A History of Art in 20th Century China (extrait)

A history

of art in 20th-century China

This book is dedicated to my wife Hu Jielan.

A history

of art in 20th-century China

Preface Today, “globalization” remains a fashionable concept, although the meaning of the term can be traced back to the history of the relationship between East and West from the 16th century onwards. Indeed, until 1793 when Lord Macartney traveled to the Chinese court, the Chinese people seemed to show little interest in the outside world.

They felt that the vast land of China contained everything and its ancient cultural traditions provided the rationale for contempt of the outside world. In fact, the history of Chinese people taking the initiative to understand world history is brief and 1840 should be regarded as a decisive date because the outbreak of the Opium War signaled the end of the stability of traditional structures and the beginning of instability, conflict, anxiety, and suspicion; the naval battles of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 delivered the modern world’s final blow to China, and people could clearly see that a battle-scarred and conceited China had obviously failed. But soon, this frustrating failure led the nation, from the government down to the private sector, to take the initiative in observing and learning from the outside world, initially by turning to Japan. Later, numerous Chinese began to observe and understand Europe through government missions, travel, and study abroad and to understand the world, most of them profoundly aware of the depth of China’s crisis, and the previously unknown outside world came to exercise a lasting fascination.

In art history books translated and published in China, 20th-century writings about Western art history usually start with the Impressionists. The period from the first Impressionist exhibition in 1873 to the publication of the Surrealist manifesto in 1925 is described as the early period of European modernism, and during this time the tradition of poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seal-carving still occupied the mainstream art world in China, where these undeniably refined arts continued to excite people’s interest. Leaving aside the Western painting introduced at the Chinese court from the late Ming onwards by missionaries, contacts with Western painting were also gradually beginning at the popular level.

Trade brought with it not only the products of Western merchants but their cultures and interests as well, and Western paintings produced in the 18th and 19th centuries in the coastal areas of Guangdong demonstrate that, once there is contact, interactions between different civilizations rapidly ensue. At that time, people were no longer discussing the popularity of the “Chinese style” in Europe, but rather the impact of European or English taste on Chinese dignitaries and elites.

The 1911 Revolution and the subsequent New Culture Movement both created the conditions for the emergence of a universal Westernized culture, and in the writings of intellectual leaders “science” and “democracy” were understood to provide the ideological and institutional background for painting understood to be “realism”, and the logic of this analysis inspired young artists to examine and learn from European realist painting from the Italian Renaissance onwards. It is easy to appreciate that after Xu

Beihong left for Europe in March 1919 he first visited the British Museum in London to gaze in wonder at the carvings from the ancient Greek Parthenon and as the early avant-garde in Paris reveled in a carnival of new doctrines, Xu Beihong chose a student of the Academicist Jean-Léon Gérôme to be his teacher. Of course there were other sensitive young artists, and in December 1919, Lin Fengmian, the man who occupies an important position in the history of 20th-century Chinese art, and his classmates boarded a ship in Shanghai to travel to Paris to study art. After returning home, Lin Fengmian, like the leaders of those modernist groups in Paris, launched a campaign to promote modernist ideas, and with the support of the renowned university president Cai Yuanpei, he and his friends, including the critic Lin Wenzheng, vigorously promoted the spread of the new art. This was indeed an era of learning from the West. As early as 1919 another significant painter Liu Haisu wrote A Brief History of the Western Landscape, in which he introduce Impressionism, and increased interest in the paintings of Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and others; even before he went to study in Europe before the end of 1927 his style was very close to that of Cézanne. Like Lin Fengmian and others, he was a long-term defender of modernist art through his painting practice and theory, and it was not long before people were able to read the Storm Society Manifesto of 1932 that echoed the Futurist Manifesto. Through the efforts of the many artists who returned from Europe, by the 1930s Chinese people in educated and artistic circles were able to learn of the news and controversies emanating from the different schools of European modern art and to witness the diverse artistic practices ranging from Impressionism and Expressionism to Cubism, Futurism, and even Surrealism.

However, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 critically impinged on artists’ creative lives, and the vast majority of artists found themselves displaced. Even in the city of Chongqing in the Chinese hinterland, their work was interrupted by Japanese aircraft bombing; the civil war that began in 1945 brought complex political contestation into play and artists, like other intellectuals, were unconsciously contaminated by the dust of ideology. The earlier liberal atmosphere was coming to an end, especially once those artists who had previously accepted the influence of Mao Zedong’s thinking on literature and art made a clear political stand. After 1949, China’s unique social reality and institutional background completely isolated artists in mainland China from those in Western countries and only through Soviet socialist art (mostly realist painting and sculpture) could they continue to learn from traditional European art. Subject to the demands of official criteria for art and politics, artistic creation on any subject fell into the trap of instrumentalist artistic practice, and even traditional Chinese painting was required to transform in order to become an artistic tool with socialist content providing propaganda for the Party and its leadership, even though many painters well versed in the Chinese tradition were reluctant at heart. The situation reached its climax during

the Cultural Revolution era between 1966 and 1976, a time that people can indeed research as history using methods of comparison with the art glorified by the Nazis and with Soviet art of the socialist period, although clearly, Chinese art had its own social and political context for the complexity of the unique changes it underwent.

The modernist movement of the 1980s (and the new art of this period that people love to describe as the ‘85 New Wave, the ‘85 Art Movement, or the avant-garde) was the product of China opening its doors to the outside world once again and the emergence of various artistic phenomena was reminiscent of the situation in the 1920s and 1930s. We can describe this period as a “re-connection with Western modernism,” although after 1987 one can see some characteristics of postmodern works with the more sensitive avant-garde artists in China being familiar with the work of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and even Beuys. At the same time, it gradually became apparent in the late 20th century that the artistic questions that had vexed artists in the 1920s and 1930s had surfaced again.

