Hua Junwu

Hua Junwu ( Chinese  華君武  /  华君武 , Pinyin Huá Jūnwǔ , born April 24, 1915 in Hangzhou , Zhejiang Province , China; † June 13, 2010 in Beijing , China) was a Chinese cartoonist who had worked since the 1930s did cartoons for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its media.

Life

Hua started drawing caricatures when he was still at school. After graduating from middle school, he went to Shanghai and worked as a bank clerk. During this time he came into contact with Chinese and foreign cartoonists, for example with the Russian Geogii Sapojnikoff ( Sapajiu ), who was exiled in Shanghai, and got to know the way of drawing of the German cartoonist EO Plauen .

After the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1937, Hua went to the communist stronghold of Yan'an in Shaanxi Province in 1938 and worked there as a political cartoonist who worked with ink on rice paper and very often combined popular rhymes with the pictures. In 1940 he joined the party. During his time in Yen'an, he had close contact with the writer Ding Ling and the artist Hu Feng .

After defeating Japan in 1945, Hua went to northeast China, where his humorous and often sarcastic cartoons were well received. His caricature Chiang Kai-shek, however, was not very flattering, so that Hua was put on the Kuomintang's wanted list .

In 1949, the year the People's Republic of China was founded, Hua became head of the arts and culture section of the Beijing People's Newspaper . In the 1950s, Ding Ling and Hu Feng fell out of favor with Mao Tse-tung as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary intellectuals . Hua reviled the two in his cartoons. Hua was also reviled and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution . He had to take part in the public criticism and abuse events of the Red Guards . The banner concerning him carried the inscription: "Beat down the black artist boss Hua Junwu". He was no longer allowed to draw, had to muck out the pigsties and haul water buckets at a cadre school in Tianjin .

After the end of Mao and the new, more open policies of the Chinese leadership, Hua apologized to Ding Ling and Hu Feng after they came out of the labor camps. Hua's drawings continued to be received very critically by the ruling class. An example of this is the drawing Ye Gong Hao Long (Lord Gong Loves the Dragon), in which Hua depicted the dragon with two characters that mean democracy .

His complete works were published in 10 volumes in 2003, and upon his death he bequeathed all of his caricatures to the National Gallery in Beijing.

Works

• Satire and Humor - Selected Cartoons of Hua Junwu 1983 - 1989 , China Today Press, Beijing 1991 ISBN 7-5072-0249-6 .
• Man hua yi sheng . Xin shi jie chu ban she, Beijing 2005, ISBN 7-80187-570-2 .

Web links

• Obituary (en.)
• CV (en.)
• CV with cartoons

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Die Welt June 15, 2010: Laughing with Mao

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Hua is the family name here, Junwu is the first name.