Mending Memory by Hand and Brush: Socialist China's Colored Photographs

Abstract

A remarkable quality of Chinese vernacular photographs during the socialist period is their efflorescence of color. From studio colorists well-versed in the art of potassium cyanide to private brushstrokes in thick marker, the prevalence of photo-coloring (zhuose) evidenced a marked degree of dissatisfaction with an unmanipulated print. Bracketed by Chinese photo studios’ national institutionalization in 1956 and the promulgation of commercial color rolls in the 1980s, this discussion builds from extant scholarship on Chinese vernacular photographs of the 1960s and 1970s. By analyzing colored Tiananmen photographs of the Cultural Revolution, a posthumous biography of photo-colorist Zhou Qi, and various examples from the volume Anonymous Photos (Yiming zhao), this article demonstrates that photo-coloring was a crucial aesthetic agent in negotiations between officially mandated postures and bold ways of inscribing individual experiences as chromatic repositories of memory and meaning, marking a site where mass visuality and more specific imaginations of the self collided into color.

Introduction

What color was the Chinese Revolution? From blood testimonials to “yellow music” to “blue ants” and Jiang Qing's protracted search for cinematic green, modern Chinese visuality boasts no shortage of discourse around the ideological alliances of a specific color. Beyond the explicit political weight of a color-idea like red, socialist Chinese color(s) also subsisted as a media technology, a grassroots practice, a commercial industry, and personal indices of one's intense affective landscapes. Over the years, various scholars have demonstrated the diversity of cultural production during China's socialist period (1949–78) with special attention to certain mediums: cinema, propaganda posters, and music. From a cultural-aesthetic perspective, these forms proved highly variable, depending on local aesthetic traditions, individual artists’ skill, and representational demands of specific campaigns. For example, while official mandates such as the “three prominences” (santuchu) alongside its complementary offshoots inaugurated a template for politically sanctioned treatments of visual form, vernacular practices incorporated familiar aesthetic languages derived from folk tradition.¹ From a media-technological perspective, color occupied the heart of Chinese socialism's teleological mission. Protracted debates on cinematic technology in the 1950s and 1960s directly reflected shifting ideological allegiances on the political world stage; and later, when the Baoding Film Stock Factory finally mastered the domestic production of colored film, color emblematized the consummation of a new national form.² In order to unify diverse audiences as active receivers to political spectatorship, color was the language of grassroots industriousness and visual cohesion. In broader terms, color was the privileged vehicle for engineering an aesthetically distinct socialist state.³

Indeed, a remarkable quality of Chinese vernacular photographs during the socialist period is their efflorescence of color. From studio colorists well-versed in the art of potassium cyanide to more private works showcasing a mix-medial sensibility, coloring evidenced creativity, industriousness, and vivid imagination (figs. 1 and 2). Sometimes, color was applied immediately followed by the taking of that photograph, but in other cases, months or even years passed before a memory of some meaningful experience was encoded to color. Whether approached as works of art or evidentiary historical records, the discipline of photography has traditionally privileged content, form, and indexical legibility. Yet the application of an additional material substrate atop pure photographic inscriptions suggest that the untouched monochromes key to canonical theories of photo-indexicality are ultimately incomplete repositories for memory and meaning. As Deepali Dewan illustrates in the case of Indian photography, the coterminous presence of paint has historically relegated these artifacts to a status of the “unusual or remarkable not because of the circumstances of their historical production but because of the centrality of photographic indexicality today and the hegemonic status of the black-and-white photographic image in histories of photography.”⁴ The nineteenth-century arrival of painted photography in China imbricates similar transcultural and transnational discourses. As this practice extends into the socialist period, however, allegiances to traditional painterly aesthetics are reassembled as new vernacular codes, arbitrated both by streamlined studio structures and customers’ own imaginations of the self. The term zhuose (coloring), newly interlocked as the last step of a studio photo's production chain, operates as a clear distinction in both genre and technique between the vernacular Chinese practices discussed in this article and earlier appearances of the painted photograph. As such, this discussion addresses color in the socialist period via photography from the perspective of practice, use, and sociality, that is, the people who colored, how they colored, the industry they constructed, and the subsequent worlds they created.

