SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2023

This thesis examines the Chinese Peasant Painting Movement in Huxian from 1949 to 1978. It begins with an unusual and straightforward question: are peasant paintings real art? The Chinese Peasant Painting Movement was a significant art movement, which engage the peasants in art creation. However, due to its origins in the Chinese Communist Party’s official policies, the artistic aspect of the movement has been largely overlooked. Both the movement itself and the peasants’ paintings have been treated as political appendage. In this research, I investigate history of the peasant painting movement in Huxian to reassess the social origin of the movement. I identify traditional Chinese painting elements in peasant paintings to explore the continuity of techniques, spatial sense, and autonomy. My goal is to discover the artistic autonomy of peasant painters in the movement, highlight their works, and include peasant paintings in the broader context of Chinese painting history. To accomplish this, I have chosen representative peasant painters and focused on their works from the period of 1966-1976: Dong Zhengyi (董正谊), Li Fenglan (李凤兰), Song Houcheng (宋厚成), and Yang Zhixian (杨志贤). In so doing, my research argues that Huxian peasant paintings are in line with traditional Chinese painting and created under the inspiration of peasant artistic autonomy.