RED IN BLACK AND WHITE

Red in Black and White is an exhibition of works by Liwanna Chan who is completing her doctorate at the School of Art History & Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

Liwanna’s thesis focuses on the folk art of paper cutting and its significance in the development of socialist art in late twentieth century China.

A series of mixed media works make up the practical component of the thesis.  The imagery is inspired by the art and politics of China at the height of Mao’s revolution.
 
RED, IN BLACK AND WHITE

Jianzhi (paper cut) is an ancient Chinese folk art. It flourished as a peasant art form quite distinct from elite literati traditions and practices until Mao Zedong identified folk arts as the central component of his new arts policy in his 1942 Yan’an Forum Speech on Literature and Arts.  This led to the Yan’an Art movement. Artists specialising in different genres had a common ideology - art for the revolution.  In the late 1930s to early 1940s, they departed from their own genre and created expressionist style woodcuts that exposed the dark side of society.  In 1942, based on Mao’s artistic direction, their works evolved from protest expressionism to the folk-based ‘woodcut jianzhi’ with optimism aimed to mobilise the people to build a new nation. The Yan’an movement illustrates the significant role of jianzhi in the formulation of art styles and forms appropriate to a revolutionary movement.

The body of works in this exhibition conceptualises the subject matter and style of the revolutionary artists from Yan’an in the 1940s.  They are connected and sequenced through visual motifs rather than historical chronology.

There are images that:
1.  evoke important events during the twentieth century such as the 1919 May Fourth movement, Mao’s Yan’an speech, the activities under the revolutionary government in Yan’an and arts of the new China.
 
2.  reinterpret the work of the veteran artists by exploring and recreating their images.

3.  illustrate the aesthetic aspects of jianzhi.

4.  demonstrate the contrast between Shanghai and Yan’an and the shift of the avant-garde art hub from cosmopolitan Shanghai to the remote and desolate Yan’an in Shaanxi province in 1942 when Mao Zedong politicised the arts through his Yan’an speech