The Socialist Color Industry

Photographic coloring arrived in China following the first Opium War (1839–42), with records of photographer-colorists as early as 1866. European patrons, predominantly from France and England, sent their daguerreotypes to East Asia for color-treating, allowing studio practices to flourish in fin de siècle port cities.⁵ Pre-revolutionary Chinese palettes were limited only by the availability of dyes (locally produced and imported from Europe and Japan), while the content of colored photographs were commonly commissioned ethnographic records or aristocratic portrait sittings. Stylistically, colors loosely derived an aesthetic vocabulary from Chinese painting's long heritage.⁶ The 1920s saw a reorientation of photographic coloring from artifacts of transnational outsourcing to compounding discourses on the contingencies of Chinese modernity. In addition to photography, Shanghai emerged as the center of modern Chinese media culture as a whole, and while it gave rise to “explorations [of] verbal and visual modernist aesthetic practices” that probed at questions of modernity, history, and national essence, the city was also home to an increasing number of studios for whom photography and color operated under less monumental considerations.⁷ Lu Ziwen, a photographer-colorist under Shanghai's Pinfang Photo Studio (Pinfang zhaoxiang guan), popularized coloring photographs of Peking Opera performers in the mid-1920s, and a bourgeoning demand for an individual's own portraits followed.⁸ With the development of dry film alongside increasing foreign imports, the price of photography was drastically reduced and “Shanghai studios sprang up like mushrooms after rain.”⁹ Photographs and coloring were sold either together or separately, facilitating a distinct stranger sociality. One account recalls the charm of this infrastructure: “A stranger-photographer takes a photograph, another stranger-colorist supplies the customer with soft and beautiful colors according to imagination and personal taste. This is precisely the ‘stranger effect’ of the photo production process—to endow a sense of joy to the mundane trifles of everyday life. Those elusive colorists, especially, were like magicians in the eyes of children.”¹⁰ Although the intellectual ambition of these Shanghai colorists did not necessarily share in reformist dialogues concerning modernist aesthetics, colorists nonetheless became rarefied, elusive artists in the eyes of the urban quotidian. The sense of astonishment engendered by vernacular media technologies provided the masses with illusion and enchantment, both literally and metaphorically. While it may seem like these Republican-era colored plates offer a less trenchant political commentary on Chinese modernity under strictly representational terms, the “stranger effect” illustrated above nonetheless evoked analogous fragmentary experiences, not so much by the epistemic rupture promulgated alongside novel media technologies but rather in the intersubjectivity given by multiple layers of commodity exchange. Such contracts underlay the production process, negotiating between the depersonalized, urbanistic nature of anonymous transactions and fashioning highly personalized dispositions, “according to [the colorist's] imagination.” When transposed onto an ecology of coloring, the notion of “stranger sociality” caters instead to enriching the banality of everyday life. For studio photographs, then, while mise-en-scènes, framing, and posing would later transform along ideological lines, a desire to curate the aesthetic involvements on the part of customer and colorist remained the essence of photo-coloring well into the socialist era.

