An Impossible Utopia: People’s Art and the Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution period of the People’s Republic of China (1966-1976) was crucial in the creation of modern-day China. The material culture of that period mirrors the turbulent political activity of students and the directives of the Communist Party’s central leadership during the height of the Mao Zedong personality cult. The commercial manufacture of posters, often the sole decoration available for the public and private spheres, offers strong examples of the design style of this time. The posters are not only indicative of the propagandistic fervor of production, but the aesthetic changes initiated in the visual and performing arts during the period as the state consciously manipulated style in an effort to create a “people’s” art and envision a Marxist utopia. This paper suggests that a comprehension of folk arts and popular culture is essential for understanding the visual language of this specific geographic and political space. A new perspective on the reconciliation of reality and ideology during the Cultural Revolution is gained through an analysis of popular form and content, and reveals not only the basis of a modern mass culture, but the unprecedented unification of high and low art forms

Power, identity and antiquarian approaches in modern Chinese art

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late Imperial China. Following various publications by Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730-1797), Wu Yi 武億 (1745-1799) and Qian Daxin 錢大昕 (1728-1804) in the 18th century, the study and collecting of rubbings of Northern Wei stone inscriptions and steles was popular. Such spread of interest in jinshi, inscriptions on metal and stone, also formed a base for studying seal carving, epigraphy and archaic painting. While traditional antiquarians would cherish inscriptions which enabled them to correct mistakes in the transmitted historical texts and the Classics, however, much of the antiquarian activity was adapted to mere literary exercise or connoisseurship, for instance, to supplying materials which could provide models for seal-carving and calligraphy. Examples could be seen in the calligraphy works and seal carvings of the Xiling bajia 西泠八家 (Eight Masters of Xiling, i.e. Hangzhou), also known as Zhe School of Calligraphy and Carving. Their keen interest in seeking inspiration from steles for their artistic presentations has been recorded in their writing and painting. In addition, the way the scholar-collector of the 19th and early 20th centuries mounted the rubbings, seals, inscriptions, paintings, letters and textual evidence studies into one album shows a changing ideology: rubbings were not only for scholarly study in classical learning, but were regarded as part of the art form and were appreciated on various social occasions. The antiquarian movement ultimately served as a tool for re-writing art historiography in modern China. This paper aims to address the phenomenon and formation of the jinshi painting that dominated in late Imperial and early modern China. Through case studies of three important jinshi societies in Shanghai, I will investigate in what way literary taste from the southern region gradually replaced imperial patronage which was in decline after the Qianlong emperor’s reign, and how the shift of the cultural centre from Beijing to the southern regions from the mid-19th century onwards became a reflection of changing power and identity for cultural leaders and their perspectives in history and the history of objects

Research on Calligraphy Evaluation Technology Based on Deep Learning

Today, when computer-assisted instruction (CAI) is booming, related research in the field of calligraphy education still hasn’t much progress. This main research for the calligraphy beginners to evaluate their works anytime and anywhere. Author uses the literature research and interview to understand the common writing problems of beginners. Then conducts discussion on these problems, design of solutions, research on algorithms, and experimental verification. Based on the ResNet-50 model, through WeChat applet implements for beginners. The main research contents are as follows: (1) In order to achieve good results in calligraphy judgment, this article uses the ResNet-50 model to judge calligraphy. First, adjust the area of the handwritten calligraphy image as the input of the network to a small block suitable for the network. While training the network, adjust the learning rate, the number of image layers and the number of training samples to achieve the optimal. The research results show that ResNet has certain practicality and reference value in the field of calligraphy judgment. Regarding the possible over-fitting problem, this article proposes to improve the accuracy of the judgment by collecting more data and optimizing the data washing process. (2) Combining the rise of WeChat applets, in view of the current WeChat applet learning platform development process and the problem of fewer functional modules, this paper uses cloud development functions to develop a calligraphy learning platform based on WeChat applets. While simplifying the development process, it ensures that the functional modules of the platform meet the needs of teachers and beginners, it has certain practicality and commercial value. After the development of the calligraphy learning applet is completed, it will be submitted for official

Archiving Body Movements: Collective Generation of Chinese Calligraphy

As a communication channel, body movements have been widely explored in behavioral studies and kinesics. Performing and visual arts share the same interests but focus on documenting and representing human body movements, such as for dance notation and visual work creation. This paper investigates body movements in oriental calligraphy and how to apply calligraphy principles to stimulate and archive body movements. Through an artwork (Wushu), the authors experiment with an interactive and generative approach to engage the audience's bodily participation and archive the body movements as a compendium of generated calligraphy. The audience assumes the role of both writers and readers; creating ("writing") and appreciating ("reading") the generated calligraphy becomes a cyclical process within this infinite "Book," which can motivate further attention and discussions concerning Chinese characters and calligraphy.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure