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.