part Three: Coda: 13. Never forget Mao: The Monumental as Radical Universal OR: The Making of a “Maoist Modern”, by Barbara Mittler

Koppel-Yang, Martina. “Zaofan Youli/Revolt is Reasonable: Remanifestations of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese Contemporary Art of the 1980s and 1990s.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 2 (Fall 2002): 66-75.

Kraus, Richard. “China’s Cultural ‘Liberalization’ and Conflict Over the Social Organization of the Arts.” Modern China 9, 2 (April 1983): 212-27.

—–. “Art Policies of the Cultural Revolution.” In Christine Wong et.al eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991.

—–. Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and Chinese Art of Calligraphy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

—–. “China’s Artists between Plan and Market.” In Debord S. Davis, et.al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, 173-92.

—–. The Party and the Arty in China. Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Matthew D. Johnson]

Kyo, Yi Yi Mon (Rosaline). “Labor and Art During the Cultural Revolution: An Analysis of the Sculptural Installation Wrath of the Serfs.” Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art (special issue on the Cultural Revolution) 4, no. 2/3 (2017): 243-268.

Lachman, Charles. “‘The Image Made by Chance’ in China and the West: Ink Wang Meets Jackson Pollock’s Mother.” Art Bulletin 74, 3 (Sept. 1992): 499-510.

Lai, T. C. Three Contemporary Chinese Painters: Chang Da-chien, Ting Yin-yung, Chang Shih-fa. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958-1976: Amateur and Professional.” Art International 27, 1 (Jan-March 1984): 1-12.

—–. The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: Univ California Press, 1988.

—–. “The Persistence of Propriety in the 1980s.” Perry Link et al., ed. Unofficial China Popular Culture and Thought in the People?s Republic. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989, 156-171.

Lee, Mabel. “The Aesthetic Dimension’s of Lin Chunyan’s Art: A Case Study of Opportunity, Relocation and the Individual.” Linchunyan.com.

Liu, Wenwen. “Wu Guanzhong’s Landscape Painting as a Response to Art Policies of Socialist China.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 20, 2 (Dec. 2018): 88-115.

Liu Xilin. “Private Moments.” Asian Art News 10, 5 (Sept/Oct 2000): 60-63. [on Shandong artist Yan Ping]

Lin, Xiaoping. “Those Parodic Images: A Glimpse of Contemporary Chinese Art.” Leonardo 30, 2 (1997): 113-22.

Lu Peng. 90’s CHINA ART, 1990-1999. Changsha: Hunan meishu, 2000

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. “Global POSTmoderniZATION: The Intellectual, the Artist, and China’s Condition.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997).

—–. “Art, Culture, and Cultural Criticism in Post-New China.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 111-33. [Project Muse link]

Lufkin, Felicity. Images of Minorities in the Art of the People’s Republic of China. Master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.

MacRitchie, Lynn. “Precarious Paths on the Mainland.” Art in America 82 (March 1994): 51-53.

Moner, Laia Manonelles. “Yugong yishan: Myth, Utopia and Community in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art.” China Perspectives 1 (2021): 41-48.

Murphy, J. David. Plunder and Preservation Cultural Property Law and Practice in the People’s Republic of China. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Noth, Juliane. “Confucius and Tolstoy in India: Shi Lu’s Paintings of 1970 and the Socialist Culture of Maoist-Period China.” Art History 39, 5 (Nov. 2016): 952-83.

Pi, Daojian. “Aesthetics, Art History, and Contemporary Art in China.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 49-50.

Schell, Orville. “Chairman Mao as Pop Art.” In Schell, The Mandate of Heaven. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1994, 279-92.

Silbergeld, Jerome. “Chinese Visual Arts.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 1995.

Silbergeld, Jerome and Gong Jisui. Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993.

Strassberg, Richard E and Waldemar A. Nielsen. Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China. Pasadena, CA: Pacific Asia Museum, 1987.

Sullivan, Michael. “Art in China since 1949.” The China Quarterly 159 (Sept 1999): 712-722.

Tang, Xiaobing. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

Teo, Phyllis. Rewriting Modernism: Three Women Artists in Twentieth-Century Chna: Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016.

[AbstractRewriting Modernism offers a fresh reading of modernism from the perspective of three women artists – Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen – who were professionally active at different stages in China’s political history. Analysing Chinese works largely unknown in the English-language literature to date, Phyllis Teo investigates how the artists negotiated their identities in circumstances that made their status as women living in twentieth-century China particularly distinct. Providing relevant narratives and historical events, the book seeks to understand how the conventional perception of gender in Chinese society can be shown to be at work in the visual arts. Its juxtaposition of artists of different generations thus constitutes a deliberate attempt to create new opportunities for comparative studies of female artists in China, and to produce a dynamic reading of modern Chinese art from a different perspective.]

Tinari, Philip. Artists in China. Verba Volant, 2007.

Wang, Eugene Y. “Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 488-552.

Wang, Meiqin. Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art. NY: Routledge, 2015.

[Abstract:This book explores the relationship between the ongoing urbanization in China and the production of contemporary Chinese art since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wang provides a detailed analysis of artworks and methodologies of art-making from eight contemporary artists who employ a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. She also sheds light on the relationship between these artists and their sociocultural origins, investigating their provocative responses to various processes and problems brought about by Chinese urbanization. With this urbanization comes a fundamental shift of the philosophical and aesthetic foundations in the practice of Chinese art: from a strong affiliation with nature and countryside to one that is complexly associated with the city and the urban world.]

Wang, Yang. “Envisioning the Third World: Modern Art and Diplomacy in Maoist China.” ARTMargins 8, 2 (June 2019): 31-54.

[Abstract: In the mid-1950s, China conducted robust cultural exchange with the Third World in tandem with a parallel political program to influence non-aligned nations in contestation to the Soviet Union and Western powers. This article examines this underrecognized facet of Maoist-era art through the international engagements of two Xi’an artists, Shi Lu (1919–1982) and Zhao Wangyun (1907–1977), who traveled to India and Egypt as cultural attaché of the Chinese state. By tracing the travels of the two artists in light of their artistic and theoretical formulations, this article argues that contact with decolonizing spheres of the Third World inspired Chinese artists to embrace forms of indigenous Chinese art like ink painting in rejection of Euro-American modernism. In solidarity with other non-Western art spheres that developed similar nativist responses to the hegemony of Western modernism, Chinese artists belonged to a global postwar movement to assert political independence through artistic autonomy and national style.]

—–. “Good Girls and the Good Earth: Shi Lu’s Peasant Women and Socialist Allegory in the Early PRC.” China Perspectives 4 (2021): 61-71.

Wang, Yuejin. “Anxiety of Portraiture: Quest for/Questioning Ancestral Icons in Post-Mao China.” In Liu Kang and Xiaobin Tang eds., Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Wu Hung. “On ‘Secret Messages’ in Modern Chinese Art.” Chinese Culture Quarterly 2, 3 (1988): 107-113.

—–. “Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments.” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 84-117.

—–. ed. Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West. Hong Kong: New Art Media Limited, 2001.

—–. ed. (with Peggy Wang). Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. NY: MoMA, 2010.

[Abstract: Despite the liveliness and creativity of avant-garde Chinese art in the post-Mao era and its prominence in the world of international contemporary art, there still lacks a systematic introduction to this important work in any Western language. Moreover, most of the relevant primary documents have existed only in Chinese, scattered in hard-to-find publications. [This book] remedies this situation by bringing together carefully selected primary texts in English translation. Arranged in chronological order, the texts guide readers through the development of avant-garde Chinese art from 1976 until 2006. Because experimental Chinese art emerged as a domestic phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s and its subsequent development has been closely related to China’s social and economical transformation, this volume focuses on art from mainland China. At the same time, it encompasses the activities of mainland artists residing overseas, since artists who emigrated in the 1980s and 1990s were often key participants in the early avant-garde movements and have continued to interact with the mainland art world. The primary documents include the manifestos of avant-garde groups, prefaces to important exhibitions, writings by representative artists, important critical and analytical essays, and even some official documents. Each chapter and section begins with a concise preface explaining the significance of the texts and providing the necessary historical background; the volume includes a timeline summarizing important art phenomena and related political events.]

Wu, Kejia. A Modern History of China’s Art Market. London: Routledge, 2023.

[Abstract: This is the first English-language account of the modern history of China’s art market that explains the radical transformations from the end of the Cultural Revolution, when a market for art and artifacts did not exist, to today. The book is divided into three sections: Part I examines how the art market in China was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, restarted, grew, and expanded into its current scale. Part II analyzes the distinctive value system of the Chinese art market where the state-run art system including academies, artist associations and museums co-exist with an independent market-oriented system; and traverses the most significant policies that drive decision-making and market structure. Part III explores the driving force of art creation by telling the stories of five contemporary artists across three generations.

Young, John T. Contemporary Public Art in China: A Photographic Tour. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

Xin Zhongguo meishu tushi (Illustrated history of the art of new China). 2 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian, 2000. [vol. 1: 1949-1966; vol. 2: 1967-1976]

Xin Zhongguo meishu wenxian bowuguan (Museum for new China’s art documents). 8 vols. Haerbin: Heilongjiang jiaoyu, 2001. [a chronological, year by year, overview of the history of art in the PRC]

Zhang, Yiguo. Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998.

Zheng, Shengtian. “Modern Chinese Art and the Zhejiang Academy in Hangzhou.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 51-54.

—–. “Brushes Are Weapons: An Art School and Its Artists.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Zhou, Lin. “Art Law in China.” ChinaliveWeb.

Zhou, Xian, ed. Visual Culture in Contemporary China. 2 vols. Routledge, 2024.

[Abstract: A two-volume set that examines the interaction between social transformation and visual culture in contemporary China, this book explores the visual construction of popular culture, avant-garde art, and grassroots media culture. Drawing on an approach of Marxist historic materialism and academic resources of sociology, communication, and art, this study of contemporary China’s visual culture emphasizes two inter-related aspects – the visual construction of society and the social construction of the visual. It seeks to unravel how visual culture is produced and constructed, as well as how it reflects the profound social transformation and reshapes people’s understanding and experience of modernization. In this volume, the contributors revisit popular culture, avant-garde art, and grassroots media culture in contemporary China, analyzing the visual image and representation, and visual culture’s role in social construction. In doing so, the book also reveals the cultural tension of contemporary China, in which the visual aspect figures prominently.]

