Cai Jingxuan

MA Asian Art Histories

2025

Jingxuan previously worked in the financial sector. A long-standing passion for art and cultural history led her to pursue formal studies in LASALLE College of the Arts’ MA Asian Art Histories programme.

Her research focuses on Chinese art during and after the Cultural Revolution, with particular attention to how artists navigated political, social and cultural transformations in this period. Her thesis examines the Scar Art movement as a visual response to historical trauma and a catalyst for the revival of humanism in post-Mao China.

Looking ahead, she aspires to contribute to curatorial projects and research that deepen public understanding of modern and contemporary Chinese art, and to explore its dialogues with broader Asian and global art histories.

caijingxuan2015@163.com

Thesis abstract

Fragments of memory: Chinese Scar Art and the revival of humanism

This thesis examines Chinese Scar Art (1978–1985) as a critical visual response to the Cultural Revolution, focusing on its dual function in reconstructing historical memory and reviving humanism in post-Mao China.

It situates Scar Art within a shifting political and artistic context after 1976, tracing how the lessening of state controls enabled a brief but profound period of creative reflection before official discourse moved towards intentional forgetting. While some works were welcomed and others were censored, this tension reveals the contested nature of memory in contemporary China.

Drawing on the theories of cultural memory and cultural trauma, this thesis analyses how artists transformed personal and collective experiences of political violence into symbolic and enduring images. Through close iconological analysis of portrait-based artworks by Gao Xiaohua, He Duoling, Luo Zhongli and other artists of the same period, the study identifies visual strategies that resist propagandist aesthetics and re-centre the human subject.

Scar Art’s ethical orientation is rooted in empathy, dignity and the acknowledgement of suffering, constituting an enduring legacy that influenced later artistic movements, even as direct representations of the Cultural Revolution gradually receded from public review. By integrating visual analysis with historical and theoretical perspectives together, this research positions Scar Art as a significant site of cultural negotiation, humanism revival and memory collection in modern Chinese art history.