Folk Art and Modern Culture in Republican China by Felicity Lufkin (review)

Folk Art and Modern Culture in Republican China is a valuable addition to the studies of folk art, folklorics, and modern Chinese cultural history. Felicity Lufkin, employing the keen sensibility of an art historian, gives shape to the fraught intertwinement of folk art and modern culture in Republican China. Through rich illustrations and strong formal analysis, Lufkin visualizes how Chinese folk art, on the one hand, came to be understood to be primitive, backward, and in need of intellectual intervention and, on the other, held considerable power over the development of modern Chinese culture and politics. In conversation with earlier works by Chang-tai Hung and David Holm and, more recently, Xiaobing Tang and James Flath,¹ Lufkin zooms in on folk art—woodcut prints and Chinese New Year pictures (年畫 nianhua) in particular—to ponder the relationship between art and politics in twentieth-century China.

In chronological order, Lufkin delineates how the study of folk art in Republican China took its cue from the earlier movement of folklore studies, converged with and diverged from the New Print movement, and eventually was appropriated by both the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Part 1 depicts how the artistic, intellectual, and public discourses shaped, negotiated, and assimilated folk art in the years leading up to the full outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Lufkin gives [End Page E-7] full volume to both the attraction to and ambivalence over the concept of folk art: from the abounding joy of Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻 1895-1953) at seeing Niren Zhang (泥人張) clay figures—which he compared to masterpieces of the best European sculptors—to his reluctance to meet folk artists in person (chapter 1); from Lu Xun's endorsement of and the Modern Print Association's embrace of "folkloric prints" to the criticisms that the association received for fixating on images of localized everyday life in Guangzhou without contributing to the buildup of revolutionary ethos (chapters 2 and 3); from the success of the first major Chinese exhibition of folk prints held in Hangzhou in 1937 to the curators' realization that recontextualizing folk art in a modern exhibition hall and in accordance with enlightenment discourse could not guarantee the full exorcizing of feudal remnants (chapter 4). Insofar as folk art was a source for both pride and shame for modern Chinese artists, intellectuals, and educators, "two contradictory views regarding folk and popular prints simply coexisted" (105). On the one hand, the perceived backwardness and primitivism embodied in folk art seemed to beckon elite intervention and top-down reform. On the other, despite efforts to reify the negative connotations of folk art and to fossilize it as an unchanging specimen from the past, the "diversity and cultural richness" of folk art persevered and even "intensified" at a moment of national crisis (106). Part 2 showcases how both the GMD (chapter 5) and the CCP (chapters 6 and 7) utilized folk prints during the Second Sino-Japanese War for wartime mobilization, national salvation, and the promotion of party politics. While, in Nationalist-controlled areas, the GMD narrowed their use of folk-based propaganda mostly to the resistance Door God (chapter 5), the CCP in Yan'an and other Communist base areas explored more extensively the use of folk art such as the new-style New Year pictures and papercuts (chapters 6 and 7). Lufkin is careful to note, however, that while both parties found that the "new wine" of wartime propaganda "fit comfortably and appealingly into the 'old bottles'" (136), such successful appropriation of folk art at a time of national crisis did not dispel anxieties surrounding the old forms, for fear that it would promote "feudal superstition" (164). Such suspicion of and dissatisfaction with the folk prints left room for further reform. Without making explicit the causality between the lingering suspicion of folk art and renewed reform measures in the People's Republic of China, Lufkin ends the book with a compact conclusion highlighting the key events...