Xiaobing Tang

Echoes of Roar, China! On Vision and Voice in Modern Chinese Art Xiaobing Tang First published in the December 1935 issue of Modern Prints, journal of the Modern Prints Society based in Guangzhou, the black-and-white woodblock print Roar, China! (fig. 1) by Li Hua (1907 – 94) was subsequently dis- played in the Second National Traveling Woodcut Exhibition that opened at the Sun Yat-sen Municipal Library of Guangzhou on July 5, 1936. From there, the exhibition traveled to several cities in southeastern China and arrived in Shanghai by the beginning of October. After its week-long stop in Shanghai, local organizers took turns arranging for the exhibition to visit more cities and townships in the following months, thereby presenting this print as well as some six hundred other contemporary woodcuts to hun- dreds of thousands of viewers across the country. True to the vision and commitment of the woodcut movement that had emerged since the early 1930s, this Second National Exhibition brought to positions 14:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-010 Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press positions 14:2 Fall 2006 468 Figure 1 Li Hua, Roar, China!,1935, woodblock print, 20 3 15 cm. Reprinted from Hanning dadi (Frozen Land) (Changsha: Hu’nan Meishu, 2000) its vast audience stark images of current events, of war, flood, and famine, of the disenfranchised and underrepresented, and of desolate rural and urban lives and landscapes. Participating artists showed little interest either in themes favored in traditional Chinese painting (birds and flowers, winding brooks, distant mountains) or in conventional studio exercises (still lifes and nudes). They also consciously eschewed any abstract or idiosyncratic visual language that would be associated with various modernist schools and that Tang ❘❘ Echoes of Roar, China! 469 Figure 2 Lai Shaoqi, Roaring China, 1936, woodblock print, 12 3 11.5 cm. Reprinted from Banhua jicheng (Landmarks in Prints) (Shanghai and Nanjing: Lu Xun Jinian guan and Jiangsu Guji, 1991) would undercut a claim to realistic representation. In all these aspects the Second National Exhibition was remarkably consistent with its predecessor, the first National Joint Woodcut Exhibition that took place in Beiping in January 1935. One striking feature of the second exhibition that originated from Guangzhou, compared to the first exhibition, was the fascination with what Li Hua’s print Roar, China! explored both thematically and formally. At least ten artists, judging by the exhibition catalog published in the accom- panying Field of Woodcuts, contributed about fourteen prints that sought to depict a collective and reverberating voice. This fascination with an aural experience and expression, for instance, is central to Tang Yingwei’s Outcry and Women’s Voice, Hu Qizao’s Angry Roar, Lai Shaoqi’s Roaring China (fig. 2), and many other works. The reach of Roar, China! went far beyond the exhibition of 1936. The positions 14:2 Fall 2006 470 print has long been regarded as a masterpiece from the first stage of Li Hua’s outstanding career as a woodcut artist. It has also been widely anthol- ogized as a representative work from the first phase of the modern Chinese woodcut movement, which would reach a new horizon as the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937. Indeed, as I argue below, Roar, China! articulates the deepest creative aspirations of the Chinese woodcut movement, in par- ticular, and the logic of the political culture in modern China, in general. It also encapsulates a profoundly bestirring modern age, in which national awakening and international solidarity were vital to an emancipatory artis- tic imagination. More than all the other contemporary prints preoccupied with a similar theme, Roar, China! adroitly exploits the visual properties of a woodcut. The taut, muscular, and naked male body, bound and blindfolded, is presented for our frontal view. The incisions by the artist are decisive, generating lines in relief that are sharp, angular, and animated. By forgoing tonal transitions to accentuate the jagged black lines, the artist gives the constrained body a translucent quality, suggesting a radiating force that charges and electrifies the physical body. In contrast, the encircling rope, its dark weight under- scored by neatly arranged dots and triangles, conveys a tightening imposi- tion that is as deliberate as it is impervious to the desperate individual. While the austere aesthetic and primeval scream conveyed by the print may readily remind us of an expressionist work such as Edvard Munch’s Scream (1895) (fig. 3), Käthe Kollwitz’s Never Again War (1919 – 24), or even more directly the latter’s Fettered Man (1927) (fig. 4), Li Hua’s creation