119 Ding Cong (b. 1916)
Images of Today
1944
gouache on paper
149.3 x 28.6 cm
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas (gift of William P. Fenn)
Ding Cong's biting satire of a sick society and its corrupt government is typical of the disillusionment of many of China's artists and intellectuals during the 1940s. The painting, which was at one time mounted as a handscroll, reads from right to left in the traditional manner. It opens at the right with a student and hapless professor whose studies are clearly useless in wartime, and proceeds to a group of evil war profiteers. Next, a blindfolded artist in dapper Parisien garb proudly displays his painting of a mangy dog. Censors scrutinize the texts of a dishevelled writer, a painted woman holds her nose at the stench of a crippled soldier, her wealthy patron refuses to aid a refugee, and officials argue over bureaucratic details while food and cloth rations rot and are nibbled by rats. Finally, a journalist walks stiffly with an official notice stuffed in his mouth. Ding Cong's interest in the work of the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who visited Shanghai in 1930, is evident in many of his paintings. The son of the pioneering cartoonist Ding Su, he signed this work Xiao Ding, or Little Ding.