“Supply Exceeds Demand, Demand Exceeds Supply”
[ms23_021]
WINDOWS ON AN ERA
A Motley Democracy of Forms
As editor of Modern Sketch, Lu Shaofei gave his magazine one mission: “grasp the era.”The guidelines were simple. He invited contributors to send in material that “critiquesthe fine points of life’s problems, be they large or small” and “describes every level ofsociety.” Submissions were not to “promote any ideological line,” and photographs couldbe sent in as well, if they were “cartoon-like.”[1] He specifically encouraged contributorsto “explore the future, be it bright or dark,” all with the goal of “making life better.”[2] Luknew very well that his editorial strategy extended an artistic carte blanche to potentialcontributors. In effect he was asking them, in the spirit of free and uninhibited
expression, whoever and wherever they were, to present their personal angles on acomplex and anxious era. The visions they offered could, in the interests of exposing atruth, be embellished and exaggerated, and they should have a point—the sharper thebetter.
But before surveying this imagery, it bears mention that Modern Sketch published bothgraphic art and the written word. Manwen—the verbal counterpart to manhua
—comprised up to one-third of any given issue’s content. In practice manwen referredto a miscellany of jokes, one-act plays, journalistic fragments, erotic anecdotes, travelsketches, glossaries of transliterated “modern” terms, whimsical essays, satirical songs,and drolly cynical social commentary.
Detail from the Modern Sketch manwen
called “An Introduction to Some
Modernisms.”
Readers found this guide to
transliterated loan words so useful they
asked for another installment.
(detail highlighted in red)
[ms02_028]
Although we will not deal with manwen here, it is worth noting that a good deal ofwritten content in Modern Sketch aimed at promoting and developing the art ofcartooning. To this end Lu Shaofei not only wrote a column answering practicalquestions sent in by would-be contributors, but also hosted a substantial series of
translated and original articles on the history, artistic techniques, and foreign masters ofcartoon illustration.
Foreign Models: Toba Sōjō to James Thurber
China’s cartoonists were keenly interested in where their art came from and how it wasdeveloping internationally. The illustrated articles in Modern Sketch, many translatedfrom Japanese, satisfied their curiosity. Here are just a few samples of foreigncartoonists’ art as introduced through Modern Sketch:
Image by 12th-Century Japanese monk Toba Sōjō
[ms16_038] detail
Images by French caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)
[ms11_039] detail
Image by British graphic humoristand long-term Punch contributorSir John Tenniel (1820-1914)
[ms14_039] detail
Image by German dada-expressionist painter and
caricaturist GeorgeGrosz (1893-1959)
Courtesy of Shanghai Library
[ms12_038]
Image by Japanese leftist cartoonistMasamu Yanase (1900-1945) depictingthe expansionist, anti-communist PrimeMinister Tanaka Giichi’s “EquitableDistribution of Fertilizer.”
[ms31_041] detail
The Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), a caricaturist for New York VanityFair who visited Shanghai in 1934, had a direct influence on several Chinese cartoonists’style. For instance, Covarrubias’s clean, linear drawing style seems mirrored in the workof Zhang Guangyu, as can be seen when comparing certain images by the Mexican andChinese artists. To conclude that Zhang’s style is derivative of Covarrubias’s, however,ignores how both artists participated in the Modernist predilection for primitive art:Mayan in the case of the Mexican artist, Chinese—and beyond—in the case of Zhang
Guangyu.[3] Nor should one assume any stigma was attached to copying foreign models.China’s cartoonists saw imitation as a way of building a foundation for an individualstyle.[4]
The modernist predilection for primitive art can be seen in an image by aMexican artist (above, left), and mirrored by a Chinese artist in Modern Sketch
(above, right).
Miguel Covarriubias“Female Zapatista Soldiers”
[ms02_003] detail
Zhang Guangyu
detail from “Folk Love Songs” series
[ms14_035] detail
James Thurber (1894-1961) andother cartoonists of The New
Yorker were admired, too, as wasthat magazine’s smart literaryprose, which Modern Sketch’suniversity-educated, left-leaningtheorist Wang Dunqing describedas “able to convince average
petty urbanites that they are themost clever of intellectuals.”[5]
Modern Sketch contributorswere avid collectors of foreignmagazines, which flowedinto China’s treaty portsalong with the resident andvisiting foreign populations.
