Jiang Feng, Revolutionary Printmaker

The printmaker Jiang Feng is a particularly interesting example of the revolutionary artist who became an influential bureaucrat under the new regime. After making contributions to leftist art as a woodcut artist and activist in the pre-1949 period, under the new regime Jiang Feng assumed the dialectical roles both of party spokesman for art and of revolutionary idealist. He dominated the art world between 1949 and 1957, the period in which the basic system of ideological control, the bureaucratic structure, and the stylistic and thematic outlines of the new art were put in place.

A brief exploration of his background is useful for understanding the policies promoted by the Communists. Jiang Feng (originally named Zhou Xi) was

born in Shanghai in 1910. Communist admirers describe him as a true proletarian: a third-generation urban worker.^[9] His father was a carpenter; his mother and two younger sisters worked in a silk factory. He became involved in leftist strike activities at the age of seventeen, at eighteen went to work as a bookkeeper for the railroad, and at nineteen began evening art study at the White Swan Western Painting Club (Bai'e xihua hui ) in Shanghai.^[10]

In the spring of 1931, when he was twenty-one, he became involved, through the White Swan Club, with students who had been expelled from the National Hangzhou Arts Academy (Guoli Hangzhou yizhuan ) for left-wing activities.^[11] Several of these students had been active at school in a club called the West Lake Eighteen Art Society (Xihu yiba yishe ), which was founded, with the encouragement of the academy's director, in the eighteenth year of the republic, 1929.^[12] The Hangzhou society soon split into two groups because of political differences.^[13] A Communist Youth League organization, established at the academy in 1930, attracted leftist members of the original group.^[14] The following spring Jiang joined the students and former students in launching a third group, Shanghai Eighteen Art Society Research Center (Shanghai yiba yishe yanjiu suo ),^[15] which was left-wing in orientation and had more than forty members.^[16]

Shortly thereafter, the new group was contacted by the writer and critic Feng Xuefeng on behalf of the General Alliance for Left-Wing Culture,^[17] a Chinese Communist party front organization. From this point on the Shanghai Eighteen Art Society became a focus for activities of the League of Left-Wing Artists. Jiang Feng helped publish a leftist journal, one of many editorial projects in which he would be engaged, and undertook to spread anti-imperialist propaganda among Shanghai's workers.^[18] The Eighteen Art Society also received a number of donations from the influential novelist and educator Lu Xun via his close associate Feng Xuefeng, including both cash and art books.^[19]

The feminist writer Ding Ling met Jiang Feng briefly in 1931, when he was living in an old book warehouse that served as the publication center for an underground literary journal.^[20] This habitation may have been arranged for him by Feng Xuefeng, who settled another writer, Lou Shiyi, into the same abode in April.^[21] In mid-August, Feng arrived with the news that Lu Xun had engaged a Japanese woodcut instructor,^[22] a teacher who happened to be in Shanghai on vacation. Selection of participants in the class was left to the Eighteen Art Society, who allocated six places for their own members, two for the Shanghai Arts College (Shanghai yizhuan ), two for the Shanghai Art Academy (Shanghai meizhuan ), and three for the White Swan Western Painting Club. The tutorial, held between August 17 and August 22, covered practical woodblock carving and printing techniques and the study of original prints ranging from ukiyo-e to the works of the German leftist Käthe Kollwitz. Lu Xun himself served as translator for the sessions. Although there is no in-

No image available

Figure 1
Jiang Feng, Kill the Resisters, 1931,
woodblock print, 14 cm × 17.7 cm.

dication that Jiang Feng was personally close to the older man, Jiang's subsequent writings indicate that he considered Lu Xun to be a role model. Among the thirteen students were several who subsequently became influential revolutionary artists, including Jiang Feng and Chen Tiegeng. Jiang's surviving student prints, like those of other participants, emulate European expressionist styles, and there is every reason to believe that the young artists saw themselves as part of an international leftist art community.^[23]

The leftists soon had an opportunity to apply their skills to the national good. Among Jiang Feng's antigovernment broadsheets is Kill the Resisters (fig. 1) of late 1931, which depicts demonstrators fleeing as they are gunned down by Nationalist troops. This print at once supported resistance against Japanese territorial claims in China and attacked the Nationalist government's inappropriate response to public opinion. Late in the next year, Hu Yichuan, a Communist former student at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy, carved his more technically refined call to arms, To the Front (fig. 2).

