Jia_Jia Shi Lu

10.1177/1077800405276766QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / August 2005Jia / THE RECONSTRUCTION OF APOLITICALICON

The Reconstruction of a Political Icon:Shi Lu’s Painting Fighting in Northern Shaanxi

Jia JiaUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

As an instance of semiotic interpretation of political art, this article rereads a paintingcreated during the 1950s by Shi Lu that depicts the Chinese Communist leader, MaoZedong. The author identifies the artist’s visual references to traditional Chinese land-scape painting and the embodied traditional values, differentiates the work from the pop-ular revolutionary art style of the same age, and argues that this act of referencingproblematizes the dominant ideology in a politically highly charged historical context byreconstructing the commonly depicted political icon Mao through dislocated style andscale. The interpretation demonstrates how signifiers both in the forms of text and mem-ory can interfere with current cultural drive and rename the signified through subtlevariations.

Keywords: revolutionary art; Chinese traditional landscape painting; political icon;Mao Zedong; semiotics

Mighty they stand between Heaven and earth,In orderly function like the body’s ducts and veins.Who was he who first laid out their origin?Who, in labor and striving, urged it on?Creating in this place the simple and artificed,With forces joined, he bore long-suffering toil.Could he have not applied hatchet and ax?He must have used spells and incantations.No tradition survives from the Age of Chaos,Such a mighty deed none can repay.I have heard from the priest I charge of sacrificeThat he descends to taste the offering’s sweet scent.Finely wrought, I made this poem,By which I may join in requiting him.

(Han Yu, 768-824, “South Mountains,”as quoted in Owens, 1996, p. 28)

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Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 11 Number 4, 2005 535-548DOI: 10.1177/1077800405276766© 2005 Sage Publications

The Tang-Dynasty Chinese poem absorbed me into the landscape, where Iwas made to share the awed appreciation of nature. Yet suddenly, I am awarethat someone else is there beside me in the spectacle. Through the mistyclouds, faintly, I see a figure, a figure with the mighty power to create the scen-ery and to blow my existence into the text.

The relationship between mountain landscapes and the appreciation forpower has remained a constant motif throughout history. At the same time,the critical analysis of political icons and visual texts has a long and rich his-tory in semiotics and interpretive social science (see Barthes, 1972; Becker,2002; Hall, 1997). In this article, I offer a critical, political reading of a Chinesepainting titled Fighting in Northern Shaanxi by Shi Lu. My interest in the recon-struction and interpretation of political icons was initiated by this modernChinese painting (see Figure 1), which depicts Mao Zedong, the ChineseCommunist leader who established the People’s Republic of China in 1949.The picture shows Mao standing on a cliff, which is a common focal themeamong Chinese Communist imageries. In this article, I analyze how thispainting deviates from the conventional way of portraying the legendarypolitical leader in the dominant pictorial propaganda discourse. My argu-ment is that by bringing the common political theme back into the tradition ofChinese landscape paintings, the painter Shi Lu challenged the conventionalrepresentation of Mao and the revolutionary ideology embodied therein.

To study the inherent contradiction between the conventionalized struc-tures underlining the painting, I draw on Albers and James’s (1988) method-ology of semiotic analysis of images, which is articulated in their article“Travel Photography, A Methodological Approach.” Examining the relation-ship between postcard imagery and ethnicity as a case study, they demon-strated a way to relate pictures to a wider ideological discourse. The methodAlbers and James proposed attempts to see the ideological meaning of certainvisual elements, such as stagy posing, through comparison work among“parallel and contrasting structures in other pictures” (p. 147) This approachemphasizes the historically constructed nature of visual works by under-standing visual elements, especially composition, through their accumulatedassociations within the local tradition. Bringing this method to bear on a Chi-nese historical context, I find the method casts light on my reading of this Chi-nese painting that was made during the fevered left-wing political move-ments which soon led to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, an era ofdisruption of the local tradition. Visually, the disruption expressed itself inthe dominant representation field by a major technical departure from tradi-tional ink-and-brush painting skills toward oil painting, despite the con-trolled revival of traditional painting led by Mao’s movement of “AHundredFlowers” in the 1950s. However, the painting Fighting in Northern Shaanxiinterweaves a current political theme with traditional representation materi-als and skills and, thus, problematizes the theme by colliding its aura with thehistorical association of the traditional representation method.

