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THE GREATEST CARTOONISTS OF 20TH CENTURY CHINA

Although China has gained undeniable recognition on the world’s scenes, yet Chinese animation remains an enigma in the West – despite quite a few outstanding artists who were highly productive throughout the 20th century.
Now it's about time to finally meet them!
1.Zhang Leping
 (1910–1992)
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Most famed for his 'Sanmao the Orphan' comics. In the late 1920s, Zhang moved from his coastal hometown to Shanghai, where he quickly found work as a commercial artist and cartoonist. Zhang joined Ye Qianyu and others in 1935 in an anti-Japanese cartoon propaganda team. He debuted the 'Sanmao the Orphan' comics — China's first cartoons produced specifically for young children — in 1935 and drew them until 1937, when the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War led Zhang to leave Shanghai as a member of a cartoonist propaganda troupe.

China Daily - sunflower from the Diary of San Mao in 1960s

He traveled all over China during the war, finally returning to Shanghai in 1945, and quickly returned also to his Sanmao character, producing new series of cartoons that depict Sanmao as a child recruit in the corrupt Nationalist army. Zhang's biggest hit came in 1947 with the serial publication of 'The Wandering Life of Sanmao', a narrative about the trials and tribulations of life on the streets for Shanghai's orphan children.

Picture source: China Daily; Sanmao joins the army
After the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949, Zhang and his family moved into the second floor of a house on Shanghai’s Wuyuan Road, in the Former French Concession. He would live there for the rest of his life, as he worked as a cartoonist at state media publications (Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, the Shanghai-based Liberation Daily and the Shanghai Youth and Children's Publishing House).
Zhang suffered criticism during the Cultural Revolution and  was consequently forced to stop writing
On 1977 June 1, after ten years of absence, Zhang returned to his Sanmao comic.
Picture source: Beijing Cream

In 1983, Zhang Leping received the "National Advanced Children and Young Workers" award. In the same year, he contracted severe Parkinson's disease; in spite of the difficulty in drawing he consequently encountered, he continued his cartooning career. In 1985, he received the "Yushu Award" and became the editor-in-chief of Shanghai's Manga World magazine. He produced his final comic strip in 1986, titled People to Old Age (人到老年).

On April 4, 1991, his last comic book, "Cat Feeding Rats", was published in the Liberation Daily. In the winter of the same year, Zhang decided to donate the manuscript of San Mao to the Shanghai Art Museum. 
Picture source: Maura Elizabth Cunningham - The statue of Sanmao and Zhang Leping outside Zhang's memorial hall in his hometown Haiyan

2. Ye Qianyu

(1907-1995)
Picture source: Cafa Art info

 Born in Tonglu, Zhejiang Province, Ye Qianyu taught himself drawing in his youth. As a caricaturist, Ye was an influential figure in the Chinese arts scene. In the mid-1920s, he went to Shanghai and started to design commercial work, educational illustrations and stage props. In 1929, he started contributing his critical work to newspapers and journals. Ye joined Zhang Leping and others in 1935 in an anti-Japanese cartoon propaganda team. After 1949, he became Professor of Chinese painting at the Central Art Academy. In the late 1950s, Ye was branded a Rightist; from 1969-1975, he was imprisoned as a "Guomindang Spy". His name was cleared in 1978.

Picture source: Asia Pacific MEmo - 4th Mr Wang strip
Picture source: Lambiek.met; Mr Wang strip
Picture source: Christie's
Picture source: Asia Observer
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3.Feng Zikai
(1898 – 1975)
Picture source: Shelley Drake Hawk Ph.D
Cartoonist, essayist and educator, pioneering manhua (漫画 Mànhuà ‘  impromptu sketches’ -  Chinese comics produced in China and East Asian Cultural Sphere) artist, and lay Buddhist. Born just after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and passing away just before the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he lived through much of the political and socio-economic turmoil that arose during the birth of Modern China.
In the spring of 1921 he left for Tokyo, where he devoted his time to learning all he could of Japanese and European art, as well as attempting to learn violin, English, Japanese, and Russian. He immersed himself in Kabuki theater performances, old bookstores, research groups, and reading groups. At the end of ten months, he ran out of money and was forced to return home. However, he returned to China with a renewed faith in the potential of ink paintings.
Picture source: FindArtInfo.com
Picture source: Lambiek.Net
After coming back, he became more and more involved in the burgeoning political movements of his time. Embroiled in the political and intellectual world of Shanghai, Feng Zikai found his art naturally inclined to reproductive technologies and political periodicals.
Feng Zikai continued writing, painting, and publishing in various capacities throughout all the changes in the Chinese socio-political landscape. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Feng Zikai drew many cartoons depicting the horrors of war. However, his artwork stands out as unique, especially compared other artists of his time. He chose to not represent the Japanese antagonists as monsters or inhuman, but rather focus on the objective tragedies of war and the suffering that it wreaks upon the daily lives of ordinary people.
His art embodied the type of 'Chinese' art that could  forward the political wheel of progress of the Shanghai intellectuals.
Picture source: Christie's