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Figure 2
Hu Yichuan, To the Front, 1932, woodblock
print, 20 cm × 27 cm.

Hu Yichuan, one of the leftist students expelled from the academy earlier in 1932,^[24] was clearly better trained than the autodidact Jiang Feng.

Jiang Feng joined the Chinese Communist party in March 1932 and the next month began what was to be a fifty-year career in arts administration. He was elected an executive of the League of Left-Wing Artists and a member of its CCP and Youth League branch committees.^[25] That May, the Eighteen Art Society, which had been openly affiliated with the Communist-sponsored League of Left-Wing Artists, reorganized under a less notorious name, Spring Earth Painting Club (Chundi huahui ). The new name was chosen by Ai Qing,^[26] a member who had recently returned from Europe.^[27] Qing is known today as a poet rather than as a painter,^[28] but as we shall see in chapter 3, he remained active as an administrator and art critic.

Spring Earth held an exhibition at the YMCA in late June in conjunction with a display of Lu Xun's personal print collection. Lu Xun reportedly purchased ten Spring Earth prints, including one by Jiang.^[29] On July 13, as the Spring Earth Club conducted its Esperanto class, Nationalist and foreign police burst in and arrested eleven members, including Jiang Feng, Ai Qing, and the

instructor.^[30] Jiang Feng and the others served two years in prison, during which time they continued their studies of art and literature. A letter sent by Jiang Feng and Ai Qing to Lu Xun late in 1932 reported that they had transformed the prison into a school, every day following a set schedule for reading, painting, writing poetry, and discussion.^[31] They also practiced their organizational skills by mounting three hunger strikes over food, bathing, and medical care.^[32]

Jiang Feng was rearrested in 1933, only two months after his July release from jail, and served two more years. Lu Xun continued to give his protégé psychological support, sending him a copy of his privately published album of prints by Käthe Kollwitz. By the end of this second prison term the artist had lost his association with the CCP.^[33] His biographers do not give a reason, but communication with the organization was undoubtedly difficult, if not impossible, for party members who were incarcerated.

Moreover, Jiang emerged from prison into an atmosphere of growing antagonism between Lu Xun's two confidants, Feng Xuefeng and Hu Feng, and Zhou Yang, a leading party theorist in the League of Left-Wing Writers. Differences in literary approach were the chief issues openly debated, but a struggle for leadership of leftist literary circles was an important foundation for the dispute.^[34] In the summer of 1935, shortly before Jiang Feng's release from prison, Zhou Yang, unable to defeat the Lu Xun faction in reasoned debate, accused Hu Feng of collaboration with the Guomindang. This apparently unfounded charge led to a bitter split between Zhou Yang and Lu Xun that was publicly played out in left-wing literary journals. Jiang Feng's chief contact in the CCP, Feng Xuefeng, withdrew from the party in 1936, and Hu Feng left Shanghai the following year. Lu Xun died in late 1936.^[35]

Regardless of events in the CCP and literary world, Jiang Feng remained very active in leftist art between his October 1935 release from jail and his September 1937 departure from Japanese-occupied Shanghai.^[36] Among other things, Jiang was involved with a pictorial called Iron Horse Prints (Tiema banhua ), in which he, as an artist, ventured for the first time into a slightly avant-garde, if grim, style (fig. 3).^[37] Soviet constructivist prints reproduced in Lu Xun's 1930 publication Xin'e huaxuan (Selected Pictures from New Russia) are a likely source for Jiang's experiments.^[38]