536 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / August 2005

My study deviates from Albers and James’s (1988) case in two major ways.First, unlike the postcard, a popular media that serves to reinforce the domi-nant ideology, the object of my study is an art piece, which usually has a moreconsciously subversive potential than other forms of representation. Second,the historical moment when the painting was made was both highly politi-cized and culturally disruptive. During the Cultural Revolution, the ChineseCommunist Party (CCP) attempted to replace the traditional Chinese culturewith new Communist ideals. One of the aims of the Cultural Revolution, asthe CCP propaganda constantly proposed, was to “sweep away reactionary,decadent bourgeois and feudal influences, and all old ideas, culture, customs,

Jia / THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A POLITICAL ICON 537

Figure 1: Fighting in Northern Shaanxi, by Shi Lu, 1959Source: Web site at http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/exhib/gug/indxs/new/newpaintpgs/C4140M.html

and habits” (Peking Review, 1966, p. 17). The cultural displacements allowedroom for visual disturbance in the field of representation. However, art andliterature, considered the main vehicles for the “bourgeois and feudal influ-ences,” were main targets for reconstruction under the control of the CCP.Consequently, there emerged a very unique style that dominated propagandarepresentations, Chinese socialist realism, a hybrid product of Western tech-niques and CCP ideals. The painting I study even boldly departs from thishybrid style in its own disturbing ways and demonstrates how the tensionwithin the cultural upheaval, aroused by political movements, could realizeitself in an artistic specificity. As a result, rather than comparing differ-ent groups of images as Albers and James did, it is actually within one picturewhere I find sharply disturbing contrasts. Yet I also extend my examinationto two other paintings: One is a typical propaganda painting and the other isa traditional Chinese literati landscape painting. They represent the twoextremes of representations that collide within the painting Fighting in North-ern Shaanxi.

In modern Chinese history, Mao has been condensed into a social andpolitical icon, and there is a vast amount of literature clustering around him.In the field of imagery, Mao is the most common focal theme, usually depictedwith a strong socialist realistic touch. It has to be noted that socialist realism isdifferent from social realism. Social realism focuses on the hardship of every-day life and social problems. But socialist realism does not aim at creating anillusion of reality. Rather, it is a genre that features realistic details set up in atableau manner that serves to glorify communism. Figures depicted appearmore to be symbols rather than flesh-and-blood persons. Its idealized combi-nation renders itself almost the most ironic version of realism, because real-ism is usually regarded as the opposite of idealization. The genre came toChina from the Soviet Union as Communist parties claimed the politicalpower in both countries and became the most influential, if not the only style,in public representation. In the case of depicting Mao, the technique is evenexaggerated, for the vivid realistic details keep the political leader recogniz-able, whereas the idealized setting and stagy posing lift him to function as anicon that deserves admiration from the people.

The painting Inspection in Fushun (see Figure 2) could serve as a goodexample of this kind of representation. In the picture, Mao, accompanied by amixed group of soldiers and local workers, is standing on a mountaintopinspecting the constructions going on in the area of Fushun. In terms of sub-ject matter, everything in the picture functions as a symbol. A crash helmetand a white towel constitute an ideal image of a labor worker according to theCommunist convention of representation. Red flags signify the revolutionaryforce, and the small red flag in the worker’s hand, used for commanding, isalso a symbol of power. A woman must be present in this mixed group, asfeminism has always been a part of the Communist ideal, although her pos-ture renders her relatively naïve and submissive, whereas male workers all


appear very aggressive, stepping forward. Everyone has a highly masculineface, with tough facial structures and dark eyebrows, which is in reality not socommon among average Asian faces but works perfectly to represent thefighting spirits the revolutionary age encouraged. And they all seemextremely cheerful and energetic, looking into the bright future of Commu-nist China. Among them, Mao stands upright, one arm akimbo, with a confi-dent smile and a determined look of a real leader on his face. The natural sur-roundings are occupied by machines and ongoing constructions that on thesurface level, indicate the satisfactory progress of the local work and at thesame time on a symbolic level, correspond with the reconstruction mentalityof the CCP, which aims to reconstruct everything according to the Commu-nist ideal, including the so-called feudal and capitalist ideologies and evennatural sceneries.