Even though the grip on ideology was loosened, the revival of interest in traditional painting from the ashes of “feudal culture” is a notably unique artistic phenomenon, and at the same time artists were also using traditional materials to embark on new artistic experiments. However, the relationship between “Chinese-style paintings” produced using rice paper (or silk), brush and ink, and this fastchanging era led to sustained and lingering confusion.

From the 1990s China began to make a deep impact on the world market economy. After 1993 the new artists, who in the main produced works of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, that were questioned by overseas Chinese critics, gradually became market stars, and in the first decade of the new century, they gained widespread influence. People became lost in a complex lexical world bristling with terms like “art,” “market,” “avantgarde,” “tradition,” and “ideals” that had lost all context.

Regardless, a new world shaped by the different forms assumed by capital, such as art spaces, art districts, art galleries, art fairs, and art auctions, constituted the embryo of what seemed closer to being what is called the “globalized” system, even though China’s political system in many people’s eyes had not undergone the slightest change since 1978.

The evolution of Chinese art in the 20th century is clearly different from that of the history of European or Western art. Artists create their own art along the trajectory of their own lives and civilizations and this has determined that Chinese art is the product of centuries of its own historical background, and those who continue to produce works of art in turn constitute a part of this special history, constituting an integral part of the evidence of the past as we understand it. The function of art and its historical complexity require a full and exhaustive study but, in my opinion, historical issues rather than artistic interest are closer to the history of art we want to discuss.

For example, Li Keran’s painting of the 1970s titled Lijiang is primarily an historical artifact and, in different contexts, this piece can be viewed as artistic praise of the socialist

motherland, as it can also be viewed as political discontent with this “bright and sunny” society, but in either case we cannot limit ourselves to images, symbols, practices (or brush and ink, if it is a work produced using traditional Chinese materials), and color and provide a simple formal analysis. In different earlier versions of the preface to this book, I have explained my art-historical research methods and perspectives, and here I merely wish to remind readers that research into 20th-century Chinese art history should be different from writing a history of ancient Chinese calligraphy and painting, which were grounded in stable structures of politics, culture, and taste.

This book was first published in 2006 by Peking University Press; the revised edition was published in 2009.

Shortly thereafter, Charta Publishing House published an English version of the revised edition. In 2012, I completed a third Chinese edition containing many amendments.

Now, Somogy Press is publishing French and English versions of the third Chinese edition, and my expectation is that this will largely meet as much as possible the needs of Western readers who want to understand the particularity and complexity of Chinese art history of the 20th century.

Of course, through the publication in different languages, I also want at the same time to learn how differences are discovered by people from different civilizations and historical backgrounds, how we establish mutual contacts and knowledge between common civilizations, and how we analyze the contribution of individual lives to the value of civilizations. This is something we should bear in mind when today we talk about fashionable “global art,” and in this edition I have also touched on discussion of such questions in the first decade of the 21st century.

Here, I would like to thank Bruce Gordon Doar, who has not only drawn on his extensive knowledge of art history and his experience of living in China to complete the English translation, but has also worked on my third revised edition of the book to ensure rigorous revision of his earlier translations. I would also like to thank Zhang Xu of the Association CHINEurope, without whose recommendation and efforts the French edition of this edition could not have been published by Somogy. The publication of a French version has a special meaning for me, not only because the book is now accessible to French-language readers, but also because of the great sense of pride it gives me to link my own study of art history with France because from when I first began to study art history I have revered France as the Holy Land of European art. Xu Dan has been my assistant in liaising with Bruce Doar and the publishers and to her I wish to express my deepest gratitude, for providing invaluable help in handling the complexity of coordinating the publication of the book.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife Hu Jielan for her infinite patience and support during the writing of this book and to my daughter who has now embarked on her career in the field of art, which makes me feel very pleased.

This book is dedicated to them, and my joy is difficult to suppress!

Thursday, May 23, 2013, St Mark’s Piazza, Venice

Preface to the first english edition On 24 April 2009, I changed planes in Budapest and flew to Venice. On the plane a handsome young steward handed me a few newspapers, and I casually leafed through the Financial Times. In the ‘Commentary’ section I read this headline ‘Why Brands Now Rise in the East’. The article piqued my interest with its humorous lead-in: ‘Not long ago, Joanna Seddon, a marketing executive, lost a button on her Louis Feraud suit and looked for a store in New York or London at which to get it replaced. Ms. Seddon, an executive vice-president of Millward-Brown, was out of luck: the late French designer’s New York store on Madison Avenue had closed. She had to turn to China, where Feraud has 11 outlets.’ In this article John Gepper related, ‘This week, Porsche chose the Shanghai motor show to launch its Panamera four-door saloon, the fourth Porsche line after 911...’ Just above this article was an editorial piece— ‘China Flexes New Economic Muscles at Sea’, which opined that ‘if Beijing has a navy to match that of the US it will raise questions of the postwar balance of power in the Pacific’. In the ‘World News’ section, I read an article titled ‘China sees the EU as mere pawn in global game’. In the ‘Markets and Investing’ section, writer Jim O’Neill (chief economist at Goldman-Sachs) headed his article with the forthright title ‘China shows the world how to get through a crisis’. His conclusion: ‘In the next two years, China is very likely to overtake Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world’.

Financial Times is a European newspaper, and to have so much space directly touching on China demonstrates a fact that has been evident in recent years: the world is beginning to take more notice of China. In the global art field, we have seen on Artprice’s top 500 list of art auction prices that eight of the top twenty names are Chinese artists (Top 500 Artprice 2008/2009). In fact, contemporary Chinese artists have been familiar figures for years at European and American auctions.

My mention of the above news items does not mean that I embrace an offensive, narrow nationalism. What is more, I do not feel that the positive news about China that we see in the media daily in any way justifies a sense of complacency. As a Chinese born in the 50s, I am well aware that our so-called ‘upsurge’ has come at great cost, to the point that it would be no exaggeration to say that our current reality faces disastrous problems, such as grave damage to the environment, increased social inequity and huge disparity in distribution of wealth. I believe that the amazement that people express about China is due solely to the economic upsurge, but description of the ‘Chinese miracle’, as it has been called in recent years, requires a more complex approach.