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Taiwan/HongKong

Cameron, Nigel. “Hong Kong: The Development of Modern Art.” In Oscar Ho and Eric Wear, eds., Hong Kong Art Review. Hong Kong, 1999, 60-65.

Cartier, Carolyn. “Image, Precariousness and the Logic of Cultural Production in Hong Kong.” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinar International Studies 9, 3 (2012).

[Abstract: Interpretations of culture in Hong Kong have tended to portray the city in terms of the vanishing present, in some combination of the instant, fleeting and disappearing. This article redresses such language of lack to consider instead how the idea of precariousness in the realm of the cultural has been less a condition of cultural production than a cultural strategy. Street art, including alternative performance art and political graffiti, has made the city itself the site of roving cultural production: walls, street surfaces and passageways accommodate forms of expression that the city’s cultural institutions have only more recently and uneasily embraced. In these different modes of time-space, contemporary alternative art occupies transitory territory and locates its ‘precariousness’ in lack of definitive status and uncertain future – mimetic conditions of defining culture in Hong Kong society itself. Its measures, by contrast, emerge in Jacques Ranci?re’s distribution of the sensible: the ways in which they render what is visible, knowable and ultimately sayable. As objects generating negotiation, such contemporary cultural projects anticipate instabilities of the present, identify hegemonic political economic logics and seek modes of resistance. Within these perspectives, this discussion juxtaposes two simultaneous events: the exhibit ‘Memories of King Kowloon’ on the historic graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, and the stenciled graffiti of Ai Weiwei in public space during April and May 2011.]

Chan, Luis. “The Hong Kong Artists Group.” The Studio CXLVIII (July 1954): 84-87.

Chang, Tsong-zung. “Visionaries and Icon Painters: One Aspect of Hong Kong Contemporary Art.” Renditions 29/30 (Spring/Autumn 1988): 275-92.

—–. “The Inverted Laboratory of Ho Siu-kee.” In Oscar Ho and Eric Wear, eds., Hong Kong Art Review. Hong Kong, 1999, 104-6.

—–. “The Secret Artist–Is Hong Kong Art the True Underground.” Art Planet: A Global View of Art Criticism 1/0 (1999): 178-81. Also published in Eric Wear and Lisa Cheung, eds., Private Content: Public View. Hong Kong, 1997, 82-88.

Chong, Doryun. “‘Site of Desire, Desire for Art that Speaks’: 1998 Taipei Biennial.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, 1 (April 2000):

Clark, John. “Taiwanese Painting Under the Japanese Occupation.” Journal of Oriental Studies 25, 1 (1987): 63-104.

Clarke, David. Art and Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 1996.

—–. “Varieties of Cultural Hybridity: Hong Kong Art in the Late Colonial Era.” Public Culture 9, 3 (Spring 1997): 395-415.

—–. “Hong Kong Art and the Transfer of Sovereignty.” The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 29 (1997): 1-21.

—–. “Found in Transit: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change.” In Minglu Gao, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art. Berkeley: University of Californiat Press, 1998, 175-81.

—–. “Breaking Down Barriers: The Art of Kwok Mang Ho.” In Kwok–Art Life for 30 Years, 1967-1997. Hong Kong, 1999, 13-14.

—–. “The Culture of a Border Within: Hong Kong Art and China.” Art Journal (Summer 2000).

—–. “Towards Psychic Decolonization: the Development of Luis China’s Painting.” Besides 2 (1999): 161-168.

——. “The Art of Ellen Pau.” Besides 2 (1999): 193-196.

——. “Remembrance and Forgetting: Public Space in Hong Kong during the Transfer of Sovereignty.” Besides 2 (1999): 257-262.

——. “Found in Transition: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change.” In Gao Minglu ed., Inside/Out: New Chinese Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

——. Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Contemporary Taiwanese Art (Bibliography prepared by Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC)

Close-up: Contemporary Art from Taiwan (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC) [good site, with essays, interviews, etc]

From Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan. HK: Asia Art Archive, 2006. [essays on this HK artist by a variety of scholars]

Gabrakova, Dennitza. “Hong Kong Collage: or the Intimacy of Distance.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 20, 2 (Dec. 2018).

Hinterthur, Petra. Modern Art in Hong Kong. HK: Myer Publishing Co., 1985.

Hu, Chia-yu. “Taiwanese Aboriginal Art and Artifacts: Entangled Images of Colonization and Modernization.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 193-215.

Kikuchi, Yuko, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007.

—–. “Refracted Colonial Modernity: Vernacularism in the Development of Modern Taiwanese Crafts.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 217-47.

Kojima, Kaoru. “The Changing Representation of Women in Modern Japanese Paintings.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 111-32.

Kubin, Wolfgang. “Floating Signs: Art as Life, Life as Art in Contemporary Hong Kong.” Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatique 48, 3 (2004): 701-15.

Kuo, Jason S. T. “Taiwan Sculpture: Growing up and Moving On.” Asia-Pacific Sculpture News 1, 1 (Winter 1995): 34-40.

Kuo, Jason C. Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2000.

Lai, Edwin K. “The Hong Kong Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1906.” Besides 1 (1997): 111-134.

Lai, Edwin K and Lee, Jack S. C.. “A Chronology of Visual Arts Activities in Hong Kong 1900-1930.” Besides 1 (1997): 135-230.

Lai, Mei-lin Eliza. “The Art of Garlord Chan.” Besides 2 (1999):177-192.

Lai, Ming-chu. “Modernity, Power, and Gender: Images of Women by Taiwanese Female Artists under Japanese Rule.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 133-65.

Lai, T.C. Three Contemporary Chinese Painters: Chang Da-chien, Ting Yin-yung, Chang Shih-fa. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975.

Liao, Hsin-Tien. “The Beauty of the Untamed: Exploration and Travel in Colonial Taiwanese Landscape Painting.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 39-65.

Lu, Victoria. “The Rising New Moon: Contemporary Art in Taiwan since 1945.” Art and Asia Pacific (Sept. 1993): 40-46.

Man, Eva Kit Wah. “Experimental Painting and Painting Theories in Colonial Hong Kong (1940-1980).” In Mary Wiseman and Liu Yuedi, eds., Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 333-52.

Man and Earth: Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan. Asian Art Coordinating Council, 1995. [featuring the art of Cheng Tsao-tung, Yu Peng, Hsu Yu-jen, and Kuo Chuan-chiu]

McIntyre, Sophie. “Made in Taiwan.” Art Asia Pacific 3, 3 (1996): 83-86.

—–. “Duplicating Memory: Chen Shun-chu’s Photo Installations.” Art Asia Pacific 28 (2000): 62-65.

Pang, Tao, ed. The Storm Society and Post-Storm Art Phenomenon. Taipei: Chin Show Publishing Co., 1997.

Rodriguez, Hector. “The Fragmented Commonplace: Alternative Arts and Cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong.” In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003, 128-50.

Vigneron, Frank. I Like Hong Kong . . . Art and Deterritorialization. HK: Chinese University Press, 2009.

Wang, Chia Chi Jason. “Made in Taiwan.” Art and Asia Pacific 1, 2 (1994): 73-77.

—–. “From Iconoclasm to Neo-Iconolatry: Taiwan’s Contemporary Art in the Post-Martial-Law Era.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 2 (Fall 2002): 34-43.

Watanabe, Toshio. “Japanese Landscape Painting and Taiwan: Modernity, Colonialism, and Natioal Identity.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 67-81.

Yen, Chuan-Ying. “The Demise of Oriental-style Painting in Taiwan.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 83-108.

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Avant-garde

Abbas, Ackbar. “Chen Danqing: Painting After Tiananmen.” Public Culture 8, 3 (Spring 1996).

Abe, Stanley K. “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 47-76.

—–. “Exhibiting China.” In The Present, and the Discipline of Art History in Japan. Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on the Preservation of Cultural Property. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties.

—–. “Reading the Sky.” Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 53-79. [on Xu Bing]

Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009. Ed. Lee Ambrozy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Albertini, Claudia. Avatars and Antiheroes: A Guide to Contemporary Chinese Artists. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008.

Andrews, Julia and Gao Minglu. “The Avant-garde’s Challenge to Official Art.” In Debord S. Davis, et.al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, 221-78.

Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual and Installation Art in the Nineties. Breda: Fundament Foundation, 1997.

Barme, Geremie. “Arriere-Pensee on an Avant-Garde: The Stars in Retrospect.” In Tsong-ming Chang, ed. The Stars: 10 Years. Hong Kong, 1989.

—–. “Artful Marketing: Six Essays on Art.” In Barme, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, 201-34.

—-. “Mb@Game: A Beijing Screensaver.” www.mengbo.com. [article on Feng Mengbo, appearing on Feng Mengbo’s official website]

—–. “History Writ Large: Big-character Posters, Red Logorrhea and the Art of Words.” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, 3 (2012).

[Abstract: The starting point of this paper is the 1986 artwork of the then Xiamen-based artist Wu Shanzhuan, called ‘Red Humor’, which reworked references to big-character posters (dazi bao) and other Mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the Cultural Revolution. It explains how Wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966-1967. This discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during China’s Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-1978) allows us to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern China. The paper argues that, since the 1980s, Wu Shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors’, since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the Chinese character (zi) in recent decades.]

Berger, Patricia. “Pun Intended: A Response to Stanley Abe.” Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 80-99. [on Xu Bing, and Abe’s article, listed above]

Berghuis, Thomas. Performance Art in China. Beijing: Timezone 8, 2007.

Boden, Jeanne. Contemporary Chinese Art: Post-socialist, Post-traditional, Post-colonial. Brussels: Academic and Scientific Publishing, 2014.

[Abstract: This book explores the tension between individual artistic freedom and a dominant discourse of central Chinese government, between China’s cultural legacy and modernization, and between China and a global art world still dominated by a Western canon. As a case study it focuses on the artists who participated in the Venice Biennale in 1993, which was the first time contemporary art from mainland China was structurally invited to participate in a global art context.]

—–. What Is Chinese in Contemporary Chinese Art? Ph.D. diss. Ghent University, 2011.

Borgonjon, David. “Can We Talk about Dialogue? A Pre-script to Art and China after 1989.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Dec. 2017).

