Hengzhi Gong

This practice-led research explores embedded political expressions in Chinese contemporary allegorical paintings under the cultural censorship of Chinese government. It does not study allegory within paintings purely from an aesthetic perspective, but views allegorical paintings as one critical part of political practice in contemporary China.

Throughout history, self-censorship along with cultural censorship has been the mains to restrain artists’ criticism of government’s political systems, policies and leaders in contemporary China. In this vein, Chinese artists are obliged to address political ideas implicitly in their artworks.

Since the government has tightened social and political controls in China from 2017, more recent allegorical paintings compose political allegory in an even more implicit manner, which has resulted in confusion for audiences. The barrier between the allegory and the audience has one obvious consequence that the political expression might end up being recognised only among Chinese artists and political intellectuals, or even become a self-entertainment for themselves.

Political expressions in contemporary Chinese art have been widely discussed by scholars Paul Gladston, Marie Leduc and John Clark. While their work has been devoted mostly to performance, video and installation, and very little critical attention has been paid to painting, especially allegorical painting after 2012. My research argues against Walter Benjamin’s idea that allegory might only redeem the past into the present through melancholy. I posit that within Chinese political painting, allegory can be repositioned to offer new forms of knowledge to audiences. Therefore, the understandings of political allegory by audiences unfamiliar with China become an intriguing question.

The research echoes ideas of national allegory and postcolonial discussions developed by Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad and Gayatri Spivak by answering whether the expression made by Chinese painters is genuinely individual, or a colonised reflection of the first world. Within this context, I identify and examine literature that puts forward theoretical generalisations about Chinese allegorical paintings in the contemporary era, in order to reformulate a more comprehensive account of political expression in Chinese paintings under censorship.

There are four main questions in this research:

1) To what extent could allegorical painting become political practice under the increasingly severe cultural censorship in China?

2) What may be a standard to define the function of allegory in Chinese allegorical painting?

3) What strategies might artists take up in order to render their political expressions through allegory at once more legible to viewers while still not putting themselves or their painting at risk from the authorities?

4) How could Chinese artists avoid ideologically repeating the first-world countries’ discourses and produce a Chinese subjectivity in their works?

In order to answer these questions, this research will work on both the practice and writing. In practice, I will explore allegory through narrative, colour and composition in paintings. On a concrete theoretical level, I will examine the political expressions in Chinese ancient literati painting, Chinese contemporary allegorical painting and German Neo-expressionist painting, together with postcolonial theory and subjectivity in Chinese political practice to provide a unique insight to interpret allegory from a Chinese perspective.