ChinaRhyming April 12th 2024 - Getting Kinda Surreal
The Last Empress and her American Tutor, Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai, A new bio of Anna May Wong, a little competition if you can spot this reference to Shanghai's old Blood Alley, & more...
The Last Empress and her American Tutor
My latest piece for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine is now online - As everyone knows China’s final imperial ruler had his British tutor, Reginald Johnston. Less is known about Puyi’s wife Wanrong and her American tutor, Isabel Ingram...click here…
Surrealism: From Paris to Shanghai
I spent some time last year editing Lauren Walden’s fascinating text for Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai, which comes with an amazing array of photgraphs of relevant art works too. The book should be out from Hong Kong University Press in October - more details here.
Surrealism in China initially gained a foothold in Shanghai’s former French concession during the early 1930s, disseminated by returning Chinese students who had directly encountered the movement in Paris and Tokyo. Shanghai surrealism adopted a dialectical form, resonating with the modus operandi of the Parisian movement as well as China’s traditional belief system of Daoism. Reconciling the thought of Freud and Marx, Surrealism subsumed the multiple contradictions that divided Republican Shanghai, East and West, colonial and cosmopolitan, ancient and modern, navigating the porous boundaries that separate dream and reality. Shanghai surrealists were not rigid followers of their Parisian counterparts. Indeed, they commingled Surrealist techniques with elements of traditional Chinese iconography. Rather than revolving around a centralized group with a leader, Shanghai Surrealism was a much more diffuse entity, disseminated across copious different periodicals, avant-garde groups, and the entire gamut of political ideology, ranging from Nationalist party supporters to Communist sympathizers. Ultimately, the pervasive presence of Surrealism in Shanghai can be attributed to a wide range of factors: a yearning fornational renewal, the stagnancy of the guohua genre, anticolonial protest, the rise of Western individualism, circumnavigating censorship and experimentation in search of a unique artistic voice.
This is the first English-language book dedicated to introducing Chinese Surrealism, using periodicals and other primary sources to reveal the mutual cultural influences between China and Western avant-garde, and broaden the scope of Surrealist studies beyond Eurocentric prisms. Lauren Walden is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birmingham City University.
Blood Alley Beggars
A little competition - I’ll send a set of my new China Revisited (of course if you want you can always buy them from Blacksmith Books here) reprints of writing about old Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China to the first person who can tell me the book the paragraph below comes from?….
Up for Pre-order - Jonathan Chatwin’s The Southern Tour
The next book is my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series is out May 16 in the UK and USA - Jonathan Chatwin’s The Southern Tour - Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future. More details to come but here’s the cover and here’s the pre-order page….
BTW: Leftover Women on NüVoices
Talking of my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series (you can see all the titles here) Leta Hong Fincher’s Leftover Women: The Tenth Anniversary Edition has been selling brilliantly since it was published last November. Leta has been on many podcasts talking about the book, but I’ll just recommened one here - the NüVoices pod….
Japanese Modernist Painters in Seattle, 1910-1970 - 25/4/24 - Daiwa Foundation, London
(Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Zoe Dusanne, John Matsudaira, and Kenjiro Nomura at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, Seattle, 1952. Photo: Elmer Ogawa)
Curator and writer specializing in the art history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest associated with Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington, David F. Martin will discuss the art of Japanese-American painters active in Seattle, Washington in the early to mid- 20th century. Beginning with the first generation Issei to the next generation of Nisei, several of these artists achieved national and international reputations during their lives. However, their careers and personal lives suffered from being interned in incarceration camps on the American west coast during WWII. Martin will feature a wide range of styles practised by these artists from impressionism to modernism and abstraction. He will present rare images of paintings completed by some of the artists during their incarceration.
More details and booking here…
The Sinica Ultimate China Bookshelf #47 - Kang Zhengguo’s Confessions (2007)
An intimate memoir (translated by Susan Wilf) of everyday life and Communist power from the first days following the establishment of the PRC in 1949 through the Tiananmen Square protests and after. Kang Zhengguo, born into a professional family, grows up a free spirit finding himself drawn to literature. But in Mao's China, his background and interests are enough to condemn him at a young age to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor in Xian's Number Two Brickyard. Kang then catalogs his extended internment in the Maoist prison camp system. At twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, which enables him to start a new life. Rehabilitated after Mao's death, Kang finds himself still subject to the recurring nightmare of Party authority.
Click here to read in full on the Sinica Substack…
Recommended: Not Your China Doll - The Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong
Katie Gee Salisbury’s excellent bio of Anna May Wong, Not Your China Doll (Faber) has been out in the US a while and is now available in the UK…
FYI
Remember I still blog at www.chinarhyming.com
I also still post a lot of images on my Instagram feed - @oldhshanghaipaul
And, all the books noted above are available from my Bookshop.org page - an online bookstore funding independent bookstores