| The research focused on the case study of National Crisis Propaganda Group,which is a nationalist action group composed of progressive students and young artists from Shanghai Art College.During the early 1930 s,when the national crisis was deepening day by day,they made a large number of propaganda paintings and prints,then traveled twice from Shanghai to the northern areas and reached the border of Mongolia and the northwest inland.Exhibitions about the national crisis subject and mass mobilization were carried out along these journeys.As artists from Shanghai,they used paintbrush and camera to produce multiple types of image communication practices--from the exhibitions that triggered emotional mobilization,the photography investigation of the frontier that included the production of nationalist knowledge,and the cartoon drawing that expressed appreciation for folk culture aesthetics.Therefore,the travel activity and propaganda practice for the purposes of describing the crisis and imaging a nation can be integrated into the dominant discourse structure of the nationalism as an ideology,and then transformed into image text forms that can be accepted by readers from different fields back in the city as well.Revolving around the group’s two collective actions and its subsequent image creation,publication and communication practices,this is the first monograph on the study of the National Crisis Propaganda Group.Through sorting out the basic facts of the visual event and the activity experiences of the subjects,the study shows the spiritual outlook of a new generation of Chinese artists the group members represent.National Crisis Propaganda Group was not just the first student organization that went on the street to engage in national crisis propaganda and social mobilization after Mukden Incident,but also the first art group went deep into the northwest frontier to explore,investigate,and create works,and had successfully led a new trend of image creation related to our land and our people in the urban cultural field.Among the group members emerged prominent artists and photographers like Shen Yiqian,Yu Chuangshuo,Gu Tingpeng,Mo Pu,etc.,who caught the zeitgeist of leaving the ivory tower and had successful careers,peaking with the turbulent times of 1930 s and 1940 s.Thus,works created during this decade,including the images’ concepts,methods,techniques and styles,are worthy of a detailed analysis and interpretation.The activities and practices of the group involved supports from image communication social networks of the same period.In this case,the media consciousness and experience of the subjects had a distinct representative significance,which reflects the whole situation in the popular image field and a shifting trend of image concepts.Born in the Golden Decade of urban visual cultures,the group used the methods and means from modern media communication in its exhibition and image communication practices,but the contents and functions of the images it produced have inevitably turned politicized.Therefore,the case itself is an evidence of an era when the theoretical field and agenda setting of urban visual culture had largely turned to diffuse propaganda,frontier,national and other modern political concepts.In terms of the image-nation related research,image materials of the Nanjing decade were often neglected by academics,and this paper can also serve as a supplement to the studies of nation-state images between the two historical periods of Northern Expedition and Anti-Japanese War of Resistance.Re-examining the history of image and visual culture in modern China from this perspective,the study shows that the history is a continuous evolution rather than a rupture and transformation.From the perspective of technology and visual,this study is also a thematic research on the emergence of visual culture and the transformation of a mediated society.The group’s image communication practices encompassed a variety of visual media forms such as paintings,posters,photographs and cartoons,as well as two popular visual communication technologies like image exhibiting and pictorial printing.In addition,drawing and painting,photo shooting,image editing,image reading and other activities are also included in the discussion.Different medium has its own unique operating logic,analyzing each image medium based on its visuality and Communicability,shows a mutual influence of the co-construction relationship between image as the new medium and the society.Same subject from the same event can produce diversified visual figures,characters and cultural significations,and once the image is displayed,copied and circulated in the public sphere,it will reflect a more complex visual structure,such as the sight displacement among the images,the authors and the audiences,as well as the shift of viewing position between classical and popular,public and private,political and recreational,etc.Through collecting and detailed reading of relevant materials comprehensively,the dissertation explores both the interaction and tension among the visual subjects,texts and discourses under the circumstances of the anti-Japanese and nation-saving historical context and a mediated communication sphere.By understanding the process of image productioncommunication as a dynamic,contextual process,anaylising and questioning the relations between the individual and the nation-state,subjective experience and communication mechanism,nationalism and consumerism,the complex aspects of image communication in the construction of national identity in this particular era of the first half of 1930 s will be revealed. |
