~I am grateful to the many people and institutions that have supported my work on this book. First among these are my husband Iain Johnston and our daughter Kali, who constantly encourage and inspire me, each in their own fashion. I also feel fortunate to have been first born into and then married into families full of people who have shared their love...

~Folk art is part of the modern canon of Chinese art. The National Art Museum of China, in Beijing, collects and exhibits folk art. Chinese scholars study folk art,...

~The essayist and critic Lin Yutang (1895–1976), writing in 1936, assigned great power and importance to newspapers and magazines for the shaping of ideas within modern culture:

~Among China’s diverse folk arts, the one genre that drew the most intellectual attention during the 1930s and 1940s (although not in the Yifeng folk special) was the woodcut-printed New Year picture. These were pictures of various subjects, both decorative and religious, that were especially popular, as the name implies, during the New Year holidays. They were made in many different parts of China and found well beyond their immediate sites of production, both in the countryside and in the...

~In the spring of 1935, not long after receiving Lu Xun’s letter advising them to “pay attention to . . . New Year pictures” the Modern Print Association devoted three issues of Modern Print to themes of folk custom and everyday life in southern China. The first of these was a special issue on “new...

~The Folk Picture Exhibition (minjian tuhua zhanlan), one of China’s first exhibitions of folk art, opened in Hangzhou in May 1937 and displayed more than three thousand woodcut-printed New Year pictures. It was sponsored by the Zhejiang Provincial Mass Educational Experimental School and was organized primarily by the...

~The Japanese invasion of China, so long feared, disrupted and relocated Chinese culture, uprooting both individuals and institutions. The war changed the circumstances and contexts in which Chinese artists and critics worked and in which audiences saw art; it changed the very nature of the audience. In these new and difficult circumstances, the...

~The Communist’s wartime capital of Yan’an was set in the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region, which took its name from the provinces it straddled: Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia. Roughly thirty-five thousand square miles (about the size of the state of Maine) with a population of about 1.5 million at beginning of the war, this was one of China’s most impoverished...

~As the war went on, the balance of power shifted, both within and without the Communist base areas, and the initial alliance between the Communists and Nationalists deteriorated. In 1939, the Nationalist-led government cut off subsidies to the Shaan-Gan-Ning base; two years later, after clashes between Communist and Nationalist troops in central...

~The end of the war with Japan reshuffled the Chinese cultural landscape again. With their external enemy defeated, conflict between the Communists and the Nationalists renewed. Under pressure from the United States and...

~African art, 26, 27, 102

~~Felicity Lufkin is a lecturer in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching encompasses a variety of folk and popular arts, from Chinese popular prints to American quilts.