Panel 2
Robert Bickers, chair

Shen Yiqian and the use of journalistic photography, ink paintings, and cartoons as means to publicize the suffering and violence taking place in China during the wars of the 1930s
Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego
kshen@ucsd.edu

The Interpretation of Reality: Newspaper Photomontage During the Battle for Shanghai, 1937
Rana Mitter, University of Oxford
rana.mitter@chinese.ox.ac.uk

Abstracts

Shen Yiqian and the use of journalistic photography, ink paintings, and cartoons as means to publicize the suffering and violence taking place in China during the wars of the 1930s
Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego

The early 1930s was an important period for Chinese art, during which thorough
exploration of the different media available in fine and commercial art enabled urban artists to catch up with the practices of their colleagues in the international art world. However, this took place in the context of the increasingly tense relationship between Japan and China, particularly in the period between the annexation of Manchuria in 1931 and the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937. Many Chinese artists, at the same time that they mastered the techniques and functions of Western art media, became very involved in the rising movement of resistance to Japan. They used the different forms of art at their disposal to reflect peoples suffering in war and to help domestic and foreign audiences understand the situation in far-flung parts of China. This paper takes one artist, Shen Yiqian, as a case study. Shen was a graduate of the Shanghai Art Academy. He was very active in the 1930s and 1940s as an artist and journalist in many different fields, including ink painting, posters, cartoons, and photography. In face of Japanese aggression he organized the Guonan xuanquantuan (National Crisis Propaganda Team) and the Zhandi xieshengdui (Battlefield Sketching Team), which travelled to the battle fronts in both nationalist and communist-controlled territories, visited Yanan, and organized exhibitions in Shanghai and other parts of China to raise national and international attention about the reality of the war. His goal was to use art
to publicize what happened in order to stimulate patriotism in China and to inspire resistance to Japan. His activity shows how artists used visual images as a means to involve themselves in the national salvation effort. His disappearance and apparent assassination in 1944 would seem to indicate that the government of the time took his art journalism seriously as a potential threat to some of their policies.

The Interpretation of Reality: Newspaper Photomontage During the Battle for Shanghai, 1937
Rana Mitter, University of Oxford

The War of Resistance to Japan was a watershed for China in a multitude of ways that are only now being fully explored. One of them was the way in which the experience of war was reinterpreted and refracted through the print culture that had shaped the late Qing and early Republic as a whole. This paper uses one particular set of visual materials as its central point, the photomontages of war news [Zhanqing huakan Wartime pictorial] in a Shanghai newspaper, Zhonghua ribao (The Central China Daily News) during the Japanese attack on Shanghai in summer and autumn of 1937. These montages provided a daily visual diary of the ways in which total war had come to Shanghai: air raids, food queues, refugee shelters, patriotic demonstrations, and so forth. The photographs construct a particular visual imaginary, a reality shaped by the selectivity of the cameras gaze, and disseminated by mass printing techniques.
The paper will seek to explore the way in which the photomontages, along with the captions which accompanied them, sought to create a narrative of the wars progress, desperately using imagery of destruction and death in an attempt to try and inspire a reading population under assault. It will also situate the photomontages in the context of the news reporting which surrounds them, treating the newspaper as a visual object in its own right, not merely a transmitter of information. It is clear that the language and prose style of Chinese newspaper reportage of the era reflected both the new realities of Chinese modernity as well as tropes and images that were carried over from premodern narrative techniques. The way in which this style was adapted to make use of photographs, cartoons, and visual images will be explored. Appropriate comparisons and contrasts will be made with other newspapers and journals of the era.