During the period of Jiang Feng's radical activities in the city of Shanghai, eight soviets had been established by the Red Army in rural China. Under pressure of extermination campaigns by Nationalist troops, the Communist army in the south began a retreat to northwestern China in the fall of 1934, a journey now known as the Long March. Slightly more than a year later, after an arduous trek over six thousand miles of dangerous territory, the surviving members of the Red Army regrouped in northern Shaanxi. After the Japanese attacked Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai in the summer of 1937, many leftists

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Figure 3
Jiang Feng, cover design for Iron Horse
Prints, 1936, no. 1, woodblock print.

fled Japanese-occupied coastal territory for the new Communist base at Yan'an, Shaanxi.^[39]

Jiang Feng, traveling via Hankou and Xi'an, reached Yan'an by February 1938. His party membership was restored in the spring and he was assigned to publish a propaganda pictorial for the Eighth Route Army. In February 1939, he was transferred to the newly founded Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts as an instructor in the art department, thus beginning his formal career as an art educator.^[40]

He published one of his earliest surviving art historical/theoretical articles in Hu Feng's journal July (Qiyue ) in the same year, a piece in which he described Lu Xun's support of the revolutionary woodcut movement and argued that Lu Xun advocated selective use of old artistic forms to create new forms.^[41] Whatever Jiang's intentions, the piece bridges, for art, a gap that existed in literary theory between the position held by Mao Zedong and Zhou Yang, who thought that Chinese writers should use indigenous forms, and that of Lu Xun's disciples Feng Xuefeng and Hu Feng, who believed that much of China's old literature was feudal and completely lacking in democratic or revolutionary elements.^[42]

One goal of the Lu Xun Academy was to train recruits in the techniques and ideological principles of cultural propaganda so that they could gain the cooperation of local people in the Communist military campaigns against the Japanese. A crucial problem was how to produce images that would be understood and accepted by the largely illiterate rural population.^[43] The European-style woodcuts of the early thirties were aimed at a cosmopolitan audience and were not necessarily appropriate to the new situation. Because many of the artists who passed through the Lu Xun Academy were urban art students, they were urged, as part of the ideological and technical training they underwent before being sent to do anti-Japanese propaganda work, to develop more effective ways of communicating with the peasants.

Uncertainty as to how to transform the sophisticated black-and-white woodcuts into something rural people might appreciate was resolved during the winter of 1939 and 1940. In December 1939, the Communist artists learned that the Japanese had made very effective use of Chinese folk print conventions in their own propaganda.^[44] One print, based on Chinese images of the kings of hell and called Divine Retribution , made them particularly indignant. The Chinese artists therefore decided to design their own propaganda pictures in the style of rustic new year's prints (nianhua ). Because none of the Communist artists were trained in the multiple-block printing technique required for the brightly colored folk prints, two skilled peasants were enlisted to teach them how to carve and produce their new pictures. Among those who made folk pictures in this first group were Jiang Feng, his colleagues from the Shanghai leftist movement Wo Zha, Hu Yichuan, and Chen Tiegeng, and two

students from the National Hangzhou Arts Academy, Luo Gongliu and Yan Han.^[45] By June 1940, Jiang Feng had been promoted to directorship of the art section of the Lu Xun Academy, which administered both the art department and the art factory.^[46] As director of the art factory, Jiang Feng was charged with assembling and supervising more artists to make the new, revolutionary nianhua (fig. 4).^[47]