Our understanding of China today is of course closely related to China’s yesterday. Without question China’s time of great change happened in the late-Qing. Even though some westerners had an influence in China during the Ming, it was the post-Opium War period that made the Chinese people begin to re-assess themselves in earnest. The Chinese had their own civilized tradition and

their unique context which dictated that its ‘art’ or ‘fine art’ (meishu), a word that only came into use in the early 20th century, would go through different changes than in the west. At the close of the 19th century, when French painters began taking note of changing light and color in nature, Chinese painters were still delighting themselves with daubings in the brush and ink tradition. Western readers can readily grasp Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Salvador Dali and postwar art phenomena.

Yet even today Chinese viewers do not fully understand what these artists were trying to do. Western students have basic courses which touch upon European culture of the Renaissance. Through the instructive influence of various museums, they assimilate definitive knowledge of perspective, light, proportion and human bodily structure. Yet not until the early 20th century were Chinese students asked, by their forward-thinking teachers, to observe the structure of the human body, or to understand the spatial relations and positions of objects. Amid an atmosphere of jeers and curses, those students began observing the world from a scientific or empirical angle.

A hundred years have passed since the Eight Allied Powers entered Beijing. Along with complex social, political and economic changes, Chinese art also underwent unique development. It is hard for me to surmise how a western historian, working from the logical standpoint of western art history, might confront the art of China of the past 100-plus years. Of course I have read Michael Sullivan’s Art and Artists of 20th Century China (University of California Press 1996). Such a work by a western scholar about 20th century Chinese art is certainly of great help to western readers. But with respect to world art history, what does Chinese art of the past hundred years symbolize, after all? In past years I have leafed through histories of 20th century world art by French, German and American scholars. These versions mention Chinese art and artists to varying degrees, but there are great disparities among them in terms of selection and format. One day in 2006, during an opening held at a Shanghai gallery, the English art historian Edward Lucie Smith said that current art phenomena of China fill people with wonder and amazement, but the issues are so complex that judgment can hardly be made any time soon. (Nevertheless in 2009 he put Zhang Xiaogang in the second edition of his Lives of the Great Modern Artists.) I feel that for any art historian who intends to write on Chinese art, the problem of gaining an adequate understanding of the Chinese context is a pressing one.

In fact, the difficulties for a Chinese scholar of writing a history of 20th century Chinese art are likewise enormous. Difficulties include the loss of historical materials (along with artists’ works) due to war and political movements, the inconvenience of consulting materials due to archival systems, the modification of memory and outlook due to relentless thought reform and the

hindrance to free unfolding of written expression due to ideological control. A simple example is that at the National Art Museum of China, one cannot see adequate art documentation for the 1900-1949 and post-1984 periods. These difficulties do not arise because of scholarly negligence or lack of resources (such as insufficient government funding). Artistic documents as tangible entities are either incomplete (pre-1949) or hardly available at all (post-1984), mainly because of prejudice and abuse of power the established system and its political ideology. In this regard we have found studies by observant scholars such as Julia F Andrews’ Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979 (University of California Press 1994). Indeed the history of art in 20th century China is inextricably linked to politics.

In the second half of 1989, Prof. Yi Dan and I coauthored A History of China Modern Art: 1979-1989 (Zhongguo xiandai yishu shi: 1979-1989). The basic motive for writing it was the hope to record modern art of the previous ten years in a timely fashion. Due to sudden changes in the status quo, we worried that people after us would have no way of knowing the story of that decade’s art. In 1999 I completed 90s Art China 1990-1999 (Zhongguo dangdai yishu shi: 1990-1999). Regarding the art phenomena of this decade, an obvious rift emerged among critics and scholars who had previously approved of modernism. Beginning when Chinese artists participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time in 1993, the main critique and controversy did not occur between the official sector and liberal-minded artists; instead, it occurred within the group of critics who had once fought together for modernism. This revealed the complexity of issues given China’s actual conditions. One basic phenomenon was the obvious gap in views on contemporary art between critics who left China after 1989 and seldom returned (such as Gao Minglu) versus those who kept living and working within China. I was induced to ponder the reasons behind this rift.

Thereupon, the wish to consider China’s new art phenomena against a broader, more in-depth background became one of my main reasons for writing this History.

In the course of China’s reform and opening, I read Herbert Read’s Concise History of Western Painting (Frederick A. Praeger, New York 1959). As for H.H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1978) and Ernest H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (Phaidon Press Limited, 1983, 1984), I did not read them until a few years after graduation. These western works of art history had a big influence on me. But when confronting China’s ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ art, I felt the need to adopt a different method more suited to the subject. In view of the uniqueness of Chinese art and its context, I established a method of historical judgment based on a special background of politics, economics, culture and clashing civilizations. In my ‘Preface’ to the first Chinese edition I wrote of this in detail.

After 1990 I was no longer an essentialist, and I no longer believed in so-called historical necessity. I preferred to understand history through historical documentation and my own unique experiences. Often I would read historical works influenced by the French Encylopaedists or the subsequent philosophical works of Jacques Derrida.

However, I maintained a basic faith in recovering the true shape of history, or at least what I felt the shape of history most likely was. I knew that this touched upon the question of what ‘historical objectivity’ and ‘historical fact’ might mean. My view of history was determined by my background knowledge, personal experience and value system.

The Chinese version of A History of Art in Twentieth Century China (20-shiji Zhongguo yishu shi) was published in spring of 2006, and a student version was later published. In 2009 the revised Chinese version was published. In this period I often heard readers mention the need for an English version. In a global context where China is gradually becoming a nation of special concern, more and more people want to understand China’s past and present. This is doubtless a time when people have the will and interest to understand Chinese art, especially art history of the past hundred years. This is because the art history of this period not only reflects historical shifts in Chinese society but also casts images of China in various phases of the 20th century. I hope that my book will be of help to readers who are interested in Chinese art and art history.

