ICS Lecture: Christopher A. Reed, "Picturing the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45): The Politics of Memory and Cultural Entrepreneurship"

My presentation will examine historical memory and cultural entrepreneurship, not in a market-oriented economy of civil-society cultural operators, but in the state-dominated political economy of Maoist China. Examining the “painter’s practice” of five elite PRC visual artists through interview/oral history as well as visual materials, I suggest that these painters drew on varying levels of political commitment, personal interests, feelings, experiences, research, and technical skills to compose a range of anonymous, collaborative, but also individually inspired paintings of the Sino-Japanese War. I will argue that they were not just illustrators or designers even though most fall short of the definition of entrepreneurial artists as individual creators.

 

Christopher A. Reed is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937  (2004), which won the 2005 ICAS Book Prize, and was published in an authorized Chinese translation by Beijing’s Commercial Press in 2014. Along with many scholarly articles, he wrote numerous entries on the modern Chinese book trade for The Oxford Companion to the Book  (2010). He is also the co-author, with M. William Steele, of “The Modern History of the East Asian Book,” which will appear in the Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (forthcoming). A former editor of Twentieth-Century China, most recently, he has been researching China’s 20th century print and visual propaganda systems.

 

 

Co-sponsor: East Asian Studies Center

 

This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant for The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.