During this period then—and especially compared to other visual forms such as film or propaganda posters—the vernacular photo practices implicating color were less confined to color's ideological strictures, in large part due to the fact that studio photos were directed to more private means of spectatorship.¹¹ While a large number of colorists in decades prior were essentially freelance artists (they accepted commissions from multiple sources, priced based on quality and were paid by individual piece), the color industry was fundamentally transformed in 1956.¹² In tandem with Communist Economic Planning policies enacted earlier that year, the nation's entire photographic industry de-privatized in kind: by the late 1950s, “all photographic activity took place under the jurisdiction of the Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua tongxun she).”¹³ Colorists were no longer able to independently advertise idiosyncratic aesthetic or unique imaginations. All private colorists were forcibly assigned to a studio and relegated to performing ostensibly streamline coloring techniques under the studio's oversight. As a result, many colorists from the once innovative centers like Shanghai or Guangzhou migrated north.¹⁴ The concentration of newly established studios in Beijing was a preparatory ideological realignment of socialist China's political and aesthetic legacies. In a discussion of utopian photographs, Jie Li explains that “by 1958, there were over ten thousand photo studios with over forty thousand photographers serving two hundred million customers every year.”¹⁵ However, the paucity of rural colorists complicates socialist photography's reformed project. While influential periodicals such as Mass Photography (Dazhong sheying) exhorted photographers to denounce the “bourgeoisie formalism” of their studio mise-en-scènes, a vast majority of colored photographs remained derivatives from studio sittings.¹⁶ Nonetheless, the bourgeoning of urban studios in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by another marked shift—more elements of a photograph came to be colored (figs. 3 and 4).

Within the newly consolidated industry, technicians typically worked with a selection of twelve colors in either watercolor or oils, inaugurated standard procedures for mixing and application, and developed a series of representational codes all their own. One colorist explains:

Although the comparatively more limited array of base colors used by studio photographers indicates a break from nineteenth-century painterly aesthetics, coloring standards did slightly vary from region to region or studio to studio. Furthermore, when compared to other visual institutions of this period such as the highly saturated propaganda posters alluding to New Year's prints, photographic color had no clear antecedent.¹⁸ As these enterprises matured, a photo studio's strength was not only measured by its technicians and equipment but also by how many colorists were employed.¹⁹ In addition to the studio photographs’ compact size, they were also relatively affordable—about two yuan for a two-inch print. Claire Roberts further explains that they “could be printed in multiples, sent in the post, or placed under the glass cover of a work desk, or together with other family photographs in a large handing frame.”²⁰ Further testifying to the mature industrial structure of socialist studios is the division of labor that optimized an ideal product. Here, it is especially productive to think through Chinese photography's conceptual deterritorializations through the process of retouching, a crucial intravenous element in the Chinese photographic imagination. Retouching is not synonymous with the manipulation of indexical truth encoded to representational politics. Tracing photography's various appellations alongside shifting frameworks of visual truth, Yi Gu explains that in earlier traditions, too, “retouching did not supplement or correct deficits in the image but, rather, adjusted photographs to meet the visual conventions for painting.”²¹ From another angle, Hung Wu's analysis of photo technician Chen Shilin illustrates how despite regularly scheduled photo sessions, almost all of Mao's iconic photographs were pieced together from an existing photo stock, some dating as far back as half a century. Even photographs intended to stand as apotheoses of the socialist ideal were in fact fashioned through successive acts of retouching.²² For the studios of this period, the discipline was organized as a Fordist process—the photographer, the retoucher, the developer, and the colorist operated in succession (figs. 5 and 6):²³ “Comrades in the retouching group use very fine brushes to correct the negative. Not only can they erase some facial imperfections, but they can also modify based on a customer's suggestions—making thinner people appear fuller-bodied, and older people, more youthful. Comrades in the coloring group would then apply colors over the retouched prints, allowing the photographed subject to appear closer to a real person.”²⁴