Here I would like to thank Bruce Doar. Over an extended time period (beginning in August 2008) and a lengthy journey (back and forth between Australia and China), he has translated my book. Due to his understanding and feel for the background of new Chinese art, he has completed his work in an accurate, smoothly flowing and lively manner. Bruce’s translation of my previous book, Artists in Art History, received praise from many western friends. Despite the voluminous size of this new translation project, he has maintained equanimity and patience from start to finish. My student Sun Yue has been a good reader of this book. Her proofreading work has been greatly helpful to ensure that the translation, while being suited to the habits of English-language readers, is also true to the Chinese meaning. Aside from this, my student Zhao Na has contributed much to this book’s appendices, and I would like to thank her here.

Finally, the publication of this book in English has happened with the support of Giuseppe Liverani, and I owe heartfelt thanks to him and my editors.

Lü Peng 9 November 2009

Contents Preface 6 Preface to the first english edition 10 Introduction: China’s 20th-Century Narrative 4

26

Chapter 1 The Influence of Western Civilization and the Adjustment of Traditional Thinking

28 29 30 33 36 41 44

48

Background: Developments in the Late Ming and Subsequent Years China Trade Painting The Influence of Western Painters Dianshi Studio Illustrated Tushanwan and its Influence The Adjustment of Traditional Thought Early Overseas Students during the Reforms

Chapter 2 The Shanghai School and its Painters

66

New Discoveries within the Tradition Painting Societies and the Market The Shanghai School Ren Bonian, Wu Changshuo, and Wang Yiting The Significance of the Shanghai School

68

Chapter 3

50 52 54 60

The Fine Arts Revolution Cai Yuanpei’s Thinking on Art 74 The Emergence of ‘Fine Arts’ 77 Chen Duxiu 80 Unfolding Ideas on Fine Arts 70

82

Chapter 4 The Origins and Intellectual Background of Chinese-Style Painting

84 88 89 92 94

The Background of Chinese-Style Painting (Zhongguo-hua) Fine Arts Historiography and Japanese Influence Traditionalists Chen Shizeng Background Intellectual Fashions

100

Chapter 5

222

National Painting and New National Painting 102 102 107 110 114 116 123

134

The Question of Tradition Huang Binhong Qi Baishi Zhang Daqian Other Traditionalist Painters Traditionalist Thought, Politics, and Related Ideology New Guohua Painting: The Lingnan School

Chapter 6 Modern Fine Arts Education

The Basic Background of Art Education 138 Schools 144 Associations

The Art of Yan’an and Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art 244

The Art of Yan’an Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art

256

Chapter 11

224

Art in Kuomintang-Ruled Areas

281

Cartoons and Cartoonists The Third Department and the New Woodcut Organizations Disputes about National Forms and the Transition in Wartime Painters and Sculptors Painters in the Praxis of National Forms Other Painters Art of the Civil War Period

292

Chapter 12

258 262 266

136

148

Chapter 7

270 273 279

Realism and Artists The 1929 National Art Exhibition Xu Beihong 156 Painters 160 Sculptors 150 152

162

Chapter 8 Modernist Art, Intellectual Trends, and Encounters

164 164 168 172 173 177 182 188 190 192 196

202

A Poet’s Perspective Liu Haisu Yan Wenliang Modernist Painters Painters Studying in Japan Taiwanese Painters Studying in Japan Pang Xunqin and the Storm Society China Independent Art Association Modern Artistic Ideas Lin Fengmian The Decline of Modernism

Chapter 9 Left-Wing Fine Arts

Art in the Period of Social Recovery and Construction The Fine Arts in the Process of Constructing a New System 306 The Fine Arts Movement of the Worker-Peasant-Soldier Masses 308 New Pictures for the New Year (New Nianhua), Picture Storybooks and Prints 294

316

Chapter 13 The Transformation of Chinese-Style Painting and Guohua Painters

318 325 335 339 342 346

Groups, the Woodcut Study Society and 347 the Left-Wing League of Artists 351 214 Lu Xun’s Work 217 Woodcut Groups

204

Chapter 10

Crisis and Transformation in Chinese-Style Painting The Path of Transformation Fu Baoshi Qian Songyan Guan Shanyue Li Keran Shi Lu Pan Tianshou

354

Chapter 14 The Influence of the Soviet Union

356 357 358 362 367 370 388

Issues and Concepts The Soviet Background Learning from the Soviet Union Maksimov’s Classes The Transition to the Two-in-One Combination Paintings on CPC History Sculpture

504

506 510 512 514 525 530 534

Chapter 15 The Art of the Cultural Revolution Period

The Move towards ‘Cultural Revolution’ Art: 1959-65 406 The Art of the Cultural Revolution Period: 1966-76 394

438

456 459 461 462 464 466

The Beginnings of the Art of the New Period 472 478 484 491 495 499

560 561

565

Chapter 17

452

558

562

470

448

552 554

The Continuing Advance of Modernism

469

443 445

542 548

Chapter 16 The Taiwan Background The Fifth Moon Group Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong) The Oriental Painting Society The Situation of Modernism The Art of Taiwan in the 1970s The Background of Hong Kong Lui Show Kwan (Lü Shoukun) Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie) Hong Kong Art and Artists Luis Chan (Chen Fushan) Hong Kong Sculptors

440

The Post-1976 Background Sichuan Scar Painting The Life-Stream and Chen Danqing The Revolution in Form The ‘Stars Art Exhibition’ Modernism: Concepts and Controversies

