This article discusses the changing ways in which the male body was presented in Chinese art of the early 20th century, with special focus on Western-style painting and graphic art.

As Western ideas and artistic methods began flooding into China at the beginning of the 20th century, these had a very large influence on the way artists depicted the male body. In the past, most discussions of the human body in Chinese Western-style art have focused on the social acceptability female models and female nudes. However, in the art training provided in European academies, male models were first used, and later on the study of anatomy was added, so students would gain a better understanding of human skeletal and muscular structure. This also happened in China. In 1914, after Li Shutong returned from art study in Japan and set up courses in painting at Zhejiang First Normal School, he hired a male model to pose nude before the drawing class. In 1915, the Shanghai School of Fine Art hired a 15 year old boy to pose for its drawing class, and later it hired adult models. A minor controversy broke out in 1917 when an exhibition of students' work included many male nudes. At the end of 1919, after Li Chaoshi returned from art study in France and began teaching at Shanghai School of Fine Art, he was able to introduce the actual French academic methods of training, and for a time thereafter the School hired a teacher with a medical background to teach anatomy. However, even though the School used models for training students in drawing, the outcomes were still frequently awkward, according to the memoirs of one of the teachers, Wang Yachen, because the kind of artistic training that the teachers themselves had was not very solid. It was not until the mid-1920s, after more artists had returned from France or Japan, that there were teachers who were really capable of teaching drawing courses with male models. Of these, Xu Beihong at National Central University, Nanjing and Lin Fengmian at National Hangzhou Academy of Fine Art were most influential.

As these Chinese artists tried to emulate Western methods and create large oil paintings on Chinese historical or mythological events, they often expressed academic ideals of male beauty. Xu Beihong's large 1928-1930 historical painting, Tian Heng and his 500 Warriors, showed exaggerated musculature among many of the warriors. Xu's new rendition of the male body undoubtedly had a significant influence on his students and other artists at the time. The realist techniques in Zhang Anzhi's 1936 oil painting Massed Strength and his 1937 oil painting Houyi Shooting the Suns successfully captured the power and beauty of exposed male muscles. This new aesthetic perspective was clearly adopted from the West's classical Greek and Roman ideals of male beauty and strength.

This change was not limited to the new foreign media of oil painting and drawing. In 1940, when Xu Beihong fled to India to escape from the war, he used traditional Chinese pigments to paint Mister Simple and his Family Move Mountains. He used the Darjeeling school chef as his model for several drawing studies. The finished painting shows a plump but powerful male figure smashing rock. Although the contour lines of the figure retains characteristics of traditional Chinese painting, the powerful muscle contours emerging through the washes reveal a good understanding of anatomy. Another remarkable aspect of the painting is its full exposure of the male genitalia. In the Lingnan artist Fang Rending's painting Severe Drought of 1946, we see a farmer standing in the middle of his parched fields. However, judging from the farmer's incongruously well-muscled frame, it is evident that the artist still could not abandon the ideals of male beauty.

Through the decades of the early 20th century, meanwhile, bodybuilding for male strength and beauty was heavily promoted. The teachers of the Shanghai School of Fine Art organized a health club that encouraged participation in ball sports like basketball, tennis, football and ping-pong. The Young Companion magazine, which began in 1926, constantly reported on sports news and printed pictures of athletes or even political figures showing off their muscles. The practice of bodybuilding was also considered a patriotic endeavor.

These trends were reflected in popular art, as exemplified in Shanghai Sketch, published between 1928 and 1930, a magazine whose eyecatching cover artwork frequently showed male and female nudes. The male figures are invariably powerfully built, but because the artists still did not fully grasp Western culture, their compositions are sometimes puzzling. The publisher simply used these to attract buyers.

When the war against Japan intensified, woodblock printing became a favored medium for propaganda images. Male images in many of these works showed increased influence from Russian social realist and propaganda art.