Comics for the Revolution: Lianhuanhua in China 1949-1989

Please come to AAAinA at 6:30pm on Tuesday, May 26 to hear artist, curator, and former China Art Academy professor Shengtian Zheng speak about his experience creating and teaching lianhuanhua, followed by a conversation with U.C. San Diego professor Kuiyi Shen, moderated by Jane DeBevoise.

Lianhuanhua are palm-sized picture books that emerged in China in the early 1900s as popular forms of entertainment, much like comics. After 1949 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong mandated that art, including comics, should serve the people. For the next 30 years, artists were enlisted to illustrate these little picture books with images of valiant workers, victorious PLA soldiers and model citizens, often women. Hundreds of millions of copies were published. But when the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 and the political environment relaxed, classical legends, love stories, and Western sci-fi, including Star Wars, quickly replaced the heroic exploits of workers, peasants and soldiers, and the popularity of lianhuanhua surged.

A selection of lianhuanhua from the 1920s to 1989 will be on display in the AAAinA reading room during the program.

Bios:

Zheng Shengtian is an artist, scholar, and curator based in Vancouver. Before 1990, he worked at the China Academy of Art as Professor and Chair of the Oil Painting Department. He was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and San Diego State University, Secretary of the Annie Wong Art Foundation, Founding Board Director of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and the Adjunct Director of the Institute of Asian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Currently, he is the Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, a trustee of Asia Art Archive in America and a Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University. Zheng has organized and curated numerous exhibitions and events, and has frequently contributed to periodicals and catalogues. In 2013, Zheng Shengtian: Selected Writing on Art was published in four volumes by China Academy Press. His latest publications include Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century (Cambria Press, 2024) and a Chinese version. In 2011 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for curatorial work by the Vancouver Biennale. In 2013 He received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. In 2025 he was given The King Charles III Coronation Medal for his contribution to the community.

Kuiyi Shen is Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego. His teaching and writing has focused on Chinese and Japanese art with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Chinese art and Sino-Japanese art exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He received a BA in fine arts from the Shanghai Normal University and an MA and PhD in art history from the Ohio State University. Shen is the author and co-author of many books and exhibition catalogues on modern and contemporary Chinese art, including A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China (1998); Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution (2000); Zhou Brothers—Thirty Years of Collaboration (2004); Reboot: The Third Chengdu Biennale (2007); Chinese Posters (2009); Arts of Modern China (2012, winner of the 2013 ICAS Book Prize in Humanities), Echo of the Universe: Ink Art of Liu Kuo-sung (2016); Li Huayi: Landscapes from a Master’s Heart (2018) and many others. 

Jane DeBevoise is President and Chair of Asia Art Archive in America in New York and Chair Emeritus of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Prior to moving to Hong Kong in 2002, Ms. DeBevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum, responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She joined the Museum in 1996 as Project Director of China: 5000 Years, a large-scale exhibition of traditional and modern Chinese art that was presented in 1998 at the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao. Prior to 1996, Ms. DeBevoise was Managing Director at Bankers Trust Company where she worked for 14 years in New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London. With a MA from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from The University of Hong Kong, Ms. DeBevoise writes and lectures widely. Her publications include Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era (2014) and the co-authored Uncooperative Contemporaries: Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000 (2020).

Light refreshments will be provided.

The event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and other foundations and individuals.

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