638

The ’85 Ideological Trend

537 392

Chapter 18

570

574

The ‘Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition’ The Debate about Chinese-Style Painting Philosophical Trends The ’85 Art Phenomenon and Groups The Northern Art Group and Its Artists The ‘New Figurative Painting Exhibition’ and the Southwestern Art Group Mao Xuhui ‘Jiangsu Youth Art Week: Large-Scale Modern Art Exhibition’ and the Participating Artists The ‘’85 New Space’ and its Artists Zhang Peili ‘Xiamen Dada’ Huang Yongping Gu Wenda Wu Shanzhuan Xu Bing The Historical Situation and the ‘Grand Soul’ ‘China/Avant-Garde: China Modern Art Exhibition’ Vagabond Artists and Yuanmingyuan Artists Village

New Literati Painting 583 Experimental Ink and Wash 576

592

Chapter 20 Contemporary Art and Artists

594 596 598 604 607 615 618 626 630 634

The Emergence of Problems in the Market and Political System Ideology and the Market Question The Guangzhou Biennale 649 ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’

640 648

656

Background Neo-Academic Art and Exhibitions The New Generation and the New Generation Painters Liu Xiaodong Cynical Realism and Painters Fang Lijun Political Pop and Artists Wang Guangyi Gaudy Art Zhang Xiaogang

Chapter 22 Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art and its Development Video Art 678 Conceptual Photography 690 Issues of Women’s Art and Women Artists 658 674

706

Chapter 23 New Painting

The Shift in Language Zeng Fanzhi 728 Zhou Chunya 730 The Most Recent Trends

708 725

736

Postcript: The Context of Chinese Contemporary Art

Appendix

Chapter 19 New Literati Painting and Experimental Ink and Wash

Chapter 21

Notes Bibliography 786 Index 754 776

Introduction: China’s 20th-Century Narrative

I N T R O D U C T I O N : C H I N A’ S 2 0 T H - C E N T U R Y N A R R AT I V E

(preceding page) 1.

Photograph by John Thomson (1837-1921) of a traditional camera illustration shop showing the ‘master’ touching up an image, 1865

Before 1949 History is not inevitable: it is merely the source of an unending stream of questions for us to ponder.

Since the years between 1900 and 1999 constitute the ‘20th century,’ it follows logically that a ‘history of 20th-century art’ would cover the art specific to that period. Yet, for anyone familiar with Chinese historiography, it is palpably clear that taking the Western chronological designation of 1900 as a starting point for this period of Chinese art history is problematic to say the least. The years 1903 and 1904 saw the serial publication of the novel The Travels of Old Mister Derelict, a social and political satire by the late Qing-period novelist Liu E (1857-1909), in the periodical Illustrated Novels, and later in Tianjin Daily News. One of the most provocative passages in the novel, quoted below, likens the decay of Qing Dynasty China to the chaos and peril of a foundering ship: Even though the ship was 240 feet long, it had sustained damage in many places.

On the eastern side there was a hole almost thirty feet wide where the waves came crashing through, and further down the same side there was a section about ten feet long where water also was pouring in. In fact, there was no part of this ship that was not battered. The eight deckhands manning the sails really seemed to be putting all their hearts into their work, yet each paid attention only to his own sail, so that it seemed they were working on eight separate ships, and there was no coordination between them. As for the sailors, they did nothing but run amok among the male and female passengers, and at first it was not clear what they were up to. But when observed carefully through a spyglass, it became apparent that they were robbing the passengers of their food and stripping them of their clothing.

Liu E presents here a vivid metaphor of the Chinese state in crisis: the huge ship is damaged and battered, but each deckhand is attending only to his own sail, and the crew members are stealing openly from the passengers. Liu’s chilling metaphor for a nation in peril leads directly to the question: how did things come to such a pass? The answer to this question goes back in history to 1839 and the outbreak of the Opium War, an event that was to become a major catalyst of change for decades to come.

In the interpretation of many an erudite traditionalist, the 2,000-year-old Chinese painting tradition has never been either static or moribund, but has in fact always been a tradition marked by the constant change and enrichment of its artistic language. As such, this tradition has also

2.

Photograph by Holmes Burton (1870-1958) of the Great Wall of China in the late 19th century, from his series Around the World 12

3.

Photograph showing the first batch of immigrants from the mainland arriving on the dock in Hong Kong

acted as proof of the essential openness of Chinese culture. The classic and oft-cited example of this openness is the acceptance of Indian Buddhist influence on Chinese art during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Yet it also can be said that, since that period, the path followed by Chinese art was dictated by the structural, formal, and linguistic precepts set during the ensuing Song Dynasty (960-1279), and in fact artists never broke free from this path. Yet, by the late 19th century, many Chinese artists were experiencing a sense of self-questioning in the wake of intermittent encounters with Western painting—even though these were mostly paintings of religious images—and they began to create figurative works in which they sought to achieve qualities that could be described as ‘life-like’ (bizhen), ‘realistic’ (shixie), and ‘verisimilitude’ (xiangxiang), even if they used these terms as though they were standard terms in traditional Chinese artistic thought. At this time, images of people were all hagiographic or commemorative in intent, and they were never an ethical record of people’s evil actions or misdeeds.

China’s traditional literati, scholar-artists, commonly held the view that art was, in fact, only an ex-officio activity or an amateur indulgence to release the stifling sense of lack of social achievements. The creation of poetry and painting, therefore, was invariably an art that was completed in the process of private gatherings of literati friends. Artists strove to preserve, on paper or silk, the unity and integrity of the ‘three perfections’ (sanjue)—in its broadest sense meaning art forms—of poetry, painting, and calligraphy. Through enduring themes such as landscape and flower-and-bird paintings (in particular the heavily symbolic themes of the plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum), the artistic tradition—or perhaps more accurately, tradition—could be both consolidated and transmitted.

Since antiquity, Chinese scholar-artists had never denied the value of intellectual brilliance: if, however, this brilliance was applied to the creation of unprecedented and unfathomable new imagery, this would be considered a very dangerous course. It is for this reason that the Ming Dynasty artist and theorist Dong Qichang (1555-1636) cautioned against some of the more innovative tendencies in the art of the early Song master Mi Fu (1051-1107). By the same token, if innovation in painting emerged from a member of a new generation of artists without even the currency of an established reputation, it would be even more difficult for him to win approval. The essential yet intangible quality of ‘spiritresonance’ (shenyun) in painting and calligraphy, which had been pursued and expressed in many variations throughout the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties, was never seen to contain within it an inducement towards the subversion of the artistic tradition. This situation continued more or less unaltered into the late Qing period.