After modulating the negative, photographs are developed. Colorists then used iron and potassium cyanide to fade out black portions of the metallic plate, washing them to white. Sodium sulfide is then applied to adjust the photo into a tan color, after which color is painted on top.²⁵ The procedure for painting, washing, and cleaning in color is meticulously detailed depending on composition, genre as well as the chemically reactive nature of the pigment itself. For example, oil coloring is deemed as unsuitable for use on glossy paper, as it is prone to flattening the sense of depth of the original image.²⁶ Moreover, coloring glossy prints amplifies the high-key studio lighting; this is most desirable for women, as it evokes a sense of elegance and liveliness. In terms of technique and representation, portrait photography and landscape photography emerged as two major classificatory categories, due in large part to the differences between natural and artificial lighting.²⁷ Retouching and coloring constituted subsequent processes of chemical and representational modification: a term for manipulating the print is designated by the verb xi: to wash away; to wash over; to redress (a wound). When a monochrome negative's black metallic bits are dyed to white, the white then stained to tan, the tan thus readied to receive color, the operative word remains xi. Done once, the act of washing aligns with acts of purification, well constructed to allegorize revolutionary ideals into figural representations fit for public visibility, a tendency that defines idealized scenes of the Great Leap Forward, for example.²⁸ When the process becomes recursive, however, its register shifts from one of ablution to that of layering, searching, inscribing: indexical marks become undone, tainted, stained, worked and washed over with a litany of chemical mixtures. While one strand of official photographs sought to program the physical body as well as the body of photography as sites of Communist purification, the addition of a fluid supplement—color—functioned to “pollute” symbolic sites of continuous revolution. As complement to this, photographic coloring specifically is designated by the verb zhuo, describing material applications onto readied surfaces such as glue to paper, clothing to a body, or makeup to the face.

Is color an obfuscating technology? Is the colored photograph, then, an amnesic object? The freedom of choice in this kind of subjective design is not explicitly politically reflexive, but coloring practices enabled a semipublic forum for successive curations of self. Chemical modifications prepare for micro-articulations no matter how historically engaged or disengaged, simultaneously redressing historical wounds.²⁹ Discursively, the photographic surface is not so much metonymical to warehouses of hidden meaning but is instead governed the elasticity of visible layering. Whether by de-historicizing Mao's official photographs in pulling from a “second archive” or by applying gentle colors over chemically altered negatives, these monochromes were neutral surfaces that anticipated the insertion of more heightened and customized layers of affective expression. In an article titled “The Last Colorist: Using Hand and Brush to Mend ‘Memory,’” the colorist Zhuang Ganbin recalls how coloring black-and-white photographs was like “realizing the dreams” (yuanmeng) of his customers: an ordinary man can imagine himself a solider, an impoverished young woman can fashion her portrait with bright red lips.³⁰ Similar to the operation of retouching but with a heightened visual and affective thrust, color was a key complement to photographic representation. In catering to personalized dispositions, it paved the way for the mass print to evolve into an individuated socialist-industrial type, the significance of that photo's complexions contingent upon personal memories, values, and relationships with people or place.

Color-Writing on the Sites of Revolution

Anthropologist Michael Taussig approaches the difficulty of approaching color by noting its ahistorical tendencies: “Color . . . is part of the world of shimmering, changing moods, not the world of form, to which, in fact, it is antagonistic.”³¹ Beyond a technocratic framework that sees film and media technologies discipline color into chemical formulae, Taussig's discussion proposes that entire chromatic spheres are key to an individual's psychological landscape and are thus endowed with latent expository potential. Indicated by Primo Levi's quote, the idea of color-as-presence is additionally calibrated by scalar, temporal, and affective extremes. “Auschwitz” and “travels home” couples the universally symbolically charged site with associatory places only significant through subjective identification. Against socialist China's landscapes of continuous revolution, where the sensuous material worlds of everyday life collide against violent political movements that render remembrance ineffable, this section addresses chromatic “presencing” through two accounts that are distinct in time and scale—Tiananmen photographs at the height of the Cultural Revolution and a posthumous biography of a social outcast and colorist named Zhou Qi.