[ms20_037]
Hua Junwu’s series “NewAesop’s Fables” borrowsfrom The New Yorkercartoonist James Thurber’sbeast fables cartoons, butwith an explicit politicaledge, as in this fancifuldepiction of an “ArmsReduction Conference.”
Lion: When you haveclaws like mine, then we’ll
talk about peace.
[ms36_009] detail
The Geography of an Era
While the Republican-era publishing industry that spawned Modern Sketch was
indisputably centered in Shanghai, Lu Shaofei’s vision of capturing the era extended farbeyond that city, and far beyond the borders of China proper. A map diagram withaccompanying charts, published in February 1937, three years after Modern Sketchbegan, suggests just how far that network stretched. The smaller, horizontal tableprovides the number of contributors by career, listing these from the left as Laborer,Merchant, Student, Scholar, Military, and Other. The larger, vertical table enumeratescontributors by province and region.
Not surprisingly, provinces like
Jiangsu, Hebei, and Guangdong—alllocations of major cities—comprisethe highest number of contributors.But remote inland provinces such asYunnan, Gansu, and Guizhou are
represented as well, along withJapan, the Philippines, and the“South Seas,” a term referring toSingapore and the Malay
archipelago where many ethnic
Chinese immigrated or sojourned.[6]
“The Modern SketchCorrespondence Network”(detail highlighted in red)
[ms35_045]
Contributors to Modern Sketch, especially the younger ones, were grateful for the
chance to publish. For instance, Huang Yao’s cartoons first appeared in Modern Sketch in
1935, when he was 18 years old.
In this drawing, Huang’s signature character W.Buffoon delivers a “blind-fire anti-aircraftsalute” in honor of Modern Sketch’s thirdanniversary. The paintings, calligraphy, and
calligraphic paintings Huang created in his lateryears after settling in Kuala Lumpur were onlydiscovered some years after he died. Many ofthese have been acquired by the British
Museum, the National Palace Museum in Taipei,and the Singapore Art Museum.[7]
The roly-poly W. Buffoon,created by the young cartoonistHuang Yao, celebrated ModernSketch’s third anniversarywith a flatulent salute.(detail highlighted in red)
[ms33_018]
Clearly, Modern Sketch had a broad geographic ambition, quite unlike its predecessorShanghai Sketch, which focused mainly on its namesake city. Material published in
Modern Sketch reflected life and times all over Asia, from the arid northern grasslandsto the jungles of Malaya. A frequent contributor from China’s northwest, Shen Yiqian,
often depicted that region’s Central Asian nomadic peoples. In the mid-1930s, China’snorthern provinces were slipping into Japanese hands, a chilling geopolitical reality thatgave Shen’s lyrical sketches, like the black-and-white “Travel Manhua,” a political edge.
Shen Yiqian
“Travel Manhua: Sketches of the Lifeways of
Chahar, Suiyuan, and Mongolia”
[ms35_033]
The same Japanese incursions lentother political cartoons a powerfulurgency. For example, Wang
Guodong’s “Pornographic Behaviorunder the Blue Sky and Red Sun”maligns the idea of Inner
Mongolians collaborating with
Japanese infiltrators, who were atthe time maneuvering to set up an“autonomous” North China.
Wang Guodong“Pornographic Behaviorunder the Blue Skyand Red Sun”
[ms26_024]
Chinese cartoonists’ domestic
concerns were often inflected withinternational influence, as we cansee when comparing Wang’s twofigures with those from the GeorgeGrosz cartoon “The Kiss,” which wasreproduced in the very sameFebruary 1936 issue of ModernSketch.
George Grosz“The Kiss”
[ms26_040]
Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the south, more contributions came from near theequator, in Singapore. One of the most colorful is Zheng Guanghan’s illustration of an
ethnic Chinese man who has immigrated to the Malaysian archipelago to homestead inthe tropical wilderness.
