Women in Cartoons -- Liang Baibo and the visual representation of women in Modern Sketch

Over the last few years, a growing number of scholars have been analyzing the problematic role of woman’s image in the Republican Shanghai’s flourishing visual culture of the 1920s-1930s (Kuo, 2007) and the active contribution of female artists in its process of modernization (Andrews and Shen, 1999). The analysis of relevant cartoon production offers a challenging starting point to address the problem of women's representation during the 1930s from different angles. More specifically, approaching the life and works of Liang Baibo, one of the first (and few) female cartoonists and illustrators of Republican China, allows for the exploration of “gender refractions” from two complementary perspectives. The former pertains to the representation of the female artist as included in a wider, controversial discourse about the role(s) of women in 1930s Chinese socio-cultural sphere. The latter perspective investigates Liang Baibo’s active contribution in the process of modernization of 1930s visual culture.