Even in the early years of the early 20th century, the terms ‘art’ (yishu) and ‘fine arts’ (meishu) were not widely used or recognized by Chinese people, even though people were profoundly aware of the importance of calligraphy and painting (collectively known as shuhua) in the structure of Chinese traditional culture. If we locate the historical background of 20th-century Chinese art during the late Qing period, a careful study of the art world in this period ironically reveals that calligraphy and painting—recognized to be fundamental elements of classical Chinese culture—existed within an environment of defensiveness, resistance, and rout. Such combative terms perhaps do not seem applicable to a discussion about art: however, scrutiny of the artworks produced during this period demonstrates that, whether consciously or unconsciously, artists were already expressing the impact of Western modes by making clear changes to the visual world created through their brushwork.

Certainly it was possible for many Chinese artists of the literati, or scholar-official, class to ignore the larger issues of social change taking place during this time. Yet, once an artist’s official position had been stripped away, once he was forced to leave his hometown to move to the city, or once he found himself in an unfamiliar and chaotic social environment, he could not help but react and change 13

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Farewell ceremony in 1911 in Shanghai for Sun Yat-sen, leaving to take up his post in Nanjing

his thinking in order to survive. In traditional culture, the scholar-artist’s ultimate personal aim was the achievement of a lofty reputation for moral cultivation and artistic accomplishment. Even artists who had failed to attain an official position and served only as private tutors in country towns would still meet with their circle of artist friends to show their work and to demonstrate their level of moral cultivation and refinement. Confucian thinking guided people, so that a person who venerated ethics and behaved in an exemplary fashion could command universal respect and, with the exception of those who had become Buddhist monks, fame and success would not be far away. With the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839, China suffered the dual invasion of Western artillery and Western science; the consequences were felt almost immediately, as a nation that had appeared fundamentally stable for centuries began to experience the pangs of rapid and dramatic changes. These changes were manifest not only in territorial occupation and the expansion of foreign contacts, but they also began to emerge more subtly, in other facets of daily life, even encompassing the work of those Chinese artists long accustomed to working with ink and brush. Yet, people often were not consciously aware of the subtle changes that were beginning to impact their daily lives. The renowned intellectual Jiang Menglin (1886-1964), also known as Chiang Monlin, trenchantly addressed this situation in his autobiographical history Tides from the West: A Chinese Autobiography written in the 1940s, from which the following passage is taken: Supported by gunboats the Western merchants squatted like octopuses in the ports, sending their tentacles into the interior of the rich provinces. China, an enormous country larger than the United States, was herself unaware of the penetration and blind to what was bound to happen later on. The life of her millions went its leisurely and contented way from the cradle to the grave without making the least effort toward modernization, while a section of the people began casually to pick up foreign manufactures, whether for use, for pleasure, or out of curiosity.1 Whether for ‘use’ or ‘pleasure,’ or out of sheer ‘curiosity,’ it is certain that people at this time were irresistibly attracted to the new. This is understandable given that Chinese citizens had suffered far too long in an environment rank with corruption and decay; something only needed to be new for it to be accepted and absorbed into their lives. By the end of the 19th century, even a staunchly traditional literatus Lin Shu (1852-1924) embarked on translating a series of well-known Western novels that would have a profound impact on a new generation of Chinese intellectuals, and in accordance with his views on human nature, he must have regarded the emotions and story related by Alexandre Dumas fils in The Lady of the Camellias, which he translated, as profoundly moving. The so-called ‘Shanghai School’ of painting (haipai) of the late 19th century presents another example of the instinctive impulse to make use of the new (and the Western) for reasons of practicality, novelty, and 14

curiosity. This was expressed, for example, in the application of a Western-style color palette in flower paintings, with an eye to imbuing such works with a greater freshness and appeal. China’s utter defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, however, caused a shift in Chinese people’s attitudes: the Chinese people began to regard the outside world as a force to be reckoned with. The centrist viewpoint of the Imperial age had finally died an inevitable death. It was not long before the Chinese art world was beginning to apply new ‘narration’ to the tradition of calligraphy and painting, which finally evolved into such genres as ‘literati painting’ (wenren-hua), ‘Chinese painting’ (Zhongguo-hua), and ‘national painting’ (guohua). These categorizations appear to represent an effort to separate and differentiate Chinese painting from Western painting and Western art in general, and to underscore its elite and cultivated nature. However, another, more insidious effect of this differentiation was the implication that Chinese painting and calligraphy were in themselves a form of civilization, as if the Chinese were unwilling to develop any positive relationships with Western art, yet which inevitably placed them in a position of defensiveness and self-preservation.

