Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Art/Art History

This thesis investigates the intersectionality of ink painting and revolutionary politics in modern China with the work of Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) as an analytical lens. Through a critical sociopolitical contextualization of Fu's paintings at crucial junctures in his career, I will analyze the ways in which his paintings have changed to reflect their respective eras. Along with negotiating his artistic identity and practice, these same junctures have provided a means by which I will critically examine Fu's negotiations of national identity. Born in 1904 when China's final imperial dynasty—Qing (1636-1912)—was in a terminal decline, he grew up during the tumultuous era of warlordism and the shaky beginnings of the Republican Era (1912-1949). Fu was an artist and political activist during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). He was an artist in service of the entire Chinese state as a propagandist (1926-27, 1929-30 for the Kuomintang, and 1950-66 for the People's Republic of China). Though he died one year before the Maoist-led Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Fu's work was posthumously affected. In addition to the abovementioned events, I examine Fu's negotiations of national identity evident in his art historical writing, his time as a propagandist, as well as his formative studies in Japan from 1932 to 1935. His studies proved fruitful as he developed a novel trajectory of modern “guohua” (Chinese national painting) and his signature style that elevated his work to a position of paramount importance. The goal of my project is to provide, a succinct yet satisfactory historiography of modern China while interrogating the ways in which Fu Baoshi not only captured the essence of his natural subjects through novel landscape painting, but the ways in which his career embodies the search for a quintessential “Chinese-ness” within the fine arts and in the realm of national character.

Committee: Andrew Hershberger Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Michael Brooks Ph.D. (Committee Member); Rebecca Skinner Green Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Asian Studies; Biographies; Fine Arts; History; Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, History of Art

As the Chinese Communist Party sought to redefine socialism in the Chinese context and position itself in shifting international currents during the first decade of the newly founded People's Republic of China (1949–1959), the country's art establishment rejected Western modernism in favor of academic styles and selective forms of traditional Chinese practices. State-employed artists, tasked with visualizing party policies, placed themselves at the juncture of historical narratives and social discourses that defined the first decade and a half of the PRC. This dissertation examines a particular group of artists, based in the northwestern provincial capital of Xi'an, who reformulated the traditional practice of ink and color painting (guohua) as a modern artistic medium through their unorthodox brushwork and subject matter. Led by the Yan'an printmaker-turned-painter Shi Lu (1919–1982) and the former Dagongbao sketch journalist Zhao Wangyun (1906–1977), the six ink painters the Chinese Artists Association-Xi'an Branch employed garnered national acclaim for exhibiting their xizuo (“studies”) in a series of well-publicized exhibitions that began in October 1961 in Beijing. Praised for their integration of artistic style with the “character” of the northwestern region based on their firsthand observations, Shi, Zhao and their colleagues — He Haixia (1908–1998), Fang Jizhong (1923–1987), Kang Shiyao (1921–1985) and Li Zisheng (1919–1987) earned a collective name: the Chang'an School (Chang'an huapai). The “success” of the Xi'an ink painters as a modern, regional ink painting “school” was considered not merely a local or personal achievement but a national one. Through five thematic chapters that focus on the school's structural and theoretical foundations, this study suggests the Xi'an artists gained momentum through their ability to function effectively as a work unit (danwei), as content providers for the mass media and as interpreters of the broad concepts o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Julia Andrews (Advisor); Myroslava Mudrak (Committee Member); Kris Paulsen (Committee Member); Christopher Reed (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, History of Art

