Canton Modern presents twentieth-century Cantonese art and visual culture in its full complexity as an important chapter in global modernism. United in a shared linguistic and cultural identity, the southern port cities of Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong were historically marginal in China. The birthplace of China’s modern revolution, the two cities also gave rise to a distinctive visual and artistic modernism, one shaped by cross-cultural interactions and tensions between conservative and progressive artworlds. Cantonese artists broke away from the elegant poetics of classical ink painting to forge a socially oriented realism, depicting subjects ranging from leisure and labour to war and disaster. Working as journalists and publishers, they exploited the immediacy and circulation of print, photography, and cartoons to intervene in and even reform society.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Cantonese artists helped to construct its self-image in propaganda and Socialist Realist art even as national agendas increasingly subsumed regional and individual character. Although post-war Guangzhou and Hong Kong embarked on politically divergent paths, their art and visual culture remained traceable to a shared modernist legacy. Hong Kong artists, including those who overtly embraced international trends, often had fraught sympathies with their contemporaries across the border. Bringing together over 200 works from institutional and private collections, many on public display for the first time, Canton Modern recovers a deeply rooted local story with contemporary global resonance.