Vincent van Gogh in Proletarian Art: Icon of the Tortured-Artist and its Manifestations in War-Time Shanghai

The self-portraits of the tortured modern art icon, in particular, were refashioned by the artists in China and Japan to establishing the new techniques and expression that suited the ‘Eastern modern’. The language of van Gogh was translated into the Neo-Realist and Proletarian Art among the Chinese art groups when the tension between the Sino-Japanese relations gradually built up around the January 28 Incident (1932) in Shanghai. Focusing on the art of Chen Cheng-po (Tan Ting-pho, 1895-1947) who was born in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, educated in Japan and worked with the avant-garde art groups in China at the time of turbulence, this paper seeks to question how he and the fellow-artists represented their ideal of modern art through the alternative attributes to Vincent van Gogh? How did Chen Cheng-po and other Taiwanese artists who worked and lived in China situate themselves, especially after the Japanese attacked Shanghai in 1932? Based on the discoveries of Chen Cheng-po’s sketches and archive, this study aims to look into the adaptations of Vincent van Gogh’s portraits and to discuss how such bloodless interpretations later triggered the censorship in art.