Mao's Comics Artists

Far removed from its original propaganda tool, China has discovered a new, young generation of comics artists that is seeking emancipation from censorship but wants also to reach the social roots of its problems.

"Mao's people" are invading Europe, armed with just pencils. Increasing numbers of Chinese comics artists are taking one of the many applied-arts university courses in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong and then arriving on the European market and climbing its charts with print runs in excess of 500,000 copies. Not just with videogames and film cartoons but a new type of experimental and highly personal art that reflects the great changes being seen in China, where cartoons appeared in the early 20th century.

In and around the 1950s, comics were to be found in department stores, cafes, bus stations and even in company canteens. In those years, when Mao Zedong had founded Greater China, comics had print runs of between 100,000 and a million copies but were a means of ideological and cultural education, as Umberto Eco wrote in an essay in 1971. The linguist had analysed their form, structure and content and saw them as a sort of low-class education handed down from above and produced in a pedagogical, propagandistic and paternalistic style.

So, what drives the Chinese people's silent pencils today, in the year of the Dragon, and what are they thinking? In 2012, China was a special guest at the Barcelona International Comic Fair and the Festival International de la Bande Dessinee in Angouleme; it was the focus of exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and the Istituto Confucio, a permanent guest at the Cartoon Museum in Basel, the star of the "Chinese Islands" exhibition in Udine featuring works by 14 comics artists and the subject of the Canicola China anthology, published last May. Far removed from its original propaganda tool, China has discovered a new, young generation of comics artists that is seeking emancipation from censorship but wants also to reach the social roots of its problems.

We give an overview of the 9th Chinese art in Beijing and Hong Kong.
Top: Stella So. Above: Tang Yan
Top: Stella So. Above: Tang Yan
Beijing
Japanese manga were all the vogue in the 1990s. Published and circulated all over China without government permission, they were withdrawn, causing a general sense of loss that prompted many comics artists to look outside China and their gaze also fell on European comics. This resulted in the birth of an independent type of comic, with its own style and life. Today's subjects are the crisis of modernity, the impact of mass media on public life, solitude, the industrial world, over-rapid Chinese growth and a lack of points of reference with the past. Highly imaginative and with hybrids and reveries of various kinds, they are undoubtedly appealing.
Hok Tak Yeung
Hok Tak Yeung
Tang Yan is a comics artist from Shanghai who started printing, at his own expense, a project entitled Special Comics, a sort of almanac in five editions that sold 5,000 copies thanks to a community that grew and spread via the Internet. With chief editor Hu Xiaojiang, also known as Storyof and an illustrator for the Shanghai Weekly and Cosmo Man's Health, and a team of five, Special Comics was printed and sold illegally in independent bookshops for the equivalent of 12-25 Euros.
Increasing numbers of Chinese comics artists are taking one of the many applied-arts university courses in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong
Chihoi
Chihoi
Yan Cong was born in 1983 and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He embarked on his artistic career in his dormitory room. Featuring Beijing, Singapore and France, his work invokes a solitary world of fantastic creatures, midway between the children's book and bitter adult sarcasm. "The government is not interested in our underground publication but should it poke its nose in we would be forced to stop printing. China may not be a free country but we try to think, talk, learn, paint and draw all the same."
Yan Cong
Yan Cong
Hong Kong
The Hong Kong comic appeared around the 1960s and is an ongoing tale of Kung Fu and gangster heroes. Initially indebted to nearby Japan, it has now developed its own independent form and its own place in the city centre — the Comix Homebase for love stories, sex and politics.

Shy Cuson Lo worked in advertising for nearly 20 years then, one morning, he woke up as a comics artist and has never looked back. Inspired by Japanese and French comics, he draws married life but mainly international political figures, from the Dalai Lama to Hong Kong's governor Leung Chun-Ying (called, indeed, a "closet Communist") passing via Berlusconi. "I publish on Facebook because it is the only democratic place available. Anyone can comment and be free to choose whether they like something or not."
Hok Tak Yeung
Hok Tak Yeung
Chihoi is 35 years old and studied nutritional science but then realised he wanted to do something else. He started publishing comic strips in a magazine that has now closed after giving many young people a chance to show their work (and paying them). He adores Munch and loves the style of certain German comics artists, literary adaptations and sociological issues. He has published 10 books, some in Italian, "In Hong Kong, they want to change our lives and choices. But we are tired. There may be a revolution, not before or after but while we are drawing."

Born in 1970, Hok Tak Yeung grew up in Hong Kong where he also studied. In 1999, he started publishing comic strips for magazines and newspapers, some European, and has featured in exhibitions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, France and Switzerland. In 2002, he published how blue was my valley about his childhood. His experimental art radically changes the meaning of comic strips and he calls it a "wild beast" style, linked to politics.
Stella So
Stella So
Stella So was born in 1977 and studied design at Hong Kong Polytechnic. Unhappy and quiet, she started wandering through the alleyways, markets and old buildings of her beloved home-city and drawing the details of a past that fast-track urbanisation is erasing, on large A3 sheets. A Moebius fan, in 2002 she won the Independent Short Film & Video Award for an animated work. Since 2008, she has published five books (the sixth is in the pipeline) and she contributes to three magazines. Francesca Esposito

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