'Stirred Feelings in 1933': Touch, Body, and Sensation in Guo Jianying’s (1907-1979) Image-Text Practices

Manhua (a visual genre approximately translated as cartoons) is typically characterized as a form of cursive drawing for sociopolitical commentary and satire. In this paper, I attempt to delineate how the modern manhua, which flourished in 1930s Shanghai, became the artistic “devise of storing affects,” addressing perceptions and bodily sensations that encapsulate the tempos of the era within their historical, cross-cultural, and intermedial contexts. Through examining the drawings of Guo Jianying (artist/magazine editor/banker/diplomat), his image-text practices, and other works by the school of neo-sensationalists (xin guanjue pai), this paper discusses how kissing, intimate touch, and either fleeting or electrifying sensations were visually rendered through lines in print media (popular magazines and newspapers), and how the modern body was delineated as a set of sensory registers of material reality or disfigured as mechanics or animals. In view of the Japanese and Chinese neo-sensationalist agenda of approaching modern materialistic life through the sensory faculties of the subject and the mediations of language and art, the paper delves into the intertwined relationships between visuality and tactility, touch and bodily feeling, as well as affect and materiality. Engaging in experiential and affective aspects of the artistic medium, this paper will explore the previously unexamined sensuous realm and its artistic representation in Republican China, offering a historically situated investigation of sense and sensory experience within the dynamic formation of visual modernity.