TIMELESS HUMOUR

TIMELESS HUMOUR

Liao Bingxiong and Fang Cheng, masters of a fading Chinese cartoon tradition

by John A. Lent and Xu Ying

The older the Chinese cartoonist, the vaster the difference between him and his younger counterpart in artistic temperament, philosophy, and approach. The wider China opens its doors economically and culturally, the greater the loss or bastardization of uniquely Chinese ways of conceptualizing and drawing cartoons that reach back to Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. One needs only to look at—and be amused by—the satirical drawings and caricatures that appeared in late-nineteenth-century periodicals to appreciate this vital legacy of drollery and commentary. But in China today, cartooning has strayed from providing a public service or serving as a political watchdog; it has become, for the most part, strictly a commercial venture. Brush and ink techniques have been virtually abandoned, as have literature, folklore, and poetry as content sources. Facial and other features of cartoon characters are now likely to be rendered in the Japanese manga style. All of this has occurred since China accelerated its opening to the West in the 1990s.

These criticisms were heard repeatedly in interviews conducted with dozens of cartoonists in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou during the past year. Especially vociferous in their comments were two cartoon masters, Guangzhou-based Liao Bingxiong and Fang Cheng, who resides in Beijing.

Eighty-seven-year-old Liao, whose career spans seventy years, quit drawing cartoons in 1995, disgusted with the "unhealthy, meaningless" nature of modern cartooning and what he referred to as the senseless imitation of Japanese manga. A review of Liao's life and work provides clues to what he expects of his profession. Liao, a tall, slender man with a receding hair line, tobacco-stained fingers, and a hearing aid he takes off and adjusts frequently, lives in a modest apartment in Guangzhou. He seems proud of his simple life, pointing out that he can afford a car but does not feel a need for one.

In the spacious Liao Bingxiong Art Gallery, opened in 2000 in the new Guangzhou Museum of Art, sixty of Liao's works are now on view, although, as the artist is quick to point out, he donated two hundred drawings to the government. The museum has seventeen galleries, two of which feature Guangzhou artists; Liao is the sole cartoonist in China to merit his own museum gallery. Liao's career can be divided into three periods in which the focus of his work was, consecutively, opposition to Japan, opposition to Chiang Kai-shek, and self reflection. Liao says the first two periods, which extended from the early 1930s through the 1940s, were "hungry" times, and that he seldom was paid by the Guangzhou newspapers in which his work appeared. "I was very poor and could not afford to take the bus, so I walked to the newspaper to hand in my work. What payments there were, were very small."

When war with Japan broke out in 1937, Liao, then twenty-three, joined the Cartoonist Salvation Propaganda Team, a small band of independent cartoonists who moved about

notably, "Chronicle of the Cat Kingdom" (1946), which mirrored Guomindang corruption. Friends secreted him from Chongqing to Kunming, where they arranged for him to become a primary school teacher. Two years later, in 1947, he fled Chiang's terroristic regime and settled in Hong Kong, where he lived until 1950. Liao does not speak well of those three years, saying, "I drew too many cartoons daily [in all, more than three thousand were published], using more than ten pen names. Hong Kong was a cultural desert; they had a low cartoon level, and I followed them—I drew the way they liked."

Disappointed with Hong Kong, Liao returned to Guangzhou at the end of 1950, and throughout much of the following decade created thousands of works, mostly political, few of

For the next twenty years, Liao did not draw. He was sent to the White Cloud Mountain Farm for reform through labor, and then in 1960 was assigned to the Guangdong Provincial Puppet Art Troupe to work as a set designer. When he did pick up his pen again, in 1979, the

Fang Cheng, another of the few surviving masters of cartooning, also laments the changed cartooning scene in China, stating that the field is filling up with amateurs who do not have drawing skills, do not understand humor as a language, and seldom spend time in intellectual pursuits such as reading. Although many cartoonists in the past did not have formal art training, they were familiar with folk art and literary classics, from which they drew inspiration.

At eighty-four, Fang is an energetic, physically strong, forward-looking individual who is excited about his work and about life in general. He lives in a small, cramped apartment in the

were many funny shows but no humor." Using these concepts, he distinguishes between cartoons and comic strips: cartoons possess humor and language, comic strips do not.

Besides writing about humor and cartooning, Fang said his second major task is to do brush and ink paintings that incorporate cartoon-like drawings and humorous poetry. He draws on his self-gained knowledge of classical literature for ideas. "Humor is hard to learn or get," he said. "You must read a lot of books, talk about jokes, listen to humor performances, and keep protecting these humor experiences" so that they do not become extinct. Fang said the Chinese language is permeated with a sense of humor, and the more a cartoonist knows about language, the better his or her cartoons are.

the campus of what is now Beijing University). Instead, he enrolled in the chemistry department at Wuhan University in 1936, but returned home the following year, when the Japanese invasion occurred. In 1939, he resumed his studies at Wuhan, where he also got involved in acting, at the same time learning on his own to draw cartoons. "I was one of the activists there; six of us who were involved in drama started a weekly wall newspaper. I drew cartoons on the wall each week for the two years the newspaper lasted," Fang said.

place to stay, but the American director of an advertising company that represented cosmetics clients employed him as an artist. Not long after that, the chief editor of the Chinese newspaper Observer asked him to draw several cartoons weekly, and he began contributing to other newspapers as well.

In 1948, as the Guomindang realized their days were numbered, they made plans to flee to Taiwan—hoping to take the most famous artists with them, Fang said. Not wanting to follow Chiang to Taiwan, most artists escaped to Hong Kong, which is where Fang went in 1948. Although he wanted to return to Shanghai after Liberation in 1949, fate changed his course. "There was a sunken ship in Shanghai harbor, so [the ship we were on] went farther north and I ended up in Beijing," Fang said. There, he worked for the Xinman Daily, but recognizing that the People's Daily had the best opportunities for cartoonists, he joined that newspaper and not only drew cartoons but also wrote humor essays.

Liao Bingxiong and Fang Cheng, and a handful of their contemporaries embody a type of cartooning known for its eruditeness, aesthetic beauty, sharp language, and literary allusions. It is our loss that this tradition may be quickly fading away, that most of the cartoons being produced by younger artists in China today exhibit a style and technique that are the equivalent of fast food—bland and forgettable.

John A. Lent has studied and written about Asian mass communications and popular culture since 1964. He edits International Journal of Comic Art and Asian Cinema. Xu Ying is a longtime researcher at China Film Archive who has written extensively on Chinese and other countries' film and animation.

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