Christian Folk Art in Socialist Modernity: Visual Culture of China\u27s Protestant Revival

This paper studies contemporary Chinese Christianity, in particular the tension between the Protestantism of elite church leaders and the popular Christianity of the Protestant Revival. Religious practice is allowed in China insofar as it is guided to serve the interests of the modern state, but as the gap between elite and popular faith widens, encouraged by the opposition of “modern†official religion and the “pre-modern superstition†of the Protestant Revival, this situation works against the very aims of state religious policy. As I consider how this tension might be resolved, I am guided by David Morgan\u27s theorizing of religious visual culture in turning to Christian art as a site in which questions of religious power are worked out. My focus is on Fan Pu and He Qi, who, working in the media of paper cutting and painting respectively, use folk art to answer the question of Christianity\u27s place in Chinese culture. I argue for a reading of their work that sees their stylistic choice as one that fits Protestantism into the context of folk culture, attaching to their religion the positive attributes retroactively assigned to this pre-modern past. In so doing, their art may be resolving the tension around acceptable religious practice by destabilizing norms of cultural and religious modernity