also invites complex readings and responses. The presence of a dagger and the tantalizing distance between the dagger and the grasping hand of the blindfolded man, for instance, add a suspense or possible narrative to the dra- matic situation. Can he reach the weapon? Who put it there in the first place? How is he going to use it? While it is impossible to resolve such questions at once, they make us keenly aware of the fact that the afflicted individual is not able to see. At the same time, the highly dynamic composition of the image, thanks to the tension and contrasts it manages to contain, compels our eye to move upward. The first and obvious contrast between the horizontally tightening rope and the upright body is matched by the pull between the struggling Tang ❘❘ Echoes of Roar, China! 471 Figure 3 Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895, lithograph. 35.5 3 25.4 cm. © 2005 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York man and the pole leaning slightly to the left. The tension between the pole and the body is such that the top of the pole, the man’s raised right shoulder, and the bottom of the pole form a teetering triangle. This implicit triangle however is superimposed by at least two other triangles in the composition. While the pyramid formed by the man’s two bent legs provides an anchor for his resistance, his lifted head, his reaching hand, and his knee on the ground constitute a virtual triangle that, together with other structures of positions 14:2 Fall 2006 472 Figure 4 Käthe Kollwitz, Fettered Man, 1927, pen and wash, 44.5 3 36.8 cm. © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn tension, interjects a strong sense of motion and contention. This central and upward triangle also organizes our view and demands recognition of the man’s agony as well as his desperate fight. The pinnacle of this primary triangle is the blindfolded man’s head, and the most prominent feature here is his wide open mouth. As we look closely at his agonized expression, a subtle but crucial shift takes place in the dynamics of the visual effect of the woodcut. That the man is deprived of his vision and is therefore not able to see us or engage our gaze now makes us further aware of our own position and experience as viewers. Without the possibility of a mutual recognition through eye contact, it is left to his Tang ❘❘ Echoes of Roar, China! 473 voice to reach us and affirm his humanity. In other words, we are prompted to listen and hear his outcry, and, in order to express our compassion and to reassure him of our solidarity or even presence, we have no choice but to join him in crying out. We have to extend our voice and imagine that it will reach across the space in between to console him, even though his ears seem to be covered as well. Voice in this instance serves as the only possible intersubjective medium that connects the blindfolded man in front of us and ourselves. If he can hear our voice, we then succeed in informing him of our recognition of his pain and we also affirm our own humanity and agency. The conceptual effect of the print is that in front of it we must transform ourselves from a silent spectator to an active and voicing subject. The individual depicted in the frame must stop being an object for view- ing and, united with us in action, he becomes a mirror image of our own subject-position. In this light, the title given to this woodcut is all the more meaningful. The imperative “Roar, China!” makes it clear that the image not so much depicts or represents a vociferous nation as it issues an urgent order that the nation must cry out. Furthermore, the imperative is addressed not so much to the individual within the frame and already screaming, as to each and every present and future viewer of the image. The naked and blindfolded man, therefore, cannot be viewed as a metaphoric representation of China, because presumably it is the multiple human voices and outcries called forth through his existence and example that will articulate and assert the existence of China. In other words, China is called into being only insofar as human subjects actively pledge their allegiance; only such vocal affirmations will affirm the subject-position of China as a nation. By giving the name China to the subjective intervention to be mobilized by his artwork, the artist at once expressed his commitment to the nation as a cause, and revealed his conception of the role of an artist. The artist was to be an agitator as much as a clairvoyant, someone whose mandate it was to awaken the nation. By the time he made the woodblock print Roar, China!, Li Hua was a mature artist with experience in a wide range of subject matter in various mediums.

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