Conceptualizing ‘Chinese surrealism’ through translation: a case study of the China independent fine arts association’s cultural identity and its translation of surrealism in 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the questions of cultural identity in the surrealist related translation practices led by the China Independent Fine Arts Association (CIFAA) around 1935. It was the first time in the history of modern Chinese art that a group of artists translated ‘surrealism’ together and that an art association independently translated a modern Western art genre into China. Accordingly, the CIFAA’s work evidences that translation has played a vital role in the modernization of Chinese art. In this translation movement, the young artists-as-translators expressed their pioneering art concepts through translation, expressing their desire to be both ‘reformers’ of Chinese art and ‘mediators’ of Chinese and Western modern art. As reformers, the artists attempted to innovate Chinese art by introducing surrealism, while as mediators they sought to reconcile the contradiction between their desire for innovation and the mainstream left-wing Chinese expectations of realistic art by adding ‘realism’ to the Chinese semantic meaning of ‘surrealism’. This paper thus argues that the CIFAA’s translation of surrealism reflects a complex relationship between translation and the artists’ cultural identity, which ultimately conceptualizing an unprecedented ‘Chinese surrealism’ that is very different from the original Western surrealism.