Despite its traumas, 2020 was a banner year for scholarship on modern Chinese art history. In addition to the reviewed book, the field saw the publication of at least three other books by first-time authors last year.Footnote 1 This is significant because the field has produced few monographs on the socialist period since the pioneering publications of the 1990s. Christine I. Ho's book Drawing from Life reaches beyond existing scholarship to demystify aspects of socialist cultural production that were shrouded in period jargon. Ho's analysis is generated from the images, privileging artists’ aesthetic decisions rather than their biographies; in doing so, she keeps the focus on artistic agency rather than political circumstances beyond individual control. The payoff is a book of sophisticated theoretical and formal analysis that offers a nuanced view into the complex aesthetic changes that shaped visual culture in the first seventeen years of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Readers familiar with posters, socialist realist oil paintings, portraits of Mao, or revolutionary woodcuts may wonder what a study of “drawing from life” can possibly tell us about modern Chinese art. Recognizing that the state-mandated practice of sketching has been a ubiquitous yet underexamined element of artmaking in China since 1949, Ho narrates artistic developments in new China from the bottom up, exploring how artists adapted to this technical and ideological requirement. Earlier writers have described the economic and institutional changes that the Communist Party implemented in the Chinese art world after the establishment of the PRC and the novelty of the new political subject matter, but a major contribution of Ho's analysis is to recognize this universal artistic experience, including “mass sketching,” as a major source of artistic change and innovation in visual art between 1949 and 1976.
A canonical form of high socialist Chinese art in PRC museums is socialist realist oil painting, a product of institutionalized art practice. Ho demonstrates that other forms of art also emerged in the early PRC, all grounded in sketching, that were equally significant for their process, and as such, they were a method of ideological training by which artists became cultural workers. The book's ambitious scope and richly textured analysis of artists, both famous and obscure, amply reveal the previously underappreciated complexity of their pursuit of socialism and the elusive concept of “realism.”
The three chapters that make up part one establish the formative period for sketching. Chapter 1 examines the European sources adopted by artists who straddled the 1949 divide. Ho observes that despite opposition from traditionalists, drawing gained irreversible traction in the coterminous establishment of the Chinese art academy system in the Republican period, even though it remained a studio-based practice at this time. Chapter 2 traces the beginnings of the Communist art education system as sketching became the primary activity associated with xiaxiang (going to the countryside), which tasked artists with rooting their practice in social investigation to balance the academicism of studio sketching. Through the example of Wang Shikuo's charcoal The Bloodstained Shirt, Ho argues that the complete process of creation, from research to product, anointed the method of sketching as a genre in itself while serving as a form of political training for the artist. Chapter 3 returns to ink painting with a discussion of the medium's viability as a form for the masses. Defenders of the indigenous medium tried to parlay the perceived connection between ink and Western watercolor into a renewed language by shifting the emphasis from brushwork (cunfa) to wash as its primary method.
The integration of sketching at all levels of artistic practice resulted in the formation of three genres that are discussed in part two. Chapter 4 investigates the construction landscape, one of the first genres shaped by mass sketching, whose purpose was to visually amplify national progress. A painting like Li Xiongcai's Flood Prevention in Wuhan, Ho argues, succeeded in showcasing engineering expertise, mass labor, and effective governance. Chapter 5 examines paintings of revolutionary history that emerged around the twentieth anniversary of the Long March, when artists were summoned to visit revolutionary sites and tasked with evoking and reinscribing the legacy of the Chinese Communist Party through their work. By adopting plein air principles from sketching and impressionism, socialist realist artists such as Dong Xiwen were able to imbue historical paintings with visual immediacy. Chapter 6 examines the domain of artistic exchange within international socialism networks. Ho adopts the term “diplomatic sketches” to describe works created by traveling Chinese artists as expressions of socialist cosmopolitanism.
Finally, chapter 7 traces sketching practices that culminated in revolutionary romanticism, an achievement of early socialist China that leveraged the sublime of nineteenth-century European romanticism to triumphantly elevate Chinese revolutionary themes. Created after a national sketching tour, Qian Songyan's Red Crag, a painting that epitomizes sinified socialist art as a complete and indigenous style distinct from Soviet models, was heralded as the apogee of revolutionary romanticism.
Drawing from Life advances scholarship on the art of the PRC through its empirically grounded arguments, but more significantly, it treats with the full toolbox of art historical methodology a body of work that has not previously enjoyed such aesthetic consideration. The topic is one of such obvious importance that one can only wonder why no art historian thought to study it before; indeed, it heralds a new stage in which focused studies can unapologetically build upon earlier general surveys. Scholars of modern Chinese art history will appreciate the granularity of the book's research and the precision of Ho's visual analysis. The book will also be of interest to scholars of modern history and Chinese studies who seek a deeper understanding of Maoist visual culture. An innovative and rhetorically refined text suitable for graduate seminars and advanced undergraduates, it is a welcome addition to the few scholarly studies of art in the PRC.