While family portraits were the most popular genre for color application, Tiananmen photography also emerged as chromatically distinguishable. By 1960, the Tiananmen pilgrimage came to be explicitly addressed as “going to Tiananmen to see Chairman Mao.” The symbolic value of documenting presence at the “eternal and unchanging emblem of the revolution” was met by a demand for on-site souvenir photographs.³² Yomi Braester's discussion incisively identifies an aspect of performativity because the symbolic and ideological significance of this pilgrimage exerted a considerable degree of influence on the photographic act: photographed subjects projected dialogues, prepared poses, and anticipated a “future viewer” of their image. Extending this account beyond a temporal relationship to the camera pre- and post-shutter click, colored Tiananmen photos suggest that the ideological nature of this pilgrimage compelled “presence” to engage additional amplificatory avenues. While many standards regarding the use and meaning of color derived from the interplay between commercial practice and the people's own aesthetic imagination, there were instances where color needed to be far more constrained. A professional colorist positions Tiananmen photographs as the exemplar of hegemonic color consequential to the “realism” of photographic representation:

Despite the chromatic uniformity inherent in this particular genre, characteristics such as the quality of color application and image's resulting hue, saturation, and vibrance nonetheless lend Tiananmen photos a marked degree of intensification and personalization similar to aforementioned studio portraits. Such chromatic memory traces collapse the visual articulations of participation in collective history onto idiosyncratic acts of personal exposition.

Figure 7 is a souvenir photo taken by an unidentified studio photographer of an unknown individual. Images like this abounded, reaching its numerical and chromatic zenith during the Cultural Revolution. Not only were photo services at Tiananmen proper widely available, illusionistic mise-en-scènes in faraway studios also sprang up.³⁴ Conspicuously dated to December 1966, this photo was taken at the peak of the Cultural Revolution's most violent phase.³⁵ Compared to contemporaneous documents, this particular photo stands out for its relatively low-fidelity technique, given that sophisticated acrylic and watercolor technologies were widely accessible by that time. Capriciously colored over with red and yellow, emphasis is placed on the walls and roof of heavenly peace's gate, the banner written “The Great Proletarian Revolution” alongside the photograph's date and the man's own jacket, cleverly mixed to revolutionary green. Yet while the subject's figure and context are colored over, Mao's portrait is conspicuously left untouched. It is highly probable that this photo was colored by the hands of its owner, since only two colors are used, with some highlighted elements even lying outside the diegetic frame. Looking at these strokes, it is difficult to ignore the coincident tendencies of corporeal and figural motility. How might the blotchy and violent movements of pen over surface register against the coalition of itinerant Red Guards searching for class enemies in patterns that superseded the frames of bureaucratic control? Was an individual's revolutionary spirit colliding with the political events propelling it into motion, running parallel to or free from them? That there is no systematic answer testifies to color's semiotic instability. While a large concentration of colored photos at Tiananmen are aesthetically extreme, a substantial number retain the gentler tones of studio portraiture (see fig. 8). In both cases, for the person for whom yellow highlighter operated akin to a media technology on equal terms with the photographic apparatus itself, the excess energies dispelled in collisions between social and monumental scales transformed an ordinary souvenir item into an extraordinary political record.

The height of socialist chromatic expression was reached during the Cultural Revolution, a space in which interpretations of the past, interpellations of the present, and imaginations of the future were repeatedly evoked in color, literally and metaphorically: “Poignant music, moving speeches, graceful poems and prose, vital brushstrokes and ideas—all competed for the people's attention in imaging a utopia.”³⁶ Focusing on the latter half of this period in a discussion on cinema, Laikwan Pang argues that color single-handedly ushered the Cultural Revolution into a stage of aesthetic perfectionism. The obsession with curating color, in turn, dislodged even specific colors from their immanent meanings and the ideological content intended to pair with chromatic expressions was also disbanded.³⁷ Accordingly, studio and souvenir photos, too, were involved in a protracted project of wrestling the chromatic domain away from explicit or simplistic political expropriations. The subtle transformations that colored photographs performed redirects us to a condition where technical procedures, aesthetic codes, and layers of historical meaning are defined by the gradual dislodging of vernacular practices from the various political and bureaucratic institutions within which they were intimately engaged. Grappling with the complicated significatory role of color, Margaret Hillenbrand asks, “What, exactly, is the relationship between ‘excess’ and ‘meaning’ in the zone of the chromatic? Where, if anywhere, does one begin and the other end?”³⁸ Tiananmen photographs propose that excess and meaning collapse within frameworks of extreme symbolic anticipation. As a result, delimiting the temporality of photography to indexical moments, whether in the studio or on-site, is only half the story in assessing the representational and procedural domains of socialist photography.

