Political Protest

In Japan, emerging in 1952 from strict U.S. censorship, members of the Japanese Students Union (Zen Gakuren) opposed, in word and image, the Joint Security Pact of 1960 and the continued U.S. occupation and re-militarization of their country. The first and foremost to condemn the destruction of the country by U.S. bombers was the painter Matsumoto Shunsuke. Much protest art has been created by women, dealing with more than "women's issues": disarmament, nuclear power, and U.S.. bases. In Korea the underground woodblock prints emanating from the Minjung movement, composed of students, workers, and Christian churches, with their simultaneous reference to Western and Chinese traditions, especially the work of Käthe Kollwitz, protested the killings under the dictatorship and the rigging of elections and called for reunification of the peninsula. The artist Hong Song Dam used more traditional religious material.

In China a long tradition in the classical period of Chinese art, of subtle, personal forms of protest in calligraphy and painting, turned to open opposition against the nationalist armies and the Japanese occupation in the 1920s and 1930s. The stark and violent effects of German Expressionist and Russian vanguard graphics were turned to account, while Mao Zedong insisted, at the famous Yan'an forum of 1942, that all art be positive, supportive of the Chinese Revolution, and unambiguous, and so it was from 1949. There were two subsequent periods of protest: post-Mao, and post-Tiananmen. In the post-Mao era many artists exiled themselves to New York, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in order to express their opposition freely. Zhang Hongtu's 1989 painting depicting Mao Zedong as Jesus along with his disciples, a travesty of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper, intended to mock the cult of Mao and Maoism itself, was completed and exhibited in exile. Since the Tiananmen protest and consequent repression, the openings for protest within China have wavered, with a modest policy of restrained censorship.

India inherited the lively British tradition of cartooning, promulgated in the 1920s and 1930s along with the Ghandian uprising. The cartoon was another form of English lingua franca that served to cut across the boundaries of the subcontinent, where a dozen or more different languages are spoken. Much protest, such as the Kaligat painting that caricatured the British, emanated from Bengal and denounced the ethnic and religious divisions. The high regard placed by leftist and Marxist collectives on the value of propaganda (by word and image), in tune with Gandhi's insistence of nonviolence and his genius for self-presentation (as in the protest marches), ensured that visual protest in newspapers, posters, and on walls all over the country played a critical role in mobilizing masses against British rule. Since Indian independence, the cartoon has functioned much as it has in the West.

There has been a degree of international graphic solidarity with Palestine in its struggle with Israel. Resistance in the Occupied Territories is of course limited; even the use of the colors of the Palestinian flag has been banned. The work of the Palestinian poster artist Jihad Mansour (Marc Rudin) stands out, and among the many dissenting Israeli voices perhaps the most forceful has been that of the veteran Russian-Jewish Israeli David Tartakover.