Surrealism and the manhua artists of Liuyi

Until recently, the phenomenon of surrealism in China had been overlooked in modern scholarship, while Chinese artists’ engagement with other movements in western art and literature received considerably more attention. An increasing number of scholars are now realizing just how important the pictorial magazine as source material has become for the study of modern Chinese art, and are engaging with the vast body of literature in that medium that is now available to them. Surrealist, and surrealist-inspired artwork, published by leading modernists of the day, is found in many pictorial magazines of the 1930s, including that of Zhang Guangyu, Pang Xunqin, Zhou Duo and Liang Baibo. This varied selection of artwork shows how these artists and their colleagues engaged with surrealism in their own very different ways. The focus here is on surrealist-inspired art, in the form of material specifically produced for the publications in which it can be found, as illustrations to stories, articles and poems, and looks at one magazine in particular, Liuyi (The six arts), to show how a typical Shanghai-published art and literature magazine engaged with surrealism. Liuyi was published during a period of political and social uncertainty, just over one year before the start of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). The artists who worked for Liuyi and other related magazines changed direction when hostilities erupted in Shanghai to produce art in the service of national defence, and to a certain extent, began to reject what they had produced before. Nevertheless, the surrealist-inspired work these artists produced in the 1930s was of great significance, and understanding how it fits into the history of Chinese art in the first half of the twentieth century is central to our understanding of the visual arts in the twentieth century more broadly.