Feng Zikai : a biographical and critical study, 1898-1975

Abstract

This is a study of the life and work of Feng Zikai (1898-1975). While Yu Dafu, a contemporary of Feng's, in the mid-1930s evaluated his essay style as being suffused with a "clear elegance and mystery which at its most subtle is far superior even to his painting", 1 and despite having produced a steady stream of essays up to 1949, Feng Zikai has come to be thought of predominantly as an artist, and due to his particular style of painting, the manhua, as a cartoonist. It is a categorisation th.at was further formalized in Mainland China after 1949 when he was redefined by the requirements of the State as a children's cartoonist, and this is how he was seen until even quite recently. Up to the early 1980s his work was either overlooked in Mainland China, or seen through the distorting glass of Marxist-Leninist literary historians.2 In Taiwan, on the other hand, because Feng chose to remain on the Mainland after 1949, he was shunned.