Global Bauhaus: China Modern. The First Half of the 20th Century
In the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai became a real hotspot for the reform movement of Chinese artists and architects. Many of these first generation intellectuals were educated in Europe and the USA. Some of them returned from their education in the west with radical ideas and introduced new strategies for the production of art and architecture to China. The Modern Movement and the Bauhaus in Germany as well as the art-movements in Paris were some of the strongest forces in the transformation from the traditional to the avant-garde. In the 1930s and 1940s, some of the young Chinese architects studied under Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, both well known as directors of the Bauhaus, and in most cases returned to Shanghai, at least initially. After the communist takeover in 1949 the contributions and creations of these architects were considered “wrong” and many of the protagonists had to emigrate to Hong Kong, Taiwan or back to Europe or the USA. My lecture will introduce some of these architects and their work.