Cai Guo-Qiang: Calendar of Life. Nagoya: Gallery APA, 1994.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Chaos. Tokyo: Setagaya Art Museum, 1994.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Concerning Flame (catalog/brochure). Tokyo: Tokyo Gallery, 1994.

Cai Guo-Qiang: From the Pan-Pacific. Iwaki: Iwaki City Art Museum, 1994.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Flying Dragon in the Heavens. Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1997.

Chan, Lauk’ung. “Ten Years of the Chinese Avantgarde: Waiting for the Curtain to Fall.” Flash Art 25 (Jan-Feb. 1992): 110-14.

Chang, Tsong-zung, ed. The Stars: 10 Years. Hong Kong, Hanart 2, 1989.

—–. “The Character of the Figure.” In Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists. Guest Curator, Kuiyi Shen. Buffalo: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2000, 13-16.

—–. Chinese Contemporary Art at Sao Paolo (catalog). Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 1994.

—–. “Of Time and Power.” Asian Art News 8, 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1998): 68-69.

—–. “The Other Face.” Asian Art News 5, 4 (Jul/Aug 1995): 41-43.

Chang, Tsong-sung, et. al. China’s New Art, Post-1989. HK: Hanart T Z Gallery, 1993.

Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. “Symbolic Revolutions: Xu Bing and his Language Art.” Wasafiri 55 (2008): 47-55.

Clarke, David. “Reframing Mao: Aspects of Recent Chinese Art, Popular Culture and Politics.” In Art and Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996, 236-49.

Cohen, Joan Lebold. “Beyond Convention: Chinese Women Artists Today.” Persimmon 3, 2 (Summer 2002): 8-63)

Cohn, Don J. Liu Da Hong: Paintings, 1986-1992. HK: Schoeni Fine Oriental Art, 1992.

Corlin, Mai. The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China. London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2020.

[Abstract: This book is concerned with socially engaged art projects in the Chinese countryside, with the artists and intellectuals who are involved, the villagers they meet and the local authorities with whom they negotiate. In recent years an increasing number of urban artists have turned towards the countryside in an attempt to revive rural areas perceived to be in a crisis. The vantage point of this book is the Bishan Commune. In 2010, Ou Ning drafted a notebook entitled Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. The notebook presents a utopian ideal of life based on anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid. In 2011 the Commune was established in Bishan Village in Anhui Province. The main questions of this book thus revolve around how an anarchist, utopian community unfolds to the backdrop of the political, social and historical landscape of rural China, or more directly: How do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside?]

—–. “Imagining Utopia: Reading Ou Ning’s The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia.Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 1 (Spring 2019): 1-46.

Cui, Shuqin. Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.

[AbstractGendered Bodies introduces readers to women’s visual art in contemporary China by examining how the visual process of gendering reshapes understandings of historiography, sexuality, pain, and space. When artists take the body as the subject of female experience and the medium of aesthetic experiment, they reveal a wealth of noncanonical approaches to art. The insertion of women’s narratives into Chinese art history rewrites a historiography that has denied legitimacy to the woman artist. The gendering of sexuality reveals that the female body incites pleasure in women themselves, reversing the dynamic from woman as desired object to woman as desiring subject. The gendering of pain demonstrates that for those haunted by the sociopolitical past, the body can articulate traumatic memories and psychological torment. The gendering of space transforms the female body into an emblem of landscape devastation, remaps ruin aesthetics, and extends the politics of gender identity into cyberspace and virtual reality. The work presents a critical review of women’s art in contemporary China in relation to art traditions, classical and contemporary. Inscribing the female body into art generates not only visual experimentation, but also interaction between local art/cultural production and global perception. While artists may seek inspiration and exhibition space abroad, they often reject the (Western) label “feminist artist.” An extensive analysis of artworks and artists—both well- and little-known—provides readers with discursively persuasive and visually provocative evidence. Gendered Bodies follows an interdisciplinary approach that general readers as well as scholars will find inspired and inspiring.]

Dal Lago, Francesca. “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art.” Art Journal 58 (Summer 1999).

—–. “Images , Words and Violence: Cultural Revolutionary Influences on Chinese Avant-Garde Art.” In Wu Hong, ed., Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future. Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2002, 30-39.

Dematte, Monica. “Personal Icons: The Quest for a New Individuality in Chinese Painting of the Nineties.” In Quotation Marks, exh. cat. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1997, 36-37.

Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. “Monumental Memories: Xu Weixin’s Chinese Historical Figures, 1966-1976.” New Formations 75 (2012): 45-62.

[Abstract: This essay introduces the series ‘Chinese Historical Figures 1966-1976’, by Beijing artists Xu Weixin. The discussion centres on the relationship between pedagogy, historicity and memorialization in Xu’s work, drawing on both Xu’s perceptions of his own work, and on the theoretical frames in which it might be evaluated both in and beyond Chinese art practice. The article is informed by Sara Ahmed’s work on emotion, and Gerhard Richter’s notion of the blur as a clarification of the historical moment. In assessing Xu’s approach to memorialization, the article questions whether, by adopting an aesthetic of monumentality and compulsive repetition, Xu risks the series appearing too close to the governmental regime of excess and dogmatism that he is, in fact, attacking.]

Doran, Valerie C. China’s New Art, Post-1989, with a Restropective from 1979-1989. Introduction by Chang Tsong-zung. HK: Hanart T Z Gallery, 1993.

—–. “Xu Bing: A Logos for the Genuine Experience.” Orientations 32, 8 (Oct. 2001).

Driessen, Chris and Heidi van Mierlo. Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual and Installation Art in the Nineties. Breda, The Netherlands: Fundament Foundation, 1997.

Erickson, Britta. The Art of Xu Bing: Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words. Washington, DC: Arthur Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, 2001.

—–. On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter with the West. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2005.

Fok, Silvia. Life and Death: Art and the Body in Contemporary China. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2012.

Fan, Di’an and Zhang Ga, eds., Synthetic Times: Media Art China. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.

Gao, Minglu, ed. Inside/Out: New Chinese Art. Berkeley: UCP, 1998. [Online site sponsored by Asia Society, NYC]

—–. Special Issue on avant-garde art. Qingxiang (Tendency) 12 (1999).

Gladston, Paul. “Overcoming the Anxiety of Displacement: Song Tao and B6’s Video Installation Yard.” In Nicholas Hewitt and Dick Geary, eds., Diaspora(s): Movements and Cultures. Nottingham, UK: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2007, 183-95.

—–. “A(n) (In)decisive Acto of Disclosure: Reflections on the ’85 New -Wave Exhibition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art> 7, 2 (2008): 98-104.

—–. “Chan-Da(o)-Deconstruction or, The Cultural (Il)logic of Contemporary Chinese Art.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, 4 (2008): 63-69.

—–, “Something (and Nothing) Beyond the Text.” In Robin Peckham, ed., Song Kun: Fragments–River Lethe. Beijing: Timezone 8.

—–. “Bloody Animals!: Reinterpreting Acts of Violence Against Animals as Part of Contemporary Chinese Artistic Practice.” In Lili Hernandez and Sabine Krajewski, eds., Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Taboo, Bodies and Identity. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.

—–. Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2011

—–. Avant-garde Art Groups in China, 1979-1989: The Stars–The Northern Art Group–The Pond Association–Xiamen Dada: A Critical Polylogue. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2013.

Gong, Haomin. “The Chinese Character as an Interface for Artistic Creation: Re-Cognition of Graphics and Phonetics.” Comparative Literature Studies 60, 4 (2023): 621-646.

[Abstract: This essay discusses Xu Bing and Jonathan Stalling’s artworks.]

Goodman, Jonathan. “Bing Xu: 4,000 Characters in Search of a Meaning.” Art News 93 (1994).

Green, Frederik H.”The Twelve Chinese Zodiacs: Ai Weiwei, Jackie Chan and the Aesthetics, Politics, and Economics of Revisiting a National Wound.” The Rocky Mountain Review 70, 1 (Summer 2016): 45-58.

Haddon, Rosemary. “Embodied Modernity: The Gendered Landscape of Contemporary Chinese Art.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 20, 2 (Dec. 2018): 115-36,

Hay, Jonathan. “Zhang Hongtu/Hongtu Zhang: An Interview.” In Hay, ed., Boundaries in China. London: Reaktion Books, 1994, 280-98.

—–. “Ambivalent Icons: Works by Five Chinese Artists Based in the United States.” Orientations 23, 7 (July 1992): 37-43.

Ho, Louis. “Yue Minjun: Iconographies of Repetition.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 2 (Fall 2013):

Hou, Hanru. “Beyond the Cynical.” Art and Asia Pacific 3, 1 (1996).

—–. “Towards an ‘Un-Unofficial Art’: De-ideologicalisation of China’s Contemporary Art in the 1990s.” Third Text 34 (Spring 1996): 37-52.

—–. “Ambivalent Witnesses: Art’s Evolution in China.” Flash Art 61 (Nov.-Dec. 1996): 61-64.

—–. “Beyond the Cynical: China Avant-Garde in the 1990’s.” ART Asia Pacific 3, 1 (1996): 42-51.

—–, curator. Between the Sky and the Earth: Five Contemporary Chinese Artists around the World. HK: University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong, 1998.

—–. “Departure Lounge Art: Chinese Artists Abroad.” Art and Asia Pacific 1, 2 (April 1994): 36-41.

—–. “Entropy; Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. London: Kala Press, 1994, 79-88.

—–, curator. Out of the Center (catalog). Pori, Finland: Porin Tadeimuseo, 1994.

—–. “Le Plaisir du Texte: Zen and the Art of Contemporary China.” Flash Art 26, 173 (Nov-Dec 1993): 64-65.

—–. Uncertain Pleasure: Chinese Artists in the 1990’s. Vancouver and Hong Kong: Art Beãtus, 1997.

—– and Gao Minglu. “Strategies of Survival in the Third Space: A Conversation on the Situation of Overseas Chinese Artists in the 1990s.” In Gao Minglu, ed. Inside Out: New Chinese Art (catalog). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

—– and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds. Cities on the Move (catalog). Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997.

Hsu, Ching-hsuan. Hsing hsing shih nien, 1989 (The stars: 10 years). HK, Taipei, NY: Han ya hs?an 2, Hanart Gallery, 1989.

