Theme: Picturing Displacement: Yip Yan-chuen 葉因泉 (1903–1969) and the Afterlife of the Liumin tu 流民圖 Tradition

This talk examines Kangzhan liumin tu 抗戰流民圖 (Refugees of the Sino-Japanese War, 1942–43), an album of over one hundred leaves created by the painter and cartoonist Yip Yan-chuen 葉因泉 (Ye Yinquan, 1903–1969) during his flight from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong across Guangdong and Guangxi. The series depicts the impact of war and famine on people whom Yip encountered along the way—peasants, displaced families, and repatriated migrants—but especially on children, the “little refugees” (xiao liumin 小流民) whose frail, emaciated bodies constantly reappear throughout the album. Combining a manhua-inspired graphic idiom with the long-standing Liumin tu tradition—paintings of disaster refugees—Yip departed from wartime propaganda and heroic imagery to focus instead on the suffering of civilians caught between war, famine, and forced migration. This presentation draws not only on the Kangzhan liumin tu album now held at the Sun Yat-sen Library in Guangzhou, but also on recently rediscovered sketches and related landscape paintings produced during Yip’s ordeal as a refugee, now in the collections of the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Together, these works reveal how the artist reworked a long-established repertoire of scenes and motifs devised to convey the gravity of the situation, transforming them through what he experienced, saw, and heard throughout his flight to create figures and narratives that give visual form to his account of the disaster.

Speaker: Dr. Alice Bianchi

Dr. Alice Bianchi is an Associate Professor of Art History at Université Paris Cité, France, and a visiting scholar at Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, Hong Kong. She holds degrees in Chinese Studies (B.A., M.A.) and a Ph.D. from Inalco (Paris), as well as an M.A. in History and Art History from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on genre painting and on visual representations of disaster and relief in late imperial China and the Republican period. Her interests also extend to Japanese art historical treatises and Sino-Japanese artistic exchange in the early modern era. She collaborates regularly with Parisian museums of Asian art, including the Musée national des arts asiatiques–Guimet and the Musée Cernuschi. She has published in international journals such as Arts Asiatiques and the Journal of Oriental Studies, and edited The Social Lives of Chinese Objects (with Lyce Jankowski, Brill, 2022). Her forthcoming book, Images of Beggars and Refugees: The History of a Neglected Pictorial Genre in Late Imperial China, will be published by the Collège de France. Her current book project explores the iconography of war and displacement through Yip Yan-chuen’s 葉因泉 Kangzhan liumin tu 抗戰流民圖 (1942–43).

Date: 26 November 2025 (Wednesday)

Time:  4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.︱ Tea Reception

            4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.︱ Talk

Venue: Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, CUHK

Language: English

Registration: Click here

Enquiry: 3943 0406/ This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.