A 2011 essay in the prominent journal Chinese Photography (Zhongguo sheying) titled “Death of a Color Master” unearths a deeply personal account of yuanmeng's spectral side. Coloring, so central to former studio colorist Zhou Qi's life, was the element that thrust his death into public visibility. Written by his nephew, likewise a photographer, the article details the ways in which Zhou used a language of colors to contend with a declining quality of life. Born in 1957, Zhou had always wanted to be an artist: “His biggest dream was to attend the [Zhejiang] Academy of Fine Arts; others at his age didn't understand this dream, but they nonetheless admired it.”³⁹ Stricken with polio at a young age, however, Zhou was unable to pass the physical examination component of university admission; although he continued to bring in over a hundred paintings to the school, their ruling held firm. As a consolation to having been shut out from a seat at the table of mainstream art and cultural production, Zhou was recommended to a job as a colorist at Red Spark photo studio (Xinghuo zhaoxiang guan), where he would only spend three short years as a result of “disobedient behavior.” Although Zhou continued to look for ways back into the profession, life took a despairing turn.

In November 1996, when his wife had taken their children out to dine, Zhou hung himself in the bathroom. Resonating in historical terms, life for Zhou simply worsened during the post-socialist era of ostensible material and technological abundance. Unable to access the prospects of a “life of art” through legitimate aesthetic education, Zhou redirected his hopes toward a life in color. Due to the fact that studio coloring was still often regarded as a comparatively inferior form of artistic or painterly expression, the comparatively inferior space of photo-coloring was the site where his artistic dreams remained: these colored photographs span an impressive twenty-year range. Sometime during the latter half of his life, Zhou revisited a 1956 matchmaker's photograph taken of his father at Lushan Pavilion (see fig. 9). He returned to Lushan multiple times to “embody a presence” and transmit them into color as a gift to his father. Where the semantic labor of communication proved futile during Zhou's slow march to misfortune, translating experiences through color stood in for linguistic exchange. In his regard, Zhou's preference for greens, yellows, and browns filled both a lexical and an affective gap enabled by studio photography's social practices, especially as it concerned the domain of family portraits (see figs. 10 and 11). Strewn together, the colored photos consolidate into a repository from which Zhou could articulate the sum total of a “missed” life. As his nephew recalls, at that time, “having a few of these colored photographs was like possessing the entire world.”⁴¹

Luminescent hues demarcate a space where one's thoughts, ambitions, and their attendant formal expressions sought respite from the nation's grander histories of revolution and reform. Here, while a textual record might relegate Zhou to a typical allegorical figure for obsolescence, his colored photographs indicate that hand, body, and mind were constantly at work to color in the contours of an increasingly unlikely future. In this extreme case, both narratively and chromatically, the radioactive images reflected a heightened aesthetics of improbability marked by saturation and volatility. Ushered into visibility almost two decades later, these images suggest a chromatically mended iteration of “people's liberation” (renmin jiefang): in this space, the lonely, atrophied individual continually transgresses historical frames and their institutional boundaries.