Huang, Yiju. “Ghostly Vision: Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘Bloodline: The Big Family.'” In Huang, Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 75-99.

Huot, Claire. “Anything but Landscapes: The Dazzling Bodies of China’s Avant-Garde Art.” In Robert Benewick and Stephanie Donald, eds. Belief in China: Art and Politics, Deiteis and Mortality. Brighton, Essex: Green Center for Non-Western Art and Culture at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, 1996, 53-68.

—–. “China’s Avant-Garde Art: Differences in the Family.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 126-53.

Inner Visions: Avant-Garde Art in China. Documentary film produced by Lydia Chen. NY: Filmakers Library, 1994.

Kaldis, Nick. “Trans-boundary Experiences: A Conversation between Xu Bing and Nick Kaldis.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (June 2007): 76-93.

Koppel-Yang, Martina. Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989: A Semiotic Analysis. HK: Timezone 8, 2003.

Laing, Ellen. “Is There Post-Modern Art in the People’s Republic of China?” In John Clark ed., Modernity in Asian Art. Sydney:Wild Peony, 1993, 207-21.

Leduc, Marie. Dissidence: The Rise of Chinese Contemporary Art in the West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

[Abstract: How the valorization of artistic and political dissidence has contributed to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West.]

Lee, Benjamin. “Going Public.” Public Culture 5 (1993): 165-78 [on Xu Bing].

Li, Xianting. “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art.” China News Art, Post-1989. HK: Hanart T Z Gallery, 1993.

—–. “The Pluralistic Look of Chinese Contemporary Art Since the Mid-Nineties.” Chinese Type Contemporary Art 2, 2 (1999).

Li, Yiqing. “Abstract Painting: The Formation of a New Aesthetics in Post-Mao China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2  (Fall 2021): 49-97.

Lin, Xiaoping. Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.

[Abstract: affords a deep study of Chinese avant-garde art and independent cinema from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Informed by the author’s experience in Beijing and New York—global cities with extensive access to an emergent transnational Chinese visual culture—this work situates selected artworks and films in the context of Chinese nationalism and post-socialism and against the background of the capitalist globalization that has so radically affected contemporary China. It juxtaposes and compares avant-garde artists and independent filmmakers from a number of intertwined perspectives, particularly in their shared avant-garde postures and perceptions.]

Liu, Petrus and Lisa Rofel. “An Interview with Shi Tou.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 409-16.

Liu Xiaodong and His Time. San Francisco: Limn Gallery, 2002. [contains several short articles and a catalogue of Liu’s paintings]

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. “Art, Culture, and Cultural Criticism in Post-New China.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 111-33. [Project Muse link]

Ma, Yan. A Reader Response Analysis of A Book from the Sky–A Postmodern Educational Enterprise. Ph.D. diss. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1993.

—–. “Reader Response Theory: An Analysis of a Work of Chines Postmodern Art.” Journal of Visual Literacy 15, 1 (1995): 39-72.

Manfredi, Paul. “Modernist Literati: Abstract Art of Contemporary Chinese Poets.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 336-64.

The Many Faces of Mao (spoof images of Mao)

Marinelli, Maurizio. “Civilising the Citizens: Political Slogans and the Right to the City.” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, 3 (2012).

[Abstract: This paper focuses on the artwork of Chinese artist Zhang Dali entitled ‘The Slogan Series.’ Zhang uses a particular technique of text and image juxtaposition to engage with the civic political slogans that were plastered on the streets of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games. His ‘Slogan Series’ consists of large paintings: each of them reproduces the human face of a common person, either in red and white or in black and white, which is literally covered by repeated civic political slogans. The paper investigates the origin of Zhang’s artwork, shedding light on the aesthetics and socio-political implications of a double juxtaposition: in the government’s ‘new citizenship’ campaign, the slogans are juxtaposed with the cityscape, while in Zhang Dali’s work the slogans are imposed on the common people’s faces.]

Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990. Asia Arts Archive, Hong Kong.

Moner, Laia Manonelles. “Yugong yishan: Myth, Utopia and Community in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art.” China Perspectives 1 (2021): 41-48.

Mong, Adrienne. “Courting Ambiguity: Chinese Artist Xu Bing’s Inventive ‘Word Play.'” Persimmon 3, 1 (Spring 2002): 76-80.

Munroe, Alexandra, with Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru. Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. New York: Guggenheim, 2017.

Nuridsany, Michel. China Art Now. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.

Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Noth, Jochen. “Beijing 1979-1992: Frequent Changes of Scene.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 6-13.

O’Dea, Madeleine. The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China. New York: Pegasus Books, 2018.

[Abstract: The riveting story of China’s rise from economic ruin to global giant in the past four decades is illuminated by another, equally fascinating, narrative beneath its surface―the story of the country’s emerging artistic avant-garde and the Chinese people’s ongoing struggle for freedom of expression.  By following the stories of nine contemporary Chinese artists, The Phoenix Years shows how China’s rise unleashed creativity, thwarted hopes, and sparked tensions between the individual and the state that continue to this day. It relates the heady years of hope and creativity in the 1980s, which ended in the disaster of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Following that tragedy comes China’s meteoric economic rise, and the opportunities that emerged alongside the difficult compromises artists and others have to make to be citizens in modern China. Foreign correspondent O’Dea has been an eyewitness for over thirty years to the rise of China, the explosion of its contemporary art and cultural scene, and the long, ongoing struggle for free expression. The stories of these artists and their art mirror the history of their country.]

Qian, Zhijian. “Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liumang, and Performance Art in China.” Art Journal 58, 2 (Summer 1999): 60-81.

Raddock, David M. “Beyond Mao and Tiananmen: China’s Emerging Avant-Garde.” New Art Examiner (Feb-March 1995).

The Revolution Continues: New Art from China. Ed. The Saatchi Gallery. Rizzoli, 2007.

Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s. Boulder: Westview, 1998.

Saatchi Gallery. The Revolution Continues: New Art from China. Rizzolli, 2008.

Shen, Kuiyi. “Playing the Game of Word, Icon and Meaning.” In Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists. Guest Curator, Kuiyi Shen. Buffalo: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2000, 1-12.

Smith, Karen. Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China. Zurich: Scalo, 2005.

[Abstract: In the early 1990s, the idea of contemporary art in China simply did not compute to a foreign audience. But in 1993, ten contemporary Chinese artists debuted at the 48th Venice Biennale. They were immediately hailed as progenitors of a Chinese “avant-garde.” Their brightly colored, Pop Art-inspired paintings played with socialist motifs, parodied Mao, and gave a visual expression to the feelings of disaffected Chinese youth. They were everything western audiences expected of contemporary art from the People’s Republic of China. But a number of critics were rather guarded in their opinions. Was this another flash-in-the-pan phenomenon just as Soviet art had been in the 1980s? Could a Chinese avant-garde maintain a distinct identity of its own and shake off its penchant for imitation? The answer is clearly “yes.”The emergence of a market for their art transformed the lives of these avant-garde pioneers from rags to riches, from outcast to hero, from social pariah to cutting-edge cool in a Chinese society adapting to a new era. They did not change but China has changed. The ideology they once had to fight now propagates a cultural climate of laissez-faire that is tantamount to encouragement. Set against China’s official program of modernization, Nine Lives paints a compelling picture of artists working beyond the pale of official culture, who started a new cultural revolution that is sweeping China today.]

Smith, Karen, Shanchen Yan, and Charles Merewether, eds. Wang Guangyi. HK: Timezone 8 Limited, 2002.

Stone, Charles. “Xu Bing and the Printed Word.” Public Culture 6, 2 (Winter 1994).

Sang, Ye. “Fringe-Dwellers: Down and Out in the Yuan Ming Yuan Artists’ Village.” Tr. Geremie Barme. Art AsiaPacific 15 (June 1997).

Silbergeld, Jerome. “Zhang Hongtu’s Alternative History of Painting.” In Zhang Hongtu: An On-Going Painting Project. NY: On-going Publications, 2000.

Strassberg, Richard I. Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China. Pasedena, CA: Pacific Art Museum, 1987.

—–, ed. “I Don’t Wang to Play Cards with Cezanne” and Other Works: Selections from the Chinese “New Wave” and “Avant-Garde of the Eighties. Pasedena, CA: Pacific Art Museum, 1991.

Tang, Di. “No Compromise.” [article on Wang Wangwang]. Beijing Scene 3, 5 (1997).

Tang Xiaobing. Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde; The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkley: University of California Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by James Flath]

—–. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

Taylor, Janelle S. “Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing’s Art and Its Publics.” Public Culture 5 (1993): 317-27.

Vine, Richard. New China, New Art. NY: Prestel, 2008.

Visser, Robin. “Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 39 (May 2004): 277-310. [On Qiu Huadong’s Chengshi zhanche (City Tank), Wang Xiaoshuai’s Jidu hanleng (Frozen), and experimental art.] Rpt. in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 223-56.

Wang, Meiqin. “Officializing the Unofficial: Presenting New Chinese Art to the World.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 102-40.

—–. “To Demolish: Thinking About Urbanization in China Through a Collaborative Art Project in the Countryside.” Yishu–Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, 4 (2012): 30–42.

—–. Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art. NY: Routledge, 2016.

[Abstract: This book explores the relationship between the ongoing urbanization in China and the production of contemporary Chinese art since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wang provides a detailed analysis of artworks and methodologies of art-making from eight contemporary artists who employ a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. She also sheds light on the relationship between these artists and their sociocultural origins, investigating their provocative responses to various processes and problems brought about by Chinese urbanization. With this urbanization comes a fundamental shift of the philosophical and aesthetic foundations in the practice of Chinese art: from a strong affiliation with nature and countryside to one that is complexly associated with the city and the urban world. Contents:1. The Art for the City: Zhong Biao 2. From the Countryside to the City 3. De/Constructing Urbanization: Weng Fen, Chen Qiulin, and Han Bing 4. From Landscape to Urbanscape: Yan Yongliang 5. Disappearing Bodies: Liu Bolin 6. The Street at Day and Night: Wang Fenghua and Liu Xintao 7. Conclusion]

Wang, Peggy. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

[Abstract: A revelatory reclaiming of five iconic Chinese artists and their place in art history. During the 1980s and 1990s, a group of Chinese artists (Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Peili, and Lin Tianmiao) ascended to new heights of international renown. Peggy Wang offers a corrective to previous appraisals, demonstrating how their works address fundamental questions about the forms, meanings, and possibilities of art.]

