ABSTRACT
While many studies of Chinese modernism are centered on Shanghai, this chapter shifts focus to the city of Paris from the 1920s to 1940s in the Chinese cultural imaginary to discuss the work of four figures: the artist Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, and the writer Xu Xu. By viewing poetry and prose alongside visual art, three forms of artistic expression that are usually treated as distinct practices, the study shows how the site of Paris is crucial to the development of the image of the modern Chinese artist during this dynamic period of intercultural exchange.
The concept of transposition, which originates in musical theory, commonly refers to transposing music from one key or clef to another, or to transposing a song originally composed for one instrument to another. Rather than treating transposition as a “neutral and extensive term” that broadly defines any transformation a text undergoes, I show how transposition reconciles two seemingly conflicting objectives as illustrated in the experimental and often-marginalized work of Chang Yu, Li Jinfa, Fu Lei, and Xu Xu and the artistic personae they cultivated abroad. For example, in Li Jinfa’s summoning of the muse and Xu Xu’s setting of the bohemian art studio, creative nonconformity is depicted as desirable and freeing, at the same time that their ideal reader must still be able to identify iconic markers of Chinese literati culture. The process of transposition is therefore key to recognizing the various kinds of expectations placed on the Chinese artist in the context of the early twentieth century, and to understanding why Paris played such an influential role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art.