While Jiang's group worked in Yan'an, the academy's woodcut team, headed by Hu Yichuan, worked in the field.^[48] Most of Hu's team, which included Yan Han, Luo Gongliu, and Hua Shan, were academically trained artists like himself. As an administrator, Jiang Feng institutionalized the successful innovations of his better-trained colleagues. One of his own few surviving contributions to the new nianhua movement was the 1942 print Studying Is Good (fig. 5), in which plump children clutch writing brush and abacus. Traditional new year's prints often depict auspicious subjects such as fat baby boys, and the positive aspects of the theme are usually reinforced by decorative objects or attributes laden with symbolic value. In this case, Jiang Feng substituted the tools of education for fruits or fish, the customary symbols of fertility, abundance, or good luck, and added a little girl to the traditional male child. The iconographic changes are explained by slogans: "Studying is good. After you study, you can do accounts and write letters."^[49]

A series of ideological meetings held for writers and artists in the spring of 1942 culminated on May 2 and May 23 with important speeches by Mao Zedong.^[50] His remarks, often referred to as the Yan'an Talks, became the core of Communist cultural policy. Mao opened by saying that the purpose of the meeting was to ensure that literature and art became a component of the whole revolutionary machinery. To achieve this goal, artists and writers needed to be more aware of their roles in the revolution. They needed to identify with the masses and with the CCP; they needed to be clear that their audience was the workers, peasants, and soldiers; they needed to be familiar with and sympathetic to the workers, peasants, and soldiers; and they must understand Marxist-Leninist writings. Although literature might also serve the petty bourgeoisie, who were allies in the revolution, it was essential that writers and artists give the workers, peasants, and soldiers priority. Hence, efforts should be made to reach a wider audience and to raise artistic standards.

Mao acknowledged that the experience of foreign countries could guide China in achieving this goal, but he rejected crude imitation of foreign material as useless. While literature and art of a higher level was necessary for better-educated cadres, he said, satisfying this need was not central to the Communist mission. Professional writers and artists should devote their attention to speaking for the masses.

Beyond merely articulating his revolutionary cultural theory, Mao successfully described a new creative discipline to be enforced among Communist

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Figure 4
Anonymous, Protect the Border District,
ca. 1940, polychromatic woodblock
print, Bo Songnian collection.

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Figure 5
Jiang Feng, Studying Is Good, 1942,
woodblock print.

writers and artists. He denied that art for art's sake could exist, for in his view all culture belonged to a definite class and party. He further rejected various nonpolitical foundations for art and literature, including humanism, love of mankind, idealism, liberalism, and individualism.

Following the Yan'an Talks, in 1942 and 1943, the CCP conducted a rectification campaign and cadre investigation. The thought remolding process, intended to tighten party discipline, normally took several months. For reasons that have not been revealed, Jiang Feng was vehemently attacked, relieved of his duties, and kept in isolation for almost a year.^[51] Among the factors behind his prolonged investigation may have been the following: his lapse in party membership before 1938; his association with Feng Xuefeng, who had challenged Mao's views on literature and remained in the Nationalist capital of Chongqing; his friendship with Ai Qing, who was reluctant to accept party discipline in his literary activities; jealousies among contenders for key administrative posts; and a stubbornness for which Jiang Feng became notorious. Most damaging would have been suspicion of collaboration with Nationalist authorities, a charge that clouded the reputation of any Communist who survived his or her jail term.^[52]

Over the next five years, Jiang seems to have recovered from any damage to his position caused by the 1942-1943 campaigns. In 1944 he resumed his work promoting new nianhua ,^[53] and in 1945 organized a symposium on the subject.^[54] After the Japanese surrender in September 1945, propaganda activity concentrated on the War of Liberation, as the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists was later known. Artists began leaving Yan'an and the Lu Xun Academy to consolidate Communist control in other areas. One group, which included a number of future administrators, including Jiang's Shanghai friend Wo Zha, his student Gu Yuan, and the Manchurian natives Zhang Ding, Yang Jiao, and Zhang Xiaofei, was sent in October to China's northeast, about eight hundred miles away—a dangerous journey across Nationalist territory that took thirty-six days by foot and boat.^[55] The Northeast Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts (Dongbei Lu Xun wenyi xueyuan ) was established in Shenyang three years later, in October 1948.^[56]