For Chinese intellectuals of the late 20th century, a rigorous differentiation between social reform, political reform, and cultural reform became essential to academic analysis. Yet in those days of general decay at the outset of the 20th century, the thinking was quite different. Among the intellectual elite of the time who had come into contact with and to varying degrees absorbed elements of Western knowledge, a number of forceful thinkers leaned towards a more holistic view of change and reform. Pointing to the ultimate failure of the attempts at economic reform of the ‘Westernization movement’ of the second half of the 19th century, these intellectuals maintained that China’s reform must take place on several planes at once: on the political plane, because the existing system stifled innovation and creativity, and on the philosophical and cultural planes, because Confucian thought did not provide an intellectual approach or methodology for the sciences. Faced with the mission of saving their nation from the midst of crisis, even intellectuals with a deeply traditional background were in favor of borrowing tools from the West—regardless of whether these tools were political, cultural, philosophical, or scientific. There was also the widely held view that studying and adopting new technologies was not enough; people’s minds must also be reformed, and this could only be accomplished through the reform of the educational and cultural systems. New educational policies combined with new codes of ethics and a new political system constituted a total raft of measures that could save China from the brink of disaster. Although present-day intellectuals regret the theoretical decisions made by these early 20th-century intellectuals, their dedicated attempts at reform, beginning with the Reform Movement of 1898 and deepening with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, advocated an integrated, holistic revolution combining social revolution, political revolution, and cultural revolution. In understanding this background, we are also better placed to understand why diverse groups of intellectuals belonging variously to the political, cultural, and academic spheres, were all interested in participating in discussions regarding artistic reform. Prior to the 20th century, the elite literati culture had formulated many ideas and produced myriad theoretical texts treating the arts of calligraphy and painting. Most of these were rooted in the views advocated by the Song literatus Su Dongpo (1037-1101) regarding the correct lifestyle and attitude of cultivation necessary for those who engaged in the ‘dance of the ink and brush.’ During the earlier Six Dynasties (220-589), the scholar and theorist Xie He (479-502) had already called attention to a creative realm whose recognition and access was essential for the artist: while abstract and difficult to define in precise terms, Xie’s primary concept of ‘breath resonance and life motion’ was embraced as the crucial element that must be achieved in the process of artistic cultivation. During the Tang Dynasty, art historians such as Zhang Yanyuan (late 9th century) focused on the creation of compendia and catalogues, since the essential precepts and principles that artists needed to follow in the cultivation of calligraphy and painting were laid out in the Confucian classics and the Daoist philosophical canon. No ancient writings on painting and calligraphy were able to provide purer and more instructive precepts than these works, so artists were often lost in the understanding of concepts such as qiyun shengdon, The artists’ task was to express in their work their understanding and enlightened insights into these precepts and principles in different contexts, even if these expressions were also often characterized by rigidity and imitation. In fact, before the Western-influenced artist-reformers of the early 20th century, such as Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu, and Lin Fengmian, had published their treatises advocating new approaches to art, it is only in the writings of reformist intellectuals like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Cai Yuanpei, and Chen Duxiu that we can find ideas and concepts about art that differed in any material way from the ancient discourse. In the early years of the 20th century, members of the new generation of intellectuals, regardless of their academic orientation, called widely for a revolution in Chinese painting and calligraphy. Their suggestions in this ‘transitional’ period were, however, neither concrete nor constructed on a platform of informed knowledge and opinion. 2 Rather, these intellectuals primarily 15

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sought to use the methods of Western art as a means of eradicating the dominating influence of the ‘Four Wangs,’ a reference to the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty painters Wang Shimin (1592-1680), Wang Hui (1632-1717), Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715), and Wang Jian (1598-1677). Stylistically, the school of the Four Wangs had come to represent the epitome of Qing aesthetic orthodoxy, and as such had now become the symbol of a rigid, lifeless, and moribund mentality. Responding to the new aesthetic call to arms, artists took up Western materials, techniques, and concepts to attack the domain of traditional calligraphy and painting, and at the same time to expand the space of artistic creation.

In this climate, traditional terms such as ‘shuhua’ (calligraphy and painting) were now viewed as too limited or simply obsolete. thus in the process of nurturing new aesthetics, new ethics, and a new artistic persona, the terms ‘yishu’ (art) and ‘meishu’ (fine arts) were frequently adopted instead. As a consequence, the term shuhua was subsumed into a category of the fine arts and lost its dominant position as the single most representative term for Chinese art.

During this period, the Western term ‘modern’—transliterated into Chinese as moden—came into widespread use. this particular term for ‘modern’ had particular resonance in modern cities such as Shanghai, and even the general public became aware that this term represented the new fashions of a new age. Gradually, however, the Chinese transliterated term modeng was replaced in intellectual discourse and debate by the term xiandai, and as a consequence, a new kind of confusion arose. As early as the turn of the century, the terms xiandai and xiandaihua (‘modernization’) had already appeared in the writings of elite intellectuals, such as Hu Shi, and most intellectuals were deeply convinced that the development of Chinese art in the 20th century would follow the same path as the development of society as a whole—a path characterized by the dialectical clash of tradition and modernization.

Indeed, many writings on art at the time addressed this issue from various angles.

In the realm of the Western visual arts in this period, the use of the term ‘modern’ began with, and was limited to, Post-Impressionism, and later to the Cubist and Futurist movements. By contrast, the ‘modern’ art advocated by Chinese intellectuals of the time was rooted in the concepts of what had ‘verisimilitude’ (shixie) and was ‘realistic’ (xieshi); most did not have a clear understanding of the concept of ‘realism’ so well established in the Western academy, or an ability to differentiate between ‘realist’ and ‘modern.’ Confronting Western terms such as ‘modern,’ ‘modernization,’ ‘modernity,’ and ‘modernism, Chinese artists and critics plunged into a long period of conflict and debate; each camp had its own interpretation of the meaning and implications of these terms, and of course in this critical and uncertain time, the interpretations of those with the greater authority carried the most weight.

The forced attempts made to apply these terms to art in China ultimately proved only to deepen the chasm of confusion. In trying to understand this period of history, we should use a methodology that goes back to ‘that time’ by fully exercising our knowledge and empathic imagination when examining the art and writings of the period, especially in capturing the original spirit of the writing and the core facts about the works. Only in this way can we reconstruct critical knowledge about this stretch of art history and not find ourselves caught up in the maze created by such terms as ‘Westernization,’ ‘revolution,’ and ‘modernization.’ The situation at the time can perhaps best be expressed by an early metaphor created by Liang Qichao, who writing in 1901, described China as ‘a boat that has left the bank and is adrift in mid-stream’ and is now ‘stuck between two banks and unable to reach either shore.’ Even today, Liang’s description of China at that time elicits a sense of regret. Throughout the 20th century, discussions of Chinese culture have been characterized by passionate debates and the use of dichotomous pairings such as ‘Chinese painting’ and ‘modernism’ (Western painting), ‘ethnicized’ (minzuhua) and ‘post-colonial’ (hou-zhimin), ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Even in the critical discourse of the late 20th century, these dichotomies persist in discussions on art. Yet, even concepts such as a ‘fusion of Chinese and Western’ (zhongxi hebi) seem to be only a form of mediation or compromise, bringing to mind the problems inherent in Xu Beihong’s early reform measures of the 1920s and 30s.