Beyond the subject matter, the image also reveals the social values of thetime at a semiotic level. The composition of the picture is conventionally bal-anced, with the group surrounding the axis of Mao, who is definitely the cen-ter of the image. The sizes of the figures are in accordance with their politicaland social power: Mao the biggest, male workers and soldiers smaller, andthe female worker even smaller. Figures all stand in one half of the picture,facing toward the other half, which is relatively empty: a visually com-fortable, conventional composition strategy to leave room for the viewerto participate in the cheerful looking into the bright future. Mao is pre-sented absolutely frontal, due to the capacity of frontality to create ademanding, assertive force. Furthermore, the group is presented at eye level,


Figure 2: Inspection in Fushun, Collective Piece by Liao Ning ProvincePublicity Museum, Fine Art Team, Shown at the 1972 NationalArt Exhibition, China

Source: Web site at www.CL2000.com

and their physical position on a mountaintop helps enhance their symbolicimportance.

If the symbolic meanings of the white towel and the crash helmet werenewly produced in the revolutionary era, the significance of the frontal, tab-leau composition is more culturally universal and has a much longer historyin which the stagy posing and the composition of tableau have been widelyritualized and conventionalized. Albers and James (1988) discussed a picturein their article on tourist photography in which “the subject in the picture isposed in a highly stylized manner against the background of a brilliant bluesky” (p. 149). This is similar to what is happening in Inspection in Fushun.Comparing this picture produced in the local tradition with the poses on post-cards, Albers and James further argued that stagy posing, as a stylizedcompositional strategy, works to dehistoricize subject matters. In anothercase, Ravi Vasudevan (2000), in “The Politics of Cultural Address in a ‘Transi-tional’ Cinema,” examined how current Indian popular cinema reinventsitself in relation to “universal models of narration and subjectivity” (p. 131).He completed a detailed analysis of the way cinematic devices are deployedto organize narratives and generate subjectivities. For example, point-of-view editing is studied for its function to create encounter scenes in which thelocal religious tradition is revealed in the form of the expectation betweenlovers. Regarding the relationship between iconicity, frontality, and the tab-leau frame, Vasudevan pointed out that “frontal planes in cinematic composi-tion are used to relay the work of iconic condensation and also to group char-acters and objects in space of the tableau” (p. 138) The Chinese Communistrepresentation, especially in the rendering of Mao, has strictly followed thisconvention to create condensed iconic images.

Indeed, formal conventions are more inherent and subtle in representingan ideological temperament than are specific symbols, as they reflect howtime and space are perceived on a deeper structural level. This being said, achallenge toward old conventions by providing an alternative relational pat-tern, or perspective, would be extremely critical, as Shi Lu did in his paintingFighting in Northern Shaanxi. This painting was done in 1959, soon after the “AHundred Flowers” movement was finished and traditional Chinese paintingwas once again crushed to a corner in the field of representation. Fighting inNorthern Shaanxi still shows Mao on a cliff, as Mao is often associated withmountains, because many important Communist fights were won and manyCCP meetings were held in mountains. They are not just a natural artifact butalso a cultural one, for mountains are also a symbol for the great territory ofChina as the object of conquest. And Mao, a great poet as well, wrote a largenumber of heroic poems with the mountain as a constant motif. He evennamed many of his poems after famous mountains, including “MountLiupan,” “Mount Shao Revisted,” “Ascent Mount Lu,” “Mount Jinggang,”and “Reascending Mount Jinggang.” In “Changsha,” Mao (n.d.) wrote,


I see a thousand hills crimsoned throughBy their serried woods deep-dyed,And a hundred barges vyingOver crystal blue waters.