Conclusion

In the last few years, a dizzying number of discarded souvenir photographs have emerged in collectors’ repositories, newly curated volumes, newspapers, flea markets, internet forums, and the like. Much of the aesthetic materials discussed in this article have also recently been centralized in the photobook Anonymous Photos (Yi ming zhao), a vast collection of studio photographs taken between 1950 and 1980.⁴² The titular anonymity of yi points to unidentified authors and subjects, additionally connoting that something has long been scattered and lost to time. As suggested in the author's quote above, these re-concentrated vestiges of socialist visuality simultaneously illuminated vibrant, anonymous color worlds where public and private memories contend for further exposition. Similarly, the Tiananmen photos I've discussed stand out among Thomas Sauvin's encyclopedic collection, most of which date to 1985 and later. Sauvin's archive, a project that began in 2009 when the collector stumbled upon tens of thousands of discarded negatives near a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing, primarily illuminates spontaneous scenes of everyday life: parties at home, travel photos, and candid personal snapshots, demonstrating what scholars identify as the anti-radical, anti-historical ethos characteristic of visual culture in the post-socialist era.⁴³ Photographs taken during or after the Reform Era (1976–89) signaled a historical reorientation from teleological narratives vested in revolution to an individual's direct occupation with the concrete, pluralistic material world newly emergent before one.⁴⁴ Given this, the revolutionary souvenir photos at Tiananmen are further set apart by formal and visual qualities that intensify their anachronistic position within Sauvin's reservoir of popular analogue photography. Why does Sauvin's archive hang on to these items? Were the Tiananmen photos kept for longer periods of time? What accounted for their sudden discarding?

Unsurprisingly, the sea change of market liberalization and commercialism relegated these warehouses of socialist interiority to temporal and technological obsolescence, in large part simply by the sheer plentitude and newfound accessibility of personal cameras and commercial film rolls. Vernacular photography's reconfigured temporality parallels macro-scale materialist changes, such shifts often manifest in the difficulty of offering a cohesive definition of postsocialism. Responding to the disposability of socialist vernacular photographs recently thrust into hypervisibility, the cases in this article return to the original sites of discarded memory, redirecting a focus to the anachronistic technologies that animated them. What did it mean to live, look, and remember during that time? Vernacular photographs catered to everyday, usually urban citizens of the socialist universe. After all, these clients were far from the model figures or ideal types officially intended for public visibility, and they were seldom colored as such. Posing for, buying, retouching, and coloring the studio photo were fundamentally socially contingent processes. The imbrications between paint and photograph, customer and client, hand and brush occupied the heart of socialist vernacular photography, reflected by the insistence of anonymity that belie thousands of expressive faces pulsating with color.

With the advent of the mass reproducible colored film roll, hand-coloring rapidly fell into disuse in the late 1980s, spelling the end of zhuose.⁴⁵ Home kits, which once marked the livelihood of colorists, acted as toys for colorists’ children, and functioned akin to photographic makeup to customers, became a technical and technological obsolescence of this era (see fig. 12). As a result, the chromatic expressivity of one's private dreamworlds took on an externalized dimension; the new color rolls ushering in an explosion of candid photos in smooth alignment with postsocialism's materialist vibrancy. After decades of research and experimentation on optical technology that also holistically incorporated colored film, color TV, colored synthetics, industrial-scale dyeing technology and more, Lekai's color rolls were finally able to compete with famous international brands such as Kodak and Fuji. In short, the consummation of this new national technology overtook its previous vernacular form.⁴⁶ Before these engineers of China's new chromatic world bore fruit however, the height of hand-colored photographs in the three decades between the mid-1950s and 1980s is marked by an ongoing paradox between the ideological imperatives of visual representation and its increasingly pluralistic material emanations. Under the chromatic prism, broader conceptual categories such as imitation, ritual, enunciation, and even sensuality were all implicated in the push and pull between photographic truth and imagination, given by successive turns of retouching and coloring. The afterlife of color reinscribes its centrality to the socialist experience as well as to recalling that experience (see fig. 13). Artists as early as the ’85 generation have repeatedly referred to these colored photographs as a direct visual precedent in their own works, once again mending the wounds of history and memory by hand and brush.⁴⁷

Notes

Works Cited