“Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai”, an RASBJ online talk by Dr. Lauren Walden about her book
Jan. 15, 2025 Wednesday from 19:00 – 20:00 PM Beijing Time
Surrealism in China initially gained a foothold in Shanghai’s former French concession during the early 1930s, disseminated by returning Chinese students who had directly encountered the movement in Paris and Tokyo. Shanghai surrealism adopted a dialectical form, resonating with the modus operandi of the Parisian movement as well as China’s traditional belief system of Daoism. Reconciling the thought of Freud and Marx, Surrealism subsumed the multiple contradictions that divided Republican Shanghai, East and West, colonial and cosmopolitan, ancient and modern, navigating the porous boundaries that separate dream and reality. Shanghai surrealists were not rigid followers of their Parisian counterparts. Indeed, they commingled Surrealist techniques with elements of traditional Chinese iconography. Rather than revolving around a centralized group with a leader, Shanghai Surrealism was a much more diffuse entity, disseminated across copious different periodicals, avant-garde groups, and the entire gamut of political ideology, ranging from Nationalist party supporters to Communist sympathizers. Ultimately, the pervasive presence of Surrealism in Shanghai can be attributed to a wide range of factors: a yearning for national renewal, the stagnancy of the guohua genre, anticolonial protest, the rise of Western individualism, circumnavigating censorship and experimentation in search of a unique artistic voice. Dr. Walden will introduce Chinese Surrealism, using periodicals and other primary sources to reveal the mutual cultural influences between China and Western avant-garde, and broaden the scope of Surrealist studies beyond Eurocentric prisms.
Dr. Lauren Walden is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Art at Birmingham City University, UK. She has published on many aspects of Surrealism in outlets such as Visual Studies, Visual Resources, Visual Anthropology, Photography and Culture and Dada/Surrealism. Her first book Le Surréalisme de Paris à Shanghai was published with the Giacometti Foundation in 2022, and in November 2024 Hong Kong University Press published an expanded English edition which is the basis of Dr. Walden’s presentation. She is currently working on Surrealism and the People’s Republic of China under contract with Routledge. She has also held Research Fellowships at the Centre for Creative Photography, Arizona and the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds.
TO PURCHASE SURREALISM FROM PARIS TO SHANGHAI: Hong Kong University Press has generously provided this discount code: RAS20 You can use it to order from the HKUP website until Feb. 15 https://hkupress.hku.hk/Surrealism_from_Paris_to_Shanghai
Free for RASBJ members. RMB 50 for members of RAS branches in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul. RMB 100 for non-members. Interested in becoming an RASBJ member? Please sign up at https://rasbj.org/membership/ You may find paying via Alipay easier than paying by Wechat; you can also use international credit cards.
Please click “Register” or “I will Attend” no later than noon on Jan. 13 and follow the instructions. After successful registration you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to join the event. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder.
MEMBERS OF PARTNER RAS BRANCHES: Please register at least 72 hours in advance to allow time for membership verification. You will receiver several emails from RASBJ confirming registration/payment. Please check your spam folder to ensure you see all RASBJ emails.
Writing in Cha journal on Shanghai surrealism, avant garde art movements/artists in Shanghai, the role of Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Academy of Art & Lauren Walden’s new book (from HKUP) on it all….click here to read…
Lauren Walden’s Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai focusing on China’s interwar surrealists now in English from Hong Kong University Press & still in French as Le surréalisme de Paris à Shanghai from Institut Giacometti….
The first days of the new year of 1925 were to be when Wallis finally checked out of the Grand Hotel de Pekin & went to stay with her old friend Kitty Rogers in her sumptuous courtyard on Shih-Chia Hutong. At the Grand Hotel everything you could desire was on the upper floors after the lobby reception – Helen Burton’s Camel’s Bell boutique, the suites, the rooftop dance floor overlooking the Forbidden City, and the top floor dining room (here photographed in the 1920s by the American photographer John D Zumbrun who had a thriving studio in the Legation Quarter).