And Mao continued to express his ambition,

Pointing to our mountains and rivers,Setting people afire with our words,We counted the mighty no more than muck.

However, all these revolutionary associations between mountains and theambition of conquest were relatively new in comparison with the motif ofmountains in the traditional Chinese literary discourse. In traditional Chi-nese literati culture, mountains signify Nature, and Nature had played a sig-nificant role in the construction of the transcendental experience of literaticulture. It has always been endowed with a strong philosophical and contem-plative aura, as the great Dao is always in accordance with nature. More spe-cific, mountains are considered to be the site where enlightened Buddhist andDaoist legendary figures dwell and a resource for literati to seek their connec-tion with the great Dao. Not only are mountains a resort for literati to visit butthere are also innumerable literary texts that document beautiful stories inwhich detached literati retreated from political arenas to the mountains tospend the rest of their lives in mental peace and wisdom.

This is also why landscape painting was one of the most prominent genresin Chinese art history. Many landscape paintings are, in fact, cultural scenesthrough which traditional intellectuals constructed their religious and intel-lectual identities. It must also be noted that most of the traditional Chineselandscape paintings were not done by professional artists but instead, by theliterati society, the male members of which usually held government posi-tions and were often poets as well. Such a background helped to break downthe boundary between literary and pictorial discourses, as both developedwith a great deal of allusion to each other. For example, in the 14th-centurypainting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, the painter Huang Gongwang,who himself rejected political involvements, alluded in his painting to thestory of a famous hermit of the Han Dynasty. By so doing, he might have alsoattempted to flatter his patron by comparing him to the recluse of antiquity(Clunas, 1997, p. 151).

Despite all the rich cultural heritage and associations, this layer of mean-ing had been completely erased in the revolutionary paintings in Mao’s era,when a great amount of traditional culture became the target of elimination asfeudal poison and intellectuals were forcibly reeducated by peasants in theCultural Revolution. In the field of pictorial representation, mountains werestill commonly seen but inscribed with an entirely new set of meanings as dis-cussed earlier. What Shi Lu did in Fighting in Northern Shaanxi was to bring


Yang Wang

Yang Wang

back those traditional associations of mountains in ancient China to the cul-turally disrupted era highly politicized by the Communist ideology.

How did Shi Lu achieve the task of providing a different structure to repre-sent the same subject matter? It is exactly through the style of the painting thathe revived the tradition. Most of the revolutionary paintings took the form ofoil painting, influenced by Soviet socialist realism. The palpable nature of oilpainting technique serves well to render the extremely vivid details thatsocialist realism heavily relies on. Shi Lu, in contrast, employed ink andbrush, the traditional Chinese painting materials for his project. As oil paint-ing, a completely novel painting technique that had arrived in China, func-tions perfectly well for constructing a whole new vision of the New China, theink and brush recall their pictorial peers in the traditional history. Further-more, the ink-and-brush technique, to a great extent, relies on the absorbencyof paper, and the effect of the paintings could hardly have been realistic. It isexactly this material quality that lends traditional Chinese paintings a blurryand conceptually elegant feel, corresponding with the Buddhist and Daoistsense of emptiness. Therefore, it is a significant act for Shi Lu to employ thetraditional technique and, thus, invoke its traditional associations in thepainting.

