Remaking Jiangnan: Imaging the Socialist Utopia of Industry and Agriculture

This paper examines the pictorial propaganda of industrial and agricultural development in Jiangsu province, produced by artists from the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy based in the provincial capital, Nanjing, during socialist China. Gaining national acclaim in the late 1950s, this regional artist group became known for their romantic and lyrical representations of their home province and for their collectively brushed paintings documenting economic and industrial accomplishments throughout China. I focus on two groups of their most celebrated brush-and-ink paintings from the 1950s and 1960s: one portraying the industrialization of Nanjing, signaled by gushing smokestacks in steel factories and chemical plants; the other presenting idyllic rural scenes—expansive, verdant fields near Lake Tai—strikingly devoid of agricultural machinery and toiling labor.

The Jiangsu painters frequently invoked the label “Jiangnan” and its cultural connotations in both paintings and writings. I argue that their work registers the artists’ emotional attunement to their home region and stylistic references to Jiangnan’s distinctive pictorial traditions. Through close examination of this group’s treatment of composition, perspective, brushwork, and color—alongside their study of premodern landscape painting and their own writings—I evaluate how they formulated a landscape expression that balanced local identity with state mandates. Further, this study suggests that these depictions of a fully communized Jiangnan landscape, with massive collective farming and industry, reflect a politically sensitive goal of analogizing productivity to governmental legitimacy while neutralizing anthropogenic changes to the natural environment.