Zheng explains in his lengthy
caption that the red rectangles onthe front of the hut are Chinesecouplets—traditionally pasted inred-paper around doorways duringthe Lunar New Year festival. Headds that the festival decorationsresemble “national flags”
symbolizing victory over the junglewilderness, then warns that thesehardy pioneers should not beforgotten by their offspring,
especially those who have comenorth to squander their patrimonyin China’s foreign concessions.
Zheng Guanghan“Pioneer Farmer”
[ms07_023]
Even more than the geographic variety represented in Modern Sketch, the most strikingconsequence of Lu Shaofei’s editorial policy was the sheer variety of visual forms heaccommodated under the umbrella term manhua, an expression whose meaningextended well beyond what we would normally call cartoons. To be sure, familiar
genres—like single-panel “gag” and political cartoons, as well as multi-panel sequentialcomic strips—made up the backbone of Modern Sketch’s pictorial content. But as weshall see, over time Lu Shaofei accepted and published paper-cuts (jianzhi), collage(jiantie), photographs (sheying), photomontage, and even photos of small sculptedmodels (mandiao) set in dioramas. Adding to the mix were items like celebrity andpolitical caricature, children’s art, and the magazine’s cover art, the last constituting
something of a subgenre in itself. Sketch art was also common, and like Shen’s “TravelManhua” usually more a form of documentary than humor or satire. Nor did the borderbetween word and image hold firm; newspaper clippings, stock certificates, theater
tickets, paper money, and other printed matter were frequently combined with drawingsand photographs. Finally, the art submitted did not necessarily have to be fully
“modern” in appearance, but could update traditional forms like woodblock illustration.
Each issue of Modern Sketch featured aneo-traditional illustration accompanying anexcerpt from the Ming dynasty erotic novelPlum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei). Theartist, Cao Hanmei, republished the series in
two volumes in1936 and 1937.
(detail highlighted in red)
[ms18_022]
Cover Art
Designed to define Modern Sketch in the eyes of readers, the magazine’s full-color frontcovers offer a convenient point of entry into its diverse subjects and styles. What strikesthe viewer’s eye now, as it surely did in the 1930s, is a consistent theme of eroticism.Nude or semi-nude figures were undoubtedly displayed to titillate the potential buyer.Yet during the first decades of the Republican period nudity could also project positivesymbolic values, such as freedom, liberation, and physical health—all tropes aimed atcounteracting representations of China as the tradition-bound, feeble, “Sick Man ofAsia.”
Thus on the one hand we can besure that Hu Kao’s geometricallyminimalist bikinis, featured on theJuly cover and entitled “Swimsuitsof 1934,” poke fun at Shanghaifashion trends. But on the otherhand, we need to take Lu Shaofeiat least partially at his wordwhen, in his explanation of HuKao’s cover at the back of thesame issue, he explains, “Thebody is not a crime; misfortunecan only arise from insufficientknowledge of it.”
Hu Kao“Swimsuits of 1934”Cover of the July issue
[ms07_000]
When flat modernist compositionslike Hu Kao’s give way to a deepervisual perspective, semi-nude
images lent themselves to sociallymotivated figure-ground
compositions. On the cover of theJuly 1936 issue Lu Shaofeidepicted an emaciated
boat-tracker foregrounded againsta tableau of idle beachgoers.Beyond the stark contrast of richand poor, contemporary readerswould have quickly detected asubtler irony in this composition:the tracker and the bathers arealmost equally well tanned.
Lu Shaofei
“Opening Up a New Era”Cover of the July 1936 issue
[m28_000]
Skin color in such a context was, so to speak, no joke, as further suggested by thecover of Modern Sketch’s final, June 1937 issue, drawn by Zhang Yingchao, an artistgenerally deemed politically superficial because his style followed that of the American
flapper-fashion illustrator, Russell Patterson (1893-1977).Here, however, the mildly
salacious surface appearance oftwo swimmers—one a svelte,pale-skinned, bikini-clad womanand the other a muscular, darklytanned man—is sharply undercutby the fine print of the caption:“You’re almost the same color asthe corpses found floating inTianjin’s Hai River.”