Another large group of Communist cultural workers was organized as the North China Literature and Arts Work Team (Huabei wenyi gongzuotuan ), with the poet Ai Qing and Jiang Feng as leaders. Between mid-September and November 1945 the group walked from Yan'an to Zhangjiakou, in northern Hebei, a distance of some 420 miles. In their new location, about one hundred miles northwest of Beijing, they founded a Literature and Arts College at the Jin-Cha-Ji (Shanxi, Chahar, Hebei) North China United Revolutionary University (Huabei lianda ). Jiang Feng became art department head and vice-secretary of the party committee in the new college, which opened in January 1946. He served under the supervision of his old friend Ai Qing, who was vice-

director of the college. Artists from the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border District Literature and Arts Union joined the Yan'an group. Some who worked with Jiang Feng in the new college, including Wang Zhaowen, Hu Yichuan, Mo Pu, and Yan Han, became important figures in the post-1949 art bureaucracy.

In February 1946, Jiang Feng published an article entitled "The Problem of Using Old Forms in Painting" that outlined his fundamental views on pictorial art.^[57] Although the civil war delayed widespread implementation of his ideas, and he was later forced to modify parts of his program, his subsequent administrative record provides evidence of an uncompromising idealism in his approach to art. His basic assumption was that Western realism was scientific and, therefore, the only appropriate means of reflecting the life and ideals of modern people. His essay contrasts "new forms," which appear to be the conventions of late-nineteenth-century Western oil painting, with "old forms," which are those of traditional Chinese painting and new year's pictures.

Jiang cites two frequently argued justifications for a progressive Chinese artist to paint in old ways: the first was that traditional forms were easier for the common folk to accept, thus rendering propaganda more effective; the second was that patriotic artists sought by their very convictions to create "national forms" of painting. After analyzing both arguments, Jiang concluded that neither was adequate to justify the continuation of traditional art practices.

The utilitarian approach, he charged, did not hold up to scrutiny because the common people would accept Western conventions of chiaroscuro and perspective if the subject matter of the painting related to their own lives. Moreover, often the traditional mode was simply inappropriate for the task at hand. People might enjoy depictions of guerrilla warfare rendered against traditional landscape backgrounds, or images of soldiers outlined in the strokes previously used for painting delicate female beauties, but such representations failed to convey the proper atmosphere and thus were unsuitable as propaganda.

The issue of "national forms," the second commonly cited justification for promoting indigenous art, requires some explanation. The concept, developed by literary theorists in the 1930s, was strongly supported by Mao Zedong and appealed to many patriots because of its anti-imperialist flavor. Zhou Yang, who served for much of his career as Mao Zedong's spokesman on culture, was the foremost proponent of national forms in literature—"indigenous, semiliterary folk styles ... enjoyed by ordinary Chinese for hundreds of years," in the words of Merle Goldman.^[58] In art, as Jiang defined the problem, national forms were associated with traditional ink painting and folk new year's prints.

Significantly for later cultural developments, Zhou Yang's theories met, in the 1930s and 1940s, with heated opposition from Lu Xun's literary disciples,

Feng Xuefeng and Hu Feng. They urged as an alternative the adoption of Western-oriented realist forms of writing and the internationalization of Chinese culture.^[59] Jiang Feng's article revealed his strong personal sympathy for the internationalist view, while nevertheless adhering to the party-approved language of Zhou Yang's policies.