In addition to the material, what counts most in making Fighting in North-ern Shaanxi critical is its composition, which represents an entirely differentway to structure time and space, subject and object. The painting is vastlyoccupied by enormous mountains, with the foreground mountain depictedseverely dark and the background mountains extending beyond the horizon.And the mountain in the foreground was meticulously delineated, whereasthe background mountains were portrayed in a rather minimal and abstractmanner. This way of depicting mountains is very common among traditionalChinese landscape paintings; it renders nature more timeless and arousesdetachment to daily affairs. The detachment the natural scenery demands iscompletely opposite to the strong affectivity of conventional leader portraits.The overwhelming mountains draw most of the viewer’s attention and belit-tle the human figures, which are reduced to a very small scale. Mao does notseem to be in control of the whole of nature around him. Instead, he looks likepart of it, or is confronted by it, which is a completely different relational pat-tern from the Communist reconstruction mentality. In short, the power ofMao seems to be reduced proportionally as his figure. Furthermore, Mao ispresented in profile, rather than frontal, which is much less assertive. In com-bination with his small scale, it is hard to read his facial expression, whichmakes him quite impersonal. Therefore, the viewer’s emotion is less chargedby his aura. Actually, he is somehow objectified as a lonely figure standing ona cliff. In addition, unlike the composition of Inspection in Fushun, in Fightingin Northern Shaanxi there is not enough room remaining on the right, in whichdirection Mao is facing, which makes his stance very unstable.


Yang Wang


Figure 3: Waterfall on Mount Lu, by Shitao, c. 1700Source: Web site at http://www.ljhammond.com/cwgt/qing.htm

Understanding Fighting in Northern Shaanxi in the context of traditionalChinese culture is assisted by a comparison to the landscape painting Water-fall on Mount Lu (see Figure 3). This 17th-century painting was done by Shitao,a literati painter Shi Lu admired so much as to take part of Shitao’s name aspart of his pen name, which also justifies this comparison between theirworks. Both paintings share similar proportions between natural sceneriesand human figures. Like Fighting in Northern Shaanxi, in Waterfall on Mount Lu,the main figure also is not depicted frontally; the painting shows the figure’sback to us. About this painting, Annie Burkus-Chasson (1996) argued that themain figure was looking at the mist and clouds arising in the mountains andthat the figure served as an agency of vision to direct the viewer’s attentiontoward the Daoist emptiness, which suggests an alternative way of seeing asopposed to “possessive looking.” This painting is a very typical traditionalChinese representation of landscape with human figures in it and is religi-ously and philosophically loaded.

Situating Shi Lu’s painting of Mao in this long tradition, his painting looksextremely disturbing to eyes familiar with both Communist propaganda andtraditional Chinese paintings. The conflict does not exist in any visual discor-dance but instead, between the two discourses associated with the subjectmatter and the composition, respectively. That is, the subject matter, Maostanding on a cliff, is a very common Communist theme, whereas the way ofrepresentation, from the material to the composition, brings the painting backto the traditional Chinese literati culture. In addition, even the subject matterin Fighting in Northern Shaanxi is problematic. The two figures accompanyingMao look like local peasants. Rather than eagerly surrounding Mao like theworkers and the soldier in Inspection in Fushun, they sit peacefully at a dis-tance from Mao, taking care of his horse. In traditional Chinese culture, leav-ing the horse has the association of retreating from the battlefield. By lettingtwo mysterious local peasants take care of this symbol of fighting, what didShi Lu want to say?

Nobody really knows the intention of the painter. But the discrepancybetween the conventional focal theme and the unconventional but traditionalway of representation has been realized by many people, including those inhigh political power during the Cultural Revolution. In fact, Shi Lu was per-secuted nearly to death because of Fighting in Northern Shaanxi. He wasaccused of showing Mao “separated from the masses and hoping he wouldfall off the cliff” (Sullivan, 1996, p. 250). After the Cultural Revolution, Shi Lutook up painting again, yet returned to more traditional Chinese paintingthemes such as flowers, birds, and pure landscapes. But he continued hisbrave experimentation with the traditional skills with a strong impressionistflavor and was considered by an American art collector as a Chinese equiva-lent of Van Gogh. He was also restored to the famed social position he onceheld and has been regarded by modern Chinese art historians to have contrib-uted greatly to the process of transformation of Chinese painting from the tra-


Yang Wang

ditional to the modern stage. However, as Sullivan (1996) recorded, “Henever fully recovered from his ill treatment, became tubercular and schizo-phrenic, and died in a Beijing hospital in August 1982 at the age of sixty-two”(p. 250).

