Hua Junwu (華君武, 1915-2010) hailed from Hangzhou. He was born during a hectic epoch — life tossed him around quite a bit, but unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he was able to navigate through these changing times with dry feet. He had been drawing since his school days, but the seeds of his artistic career were sown around the time he moved to Shanghai to become a student at Utopia University, where he first began submitting his cartoons to magazines for publication, as well as meeting like-minded artists.
A year after the Second Sino-Japanese War started, in 1938, he left the Japanese-occupied Shanghai for Yan’an (the seat of the Communist government at that time) and worked at the Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Art, also contributing anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons to publications like Jiefang Daily. Japan formally surrendered in 1945, but the same year saw an escalation of the struggle for power between the Nationalists and the Communists, which signalled the start of the Third Chinese Revolutionary Civil War. Hua travelled through Northeast China, working as a reporter and cartoonist for Northeast Daily. 1949 saw the founding of the People’s Republic, and Hua joined People’s Daily as the head of its art department, and the China Artists Association as its Secretary-General in 1953.
In his introduction to Selected Cartoons of Hua Junwu (New World Press, 1984), Hua credits German artist E. O. Plauen (see Circus Acrobats of Life: E. O. Plauen’s Father and Son) as one of his main artistic influences. I was amused that the other artist who had Hua’s utmost admiration was Georgi Sapojnikov, a former officer of the Russian Imperial Army who occupied the spot of daily cartoonist in North China Daily News, working under the pseudonym Sapajou*.
There was considerable difference between rural Yan’an and sophisticated Shanghai, and this change of scenery is what shaped the artist’s style into its distinctive form. To quote Hua, « Shanghai in the 1930s was a cross between a colonial and feudal society, a special territory where Chinese and foreigners lived cheek by jowl. As I had learned so much from foreigners’ cartoons, my own cartoons were inevitably rather foreign in flavour. Fortunately, the only people who paid any attention to cartoons in the Shanghai of those days were, I suppose, a few intellectuals who were also foreign influenced, so I was able to get by. » After his move to Yan’an in the late 40s, Hua found his audience changing from the aforementioned ‘few intellectuals’ to a readership of mostly peasants, who found his foreign-based style alien and hard to understand. Feeling like ‘a round peg in a square hole’ and heavily influenced by the writings of Mao Zedong, Hua adopted a philosophy of ‘national style’, ‘the Chinese style and spirit which the common people of China love‘, for which he is now fondly remembered.
This collection, as noted on the cover, is bilingual – the cartoons in Chinese are included on the left, with their English translations on the right (Hua Junwu drew the English letters himself, to keep their Chinese flavour). However, in interests of intelligibility, we are just including the translated versions.
I just wanted to share some fun cartoons, but this post once again dragged me into the 20th century and its bloodshed, as well as the history of communism (this time from a Chinese perspective). Some topics are rich veins to mine, full of interesting filaments that lead to their own story.
~ ds
* The story of ‘White’ Russian refugees fleeing to Shanghai during the civil war between Bolsheviks and Tsarists is a fascinating topic in itself. Of more relevance to this post is this quote from Citizens of No State: Daily Life of Shanghai White Russians, 1920s-1930s: « A man endowed with the gift of reducing the complexities of Chinese politics to a single image and of capturing the ebullient, chaotic nature of Shanghai without sentimentality or cynicism, Sapojnikov worked for the newspaper for more than two decades. » I think a post about Sapajou is needed at some point in the future…