"Intoxicating Shanghai": Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai's Jazz Age

Dr Paul Bevan (Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, University of Oxford)

In Intoxicating Shanghai Paul Bevan explores the work of a number of Chinese modernist figures in the fields of literature and the visual arts, with an emphasis on the literary group the New-sensationists and its equivalents in the Shanghai art world, examining the work of these figures as it appeared in the medium of the pictorial magazine. It undertakes a detailed examination into the significance of the pictorial magazine as a medium for the dissemination of literature and art during the 1930s. The research locates the work of these artists and writers within the context of wider literary and art production in Shanghai, focusing on art, literature, cinema, music, and dancehall culture, with a specific emphasis on 1934 – The Year of the Magazine.

Biography
Paul Bevan is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum. Paul has taught modern Chinese literature, history, and visual culture at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the School of Oriental and African Studies. His primary research interests concern the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Period (1912-1949), particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. His research on artists George Grosz, Frans Masereel, and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom worked for Vanity Fair, has resulted in extensive research on both Chinese and Western pictorial magazines. Paul’s first book A Modern Miscellany - Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 , Leiden: Brill, 2015, was hailed as “a major contribution to modern Chinese studies”; his second offering: “Intoxicating Shanghai”: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age was published by Brill in April 2020.

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Organiser: China & Inner Asia Section, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, SOAS

Contact email: xl1@soas.ac.uk