Zhang Yingchao
[Caption:] You’re almost thesame color as the corpses foundfloating in Tianjin’s Hai River.
[ms39_000]
Readers of the time would have immediately recognized this caption as referring to thehair-raising mystery of hundreds of male corpses, mostly those of able-bodied menbetween the ages of 20 and 40, recently found drifting down Tianjin’s Hai River belowthe Japanese Concession. The local Chinese authorities insisted that the bodies were
those of heroin addicts from drug houses in the city’s foreign concessions. Strong
circumstantial evidence, however, indicated that the Japanese army had been using the
river to dump bodies—those of Chinese laborers originally hired to build militaryinstallations, and then brutally silenced to maintain secrecy.[8]
Especially during the latter half of its three-yearrun, Modern Sketch became a platform forairing otherwise censored information. Forinstance, due to fear of exacerbating tensionswith the Japanese, the Nationalist regimeblocked major newspapers from speculating onTianjin’s floating corpse incident. But because itwas not regarded as a “serious” publication,Modern Sketch could get away with publishingcartoons like Gu Yi’s “News from North China:
Changes to the Stratum under the XXConcession,” which appeared in April 1937.
Gu Yi
“News from North China:Changes to the Stratum under
the XX Concession”The word “Japan” was forbiddenby government censors, thusthe X’s. Readers, however,would have had no problem
filling in the blanks.
(detail highlighted in red)
[ms37_014]
The political innuendo behindZhang Yingchao’s swimsuit
tête-à-tête shows that there canbe more to Modern Sketch’s coverart than first meets the eye. As ageneral rule, however, coverillustrations eschewed visual
subtlety. Political messages weretypically quite stark, though oftentinged with irony, as in ChenJuanyin’s December 1936 cover“Viewing the Sunrise over theEast China Sea.”
Chen Juanyin“Viewing the Sunrise overthe East China Sea”
[ms24_042]
Where Chen quite plainly takesaim at his fellow nationals’passivity in the face Japaneseexpansionism, elsewhere politicalcommentary could be
conspicuous for its absence. Forexample, the only politics to befound in “New Temptation inPink,” by Japan-educated oil
painter Chen Baoyi, are those ofthe sexual encounter, as
facilitated by Shanghai’s livelycoffee-shop culture.
Chen Baoyi
“New Temptation in Pink”
[ms16_042]
Other covers, like Zhang
Guangyu’s cheerful January 1935contribution, commemorated theRepublican government’s Year ofChildren...
Zhang Guangyuuntitled cover
[ms13_000]
...or were drawn by childrenthemselves, like the Chineseopera character published thatsame year in March.
Chen Keyan“Martial Spirit”
[ms15_042]
A cover from 1936 featured astatuesque black woman athleteto celebrate the achievements of“colored peoples” in the 1936Berlin Summer Olympics...
Zhang Yingchao“The Olympic Victory ofColored Peoples”
[ms29_000]
...while one from 1935
grotesquely caricatured petty-bourgeois passengers in a
second-class rail coach. When itcame to cover art, it seems safeto conclude that fans of ModernSketch quickly learned to expectthe unexpected.
Ye Qianyu“The Second-classRail Carriage”
[m19_000]
Visual Narrative: The Japanese Menace
During the several years before Modern Sketch began publication, Japan hadinvaded Manchuria, taken over the neighboring province of Jehol (Rehe), andoccupied even the Great Wall of China. By 1936, the Nationalist Government hadbeen pressured into signing treaties that effectively ceded to Japan the northernprovinces of Chahar, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, and Suiyuan. For ChiangKai-shek, appeasing Japan meant more resources to attack a domestic foe: theChinese communists. But China’s elites, cartoonists included, were outraged by
this disregard for national integrity. Nor were they pleased with politicalpassivity among their countrymen, or worse, the acts of collaboration—whetherwilling or coerced at bayonet-point—reported from the occupied northernprovinces. The artists of Modern Sketch responded to the impending nationalcrisis with unruly imagination, portraying Japan and the threat it posed with a
cascade of unpredictably diverse satirical imagery.