Jack Brown in China: A Story of the Russo-Japanese War by Herbert Strang (also published as Brown of Moukden), 1933 is a Young Adult book if its time – so fairly jingoistic and usually about fairly recent events – ‘imperial fiction’ as it’s known – and with a plucky Brit at the centre. It’s on Gutenberg here if you fancy it. And the story is somewhat intriguing – set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Ivan Ivanovitch to his Russian acquaintances) Brown is an Englishman living in Moukden (Mukden aka Shenyang). Jack becomes entangled in the unfair fate of his Chinese friend, Wang Shih, wrongfully punished by a corrupt judge. Some of the descriptions of the war-torn landscape are fairly good and the opening chapters contain some descriptive detail of early 1900s Shenyang (though how accurate this is remains debatable as neither author ever visited to my knowledge).
This book was a return to the Russo-Japanese War for Strang who had previously written, just the year before, Kobo: A story of the Russo-Japanese War (1905). Herbert Strang was a pseudonym used by George Herbert Ely (1866–1958) and Charles James L’Estrange (1867–1947), co-editors in the Juveniles Department of Oxford University Press from 1907 until 1939, and the authors of several dozen adventure stories for boys and the Little Stories of Great Lives series (about a dozen titles – Nelson, Drake, Napoleon etc)…
William Hopkyn Rees – Chinaeg A Chineaid (1907) is a particularly interesting missionary account of China as it is published in Welsh. Now obviously this presents some problems to non-Welsh speakers but is a curiosity for sure.
Accrdoign to the Welsh Dictionary of Biography – “Hopkyn Rees (1859-1924) was born at Cwmavon, Glamorganshire. He entered Bala Independent College, 1877, and was minister of Llechryd and Ffynnon-bedr from 1881 to 1883, when he sailed for the North China, L.M.S., mission field. He married Margaret Charlotte Harrison of Coed-poeth, and settled at Chi Chou in 1888, where he had founded a station. He weathered the difficulties of the 1900 rebellion, and was decorated with the ‘ Blue Ribbon ‘ and given rank of Mandarin for services of pacification. He was transferred to the Peking United Theological College and the Language School for Missionaries, appointed to the Board of Revisers of the Old Testament Scriptures in Mandarin, and to the Shanghai staff of the Christian Literature for China Society. In 1915 he was elected associate secretary, with Timothy Richard, and in 1916 general secretary, of the Christian Literature Society for China, and a member of the editorial board of the Chinese Recorder in 1919. He resigned in 1921 owing to ill health, and was given the chair of Chinese in the University of London. He published China a’r Chineaid, 1906, Griffith John o China, 1901, in Welsh, and Jonathan Lees of Tientsin and How to Study Chinese, 1918, both in English. He died in London 4 August 1924.”
But there is more to Hopkyns Rees – Re-reading Anne Witchard’sLao She in London (HKUP) Witchard notes:
“It was in the summer of 1924 that Lao She received the offer of a five-year teaching appointment in London. One of the English teachers at Yenching was the Reverend Robert Kenneth Evans (1880–1925). Evans’ father-in-law was a Welsh missionary and linguist, W. Hopkyn Rees (1859–1924), who had weathered the Boxer rebellion and was now retired from the LMS to a chair of Chinese at the University of London (1921–24). Evans had been informally supervising the Gangwashi church but was home from China in December 1922 after suffering ‘a serious nervous breakdown’.
Lao She had not begun classes at Yenching until September 1923, so he could not have been taught by Evans but their paths certainly would have crossed at the church during 1922. Back in London, Evans was teaching at London University’s School of Oriental Studies. When Hopkyn Rees was looking for a candidate for an assistant lectureship in Mandarin he sought out Lao She on Evans’ recommendation. Kitted out in his Western suit and with a second-class boat ticket, paid for with a loan from the LMS, Lao She embarked from Shanghai on the SS Devanha to Harwich. He was met by Reverend Evans at London’s Cannon Street station on 14 September 1924.”
In his novel of 1920s London,Mr Ma and Son, he writes:
“The Reverend Ely was an old missionary who’d spread the Word for twenty years in China. He knew everything there was to know about China …”
Lao She’s characterisation of the Rev Ely depicts the attitudes of missionaries like Hopkyn Rees…
