Drawing from life : mass sketching and the formation of socialist realist Guohua in the early People's Republic of China (1949-1965)
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines how traditional Chinese landscape painting, often the site of an inward-turning private subjectivity, was revolutionized through mass sketching campaigns during the early years of the People's Republic of China (1949-1965). One of the most comprehensive programs to reform artistic practice in the history of Chinese art, state-sponsored sketching campaigns developed amid institutional, ideological, and aesthetic changes. Based on sketchbooks and paintings by the ink painters Fu Baoshi (1904-1965), Li Keran (1907-1989), and Guan Shanyue (1912-2000), this study tracks sketching tours that were designed to reform elite artists into cultural workers, to provide experiential knowledge of the essence of socialist reality, and to transform their observations into landscapes that would give shape to and embody the national culture of new China. The sketching tour routes mapped the industrial, revolutionary history, and cosmopolitan geographies constitutive of socialist landscape that, in turn, served as affective journeys for artists to conceive of themselves personally bound to the conceptualization, articulation, and practice of cultural work as a collective endeavor. Tracing the signal importance placed upon drawing and sketching under Maoist ideas of knowledge, consciousness, and practice, I argue that the practice of sketching in art education allowed for the discursive incorporation of previous historical approaches to painting, while inaugurating a critical emphasis on experiential authenticity and artistic participation that is central to socialist cultural production.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Ho, Christine I |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
| Primary advisor | Vinograd, Richard Ellis |
| Thesis advisor | Vinograd, Richard Ellis |
| Thesis advisor | Andrews, Julia Frances |
| Thesis advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban |
| Advisor | Andrews, Julia Frances |
| Advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Advisor | Wang, Ban |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Christine I. Ho. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Christine I Ho
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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