| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Geremie R. Barmé. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 471. $60.00.

In this evocatively written biography of artist and writer Feng Zikai (1898–1975), Geremie R. Barmé explores the nature of Feng's art, the course of his career, and his relationships to other artists and intellectuals. Feng was chiefly known for manhua, simple line brush drawings portraying people and everyday activities, primarily from the 1920s into the 1940s. Feng's sources of inspiration varied. In the beginning of his career, his best work was inspired by traditional Chinese poetry, most often only one line from a poem. A devoted father, Feng went through a period in the 1920s where children and childhood were his chief focus as subjects for his drawing. His 1927 conversion to Buddhism infused his drawings with a "sympathetic heart," producing "a message about permanence and worth, a subdued warning about the threats of mindless progress and mass culture, as well as the pitfalls of heedless plenty" (pp. 371–72). Overall, Barmé concludes that Feng's "graphic artistic vocabulary" fit well with the increasingly vernacular culture from the 1920s on. In grappling with how to build on traditional forms in order to create a modern artistic medium, Feng created "a visual style that revealed the customary through a vision that was extrarordinary" (p. 114). He stressed the essential nature of "taste" and "sensibility" (quwei) in the artist, a stance that elicited repeated attacks during his career from leftists. Although Feng was touched by many political events, he never became politically active.

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