Because the manner in which Jiang Feng articulated the debate remained important in subsequent decades, it is worth looking at his arguments in some detail. Jiang defined the question of national forms in art in terms of the tension between old and new. While he acknowledged the immediate efficacy of adopting old forms for propaganda in wartime, Jiang rejected the idea as a long-term program for the new art. People, he maintained, accept art that they are accustomed to seeing, and, he argued, such customs can be changed. As evidence he cited the popularity in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the areas closest to Shanghai, of yuefenpai images of beautiful girls. The heavily shaded, Western-influenced yuefenpai mode of drawing was introduced by tobacco companies to decorate calendars.^[60] Jiang pointed out that it soon became common in the region to commission ancestor portraits in a similar rubbed-charcoal style, thus making the traditional painted figure, which relied primarily on outline, obsolete. If tobacco company advertisements could change folk taste in such a conservative domain of representation, he implied, Communist artists should be able to do the same.

While Jiang conceded that the ink tones and brushwork of literati painting and the outlines and colors of folk painting each had their own merit, neither form alone, he argued, was entirely suitable for rendering the complexities of modern life. Rather than bringing realistic elements into traditional painting, therefore, Jiang advocated basing all art on Western techniques. Absorption of traditional elements should be a secondary concern. He particularly attacked "reformed Chinese painting," Which synthesized Chinese and Western methods, as serving no function but to extend the life of old forms.

In a small leap of logic, Jiang concluded that because realistic techniques were most appropriate for reflecting the lives and ideals of the nation, realistic forms were best for creating a national form in art. The incongruity of adopting Western conventions of painting as the basis for Chinese "national forms" of art is successfully obfuscated by Jiang's impassioned defense of realism.

Jiang's promotion of national forms was not, as the term might seem to imply, a rejection of Western art forms. On the contrary, in his view the promotion of national forms required further development of new—that is to say, Western—styles and genres. Not all new forms were suitable to this end, however. Presumably influenced by Stalinist doctrines, Jiang wrote that it was necessary to cleanse new forms of the poisons of European modernism. Jiang's opposition to most schools of modern Western art (which presumably de-

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Figure 6
Wang Shikuo, Reform the Hooligans,
1947, polychromatic woodblock print,
16.5 cm × 25.4 cm, Chinese National Art
Gallery.

veloped only after his own youthful experiments in modernist graphic design were concluded), indeed, was to have profound influence on the development of Chinese art in the 1950s. Nevertheless, at this early stage, his equation of new forms with Western techniques set China's art world on an internationalist course.

As Jiang Feng defined them, national forms of painting would be realistic and would employ Western academic principles of perspective, anatomy, composition, and color. They would not be based on traditional literati painting or on traditional folk styles, though they might be enriched by extracting apt elements from old art. This new realism would eradicate the gap between the people and "high-class art."

Jiang's intense opposition to both traditional painting and modernist Western styles set him at odds with many painters in the Nationalist-controlled territories. Self-employed professional artists often worked in traditional styles, and the ranks of China's art professors included both traditionalists and those who worked in modernist European styles. His criticism did not even spare

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Figure 7
Hong Bo, Joining the Army, 1947,
polychromatic woodblock print,
2.1 cm × 17.5 cm.

progressive professors of painting who promoted new styles that would bring Western concepts into traditional Chinese painting, for he required that Western forms provide the very foundations of art.

Although Jiang Feng's internationalist ideas differed from the vision of Mao Zedong and Zhou Yang, he was nevertheless charged with reforming the Chinese art world under the new Communist government. In this role, he would have a profound effect on the development of art in China.

In 1948, the propaganda school moved south to Zhengding in central Hebei, where it merged with and took the name of North China University, previously based in Xingtai. The artists Luo Gongliu, Wang Shikuo, and Jin Lang joined Jiang Feng's team;^[61] thereafter the art department was referred to as the third section of the North China University.^[62] Academic activity during the years in Hebei included research on local nianhua conventions^[63] and training of art propaganda workers.^[64] Propaganda pictures made at North China University, including Wang Shikuo's woodcut Reform the Hooligans (fig. 6) and Hong Bo's nianhua Joining the Army (fig. 7),^[65] set the artistic standard for the early years of the new People's Republic of China. Jiang Feng and his fellow veterans of the civil war became key figures in the Chinese art world after the Communist victory.