This essay explores Tian Han’s artistic and political experiments of "creating the new woman" and "going to the people" during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in the context of the international avant-garde. It begins with a discussion of the dialectic relationship between "the avant-garde" and "the people"

and continues to examine War of Resistance literature and art works and their profound connections with "tradition"

as well as their experimental

intermedial qualities. The essay then zooms in the intricate intertwinement of two artistic and political tendencies in Tian Han’s works

represented by the imageries of "lovers" and "heroes" : from the transformations of "lovers" to "heroes" in the film

Fengyun Ernü

to the pedagogical function of the anti-Japanese drama

Lugou Qiao

in carrying out a "a guerrilla drama warfare" ; from the intimacy between female warriors in the Beijing Opera

Xin Ernü Yingxiong Zhuan

to the construction of female soldiers through a wartime love triangle in the spoken drama

Qiusheng Fu

. The essay finally comes to explore the inseparable connections between "heroes" and "lovers" through the 1947 film

Yi Jiangnan

’

s

reflection of the 1935 film

Fengyun Ernü

. The essay concludes by situating Tian Han’s wartime experiments in the context of the confluence of art and politics

and of the avant-garde and the popular. It further reads these experiments as connecting back to the interwar international avant-garde and ushering in the artistic experiments of the socialist avant-garde of the early People’s Republic of China.