Images of Today, 1944, Ding Cong

Archive Label 2003:
Images of Today is a biting political satire painted in Sichuan, where Ding Cong fled after the Japanese occupied his native Shanghai in 1937. The painting sharply criticizes the corruption, censorship, and ineptitude of the Nationalist government and illustrates the problems of a sick society. From the right the characters include:

-A Student buried in dusty texts while his modern textbooks lie unopened
-A gaunt and gagged universitty professor attempting to feed his starving family
-Racketeers who collaborate and count their ill-gotten gains
-An artist, blind to the truth surrounding him, displaying an inept painting that resembles a scrawny dog more than the noble tiger he probably intended. Nevertherless, the painting has been sold five times to a public that can't tell the difference
-A tormented author whose every word is scrutinized by the censor
-A poor refugee who tries, in vain, to sell his coat to a well-fed official
-Corrupt officials haggling over money subscribed to clothe and feed the desparate army, while the cloth rots, and the rice is devoured by rats
-Two cold and emaciated soldiers
-Two rich women dressed in furs driving past a family of starving refugees
-A blindfolded journalist, gagged with an official invitation

Both inscriptions (by Yi Shaojun [1893/4-1988] and Ding Yi [identity unclear]) describe the painting and express the desire that the image could be disseminated more widely. In 1945 William P. Fenn, a professor at Jinlin Women’s College, brought the scroll to the United States and published it in the August 1945 Fortune magazine.

Ding Cong is a political cartoonist and illustrator whose work parallels that of the revolutionary woodcut artists. Silenced during the Cultural Revolution, he resumed an active production after 1979 and is now chairman of the Cartoon Committee of the Chinese Artists’ Association.

Exhibition Label:
"Selections for the Summer," Jun-2006, Mary Dusenbury
In the 20th century, China experienced revolutionary zeal, brutal violence, the affirmation and rejection of tradition, fear, hope, despair, and dizzying radical changes. The four artists whose work is shown here interpreted the life of their times in very different ways: Ding Cong’s handscroll is a biting political satire; Zhao Yannian, another daring social critic, used his rough-carved woodblock prints to aid and celebrate the revolutionary cause; Zhao Shao-ang’s ink paintings evoke the past and the timeless beauty of nature and at first seem unrelated to the realities of contemporary Chinese life; Xu Bing plays with Chinese ideographs to comment on meaning and the distortion of meaning.

Images of Today was painted in Sichuan, where Ding Cong fled after the Japanese occupied his native Shanghai in 1937. The painting sharply criticizes the corruption, censorship, and ineptitude of the Nationalist government and illustrates the problems of a sick society. From the right the characters include:

• A student buried in dusty texts while his modern textbooks lie unopened
• A gaunt and gagged university professor attempting to feed his starving family
• Racketeers collaborating and counting their ill-gotten gains
• An artist, blind to the truth surrounding him, displaying an inept painting that resembles a scrawny dog more than the noble tiger he probably intended. Nevertheless, the painting has been sold five times to a public that can’t tell the difference.
• A tormented author whose every word is scrutinized by the censor
• A poor refugee trying in vain to sell his coat to a well-fed official
• Corrupt officials haggling over money subscribed to clothe and feed the desperate army, while the cloth rots, and the rice is devoured by rats
• Two cold and emaciated soldiers
• Two rich women dressed in furs driving past a family of starving refugees
• A blindfolded journalist, gagged with an official invitation