It was a strange feeling: I felt as if I’d seen it somewhere, but I was sure I never knew this artist or his artworks before. I stood before Zhao Yannian’s woodcut Lu Xun is With Us. It was on exhibition in Lu Xun Museum of Beijing alongside other 20th Century Chinese woodcuts. I was greatly surprised to learn at the exhibition that modern Chinese woodcutting was founded by Lu Xun, a household figure in China.

Commonly regarded as one of the greatest writers in early 20th Century Chinese literature, Lu Xun was also a social critic known for his sharp essays on historical traditions and modern conditions of China. I knew him well as a writer and a leading figure in democratic revolution at his time, but not at all as an artistic pioneer.

Curious about this newly discovered identity of a person I thought I was familiar with, I delved into the history of modern Chinese woodcut and Lu Xun’s position in it. China was the birthplace of reproductive woodcuts, but original woodcuts, in which artistic design and actual carving were done by the same person, were developed later in Europe. Lu Xun was the pioneer to re-introduce woodcuts back to China.

In the summer of 1931, Lu Xun held a 6-day summer session on modern woodcut for 13 selected students. At that time, there were no printmaking art teachers at all in China, so Lu Xun asked a Japanese friend to teach the course. He himself brought his valuable collections of foreign woodcuts as teaching aids and served as a teaching assistant to translate Japanese into Chinese.

Besides holding the course, Lu Xun made various efforts to push forward the art of printmaking in China, such as putting his collections into replicable albums for young artists to study and holding exhibition of outstanding artworks by Chinese youths in China and abroad. Lu Xun was devoted to his cause even at the very end of his life. A few days before he passed away in 1936, Lu Xun attended a woodcut exhibition in Shanghai, offering earnest advice and encouragement to promising youths, as he always did in over 200 pieces of correspondence with young artists in China.

I awed at Lu Xun’s significant contribution to Chinese woodcut. The striking piece by Zhao Yannian I encountered earlier must owe to Lu Xun’s influence. Yet, I still couldn’t understand my strange feeling towards that specific woodcut until I took a close look at Lu Xun’s collection. Among his approximately 2000 pieces of collection by over 300 artists from nearly 20 countries, Lu Xun admired Kathe Kollwitz’s works most. Kollwitz was a German artist of Expressionism and Realism, famous for her focus on life and struggle of proletariat and her ability to depict emotional impact in prints.

That’s it! I recalled a woodcut by Kollwitz I learnt in art history class: In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht (1920). It was created as a lamentation of Karl Liebknecht, an assassinated leader of the working-class revolt. In this piece, the crowded mourners construct a huge area of black and thus convey a depressive and heavy impression. The largest area of white among the darkness is the sheet covering Liebknecht’s body, highlighting how he embodied hope and faith for his working-class followers in despair.

Lu Xun is With Us echoes this piece from form to essence. Zhao Yannian employs similar technique of black and white contrast in depicting a similar theme of mourning for a great man. This woodcut was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lu Xun’s death. Similar to Kollwitz’s piece, it juxtaposes the mourning crowd and the deceased, although the overall composition is different. In this piece, the brightest white area is Lu Xun’s forehead, symbolizing his guiding and enlightening role in Chinese democratic revolution. His vanguard ideas were hope and light in darkness.

Zhao Yannian began to study woodcut in Shanghai in 1938. Although he didn’t have the chance to learn from Lu Xun directly, he definitely benefited from Lu Xun’s promotion of modern woodcut, and therefore was indirectly influenced by Kollwitz. As my initial mystery got solved, a new one was raised. Why, among such many printmaking artists, did Lu Xun hold Kollwitz as his favorite?

The answer became clearer as I learnt about The Sacrifice (1922). It was the first piece of Kollwitz that Lu Xun introduced to the Chinese public on a newspaper in 1931.It depicts a mother reluctantly handing over her child with eyes closed in grief. Kollwitz created this woodcut in memoriam of her own son, who was sacrificed in WWI. Lu Xun, on the other hand, published this piece soon after he lost his friend Rou Shi, whose mother happened to be blind. Not knowing that her son had already sacrificed his life in the fight for democracy, the blind mother waited for him to return home in vain.

Lu Xun must have been greatly shaken and moved when he saw Kollwitz’s piece. A piece of art connected two hearts in two different parts of the world. They reverberated with a shared grief of loss deepest in humanity.

Although Lu Xun didn’t devote himself to artistic creation in printmaking, he had more in common with Kollwitz than meets the eye. Mother and child, war and sacrifice, hunger and poverty, agony and grief, oppression and resistance…all are themes frequently explored in Lu Xun’s writings and Kollwitz’s art alike. Lu Xun criticized dehumanizing feudal traditions and cried out “Save the children!” in “Dairy of a Madman” (1918), the first novel written in modern Chinese language. Kollwitz depicted the eager eyes of starving children in Germany’s Children are Hungry (1924).

No wonders Lu Xun readily embraced and spread Kollwitz’s influence. Their aesthetic and realistic pursuits coincided. Both, living in an era of change and a society of revolution, longed for “what could be” from “what was”. Both didn’t hesitate to admit the utilitarian purposes of their work. Kollwitz acknowledged she didn’t pursuit art for the sake of art, but for change in reality. Lu Xun believed in realistic power of novels to improve the society and awaken the people from feudalism.

Perhaps they were not “pure” artists, perhaps scenes they depicted were not at all beautiful, but their endeavors shared a certain beauty—the beauty of strength. It was hidden in each forceful stroke of Kollwitz’s knife and Lu Xun’s pen. It was understood and lived by both. We might often find hatred in their works, but always, we find love. The strength they share is forceful, but more importantly, compassionate.

Sources:

Huang, Qiaosheng. “Thoughts on the occasion of the 130th Anniversary of Lu Xun’s Birth and 80th Anniversary of Modern Chinese Woodcuts.” Lu Xun Museum, July 20, 2015. luxunmuseum.com.cn/html/201507/a1285.htm.

“Lu Xun and Woodcut.” Shanghai Art Critique, August 12, 2019. sohu.com/a/333400724_488482.

Wang, Xiaoming. “Lu Xun.” Britannica. britannica.com/biography/Lu-Xun. Accessed July 28, 2020.

Xia, Xiaojing. “Lu Xun’s aesthetic choice of Kollwitz’s woodcut.” Lu Xun Museum, February 16, 2011. luxunmuseum.com.cn/html/201102/a1011.htm.