Awards

Ting Yin Yung (Ding Yanyong, 1902-78) is one of the most important Chinese modernists of the 20th century. Born in Maoming, Guangdong Province, he studied at the Tokyo Fine Arts School during his youth. After graduation he returned to China to live in Shanghai and Guangzhou and Chongqing, as a professional artist, art educator and government employee. However, drastic changes took place in his life when he fled to Hong Kong alone after the Communist Party of China (CPC) took control of Mainland China in 1949. Without a job or stable income, he suffered from poverty and the death of his mother, wife and daughter. Ting’s rock bottom coincided with the Cold War when Hong Kong became the anti-communist front line of the Capitalist Bloc due to geopolitics of the region. With supports from US and UK, authority of Kuomintang (KMT), who had been relocated to Taiwan and claimed to be the orthodox heir of Chinese culture, launched ideological propaganda in Hong Kong and overseas via Chinese education, art and cultural activities and mass media, in opposition to CPC. Facing the unprecedented twists of times, how did Ting struggle to survive with his early connections in the KMT? As an artist and art educator living in postwar Hong Kong, how did he adapt to the local environment and take advantage of resource from KMT to pursuit his goals? What’s changed in his arts since he moved to Hong Kong? Following the artistic trajectory of his early years, how did he understand traditional Chinese culture in the context of Western modernism? What kind of cross-media experiment did he make to explore Chinese modern art? Hoping to challenge the binary opposition between 'art for politics' and 'art for art's sake', my thesis tries to answer the above questions to reveal the complex relationship between political powers and artists, as well as that between ideology and artistic creation in the 20th century.