7 - Woodcuts and Forsaken Subjects

Summary

This chapter explores how the Chinese woodcut rose to prominence on a surge of social and ethnographic interest among Chinese artists over the 1930s who, through the medium, sought to speak for the voiceless and downtrodden, and increasingly of those in rural contexts. The chapter aims to show how the woodcut genre helped create a new political position that personified the popular experience of what became known as the old society: if revolutionary memory was a form of overarching metanarrative joining the past to the present, what populated its landscape were what this chapter calls forsaken subjects. These subjects inhabited a civic vacuum of predatory social relations, moribund in its capacity for historical change and therefore backward and “feudal.” Over the course of war with Japan and its aftermath of civil war, the woodcut evolved from portrayals of social desolation – of moral impasse and cultural failures – to affirmative messaging, one that assigned new codes, values and frames of reference to social life, at times executed with the juxtaposition of the old and new China. The woodcut, as this chapter aims to show, offered a visual analog to May Fourth-New Culture depictions of communal life a quarter of a century earlier.