Wang, Peggy and Wu Hung, eds. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.

[Abstract: brings together carefully selected primary texts in English translation. Arranged in chronological order, the texts guide readers through the development of avant-garde Chinese art from 1976 until 2006. Because experimental Chinese art emerged as a domestic phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s and its subsequent development has been closely related to China’s social and economical transformation, this volume focuses on art from mainland China. At the same time, it encompasses the activities of mainland artists residing overseas, since artists who emigrated in the 1980s and 1990s were often key participants in the early avant-garde movements and have continued to interact with the mainland art world. The primary documents include the manifestos of avant-garde groups, prefaces to important exhibitions, writings by representative artists, important critical and analytical essays, and even some official documents. Each chapter and section begins with a concise preface explaining the significance of the texts and providing the necessary historical background; the volume includes a timeline summarizing important art phenomena and related political events.]

Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne. “Contextualizing Cai Guo-Qiang.” In special issue on Visualizing Asian Modernity, Kontur no. 20 (2010).

Welland, Sasha Su-Ling. Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

[Abstract: During the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the censorious attitude that characterized China’s post-1989 official response to contemporary art gave way to a new market-driven, culture industry valuation of art. Experimental artists who once struggled against state regulation of artistic expression found themselves being courted to advance China’s international image. In Experimental Beijing Sasha Su-Ling Welland examines the interlocking power dynamics in this transformational moment and rapid rise of Chinese contemporary art into a global phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and experience as a videographer and curator, Welland analyzes encounters between artists, curators, officials, and urban planners as they negotiated the social role of art and built new cultural institutions. Focusing on the contradictions and exclusions that emerged, Welland traces the complex gender politics involved and shows that feminist forms of art practice hold the potential to reshape consciousness, produce a nonnormative history of Chinese contemporary art, and imagine other, more just worlds.]

Wen, Liao. “China’s Feminist Values and Art.” Contemporary Art Chinese Type 1, 2 (Jan. 1998).

Wu Shanzhuan. Red Humour International. HK: Asia Art Archive, 2005.

Wu, Hung: “A ‘Ghost Rebellion’: Notes on Xu Bing’s ‘Nonsense Writing’ and Other Works.” Public Culture 6, 2 (Winter 1994).

—–. Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 1999.

—–. “A Chinese Dream by Wang Jin.” In Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization. Durham: Duke UP, 2001, 114-130.

—–. Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Art and Art Exhibition. Beijing: Timezone 8, 2007.

Wu, Shanzhua. Red Humour International. HK: Asia Art Archive, 2005.

Xiao, Lu. Dialogue. Tr. Archibald McKenzie. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: This is an unusual memoir of a contemporary Chinese artist who played a conspicuous role in the avant-garde cultural scene during the tumultuous early months of 1989.]

Zhang, Qing. “Shanghai Modern and the Art of the 21st Century.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 350-67.

Zhu, Qi. “Why Has Art Become So Pretty of Late?” Contemporary Art Chinese Type 2, 3 (June 1999).

—–. “Pretty and Injured: The Contemporary Art of China in the Late 1990s.” Century On-line: China Art Networks.

—–. Exhibiting Experimental Art in China. Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 2000.

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Propaganda Art

Art in the Cultural Revolution. Documentary Film, dir. by Kubert Leung. NY: The Cinema Guild, 1997.

Artifacts from the Cultural Revolution (Cultural Bridge Productions)

Benewick, Robert and Stephanie Donald. “Badgering the People: Mao Badges, a Retrospective, 1949-1995.” In Benewick and Donald, eds., Belief in China: Art and Politics, Deities and Mortality. Brighton, England: Royal Pavilion/Green Foundation, 1996, 28-39.

Bishop, Bill. “Badges of Chairman Mao Zedong.”

Century Art History Study–Cultural Revolution Art (Shiji yishu shi yanjiu).

The Chairman Smiles: Chinese Posters (International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands) [the Chinese section contains a sizable number of posters, many from the Paint in Red exhibit, from early perid, Cultural Revolution, and period of modernization]

Chen, Xiaomei. “Growing Up with Posters during the Cultural Revolution: Gendered Body, Cross-dressing and Androgyny in Maoist China.” In Stephanie Donald and Harriet Evan, eds., Picturing Power in China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

China Posters On-line (University of Westminster)

Chinese Pop Posters (Olivier Laude)

Chinese Pamplets [Political communication and mass education in the early period of the People’s Republic of China. Mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. These cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards and magazines, on topics such as foreign threats to Chinese security, Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural production, and marriage reform, were produced by both Kuomintang (Nationalist) and Gongchantang (Communist) supporters.]

Chinese Posters of Reform and Revolution (University of Westminster, UK)

Chiu, Melissa. Art and China’s Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. [Inconjunction with Asia Society exhibition]

CulturArtwork (Cultural Revolution posters and poetry prepared by Todd Cornell).

Cultural Revolution Art (Wenge meishu) [part of the Century Art History Study site]

Denton, Kirk A. “Visual Memory and the Construction of a Revolutionary Past: Paintings from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 203-35.

Donald, Stephanie and Harriet Evans, eds. Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution. Boulder, Co.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Du, Daisy Yan. “Socialist Modernity in the Wasteland: Changing Representations of the Female Tractor Driver in China, 1949–1964.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 1  (Spring 2017): 55-94.

Dutton, Michael. “The Badge as Biography.” In Streetlife China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, 242-71.

The East is Red (commercial website with lots of images of Cultural Revolution memorabilia)

Ferry, Megan M. “China as Utopia: Visions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Latin America.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 236-68.

Flath, James. ““It’s a Wonderful Life”: Nianhua and Yuefenpai at the Dawn of the People’s Republic.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2 (Fall 2004): 123-59.

Fraser, Stewart, ed. 100 Great Chinese Posters. NY: Images Graphique, 1977.

Golomstock, Igor. Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China. London: Collins Harvell, 1990.

Gu Zhenqing Collection of Cultural Revolution Painting Posters Chinese Art Contemporary 2, 5 (1999).

Ho, Christine I. Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.

[Abstract: 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.]

Hubbert, Jennifer. “(Re)collecting Mao: Memory and Fetish in Contemporary China.” American Ethnologist 33, 2 (May 2006): 145-61.

[Abstract: In contemporary China, compulsive collecting has become a method of accumulating both fiscal reward and cultural capital. In this article, I consider how the collecting practices of Mao-badge aficionados provide insight into the debates over value and subjectivity in contemporary, late-socialist China. By viewing Mao badges as fetishes, I accentuate the uneasy tensions between various theories of the fetish and call into question the theoretical divide between the postulated ahistorical, “private” fetish and its “public” commodity counterpart, suggesting that private, psychological drama is intimately linked to public commodity exchange. My analysis reveals how objects mediate the conflicts of meaning between different historical eras and play a central role in negotiating identities and subjectivities.]

Hung, Chang-tai. “Repainting China: New Year Prints (Nianhua) and Peasant Resistance in the Early Years of the People?s Republic.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000): 770-810.

—–. “Revolutionary History in Stone: The Making of a Chinese National Monument.” China Quaterly 166 (June 2001): 457-73. [pdf version on the China Quarterly website]

—–. “Oil Paintings and Politics: Weaving a Heroic Tale of the Chinese Revolution.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (4) (Oct. 2007): 783-814.

Jia, Jia. “The Reconstruction of a Political Icon: Shi Lu’s Painting Fighting in Northern Shaanxi.” Qualitative Inquiry 11, 4 (2005): 535-548.

[Abstract: As an instance of semiotic interpretation of political art, this article rereads a painting created during the 1950s by Shi Lu that depicts the Chinese Communist leader, Mao Zedong. The author identifies the artist’s visual references to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the embodied traditional values, differentiates the work from the popular revolutionary art style of the same age, and argues that this act of referencing problematizes the dominant ideology in a politically highly charged historical context by reconstructing the commonly depicted political icon Mao through dislocated style and scale. The interpretation demonstrates how signifiers both in the forms of text and memory can interfere with current cultural drive and rename the signified through subtle variations.]

Landsberger, Stefan R. “The Future Visualized: Chinese Propaganda Art in the Modernization Era.” China Information 8, 4 (1994): 15-41.

—–. Chinese Propaganda Posters — From Revolution to Modernization. Armonk; M.E. Sharpe 1996.

—–. Paint it Red: Fifty Years of Propaganda Posters. Groningen: Groninger Museum, 1998.

—–. Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Posters Page

—–. “Learning by What Example? Educational Propaganda in Twenty-first-Century China.” Critical Asian Studies 33, 4 (Dec. 2001).

—–. “Contextualising (Propaganda) Posters.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 379-406.

—- and Hanno Lecher. Books in Chinese Propaganda Posters: Objects of Veneration, Subjects of Destruction. An exhibition at the Libraries of the Sinological Institute, Leiden University 7 December 2004 – 30 June 2005.

—–. Chineseposters.net [Chinese Posters, 1937-present: Propaganda, Politics, History]

Leese, Daniel. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[Abstract: Although there have been many books that have explored Mao’s posthumous legacy, none has scrutinized the massive worship that was fostered around him at the height of his powers during the Cultural Revolution. This book is the first to do so. By analyzing secret archival documents, Daniel Leese traces the history of the cult within the Communist Party and at the grassroots level. The Party leadership’s original intention was to develop a prominent brand symbol, which would compete with the nationalists’ elevation of Chiang Kai-shek. However, they did not anticipate that Mao would use this symbolic power to mobilize Chinese youth to rebel against party bureaucracy itself. The result was anarchy, and when the army was called in, it relied on mandatory rituals of worship such as daily reading of the Little Red Book, to restore order. Such fascinating detail sheds light not only on the personality cult of Mao, but also on hero-worship in other traditions.]