In a discussion about the effectiveness of photo elicitation as a qualitativeresearch method, Douglas Harper (2002) pointed out that “photographs canjolt subjects into a new awareness of their social existence” (p. 21), and hedemonstrated this himself by framing photos from unusual angles. That is, adifferent form of framing suggests an entirely new perspective and maydemand reconsideration of an established fact that people are used to. Thismethod works especially effectively as the new composition invokes a com-pletely different convention to construct subjectivities at another historicalmoment. Shi Lu’s painting, in this sense, works in exactly the same way asHarper’s photos in terms of reframing the same subject matter, yet his work ismore politically engaged and the questions raised would be more socially sig-nificant. In Fighting in Northern Shaanxi, he traced back to the painting compo-sition of centuries ago and invited it to interfere with the current ideology.Historical echoes could be heard within this single image. By so doing, is hetrying to remind Mao of the danger of the fever of the left-wing politicalmovement going on at the time by cooling it down with traditional philoso-phies? Is he defending the importance of intellectuals by reviving the tradi-tional literati culture? It is hard to answer these questions. But it can be saidthat by reframing the political icon, the painting has achieved a more reflec-tive tone, which the dominant propaganda imageries and the entire revolu-tionary age lack.

Methodologically, the act of questioning in Shi Lu’s Fighting in NorthernShaanxi is achieved through the appropriation of visual elements across timeand space. In the painting, the focal theme and the way it is rendered eachcame from a different tradition, the former from Communist propaganda andthe latter from traditional Chinese literati culture. In this sense, Shi Lu’s paint-ing is a collage, a collage of the focal theme and representation techniques,each with its own histories and associations. The comparison work on com-position Albers and James (1988) proposed facilitates my analysis with explo-rations into both conventions. And Shitao’s 17th-century painting Waterfallon Mount Lu and the CCP propaganda painting Inspection in Fushun serve asgreat examples to see the different structures underlying each imagery con-vention. The totally different relation between human figures and mountainsin the two paintings represents a way to construct subjectivity on a particularideological stage. In Fighting in Northern Shaanxi, the painter makes the twoconventions collide and, thus, produces a marvelous instance of how imag-ery reinvented itself at a historical moment in turmoil. Once again, it provesthe fact that imageries, as cultural artifacts, write their own history in inter-textual dialogs, social engagements, and historical specificities.


Who was he who first laid out their origin?Who, in labor and striving, urged it on? (Han Yu, as quoted in Owens, 1996, p. 28)

In the eighth century, the poet Han Yu inquired into the supernatural cre-ation of the splendid mountain landscape, and I join him in the fictional spec-tacle that takes the form of painting. There are other viewers who cannot helpentering the scenes in images. Dreamily walking in heaven, hell, and the gar-den of delight created by Hieronymus Bosch, Andrea Fontana (1997, p. 237)reencountered the uncanniness of the 16th-century painting and reexaminedthe various interpretations it has generated. Wandering in a landscape helpsbreak down the spectaclized vision; breathing oneself into the object of inter-pretation makes the interpreter self-conscious of the act of interpretation andits variability. I envy the free paths the cavalier perspective of the painting hasoffered for the viewer to travel through because as a viewer, rather than wan-dering in the cavalier perspective of a traditional Chinese landscape paintingor focusing my attention on the assertive central figures in socialist realistpropaganda, my eyes get puzzled about the way to travel through Shi Lu’spainting: Now and then, I find myself absorbed into the colorfully renderedcloudscape in the background, striving to touch the memory clouded by his-tory; sometimes, I am breathing inside the dark foreground cliff, whoseweight suffocates me with the heaviness of political aggression; at othertimes, all of a sudden, I am left sitting next to the peasants, with a view of thepolitical leader several steps ahead of me. At this moment, I eventually get achance to share his vision, which turns out simply to be the frame of the paint-ing, with imaginations either crushed within the stuffed tiny space in theright abysmal margin of the composition or extending beyond the frame intothe real world and the interpretive realm.