Feng Zikai died on September 9th, 1975, after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

He is most famous for his paintings depicting children and the multi-volume collection of Buddhist-inspired art, Paintings for the Preservation of Life.

Picture source: Christie's
4.Liao Bingxiong
(1915 – 2006)
Picture source: zonaeuropa.com
He is widely regarded as one of China's foremost political cartoonists. Liao integrated folk art; Cantonese rhymes and idioms; and woodcut into many of his cartoons.
Early in his life, he worked as a teacher. He drew anti-war illustrations during World War II, and later joined a comic artists organization in Hong Kong. In 1946 his satirical Spring and Autumn in the Cat Kingdom debuted in Chongqing. In the early 1950s, he returned to the mainland, where he drew children's comics.
Liao learned to draw by copying, but he never received formal training in art. For this reason he called himself yěshēng Dongwu (野生动物), "a wild animal.”
Picture source: zonaeuropa.com
Picture source: zonaeuropa.com

Liao Bingxiong said "I was sad for the good people who have been victimized.  I was angry against the evil people who hurt others.  That was why I drew mostly sad and angry cartoons."  The sad and angry cartoons showed the shocking horror, terror and sorrow.  "Like a beam hanging over your head ready to come down," "Like a nightmare in which you see a meteor falling in front of you," "Like a  strange corpse by the grave or a widow crying by the burning oil lamp in the middle of the night!"

Picture source: zonaeuropa.com

Liao Bingxiong's cartoons were unique.  They were not appetizers or desserts.  When you view his cartoons, you find tears in the laughter and then you will feel an indescribable sense of solemnity and oppression.  He had mentioned this himself in an essay: "I feel that I am at a crossing point in the world history of cartoons.  Whereas cartoons everywhere are humorous (including black humor), my works tend to express sadness and anger. They do not relax people.  Instead, they make people feel oppressed and shocked."

Picture source: zonaeuropa.com

From 1932 to 1994, he spent more than 70 years in a career with many ups and downs.  But Liao Bingxiong adhered to his artistic principles.  He had four creative peaks in his career.  His serial cartoons during the initial stages of the anti-Japanese war of resistance and the "Annals of Cat County" against the KMT regime in the 1940's earned him the reputation of a "brilliant genius."  In the three years that he spent in Hong Kong before the Liberation, he created "The Story of A-Geng" for the ordinary citizens, which some Hong Kong citizens can remember with fondness.  After 1979, his "Self-Deprecation" and "The Nightmare Records" created the Bingxiong era of 1980's cartoons.

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This humble old man assessed his own art and life much lower than others.  The cartoon genius Zhang Chengyu said at the end of his life to Huang Miaozi that Liao Bingxiong kept negating his own accomplishments.  In 1979, before the sensational "Self-Deprecation" appeared, Liao nervously consulted a worker in a puppeteer company whether his cartoons were comprehensible and was relieved to receive an affirmative answer.

Only Liao Bingxiong among all cartoonists could record the sorrowful history of China in more than half a century.
The times made Liao Bingxiong.  The old man did not deny this: "Four persons made my life.  The first is the Japanese Emperor, because my cartoons were created for the sake of national salvation.  One is Chiang Kai-shek.  One is Mao Zedong.  One is Deng Xiaoping."
Picture source:zonaeuropa.com

5. Te Wei

(1915 - 2010)