The Mao Era in Objects

[Project leader Dr Jennifer Altehenger (University of Oxford): Objects were of crucial importance during the Mao Era. Think of the famous Little Red Book, propaganda posters or colorful Mao badges. These have become synonymous with life in China after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Besides such well-known examples, there were of course many more objects that profoundly shaped how people experienced the first three decades of Chinese Communist Party governance, including enamel washbasins, furniture, radios, wristwatches, bicycles, money, textiles, many different kinds of print publications, and much more…]

MaoPost.com [hundreds of PRC propaganda posters online; some for sale]

Maozhang.net [Mao Badges site: “Extending the English language discussion and documentation of Maozhang; mainly for collectors and scholars, but everyone is welcome Maozhang here includes badges bearing a likeness of Chairman Mao (毛泽东像章) and other Cultural Revolution badges (文革章). Enthusiastically celebrate the creativity of the workers, soldiers, cadres, and artists who enriched the world with billions of bright, red, and shiny objects”]

McClaren, Anne. “The Educated Youth Return: The Poster Campaign in Shanghai from November 1978 to March 1979.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 2 (July 1979): 1-20.

Michael Wolf Poster Collection.

Min, Anchee, Duo Duo, and Stefan R.Landsberger, eds. Chinese Propaganda Posters. Koln: Taschen, 2003.

Paintings Collected by the Museum of Chinese Revolution. Cultural Relics Pub. House, 1991.

Pang, Laikwan. “The Visual Representation of the Barefoot Doctor: Between Medical Policy and Political Struggles.” positions: asia critique 22, 4 (Fall 2014): 836-75.

—–. “The Dialectics of Mao’s Images: Monumentalism, Circulations and Power Effects.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 407-36.

—–. “Making Sense of Labor: Works of Art and Arts of Work in China’s Great Leap Forward.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 151-73.

Picturing Power: Posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Bloomington, Indiana University, August 23-October 3, 1999) and Picturing Power: Posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (The Ohio State University, October 6-22).

Powell, Patricia and Joseph Wong. “Propaganda Posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” The Historian 59, 4 (Summer 1997): 776-93.

Pozzi, Laura.”‘Chinese Children Rise Up!’: Representations of Children in the Work of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps during the Second Sino-Japanese War.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 13 (Dec. 2014).

[Abstract: During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945), children were a major subject of propaganda images. Children had become significant figures in China when May Fourth intellectuals, influenced by evolutionary thinking, deemed “the child” as a central figure for the modernization of the country. Consequently, during the war, cartoonists employed already-established representations of children for propagandistic purposes. By analyzing images published by members of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps in the wartime magazine Resistance Cartoons, this article shows how portrayals of children fulfilled symbolic as well as normative functions. These images provide us with information about the symbolic power of representations of children, and about authorities’ expectations of China’s youngest citizens. However, cartoonists also created images undermining the heroic rhetoric often attached to representations of children, especially after the dismissal of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps in 1940. This was the case with cartoonist Zhang Leping’s (1910–1992) sketches of “Zhuji after the Devastation,” which revealed the discrepancies between propagandistic representations and children’s everyday life in wartime China.]

“Rent Collection Courtyard”: Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt. Beijing: FLP, 1970.

Schrift, Melissa. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001.

Shen, Kuiyi. “Publishing Posters Before the Cultural Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 177-202.

Tang Xiaobing. Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde; The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkley: University of California Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by James Flath]

—–. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

Yu, Li. Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Chinese Propaganda Posters, 1957-1983. MCLC Resource Center Publication (2000).

Visual Art as Cultural Memory in Modern China: Interdisciplinary Symposium (The Ohio State University; Oct 15-16, Oct 22-23)

Wang Hanwen. The Best of Chinese Revolutionary Art Works. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Fine Arts, 1994.

Wang, Helen. Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution. London: British Museum Press, 2008.

Wang, Mingxian. “From Street Art to Exhibition Art: The Art of the Red Guard During the Cultural Revolution.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 2 (Fall 2002): 44-50.

Wang, Yang. “Envisioning the Third World: Modern Art and Diplomacy in Maoist China.” ARTMargins 8, 2 (June 2019): 31-54.

[Abstract: In the mid-1950s, China conducted robust cultural exchange with the Third World in tandem with a parallel political program to influence non-aligned nations in contestation to the Soviet Union and Western powers. This article examines this underrecognized facet of Maoist-era art through the international engagements of two Xi’an artists, Shi Lu (1919–1982) and Zhao Wangyun (1907–1977), who traveled to India and Egypt as cultural attaché of the Chinese state. By tracing the travels of the two artists in light of their artistic and theoretical formulations, this article argues that contact with decolonizing spheres of the Third World inspired Chinese artists to embrace forms of indigenous Chinese art like ink painting in rejection of Euro-American modernism. In solidarity with other non-Western art spheres that developed similar nativist responses to the hegemony of Western modernism, Chinese artists belonged to a global postwar movement to assert political independence through artistic autonomy and national style.]

—–. “Good Girls and the Good Earth: Shi Lu’s Peasant Women and Socialist Allegory in the Early PRC.” China Perspectives 4 (2021): 61-71.

Yan, Shanchen. “Political Inspiration in Art Production: On Three Oil Paintings Depicting Mao Zedong During the Cultural Revolution.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 2 (Fall 2002): 51-60.

Zhang Youyun 张幼云. Nisu “Shouzu yuan” de chenfu 泥塑《收租院》的沉浮 (The ups and downs of the clay sculpture Rent Collection Courtyard). Shanghai renmin meishu, 2005.

Zheng, Shengtian. “Brushes are Weapons: Art Schools and Artists During the Cultural Revolution.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 2 (Fall 2002): 61-65.

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Popular and Folk Art

Dal Lago, Francesca. “Crossed Legs in 1930s Shanghai: How ‘Modern’ the Modern Woman?” East Asian History 19 (June 2000): 103-44.

Deco Orient: Vintage Chinese Posters [excellent site; contains short essays on the history of Chinese posters, with an emphasis on Republican period calendar posters, as well as galleries of posters; galleries of the following artists: Ni Gengye, Hu Boxiang, Jin Meisheng, Zhang Mantuo, Zhiying Studio, Zhou Baisheng, Wu Zhili, Liang Dingming, Chen Shiqing, Xie Zhiguang, Ding Yunxian, Ting Kang, Tang Mingsheng, Lin Da, Yuan Xiutang, and others]

Dong, Yue. “Yangliuqing New Year’s Picture: The Fortunes of a Folk Tradition.” In James Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer, eds. Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-Present. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.

Flath, James A. Printing Culture in Rural North China. Ph.D. diss. Vancouver: The University of British Columbia, 2000.

—–. The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art and History in Rural North China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.

—–. “‘It’s a Wonderful Life’: Nianhua and Yuefenpai at the Dawn of the People’s Republic.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2 (Fall 2004): 123-59.

—–. “The Chinese Railroad View: Transportation Themes in Popular Print, 1873-1915.” Cultural Critique 58 (Fall 2004): 168-190.

Hung, Chang-tai. “Repainting China: New Year Prints (Nianhua) and Peasant Resistance in the Early Years of the People?s Republic.” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 42 (2000): 770-810.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Art Deco and Modernist Art in the Chinese Calendar Posters: Initial Identificaitons.” In Jason C. Kuo, ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s. Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming.

—–. “Reform, Revolutionary, Political and Resistance Themes in Chinese Popular Prints, 1900-1940.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 123-76.

—–. Art and Aesthetics in Chinese Popular Prints: Selections from the Muban Foundation Collection. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.

—–. Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Lee, Jack S. C. “A Study of Calendar Posters Paintings in the Early Twentieth Century Hong Kong and Canton.” Beside. HK: The Workshop: Hong Kong Art History Research Society, forthcoming.

Lufkin, Felicity. A Choice of Tradition: Folk Art in Modern China, 1930–1945. Ph. D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, 2001.

—–. Folk Art and Modern Culture in Republican China. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019.

Lust, John. Chinese Popular Prints. Leiden: Brill, 1996.

McIntyre, Tanya. Chinese New Year Pictures: The Process of Modernization, 1842-1942. Ph.D. diss. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1997.

—–. “Images of Women in Popular Prints.” In Antonia Finnane and Anne McClaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 58-80.

Ng, Chun Bong, et al., eds. Chinese Women and Modernity: Calendar Posters of the 1910s-1930s. HK: Commercial Press, 1995.

Nianhua Gallery (Prepared by James Flath, University of Western Ontario)

Reed, Christopher A. “Re/Collecting the Sources: Shanghai’s Dianshizhai Pictorial and Its Place in Historical Memories, 1884-1949.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 44-72.

Rudova, Maria. Chinese Popular Prints. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1988. (text in English. Prints are from V.M. Alekseev’s collection)

Wan, Margaret B. Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020.

[Abstract: provides a richly textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Drum ballad texts (guci) evoke one of the most popular performance traditions of their day, a practice that flourished in North China. Study of these narratives opens up surprising new perspectives on vital topics in Chinese literature and history: the creation of regional cultural identities and their relation to a central “Chinese culture”; the relationship between oral and written cultures; the transmission of legal knowledge and popular ideals of justice; and the impact of the changing technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the reproduction and dissemination of popular texts.]

Wang Shucun 王树村, ed. 1959. Yangliuqing nianhua ziliao ji 杨柳青年画资料集 (A collection of Yangliuqing new year prints). Beijing: Renmin meishu, 1959.

Wang, Shucun. Ancient Chinese Woodblock New Year Prints. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985.

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Woodcuts/Prints

Barker, David. Traditional Techniques in Contemporary Chinese Printmaking. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.

Chang, Tsung-zung. “Images of Modern Chinese.” Catalog of Sweet Briar College Art Gallery exhibition, Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints (Aug to Dec. 2000).

Farrer, Anne, ed. Chinese Printmaking Today: Woodblock Printing in China, 1980-2000. London: British Library, 2003.

Flath, James. “The Chinese Railroad View: Transportation Themes in Popular Print, 1873-1915.” Cultural Critique 58 (2004): 168-90. [Project Muse link]

Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints: From the Communist Revolution to the Open Door Policy and Beyond, 1945-1998. Exhibition (University Art Gallery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA; Sept. 24-Dec 3. 1999)

Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints: From the Communist Revolution to the Open Door Policy and Beyond, 1945-1998. Catalog of Sweet Briar College Art Gallery exhibition, Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints (Aug to Dec. 2000). [excellent site, with articles, an introductory slide show, and the entire exhibition online]

He, Weimin and Shelagh Vainker, eds., Chinese Prints 1950-2008 in the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2007.

