This dissertation examines Taiwan's modern poetry and painting movements during the 1950s and 1960s, which represent a critical phase of the development of Chinese modernism during the 20th century. With the Communist takeover of China in 1949, the early promise of the May Fourth cultural movement to modernize Chinese poetry and painting was rapidly quenched. It was in postwar Taiwan---where although political intrusion in the arts did exist, it was relatively less severe---that we saw the only collective effort to further the previous endeavors to develop modernist works. Like their May Fourth predecessors, modern Chinese poets and painters in Taiwan were bound by the inevitable tensional dialogues engendered by the battles and negotiations between the intruding ideologies of the West and the resistant indigenous cultural strengths. Their appropriation of Western aesthetic strategies, however, must be considered a function of their anxiety and attempts to come to terms with the increasingly uncertain future of Chinese culture. As they were the first to look critically at the Western models which had previously been privileged at the expense of losing Chinese tradition, Taiwan's modern poets and painters were concerned about how to achieve a modernism that was Chinese, and their search for modern elements within the Chinese tradition had a profound impact on later generations in both Taiwan and Mainland China. The first chapter of this dissertation traces the development of the modern poetry movement and reviews proposals from its leading poets, including Ji Xian, Qin Zihao, Yu Guanzhong, Luo Fu, and Ye Weilian. Chapter two provides a reading of modernist Chinese poetry based on the specific social-historical and cultural condition in postwar Taiwan and explores the poets' inherent motives towards adopting a strategic ambiguity. Chapter three examines the paintings by two leading artists Liu Guosong and Xiao Qin, which provide prime examples of the negotiations that occurred between the East and the West, the traditional and the modern. Chapter four looks at the works of the modern poet-painter Chu Ge, who has reinvented the historically important literati tradition of using the interrelations between poetry, painting, and calligraphy.
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