‘China and the Art of War: Perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian War in Chinese Online Poetry and Visual Art Narratives, 2022-Present’
Type
conference lecture
Date Issued
2024-08-29
Author(s)
Abstract
Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 has rocked our understanding of the geopolitical world order and the role of war in the twenty-first century. China’s official reactions and its relations with Russia have confounded the world. Xi Jinping’s newly pledged ‘no-limits friendship’ with Putin manifested in China’s official media touting Putin’s war propaganda while censoring pro-Ukrainian news. Scholarly debates and global media have dissected the Russo-Ukrainian war from political, economic and social angles, yet few studies analyse Chinese unofficial reactions in popular culture. Chinese cyberspace has become a battleground for contesting discourses from China’s vernacular culture and the officially sanctioned culture of the Party State. This study responds to the urgent need to deepen our understanding of China’s vernacular culture by artistic and cultural perceptions of the war as seen in online poetry and visual art. Using Foucault’s concept of parrhesia (‘speaking truth to power’) with its connotations of freedom of expression, transparency, duty and gossip (Foucault, 1983), this study aims to explore China’s indigenous tradition of a vernacular culture ‘speaking truth to power’ in poetry on Weibo and WeChat and visual art narratives by Cao Fei, Huang Rui, Qi Shaoting, Li Qiang, Deng Kangyan and Badiucao in China and abroad. It will shed new light on how artists and writers brave the risks to go against the Party line and show solidarity with Ukraine, while voicing direct and indirect critiques of autocracy. This paper is jointly authored by Daria Berg and Qian Cui.
Language
English
Keywords
Russia
poetry
Internet literature
visual arts
China
Chinese online poetry
Chinese visual arts
Ukraine
war
Subject(s)
Division(s)
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Name
BERG & CUI EACS-2024 Tallinn 20240829.pdf
Size
151.64 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
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