Single-panel Cartoons: Windows on an Era
For all their rich variety, cover illustrations belong to the most plentiful subgenre foundin Modern Sketch: the captioned, hand-drawn, single-panel cartoon. Including coverart—but excluding media like paper-cuts, photographs, and photomontage—ModernSketch published over 1000 single-panel works. To call these “windows onto an era”may sound like a convenient, even reductive, cliché. For several important reasons,however, the comparison is helpful. First, Lu Shaofei’s invitation for contributors toframe and expose the inner workings of their life and times calls to mind the idea ofwindow-like visual openings onto a larger picture of reality. Second, in terms of thevisual structure of the magazine itself, Modern Sketch inherited the conventions of thepictorial magazine, whose format encouraged the reader’s eye to travel vicariously, andoften voyeuristically, into the new and unknown.Then as now, pictorialpublications were not somuch read as scanned, aprocess that involved
searching for, then engagingor rejecting, the variousdemands for sympathy,action, shame, laughter,envy, pleasure, shock,
horror, and so on offered byframed images arranged onthe plane of the page—notunlike windows arrayed onthe face of a building.
Xu Ruoming“Floating Blossoms Fillthe City in Spring”
[m34_000]
Strictly speaking, pictures are not windows; but to disregard the striking iconic
resemblances between one and the other would be a mistake. This is because beyond
surface appearances, windows by their very nature visually mediate interiors andexteriors, insiders and outsiders, the seers and the seen, the dominator and thedominated, making them an endlessly flexible figure for picturing, and potentiallyinverting, unequal power relations. It should not come as a surprise, then, that
contributors to Modern Sketch played extensively with the visual ironies made availableby positioning the frames of windows within the frames of their cartoons. In doing sothey open some thought-provoking windows for us—outsiders to the historical world ofModern Sketch—onto how the single-panel cartoon constructed the multi-layeredimagery of an era.
Cartoon windows could be large orsmall, transparent or opaque, viewedfrom within or without. In Lu
Zhixiang’s series “Shanghai Winter,”for instance, window glass separatesthe haves from the have-nots, butalso positions the gaze of the vieweron either side of a stark economic
divide. Not to be ignored either is thatLu published these images in aJanuary issue; like many popularpictorials, the content of ModernSketch shifted with the seasons.
Lu Zhixiang“Shanghai Winter” seriesThey just go on withtheir lives like this, no senseof the changing seasons.
[ms01_024] detail
Lu Zhixiang“Shanghai Winter”
series(The Master at onein the afternoon)“You should say‘Good morning’!”
[ms_01_024]
Lu Zhixiang“Shanghai Winter”
series(Street scene on a coldday) “Why don’t thesepeople have leather
overcoats?”
[ms_01_025]
Liu Lipu’s 1934 cartoon “Human Lives in Ubiquitous Autumn Rain” achieves a similareffect—also through the icon of the window, but using soft, rounded, faceless figures inshades of gray rather than Lu Zhixiang’s spare, bleak line drawing. In Liu’s compositionstylized raindrops visible through the open window in the panel’s upper right corneroffer a visual point of entry from the leisure apartments of a wealthy man and his
female companion out into the cold wet street below, where a rickshaw puller exposedto the elements hauls his fare. The puller’s gaze is tilted upward to view a passengerriding comfortably behind the windows of a chauffered limousine—the motorized,upper-class counterpart to his own human-powered vehicle. What does the rickshawman feel? Longing? Resentment? Resignation? In the absence of facial features we canonly guess. But following his gaze beyond the automobile, we return to the warm, dryinterior of the wealthy man’s chamber, lending closure to the top and bottom of thepanel, and leaving us to ponder the nature of the relationship between these two men.
