Beyond ornamentation : Pang Xunqin's wartime craft design expanding the realm of art in everyday life

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the Craft Art Compendium (Gongyi meishu ji 工藝美術集) created in 1941 during the Second World War in China by the artist, designer and educator Pang Xunqin 龐薰琹 (1906–1985). At the height of the Second World War, most artists shifted their attention to the creation of propaganda calling for resistance to the Japanese invasion. Why did Pang Xunqin create the Craft Art Compendium featuring pictorial craft designs of everyday objects? Scholarship on Pang’s works generally focuses on his modernist paintings created in the 1920s and 1930s. Art historian Christine Ho’s recent research examines Pang’s wartime designs, highlighting his reinterpretation of Chinese archaic motifs and ethnic-minority craft for elevating cultural nationalism and the status of craft design. This dissertation aims to bridge the gap between the studies of Pang Xunqin’s paintings and craft designs, finding his sources of inspiration for his craft designs apart from folk-minority craft and delving into his concepts of art and craft by investigating the Craft Art Compendium. Through an analysis of Pang’s paintings and craft designs made between the 1920s and 1940s as well as his writings, I argue that by incorporating the Bauhaus’s concepts, Pang Xunqin’s Craft Art Compendium unifies painting, design and craft with the ideal of egalitarianism, creating functional craft designs of everyday objects with diverse ornaments that transform into pictorial representations and connect art to life and society in wartime China.