Jinan Times, June 14, 2010

Hua Junwu (华君武), a cartoonist who got his start in the 1930s, drew caricatures in Yan'an in the 1940s, and joined the People's Daily in 1949. Today's China Daily has a look back at his career:

His caricatures typically featured people with unkempt dress and messy hair, unadorned yet imposing; and despite the lack of detail, Hua vividly captured their inner state, critics say.

"Hua will be remembered as the pioneer of political caricature in modern China, " said Zhang Yaoning, vice-president and secretary general of the China Journalism Caricature Research Society.

Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in 1915, Hua started to draw cartoons in 1930 for the campus journal when he was a middle school student. His first cartoon work depicted students with exaggerated painful expressions while being vaccinated.

The cartoon featured on the front page of the Jinan Times is a 1993 self-portrait annotated with Hua's poetic observations on the difficulties of figure sketching:

画人难画手，画兽难画狗
脸比手更难，捂面遮百丑

It's tough to sketch a person's hands,
With beasts, the dogs are hard to draw.
Compared to hands, a face is worse,
So cover it up to hide the flaws.

Update (2010.06.15): Justrecently's blog has an informative obituary of Hua that quotes from Chang-tai Hung's War and Popular Culture, Resistance in Modern China, 1937 – 1945 concerning Hua's transformation in Yan'an:

While Cai Ruohong, a diehard Marxist, was so affected by Mao’s criticism that he admitted his past ideological errors and almost completely abandoned cartooning,[..] Hua Junwu took a more positive step: as Communist dramatists had done with their foreign models, he relinquished the style of Sapajou and Plauen from his Shanghai days and attempted to “sinicize” his art, incorporating folk idioms (such as proverbs) into his cartoons to present a more familiar look to the peasants. He and Zhang E also turned their drawing pens against the Guomindang.