Liu Lipu
“Human Lives in Ubiquitous Autumn Rain”
[ms10_006]
Windows always serve some compositional purpose, sometimes simply to define theplane of an interior wall, to provide “light,” or to indicate night and day. Even withoutany notable objects or people visible through them, windows can by their sheer sizesignify power and wealth, setting the scene for the cartoonist’s barbs.Shen Tuzheng, for example, uses agiant picture window as backdrop fora cartoon satirizing nepotism ingovernment officialdom.
Shen Tuzheng
- But Daddy, you promised! He saidthat certificate of appointment wouldbe in the bag for him tomorrow!
[ms31_031] detail
Hua Junwu
Manager of the Tarzan MattressCompany: Gentlemen, observe thebounciness of our mattresses!
[ms24_011] detail
More commonly windows are drawnas open frames set within the largerframe of a cartoon panel, thus
aligning the viewer’s gaze with thedetached perspective of the rich, whoare often shown making coldcommentary on anonymous
panoramas of political violence andsocial misfortune.
Chen Fengxiong(sent from Beijing)
Grandson: Grandpa, look at these kids.Why don’t they stay home and eat theirsupper instead of letting the police beatthem up for petitioning the government?They just don’t get it. Hey, another one’s
down. They just don’t get it.Grandpa: That’s quite enough. Youmight upset them. Come, let’s drink!
[ms26_021] detail
Liu Xinquan
(sent from Hong Kong)“The West WindCreeps East”Tourist: The people of youresteemed country go aboutnaked. Such ill manners!Tour guide: Again youmisunderstand. These aremembers of a nudist society,a fashion that has come herefrom your esteemed country.
[ms34_014] detail
not all artists who did so were male.
One of the very few womancartoonists who published inModern Sketch, Liang Baibo,places a pair of highly-stylized female nudes
conversing in front of a largewindow. As was often thecase, the caption
undermines the image, herewith an ironic aside on men’scontinuing preference for theoutmoded fashion offoot-binding.
Cartoonists also used windows to position the viewer as a sexual voyeur. Interestingly,
Liang BaiboTo the woman withbound feet: You have moreboyfriends than I do!
[ms23_000]
The densely built, window-ridden environment of thetreaty-port cities certainlyencouraged a fascinationwith the role of the voyeur.The desired object of thegaze, however, might be leftto the imagination, as in YeQianyu’s August 1934 cover“Ingredients of Seduction”...
Ye Qianyu
“Ingredients of Seduction”
[ms08_000]
...or viewers and the viewedmight all be on displaythrough a balcony windownearly coextensive with thecartoon frame itself.
Zhang YingchaoMama Zhao, what arethose ugly mugs lookingat? It’s not as if an airplane
were flying over...
[ms02_013]
Not all windows belonged to buildings. Jin Mo’s “Evening on the Pearl River” uses thestern window of a sampan as the focal point for his single-panel window onto the“salt-water sister” (xianshuimei) prostitution trade near the southern treaty port of
Canton. Salt-water sisters (note the abbreviation “S.W.” on the pennants) was the termfor prostitutes who since the 19th century had exclusively served foreign sailors aroundthe treaty ports of Hong Kong and Canton. From today’s perspective the most strikingelement of this cartoon is its lack of explicit condemnation for prostitution, imperialism,or worse—Chinese prostitution catering to imperialist powers. Seeing this cartoon, hiseyes drawn inexorably to the sordid scene in the window of the sampan, would a typicalChinese male reader of the 1930s feel appalled? Bemused? ...or appalled at his ownvoyeuristic—and thus vaguely complicitous—bemusement?
Precisely because such
questions are impossible toanswer, this cartoon raisesour awareness of the
historical gap between theinterpretive conventions oftoday and those of the1930s, especially when itcomes to politics of
representing the nation.Without exception, theartists of Modern Sketchwere deeply concerned withthe fate of China. But whenconfronted with a cartoonlike Jin Mo’s, we are
reminded of how much therules for expressing suchconcern have changed.
