HICCS 2025

This panel explores the intersection of poetry, art, and aesthetics in contemporary Chinese culture, focusing on poet-artists in modern China, the influence of classical Chinese poetry on Feng Zi Kai’s comic creations, and the role of inscription in shaping modern aesthetic expressions in stone and script.

Paul Manfredi
Department of Chinese Studies, Pacific Lutheran University, Professor of Chinese

Title:
Contemporary Literati: Poet-artists in China Today

Abstract:
This presentation will explore the work of a group of poet-artists who are sometimes collectively named the “shipai” 诗派 (“poet’s group”), and who have been regularly exhibiting their visual art works in group shows since around the year 2010. More specifically, I am examining the relationship between this group and some of their classical precedents in the literati tradition. Broadly speaking, the literati tradition continues to find new expression in contemporary China, and the work of these poet-artists is a good case in point. As China grows more culturally influential in the global context going forward, understanding how ancient traditions are reformed and elaborated into more recent aesthetic trends is important. Beyond this, examining this particular group of artists who work in poetic and visual realms helps us to better understand some essential dynamics of Chinese cultural production of the past three decades, specifically in terms of the impact of market capitalism on creative work. Artists featured in this discussion include Yan Li 严力, Mang Ke 芒克, Lv De'an 吕德安, Luo Qing 罗青, Yu Xiang 宇向, Chu Yu 楚雨, and others.

Lok Yan Emily Tang
School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong (HKUSPACE), College Lecturer

题目：
畫中有詩：中國古典詩詞對豐子愷漫畫創作的啟發與影響
Poetry in Painting: The Inspiration and Influence of Classical Chinese Poetry on Feng Zi Kai’s Comics Creation

摘要：
豐子愷（1898-1975）是近代中國漫畫的奠基者，學界普遍認同他的漫畫創作深受日本畫家竹久夢二的影響，「漫畫」一詞亦從日本引入；然而，豐子愷也有傳統中國文人的一面，他上承中國文人畫的減筆畫脈絡，截取古典詩詞句子入畫，創作出大量趣味盎然、充滿詩情畫意的漫畫。本文分析豐子愷的畫作、創作理念及過程，探討中國古典詩詞對豐子愷漫畫創作的影響，以見出他在選取學習日本繪畫的藝術風格時，背後所植根的中國古典詩詞美學。

Alina Scotti
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, PhD Candidate

Title:
Aestheticizing Stone and Script: Inscription in Three Modern Guises

Abstract:
This paper examines three, visual and/or textual representations of script by scholar-artists in late Qing and Republican China, all of which encircle a central, human figure into stone materials that further contain
carved inscriptions. First, it will consider an 1866 self-portrait by iterant artist Xuan Ding 宣鼎 (1832-1880); second, Ren Bonian's 任伯年 (1840-1896) 1886 portrait of the painter-epigrapher Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩 (1844-1927); and third, Lu Xun's (1881-1936) 1925 prose-poem Epitaph 墓碣文. The paper interrogates how and why intellectual and artistic subjectivity extend into and is absorbed by inanimate material (stone) and form (script). It will argue that an entanglement of human potential and stony script demonstrates a locating of modern identities beyond both metaphysical and material knowns. The two portraits embed the image of the scholar-artist into stone (an inkstone or a stone rubbing-like background). Antiquarian visual convention creates a contrast of black-and-white negative space that is broken only by accompanying painterly renderings of carved-in script, akin to stelae inscriptions and epigraphic calligraphy. Stone in Lu Xun’s Epitaph becomes a haunting yet stabilizing presence amidst the splitting of the literary form into something that is both prose and poem, speaking and inscribing, and this stabilizing ability forces the stone into a central narrative position. Each of these works raise questions of the simultaneous location of creative subjectivity in human form and in inanimate materiality, interconnected by script, thereby adding new dimension to the role of both script and of material in modern Chinese cultural history.