Homann, Joachim, ed., Woodcuts in Modern China, 1937-2008: Towards a Universal Pictorial Language. Hamilton, NY: Picker Art Gallery/Colgate University, 2009.

Hong, Chang-tai. “Two Images of Socialism: Woodcuts in Chinese Communist Politics.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (January 1997): 34-60.

Hwang, Yin, ed. The Art of Contemporary Chinese Woodcuts: A Portfolio Assembled by Christer von der Burg. London: The Muban Foundation, 2003.

Li, Hua. Chinese Woodcuts. Tr. Zuo Boyang. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1995.

The Muban Educational Trust

[The Trust a small, non-profit making body based in Putney, London. It is dedicated to the preservation, conservation and development of the extensive collection of Chinese woodcut prints assembled by Christer von der Burg and the late Verena Bolinder-Müller during the late 1990s. The Trust is administered by Haiyao Zheng, David Barker and Anne Farrer, three individuals with broad interests in the field supported and advised by a board of Trustees. Our current major project is the completion of a pictorial and biographical archive of the collection which will assist access to the collection by both specialists and non-specialists alike.]

Shang, Hui. “Chinese Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century: New Horizons and Energies.” In Xiaobing Tang, eds., Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinees Woodblock Prints. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2011., 18-21.

Shen, Kuiyi. “The Modernist Woodcut Movement in 1930s China.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 262-89.

Smedley, Agnes. The Chinese Woodcut: A New Art Form for the 400 Million. NY: Touchstone Press, 1948.

Sun, Shirley Hsiao-ling. Lu Hsun and the Chinese Woodcut Movement: 1929-1935. Ph. D. diss. Stanford University, 1974.

—–. Modern Chinese Woodcuts. San Francisco: Chinese Culture Foundation, 1979.

Tang, Xiaobing. “Echoes of Roar, China! On Vision and Voice in Modern Chinese Art.” positions 14, 2 (Fall 2006): 467-94.

Tang Xiaobing. Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde; The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkley: University of California Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by James Flath]

—–. “Introduction: Continual Experimentation in Modern Chinese Printmaking.” In Tang, ed., Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinees Woodblock Prints. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2011, 8-17.

—–, ed. Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinees Woodblock Prints. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2011.

—–. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

—–. “1936, October: Resonances of a Visual Image in the Early Twentieth Century.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 426-32.

Wachs, Iris. “Themes, Styles, and the Historical Backgroun.” Catalog of Sweet Briar College Art Gallery exhibition, Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints (Aug to Dec. 2000).

Wachs, Iris and Tsung-zung Chang. “Introduction.” Catalog of Sweet Briar College Art Gallery exhibition, Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints (Aug to Dec. 2000).

—–, eds. Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints: From the Communist Revolution to the Open-Door Policy and Beyond, 1945-1998. Ein Harod, Israel: The Museum of Ein Harod, 1999.

Xiao, Tie. “Frans Masereel, Wen Tao, and Woodcut Lianhuanhua in 1930s Shanghai.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 2 (2013).

Yan, Shancun. “History of the Modern Chinese Print.” Trs. Iris Wachs, Li Youchun, and Han Guotung. Catalog of Sweet Briar College Art Gallery exhibition, Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints(Aug to Dec. 2000).

Zhongguo banhua guan (China prints gallery). [“Chinese Prints Gallery is established by Taiwan Hoke International Art Collection. It lies beside the beautiful West Lake of Hangzhou. We meet a group of friends interested in woodblock printings, trying to popularize Chinese prints.”]

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Cartoons/Comics

Altehenger, Jennifer. “A Socialist Satire: Manhua Magazine and Political Cartoon Production in the PRC, 1950–1960.” Frontiers of History in China 8, 1 (2013): 78–103.

Andrews, Julia F. “Literature in Line: Picture Stories in the People’s Republic of China.” Inks: Comic and Comic Art Studies 4, 3 (Nov. 1997): 17-32.

Bader, A.L. “China’s New Weapon: Caricature.” The American Scholar 10 (1941): 228-240.

Barme, Geremie. An Artist Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1978). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Bauer, Wolfgang. Chinesische Comics: Gespenster, M?rder, Klassenfeinde. D?sseldorf : E. Diederichs, 1976.

Bevan, Paul. A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938. Leiden: Brill, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by John A. Crespi]

[Abstract: Paul Bevan explores how the cartoon (manhua) emerged from its place in the Chinese modern art world to become a propaganda tool in the hands of left-wing artists. The artists involved in what was largely a transcultural phenomenon were an eclectic group working in the areas of fashion and commercial art and design. The book demonstrates that during the build up to all-out war the cartoon was not only important in the sphere of Shanghai popular culture in the eyes of the publishers and readers of pictorial magazines but that it occupied a central place in the primary discourse of Chinese modern art history.]

Bi, Keguan 毕克官. “On Feng Zikai’s Cartoons.” Tr. Wang Mingjie. Chinese Literature 8, 2 (1981): 73-80.

—–. Zhongguo manhua shihua 中国漫画史话 (Talks on the history of Chinese cartoons). Jinan: Shandong renmin, 1982.

—– and Huang Yuanlin 黄远林. Zhongguo manhua shi 中国漫画史 (History of Chinese cartoons). Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1986.

CartoonWin.com (Katong zhi chuang, Shanghai). [this wonderful site–in Chinese–contains full versions of serial picture storybooks (lianhuanhua); there are adaptations of traditional novels, as wells as of modern fiction; one section, Xiandai xiju lianhuanhua (Serial picture stories of modern revolutionary plays) has complete versions of White Haired Girl, Shajiabang, Red Lantern, Red Detachment of Women, Surprise Attack on the White Tiger Regiment, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, War on the Plains, Longjian song, On the Docks]

Chang, Le-Ping. Adventures of Sanmao the Orphan. Hong Kong: Joing Publishing, 1981.

Chang, Meng-Jui. “Liu Hsing-Chin, Taiwan’s King of Comics.” Tr. Johnaton Barnard. Sinorama 26, 4 (April, 2001): 78-85.

Chen, Jack. “China’s Militant Cartoons.” Asia 45, 12 (Dec. 1945): 308-312.

Chesneaux, Jean, ed. The People’s Comic Book. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1973. [Translations of People’s Republic of China comic books dealing with historical and political themes]

Cheng, Fang. “Cartoons in China.” Witty World 1 (1987): 36-37.

Conn, Virginia L. “’Such Great Sights’: Aestheticizing the Future of Labor in Little Smarty Travels to the Future.Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 1/2 (2022): 34-45. 

[Abstract: By considering the aesthetic absence of labor in Ye Yonglie’s Little Smarty Travels to the Future, this essay considers the ways in which Ye’s illustrated children’s book calls readers to help create a utopian post-scarcity society that both patronizes physical labor as beneath the dignity of utopian citizens while also being founded on other classes of labor that it renders invisible. In particular, this essay argues that, by visualizing a future free from labor while refusing to see certain types of labor as part of that freedom, Little Smarty reproduced of some of the very ideological impositions against which it staked a claim, with lasting repercussions for contemporary political messaging.

Crespi, John. “China’s Modern Sketch–1: The Golden Era of Cartoon Art, 1934-1937.” MIT Visualizing Cultures.

—–. “China’s Modern Sketch–II: Nine Thematic Visual Narratives.” MIT Visualizing Cultures.

—–. “China’s Modern Sketch–III: Image Galleries.” MIT Visualizing Cultures.

—–. “Beyond Satire: The Pictorial Imagination of Zhang Guangyu’s 1945 Journey to the West in Cartoons.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner ed., Oxford Handbook on Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 215-244.

—–. “The Pictorial Turn and China’s Manhua Modernity, 1925-1960.” ACAS: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (Feb. 2017).

—–. Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Bevan]

[Abstract: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China’s modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations across the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation. In this compelling media history, John Crespi argues that manhua must be understood in the context of the pictorial magazines that hosted them, and in turn these magazines must be seen as important mediators of the modern urban experience. Even as times changed—from interwar-era consumerism to war-time mobilization to Mao-style propaganda—the art form adapted to stay on the cutting edge of both politics and style.]

Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Sanmao: Classic Cartoons and Chinese Popular Culture.” In John Lent, ed., Asian Popular Culture. Boulder: Westview, 1995, 139-58.

Fitzgerald, Carolyn. “Intersections between Cartoon and National Art: Ye Qianyu’s Search for the Sinicized Cartoon.” In Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms: Chinese Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937-49. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 79-123.

Harbsmeier, Christoph. The Cartoonist Feng Zikai: Social Realism with a Buddhist Face. Oslo: Universitetforlaget, 1984.

Harder, Hans and Barbara Mittler, eds.. Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2013.

Hsiao, Hsian-wen. Political Cartoons in Taiwan: Historical Profile and Content Analysis. Phd. diss. Temple U, 1995.

—–. “Releasing the Clamps: Taiwanese Cartoonists Speak Out.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 7, 1-2 (1996): 77-86.

Hua, Junwu. Satire and Humour From a Chinese Cartoonist’s Brush Selected Cartoons of Hua Junwu. [bilingual edition]. Beijing: China Today Press, 1991.

Huang, Dingru. “The Sensual Surplus of History: Cao Hanmei’s Pictorial Adaptations of Jin Ping Mei in Wartime China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 35, 1 (Summer 2023): 58-93.

Hung, Chang-tai. “War and Peace in Feng Zikai’s Wartime Cartoons.” Modern China 16 (Jan. 1990): 39-83.

—–. “The Fuming Image: Cartoons and Public Opinion in Late Republican China, 1945 to 1949.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (Jan. 1994): 122-145.

Hwang, John C. “Lien Huan Hua: Revolutionary Serial Pictures.” In Godwin Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978, 51-72.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Shanghai Manhua, the Neo-Sensationist School of Literature, and Scenes of Urban Life.” MCLC Resource Center (Sept. 2010).

Lee, Casey. “2008-2009: Chinese Media Fans Express Patriotism through Parody of Japanese Web Comic.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 912-17.

Lent, John A. “The Renaissance of Taiwan Cartoons.” Asian Culture Quarterly 21, 1 (1993): 1-17.

—–. “Comics in East Asian Countries: A Contemporary Survey.” Journal of Popular Culture 29, 1 (1995): 185-98.

