The Sensual Surplus of History: Cao Hanmei’s Pictorial Adaptations of Jin Ping Mei in Wartime China

Abstract

This paper explores the life and works of Cao Hanmei as a “misfit” in Chinese cartoon history, who, against the dominant understanding of wartime cartoons as a form of resistance and enlightenment, chose to visualize Jin Ping Mei in occupied Shanghai. I examine the stylistic transformations throughout Cao’s two-decade-long endeavors visualizing the novel and unravel the intricate dynamics between his works and his times. I argue that Cao’s pictorial adaptations of Jin Ping Mei engage with history not only by projecting contemporary struggles, chaos, and trauma onto a well-known ancient story, as other critics have suggested, but more importantly by constructing a “sensual surplus” that defies appropriation by the grand narratives of history. This sensual surplus manifests in his affective combination of the genre hybridity and stylistic anachronism of manhua, the critical re-envisioning of female characters, and the mobilization of feminine details and condensed surfaces. Through Cao’s case, this paper aims to enrich the understanding of the complexity of Shanghai’s visual culture in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the continuities and discontinuities after the Japanese occupation, and to demonstrate the porous boundary between cartoons and other forms of visual arts that approach history through images.