Who was he who first laid out their origin?Who, in labor and striving, urged it on? (Han Yu, as quoted in Owens, 1996, p. 28)

If Han Yu was asking about the supernatural creator of Nature, I pose thesame question yet to the creation of the literary and visual texts that renderspectacular nature, the power of whose form either endows their content withmighty power or deprives it of it, ideologically or cosmologically.

POSTSCRIPT: ON MEMORY

The Cultural Revolution has faded into the past and China has entered anew stage of ideological reform since 1978. Born in the year when thereform was officially started, I have never actually experienced the era of tur-moil. However, the collected memory of the national trauma has constantlyasserted its presence in everyday life, and the vivid images into which the his-tory crystallized has offered me a textual access to the young years of the gen-


eration of my parents. These images demand rereading as the history isrewritten in the new reform era. In the field of artistic practice, the con-scious experimentations with the iconic image of Mao or Mao’s Suit (ZhongShan’ Suit in Chinese) by contemporary Chinese modern artists have greatlyinspired me (Wu, 1999, p. 49).

At the same time, there are also works like the sweet and innocent film Inthe Heat of the Sun (Wen, 1995), which tells the other side of the story, tran-scending the beauty of youth over the political setting. Yet the film also makesits subversive statement by breaking the critical drive toward a normativenegation of the Cultural Revolution in the highly globalized reform era at theend of the century. It particularly problematizes the issue of memory througha person’s desperate making up of his adolescent recollection. In this aspect, itworks in a similar way as Shi Lu’s painting in terms of bringing memories tointerfere with the current cultural drive, the former in a personal form, thelatter a historical one.

Educated in contemporary China and the United States, I attempt to offer acritical reading informed by both Chinese histories and contemporary visualtheories. My reading of this visual and historical text is, thus, generated by myhybrid intellectual experience of both Western and Chinese art historical per-spectives and vocabularies. Admittedly, my understanding of the past isthereby limited to my contemporary experience, yet I wish it to echo with thevisual text in their shared nature of historical reinvention of memory and thepast.

REFERENCES

Albers, P., & James, W. (1988). Travel photography: Amethodological approach. Annalsof Tourism Research, 15, 134-158.

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang.Becker, H. S. (2002). Visual evidence: A seventh man, the specified generalization, and

the work of the reader. Visual Studies, 17(1), 3-11.Burkus-Chasson, A. (1996). Clouds and mist that emanate and sink away: Shitao’s

Waterfall on Mount Lu and practices of observation in the seventeenth century. ArtHistory, 19(2), 168-190.

Clunas, C. (1997). Art in China. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Fontana, A. (1997). Of heaven and hell: Narrating Hieronymus Bosch. Qualitative

Inquiry, 3(2), 237-249.Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Lon-

don: Sage.Harper, D. (2002). Talking about pictures: A case for photo elicitation. Visual Studies,

17(1), 14-25.Mao Zedong. (n.d.). [Poetry]. Retrieved from http://www.xys.org/xys/ebooks/

literature/poetry/Mao_poetry/mao3.txtOwen, S. (1996). The end of the Chinese “Middle Ages”: Essays in Mid-Tang literary culture.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


Peking Review. (1966, September 2). (36), p. 17.Sullivan, M. (1996). Art and artists of the twentieth century. Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press.Vasudevan, R. S. (2000). The politics of cultural address in a “transitional” cinema: A

case study of Indian popular cinema. In C. Gledhill & L. Williams (Eds.), Reinventingfilm studies (pp. 130-164). London: Arnold.

Wen, J. (Director). (1995). In the heat of the sun [Motion picture]. China: Hong KongDragon Film, China Film Co-Production Corporation.

Wu, H. (1999). Transience: Chinese experimental art at the end of the twentieth century. Chi-cago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

Jia Jia is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Communications Research,University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, specializing in Chinese visualculture and media rhetoric.


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