—–. Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America: A Comprehensive, International Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996.

—–. “Comic Art in Asia: Historical, Literary, and Political Roots.” Special issue of Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 7, 1-2 (1996).

Lent, John A., ed. Illustrating Asia: Comic, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.

Lent, John and Ying Xu. “Timeless Humor: Liao Bingxiong and Fang Cheng, Masters of a Fading Chinese Cartoon Tradition.” Persimmon 3, 3 (Winter 2003).

Lent, John A., and Xu Ying. “Chinese Women Cartoonists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” International Journal of Comic Art 5, 2 (2003): 351-366.

—–. Comic Arts in China. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017.

Liu-Lengyel, Hongying. Chinese Cartoons As Mass Communication. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2000.

Liu-Lengyel, Hongying, and Alfonz Lengyel. “Ancient Literature and Folklore in Modern Chinese Cartoons.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 7, 1-2 (1996): 45-53.

—–. “Liao: 62 Years in the Forefront of Chinese Cartooning.” Witty World 18 (1994): 24-26.

Macdonald, Sean. “Two Texts on ‘Comics’ from China, ca. 1932: ‘In Defense of ‘Comic Strips” by Lu Xun and ‘Comic Strip Novels’ by Mao Dun.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 6, 1 (2011).

Matthewson, Amy. Cartooning China: Punch, Power, and Politics in the Victorian Era. London: Routledge, 2022.

[Abstract: This book explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the author engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness.]

Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua). Colgate University Digital Libraries Collection.

Modern Sketch III: Images Galleries. MIT Visualizing Cultures.

Ng, Wai-Ming. “Japanese Elements in Hong Kong Comics: History, Art and Industry.” International Journal of Comic Art 5, 2 (2003): 184-193.

Pozzi, Laura.”‘Chinese Children Rise Up!’: Representations of Children in the Work of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps during the Second Sino-Japanese War.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 13 (Dec. 2014).

[Abstract: During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945), children were a major subject of propaganda images. Children had become significant figures in China when May Fourth intellectuals, influenced by evolutionary thinking, deemed “the child” as a central figure for the modernization of the country. Consequently, during the war, cartoonists employed already-established representations of children for propagandistic purposes. By analyzing images published by members of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps in the wartime magazine Resistance Cartoons, this article shows how portrayals of children fulfilled symbolic as well as normative functions. These images provide us with information about the symbolic power of representations of children, and about authorities’ expectations of China’s youngest citizens. However, cartoonists also created images undermining the heroic rhetoric often attached to representations of children, especially after the dismissal of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps in 1940. This was the case with cartoonist Zhang Leping’s (1910–1992) sketches of “Zhuji after the Devastation,” which revealed the discrepancies between propagandistic representations and children’s everyday life in wartime China.]

Rea, Christopher. “‘He’ll Roast All Subjects That May Need Roasting’: Puck and Mr. Punch in Nineteenth-Century China.” In Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler, eds., Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2013, 389-422.

Scott, Rebecca. “‘Seizing the Battlefield’ in the face of ‘Guerrilla Vending’: The Struggle over the Dissemination of Lianhuanhua, 1949 to 1956.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 1  (Spring 2017): 136-171.

Shen, Kuiyi. “Comics, Picture Books, and Cartoonists in Republican China.” Inks: Comic and Comic Art Studies 4, 3 (Nov. 1997): 2-16.

—–. “Lianhuanhua and Manhua: Picture Books and Comic in Old Shanghai.” In John A. Lent, ed., Illustrating Asia: Comic, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 100-20.

Stember, Nick. “The Shanghai Manhua: A History of Early Chinese Cartoonists, 1898-1938.” MA thesis. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2015. [Available online here]

Tang, Chu-Fen. “Taiwan Millionaire Cartoonists Find Success with Marital Spats, Sayings of Sages.” Witty World 15 (1993): 12-13.

Taylor, Jeremy E. “Cartoons and Collaboration in Wartime China: The Mobilization of Chinese Cartoonists under Japanese Occupation.” Modern China 41 (2015): 406-435.

[Abstract: The work of Chinese cartoonists who published their illustrations in the popular press in occupied China from 1937 to 1945 has largely escaped the attention of scholars of both the occupation itself and the broader field of cartoon history. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing how the very nature of the occupation, together with efforts undertaken by collaborationist governments such as that of Wang Jingwei, created a context in which a particular body of artists could continue to draw. In so doing, the article raises questions about the place of “collaborationist” cartoonists in the broader development of art and propaganda in China and about the very nature of collaboration in the Chinese context.]

Wei, Shu-chu. “Redrawing the Past: Modern Presentation of Ancient Chinese Philosophy in the Cartoons of Tsai Chih-Chung.” In John A. Lent, ed., Illustrating Asia: Comic, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 153-70.

Wilkinson, Endymion, tr/ed. The People’s Comic Book: Red Women’s Detachment, Hot on the Trail, and Other Chinese Comics. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973. [also has: “San-yuan-li,” “Bravery on the Deep Blue Seas,” “Li Shuangshuang,” “Letters from the South,” and “Lei Feng”]

The World of Lily Wong (website).

Wong, Wendy. Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Wu, I-Wei. “Participating in Global Affairs: The Chinese Cartoon Monthly Shanghai Puck.” In Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler, eds., Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2013, 365-88.

Xiao, Tie. “Masereel, Lu, and the Development of Woodcut Picture Book (連環畫) in China.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 2 (2013).

Xu. Lanjun. “1935, July 28, August 1: The Child and the Future of China in the Legend of Sanmao.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 400-6.

Zhang, Yingjin. “The Corporeality of Erotic Imagination: A Study of Pictorials and Cartoons in Republican China.” In John A. Lent, ed., Illustrating Asia: Comic, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 121-36.

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Diaspora

Chui, Melissa. Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China. Charta, 2007.

Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

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Exhibitions and Catalogues

Against the Tide. New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1997.

Andrews, Julia F., and Gao Minglu. Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 1993.

Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual and Installation Art in the Nineties. Breda: Fundament Foundation, 1997.

“Art from Post-Tiananmen China.” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 83-92.

ArtTaiwan: Biennale di Venezia 1995. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995.

Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China. Eds.Waldermar A. Nielsen and Richard Strassberg. Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, 1987.

Burris, John, and Fan Dian, eds. Through an Open Door: Selections from the Robert A. Hefner III Collection of Contemporary Chinese Oil Paintings. Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1998

Cai Guo Qiang: Flying Dragon in the Heavens. Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisana Museum, 1997.

Cai Guo Qiang: From the Pan-Pacific. Iwaki City: Art Museum, 1994.

Cang, Xin. Existence in Translation. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002. [features detailed images of the artistic performances and writings about Cang’s works by Chinese curators and critics such as Zhu Qi, Huang Du and Feng Boyi]

Chang Tsong-zung. Man and Earth: Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan. Denver: Asian Art Coordinating Council, 1994.

Chang Tsong-zung et al. Quotation Marks: Contemporary Chinese Paintings. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1997.

China, 5000 Years (Modern Section) (Guggenheim Exhibition, NY, 1998)

China’s New Art, Post-1989. Hong Kong: Hanart T Z Gallery, 1993.

China: Zeitgenssische Malerei. Bonn: Kunstmuseums, 1996.

Chinese Lianhuanhua (Serial Picture Books) Exhibition

Chu-goku gendai bijustsu ’97/Chinese Contemporary Art 1997. Tokyo: Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997.

Cohn, Don J. Liu Da Hong: Paintings, 1986-1992. HK: Schoeni Fine Oriental Art, 1992.

Collection of the Expo of One Hundred Years of Portrait Painting in China (catalog, exhib. at China Art Gallery). Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 1996.

Configura 2: Dialog der Kulturen. Erfurt: Configura-Projekt, 1995.

Contemporary Chinese Painting: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China. San Francisco: Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, 1983.

Des del Pais del Centre: Avantguardes artistiques xineses. Barcelona: Centre d’Art Santa Monica, 1995.

Dushi zhongde ziran: Renwen yu wuzhi de duehua (Urban Nature: A Dialogue between Humanism and Materialism). Taipei: The Empire Art Educational Foundation, 1994.

The First Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art 96-97. HK: China Oil Painting Gallery Limited, 1996.

History of Chinese Oil Painting from Realism to Post-Modernism (catalog). HK: Schoeni Art Gallery, 1995.

I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne and Other Works: Selections from the Chinese New Wave and Avant-Garde of the Eighties. Ed. Richard Strassberg. Pasadena, 1991.

Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995.

Inside /Out: New Chinese Art. Ed. Minglu Gao. Berkeley: UCP, 1998. [Online site sponsored by Asia Society, NYC]

Masterpieces of Twentieth Century Chinese Painting (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa)

Modern Chinese Paintings: The Reyes Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Vainker, Shelagh. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1996.

New Art in China, Post 1989 (San Jose Museum of Art, Sept/Nov, 1997)

Pan Yuliang Exhibition (Henan Museum, Zhengzhou; Sept-Oct, 2002)

Post-Mao Product: New Art from China. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1992. [catalogue of a Sept-Oct 1992 exhibition].

Representing the People (1998 Exhibition Touring England)

Three Generations of Chinese Modernism: Qiu Ti, Pang Tao, Lin Yan. Ed. Sheng Tian Zheng. Vancouver: Art Beatus Gallery, 1998.

Three Installations of Xu Bing. Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, 1991.

Twentieth Century Chinese Oil Painting Exhbition (sponsored by the Chinese Oil Painting Association)

Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists. Guest Curator, Kuiyi Shen. Buffalo: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2000. [with essays dealing with Zhang Hongtu, Xu Bing, Zhang Shengtian, Gu Wenda, Hou Wenyi, Tsong Pu]

Zhang Dali: A Second History. Colbourne, ON: Bywater Brothers Editions, 2012.

[Abstract: In his book A Second History, Beijing-based artist, Zhang Dali, examines the widespread use of photographic manipulation carried out by the Chinese government during the regime of Mao Tse-tung (1949–76). Using a compare and contrast format this artist book presents a chronological sequence of original, unmodified images together with their doctored doppelgängers which were manipulated in party-run, photo labs in the 50s, 60s and 70s for the Chinese propaganda market.]