The Chinese painter and calligrapher Wang Yiting (1867-1938) was also an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Buddhist devotee who became deeply involved with Japan. He was a central participant in a number of important efforts at Sino-Japanese economic, religious, and cultural cooperation that took place from the 1910s through the early 1930s. These projects, like Wang's own art and biography, were largely forgotten in the years following China and Japan's war of the later 1930s and 1940s. This dissertation seeks to contribute to the understanding of early twentieth-century East Asian art and Sino-Japanese cultural interaction by documenting and interpreting Wang's engagement with Japan. This dissertation will argue that Wang Yiting applied traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy to social ends and expanded the visual, discursive, and social ranges of these art forms to include Japan. Wang's early career in international business enabled him to organize artistic, religious, and philanthropic projects that aimed at cultivating friendly ties between China and Japan while also furthering the interests that Wang held dear, such as the strengthening of China as a nation, the preservation and development of China's traditional art, the promotion of Buddhism as a means of universal salvation, and the relief of the unfortunate. Wang pursued these projects while privately cultivating ties with many influential Japanese, making traditional painting and calligraphy the basis of many of his exchanges with them. Wang thus combined interests in commerce, art, religion, and philanthropy, becoming an artistic entrepreneur who was not only an accomplished painter and calligrapher but also an influential organizer of commercial, charitable, religious, and artistic projects.

Committee: Julia F. Andrews PhD (Advisor); Andrew C. Shelton PhD (Committee Member); Richard Torrance PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, History of Art

This dissertation excavates a pivotal moment in the professionalization of women painters in turn-of-the-century Shanghai, just as concepts of “art,” “tradition,” “modernity,” “womanhood,” and even “China” were undergoing radical redefinition as unstable markers of identity. It was here, on the battleground of a port city art market rife with tensions and excitement, under pressures of foreign incursion and national upheaval, that indomitable female ink painter Wu Shujuan (1853-1930) established her reputation as the most famous woman artist of her day. Among the first to adopt the grassroot trappings of the new modern artist, Wu self-published her oeuvre using imported print technologies, mounted solo Western-style exhibitions, served as a judge for burgeoning art societies, and became an icon for positioning Chinese painting in a global world. By retrieving and revalorizing her career and oeuvre from historical debris and male-dominated canons, this dissertation posits an unprecedented query into the art historical field: how was the history of modern Chinese painting co-written by women? Object-based and drawing on distinct art historical, historical, and feminist paradigms, each chapter illuminates the cast of visible and invisible agents through whom Wu engineered her fame: the colleagues and newswriters who shaped her life story into a veritable hagiography of collectible womanhood; the editors who splashed her paintings across national magazines; the sometimes-shady dealers and interpreters who repackaged her art into greater cultural narratives; and the ghostpainters who covertly copied her hand. In each case divesting her legacy of early twentieth-century misogynist stereotypes, this dissertation investigates gendered practices of inclusion and exclusion, and the (in)direct forms of agency through which the female artist negotiated her mobility and visibility across the nationscape. It not only delivers a complex portrait of Wu Shujuan as a historical s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Julia Andrews (Advisor); Namiko Kunimoto (Committee Member); Ying Zhang (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, History of Art

This dissertation outlines the history of the symbiosis between painting and Du Fu's poetry from the poet's time to the twentieth century. Examining the combination of the two arts between 1912 and 1966 will show artists' various ways of incorporating Du Fu's poems in their paintings. It suggests that a shift of spectatorship from private circles of the educated elite to the common people and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took place around 1949, which fundamentally changed the functions of traditionalist art from private communication to service to the masses and the country. In the People's Republic of China (PRC, 1949 onwards) the establishment of the Du Fu Memorial Museum in 1955 marked an important moment in the processes of politicizing and institutionalizing the symbiosis of painting and Du Fu's poetry. The museum has directed and controlled the production, exhibition, and circulation of paintings after Du Fu's poems based on constantly changing political realities. In this context, I argue in this dissertation that artists used their agency and incorporated Du Fu's poetry in their paintings in ingenious ways. They transformed their paintings, with Du Fu's texts, into versatile spaces, where on the surface they might appear satisfactory to the censors, but at other levels suggested alternative meanings available to elite viewers.

Committee: Julia F. Andrews (Advisor); Kirk A. Denton (Committee Member); Namiko Kunimoto (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History