Collage and Construction: Building a Socialist Aesthetic in Chen Yanqiao’s Woodblock Prints

The history of twentieth-century woodblock printmaking in China is indelibly connected to the modernist writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) as well as to the national foundation story of the People’s Republic. The historiography of the print movement’s beginnings has, accordingly, been shaped to fit that mould, concentrating almost exclusively on Lu Xun’s role in guiding and supporting woodblock print artists from 1931-1936, and on the material that he supplied for them to draw upon creatively, including Chinese traditional nianhua prints (New Year’s Pictures), as well as modern woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings from abroad. However, this paper seeks to expand that view by focusing on the work of Chen Yanqiao (1911-1970), a young Chinese printmaker and Communist revolutionary. I will argue that Chen’s woodcuts from the 1930s, and their connections to Constructivism and photomontage, embody a more inclusive concept of what visually inspired and influenced these print artists. Commercial print culture, including movie star tabloids, pictorial magazines, and newspapers, presented transnational art and design to Shanghai’s urban audience. However, the importance of these more popular forms of print publication have been elided from histories of China’s visual culture, stymieing a fuller understanding of how leftist artists adapted and redeployed imagery from a multitude of sources in order to produce politically progressive artwork that would appeal to as many audiences as possible. I will further argue that, in adapting Constructivism’s montage practices, Chen contributed to the building of a transnational socialist aesthetic which was then returned to international circulation in magazines and books.