Picturing Crowds in 1930s China

Xiao Tie, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago will give a talk about 1930s woodcut prints depicting crowds.

This chapter explores the 1930s woodcut prints by such radical artists as Jiang Feng, Wen Tao, Tang Yingwei, and Luo Qingzhen, which provided striking visual representations of the notion of popular will and depicted ruly and unruly crowds as the new protagonists of modern public life. I investigate how visual artists tackled the slippery relationship between the toiling crowd as a social reality and the “great masses” as a political ideal in visual representations that responded to foreign visual forms and images by such artist as Käthe Kollwitz and Frans Masereel.