Jin Mo“Evening on thePearl River”
[m19_015]
Visual Narrative: A Child Prostitute’s Life
The actual number of prostitutes working in China’s big treaty ports may nothave increased from the 1920s into the 1930s, but their public visibility explodedduring those years. At the same time, the figure of the prostitute-as-victim enteredthe popular imagination as a metaphor for the weakness of a semi-colonized,harshly oppressed China. Prostitutes of all varieties and attitudes proliferated inModern Sketch. Wang Zhu’s nine-panel “Illustrated Biography of a ChildProstitute” takes the victimization story to a shocking extreme, narrating thephysical and mental devastation of a “little thing” (the euphemism for underage
sex workers) in the treaty port of Tianjin.
Especially in the later years of Modern Sketch’s 39-issue run, cartoonists used the image
of the window to express intensifying distress over imminent national crisis.For instance, cartoonists likeChen Huiling drew attentionto Japanese militaryexercises as a sign of
looming invasion. The openwindow in his illustrationfrom November 1936 forcesus to share a view of skylineand aircraft with two lovers.His caption suggests that webe alarmed less at thewarplanes than the
hedonistic couple’s willfulobliviousness to eventsoutside.
Chen HuilingHer: Just listen to thegunfire! How frightening!Him: Oh forget about it.Nothing but another roundof military exercises bythe you-know-who!
[ms32_024]
If large windows symbolizepower, small ones could beicons of entrapment anddespair, as in an untitledcartoon by Lu Di in ModernSketch’s final issue.
Lu Diuntitled
[ms39_025] detail
Or, as shown in one of LiaoBingxiong’s simple,deceptively child-like
compositions, the very lackof windows could inspirehope in the face of despair.
Liao BingxiongIt’s a bright world outside the
prisoner’s cage!
[ms34_036] detail
Liao’s was a much-needed optimism. Three months later, in April 1937, a cover byZhang Ding envisioned the consequences of having a home bereft of windows, doors,and even walls. The caption, based on a quotation from the Confucian philosopherMencius, indicates that this was a depiction of the rural famine and local warfareravaging the inland province of Sichuan. For the urban reader of Modern Sketch, thenear total exposure of Zhang’s desperate peasant may have held an allegorical
meaning. Beyond suggesting privation in the distant countryside, the image of shatteredwalls, windows, and doors implied a larger and more immediate sense of vulnerability:that faced by the Chinese nation itself, confronted by the overwhelming forces ofJapanese militarism then massing on its distressingly porous borders.
Zhang Ding “Victims of Famine Lie Dead in the Wilderness
(The Scenery of Central Sichuan)”
The writing on the broken doorframe is half of a traditional New Years couplet,invoking the “deep and fulfilling blessings of the emperor.” Zhang includes it as
bitter commentary on the failure of China’s current rulers.
[ms37_000]
Economic inequality, official corruption, the rural-urban divide, student protests, thepredilections of petty-urbanite readers, the depredations of the Japanese,
representations of women...Modern Sketch has something for almost everyone with aninterest in modern China. The single-panel cartoons in Modern Sketch and otherperiodicals of the time can indeed be treated as windows onto specific historicalrealities. But the frequency and variety with which images of windows themselvesappeared in these cartoons should tell us something more: that these cartoonists, byobserving the world around them and emulating colleagues either in China or abroad,were developing their own iconic language of the cartoon. Just as what we say dependson how we say it, “reading” even the simplest cartoons requires attention to how thecartoonists of Modern Sketch manipulated the dynamic visual discourse that emergedfrom the magazine’s every page. Understanding this art also requires moving deeperinto the motley graphic forms that were redefining the art of the Chinese cartoon.
Visual Narrative: Exploitation & Oppression
Many cartoonists felt compelled to expose the suffering and injusticethat the strong inflicted on the weak in a society riven by uneven
distribution of wealth and power. The issues they represented—construction site accidents, corrupt officials, degradation of
women, and the hard lot of the poor in the city and the
country—were as alive in the minds of Chinese then as now: all partof the never-ending feast of big fish on little fish that haunts the
dark underside of modernity.
On viewing images of a potentially disturbing nature: click here.Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2011 Visualizing Cultures
Creative Commons License
因篇幅问题不能全部显示，请点此查看更多更全内容