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woodcut prints (Figure 1 &2) which appeared in Buddhist devotional arts, nianhuas and folk tales, young artists from the New Woodcut Movement learnt from western woodcut artists that they should work in the form of an individual artist and the artist should convey their “ideas and attitudes find expression not only when he produces the original design but also in different types of marks he makes with his knife and chisel when he carves the block” [4] in contrast to the production of traditional print where engraving and printing were separate processes performed by different people and the creators of traditional prints were viewed as artisans, not artists.” [5] .

 

In “To The Front!”(Figure 3) a woodcut of 1932, Hu made this woodcut to persuade his nation to fight against the Japanese. At the time, China was struggling under Japanese aggressions that started with the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Drawing on the emotional intensity and style of German Expressionist art, he produced a powerful image using the stark contrast of black and white and strong angular lines to depict realistic people under hardship. The main figure dominates almost ¾ of the picture. His size added with his outstretch hands make him very powerful. His existence was depicted with broad slashes, which echoes the artist’s urgency in uniting the masses and fight against the Japanese. The mask-like figures in the background convey the power of the masses. This image was a call to a different life. During that period of time, artists only made woodcuts on people either going to the field or suffering hardship. They never use utopia images to persuade the people to fight as they were looking for powerful, dramatic images that could immediately bring out the urgency of needing to fight back.

 

By learning the styles of leftist western woodcut artists and using powerful and realistic imageries to deliver messages to the masses and focusing on social ills of their time, young artists including Hu, see themselves as part of an international leftist arm community [6] . And in “To the Front!”, we can see a big influence of Kathe Kollwitz’s work, a woodcut artist from the German Expressionalism. Instead of finding beauty in physical attractiveness, what Kollwitz tried to reflect through the illustration in the human body is “the physical reflection of the labors, the efforts, the cares and concerns, the loves, losses, and grief’s that made up the lives of real and ordinary people.” [7] (Figure 4). It was from Kollwitz that artists realized the power of the physical actions of the human body. The strong, diagonal lines of the was echoing the main figure’s body and the movements of the peasants in “Outbreak”(Figure 5), The use of broad slashes and simplicity of the depiction of human figures is characteristic of the period and it was directly taken from the simplicity of human figure represented by Kollwitz in “Memorial to Karl Liebknecht”(Figure 6). In both “Memorial to Karl Liebknecht” and “To The Front!”, the artists used black to set the mood. In “Memorial to Karl Liebknecht”,the people were all bowing down to the dead body, conveying a sense of downward motion which signifies sadness and in “To the Front” The upward outstretch hand of t本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。