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Another Chinese manhua artist and animator, also called ‘Founding Father of Chinese animation'.
He was born as Sheng Song to a poor family in Shanghai. As a teenager, he started drawing political cartoons, and would later make a living drawing anti‑Japanese propaganda. After Mao Zedong's seizing power in 1949, an executive in charge of the Changchun Film Studio would remember Te Wei's cartoons, and approached him to lead the studio's animation department, despite his total lack of experience in animation. The Japanese animator Tadahito Mochinaga served as his mentor, and the two became lifelong friends.
Picture source: bfi.org.uk; Four films by the master Chinese animator Te Wei (clockwise from top left) 1956’s The Proud General (aka The Conceited General); 1960’s Where Is Mama, 1988’s Feelings from Mountain and Water and 1963’s The Cowboy’s Flute
Within a year, the studio was relocated to Shanghai, where they enjoyed a brief period of artistic freedom with governmental funding during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Initially, much was learned by studying Soviet animation, but the studio soon started experimenting with techniques based on domestic traditions. The Conceited General (1956) shows influences from both Chinese culture, with character designs and music inspired by the Peking opera, and Soviet animators such as Ivan Ivanov-Vano, as well as western ones such as Walt Disney.
During a visit to the studio, then Vice Premier Chen Yi suggested that they make an animated version of the paintings of Qi Baishi. A group of animators led by Te Wei thus set out to create 'Where is Mama'. The film was the first to make use of ink-wash animation, and would go on to win several awards, both in China and internationally. It was followed by The Cowboy's Flute (1963) in the same technique.
Picture source: cineforum-classico.org Feelings of Mountains and Water
In 1964, as Mao was gearing up for the Cultural Revolution, the studio was shut down, and Te Wei was placed in solitary confinement for a year. To keep his spirits up, he would sketch on the glass pane of a table that stood in his small room, erasing the drawings when he heard a guard approaching. Te Wei spent the following years in exile in the countryside, and was not able to return to the studio until 1975. The constraints of the Cultural Revolution were starting to loosen, and Mao's death in 1976 was followed by a new period of artistic vigour.
The 1980s would be an intense period for Te Wei, who found himself in charge of some 500 workers at the studio. Still benefitting from state funding, the studio produced some of its most acclaimed and experimental work. Having stepped down as studio president in 1984, Te Wei directed the feature film 'Monkey King Conquers the Demon' (1984), based on Journey to the West, and the acclaimed 'Feelings from Mountain and Water' (1988), that would turn out to be his last film.
In 1989, the communist party honored Te Wei by naming him one of the four outstanding filmmakers in China's history.
Picture source: bfi.org.uk, The Cowboy's Flute - ResearchGate

6. Wan Brothers

Picture source: chinaculture.org

Animation got its start in China in 1922, with the Wan brothers’ Shuzhendong Chinese Typewriter, a short advertisement produced for the film department of the Shanghai Commercial Press. Wan Laiming (1900-1997), the Walt Disney of China, his twin brother Wan Guchan (1900-1995), and their younger brother Wan Chaochen (1906-1992) were originally from Nanjing. Their mother encouraged an early interest in the arts, especially puppetry. Laiming joined the Commercial Press in 1919, and his brothers soon joined him there. The Press operated one of the earliest film studios in China, having in 1917 acquired equipment from an American entrepreneur gone bust.

Picture source: Boston Street Lab

Employees of the Press, including the pioneering director Ren Pengnian, were initially trained by a crew from Universal Pictures, which was shooting on location in China in 1919. The Motion Picture Department produced a number of silent short films between 1919 and 1921, and then made China’s first feature film, 1921’s Yan Ruisheng, which was directed by Ren.

Picture source: bostonstreetlab.org; Wan Laiming (center) discuss production with brothers Wan Guchan (right) and Wan Chaochen (left).

Wan Laiming and his brothers had been experimenting with flip books and zoetrope animations on their own before creating the 1922 short for the Commercial Press. Their original style of film animation is unknown, but by 1926 the brothers were working at the Great Wall Film Company, where they produced the 10 minute long 'Uproar in the studio'. Modeled on Max Fleischer’s 'Out of the inkwell', the short combined live action film of an artist with animation of the drawing he is working on. The artist was played by Wan Guchan.

Animation Resources - Princess Iron Fan

In 1935, the Wan brothers made China’s first sound cartoon, 'The camel's dance', for the Mingxing studio. As the political situation in China became more dire, the brothers supported the war effort by turning out patriotic cartoons. Despite the worsening situation, and inspired by the Disney film 'Snow White and the seven dwarfs', Wan Laiming pursued his dream of developing a uniquely Chinese approach to animation, one that would draw on traditional stories, using traditional art and music. Working under severe budget constraints and Japanese occupation, the Wan brothers managed to complete China’s first feature-length animation in 1940, the black-and-white 'Princess Iron Fan', based on an episode of the Monkey King saga, “Journey to the West. 'Princess Iron Fan' was a popular success, and was even shown in Japan during the war, where it was a major inspiration for a young Tezuka Osamu, creator of “Astro Boy.” — Jean Lukitsh

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