This new module (EAST3190), taught by Dr Alison Hardie, is intended to help students think about how visual images reflect developments in Chinese society and culture over the course of the 20th-21st centuries. The idea is to look beyond the limits of what is normally considered 'art history' or 'fine art' to see how the visual arts interact at a practical level with everyday life.

The lectures cover topics such as propaganda posters and advertising, graphic design, representations of power and leadership, woodblock prints, cartoons, graphic narrative and animation (sample lecture notes). We can see, for example, how advertisement calendars from the 1930s reflect middle-class aspirations to a 'Westernised' lifestyle, and wonder whether their renewed popularity as collectors' items in the 1990s indicates nostalgia for a time when urban China seemed to be following its own path to modernity.

We can see how the militarisation of society during the Cultural Revolution is matched by propaganda posters with military themes and with a great deal of red colour, by contrast with the more peaceful and polychrome posters of the 1950s. We can come to understand how the cover design of books which spread ideas about how to modernise China was influenced by archaeological discoveries from China’s past, which boosted patriotic feelings while China was under threat from foreign powers in the first half of the 20th century. We can observe how the Communist Party turned to the techniques and style of traditional woodblock printing to spread its revolutionary message.

Seminars, which include student presentations, cover subjects such as representations of modernity in Republican-era Shanghai, changes in Chinese clothing in the 20th century, and the social uses of calligraphy. The module is assessed by essay, so students have a chance to work in more depth on a visual topic that particularly interests them – they can choose from a list or suggest their own topic; in preparation for the essay, one of the seminars takes the form of a workshop on how to write essays on visual topics.

Student feedback after the module’s first first semester of teaching was positive, and I am planning to develop a text-book based on my research for the module, so that teachers at other universities who may be art historians with no specialised China knowledge, or Chinese studies people with no specialisation in visual arts, can guide their students in exploring this area.