Can this concept of so-called East-West fusion also not be viewed as just another way of being ‘stuck between two banks’? Even the early arguments of the respected scholar-artist Chen Shizeng (18761923) regarding traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy in essence merely constituted a kind of eloquent and defensive apologia. His concept of literati painting (wenren-hua), while emphasizing quality and cultivation, did not concretize reform but rather limited it to a superficial psychological plane. There is a commonly held psychological theory that people’s thinking and inclinations are guided by their projected expectations of the future. From this point of view, those intellectuals who advocated adopting Western concepts and methodologies would not be inclined psychologically to pursue literati ideals, such as ‘purity and simplicity,’ while those literati artists hoping to preserve the traditional concepts of right moral conduct and personal cultivation would naturally hope to continue to use calligraphy and painting to express the psychological and spiritual worlds they recognized.

Thus there was never any resolution to the long debate between these two camps, nor were they able 16

ever to arrive at a unified position on how best to reform Chinese art.

We should however note that, even in the case of the most progressive Chinese painters, their understanding of ‘nature’ remained rich in interiority. Liu Haisu (1896-1994), for example, adopted oils for his landscape paintings, but his brushwork and compositional approach still remained deeply expressive of the literati’s spiritual connection to nature. In fact, it can be said that those artists born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when compared with later artists, especially those born in the second half of the 20th century, were, in their training and background not far removed from the traditions that they treated with suspicion, criticism, and rejection, and they were undoubtedly influenced by and steeped in those traditions, which to varying degrees embodied the sensibilities and understanding of the traditional literati class, as outlined by Jiang Menglin: If a Chinese student wants to understand Western civilization, he can only base this on his understanding of his own civilization. The more he understands his own civilization, the easier it is to understand Western civilization, and based on this assumption, I feel that the difficult task of poring over the Chinese classics late at night was never pointless because it made it so much easier for me to absorb and assimilate Western thinking. I also felt that my future work was discovering those things lacking in China and drawing on those things which are needed from the West. Once I grasped these concepts, I gradually acquired self-confidence and discarded my timorousness; at the same time the path ahead also seemed brighter. 3

5.

1932, memorial service for officers of the Nineteenth Route Army fallen in the Battle of Shanghai (Songhu Battle) of that year defending the city against Japanese invaders

Regrettably, today’s intellectuals find it hard to accept this insight of Jiang Menglin from the 1940s, and the majority of intellectuals whose education in the traditional classics was cut short have already lost the ability to understand and compare different civilizations. The study of the West that began in China in the 1980s was to a great extent a replay of what had taken place half a century earlier before the outbreak of World War II. What was different, however, was that when Western civilization was once more being received, the embers of China’s own tradition were already extinct, and people could only describe tradition from the fragments gleamed of a diminishing history and from the uncertainties of perceived racial identity.

In the 1920s and 30s a number of new-style art academies and art societies were established, and they sought to formulate policies and curricula that would do away with traditional methods of art education, such as private tutoring and the studio-based system in which stylistic precepts were transmitted from master to student. Changes in ideas, content, tools, and materials engendered concomitant changes in teaching methodologies. In 1905, a major change came with the abolition of the Imperial examination system. This fundamental and concrete development reoriented the path of education for the new generation towards society and a more ready acceptance of new paradigms for learning. Western-style art exhibitions and salons became very popular among young people, who felt intensely the unfolding of a new way of life and a new world. Even though some of the more radical approaches were met with moralistic censure and resistance—as, for example, when Liu Haisu began using nude models in his painting classes at the Shanghai Art Academy in 1914—there was nevertheless a fundamental sense that human nature had been liberated and, although articles treating traditional ethics continued to appear, people were delighted by the new psychological atmosphere and the new possibilities. However, the year 1927 was marked by the collapse of the already fragile alliance between the Kuomintang (KMT) government and the Communist Party of China (CPC).

From this moment on, the intellectual world’s attention was no longer riveted on the art controversies such as Liu’s ‘nude model’ incident; rather, artistic discourse was now reoriented towards the more critical social and political issues that were emerging.

The decade from 1927 to 1937 was in some ways a period of relative stability, the KMT government undertook some short-term efforts towards modernization. During the period of ‘white terror,’ the CPC undertook internal political rectification and self-reflection, seeking once again to resume its revolutionary activities and carry out its mission. Relying on sympathetic and idealistic youth, CPC cadres did their utmost to induct these young people as Party members in order to transmit Marxist revolutionary thought, which was regarded as the most appropriate way to reform Chinese society.

The general disillusionment that the intelligentsia felt towards the KMT regime was another factor influencing the younger generation to lean towards leftist views of cultural education, and a number of leftist art movements sprang up in this period, influenced by both the Soviet Union and the CPC. By the early 1930s the art world was already engaged in the exploration of new political viewpoints as well as in risky political action. The debates that had taken place in the previous decades now took on 17

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Photograph by Wang Xiaoting of child caught in the Japanese attack on Shanghai railway station in August 1937

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Photograph taken in late 1945 of Mao Zedong with Chiang Kai-shek during negotiations 18

a special significance. As a result of the activities of young artists returning from overseas study in Japan, the USA, and Europe (France in particular), the ensuing debate on modernism vis-à-vis realism formulated the 20th century’s earliest dissenting opinions on modernism. Yet, despite the passionate nature of this debate, none of the participants seemed to have a clear understanding of the relationship between artistic style and expression and the political and social conditions of their times.

The use of the term ‘realism’ (xieshi-zhuyi) acquired a unique connotation in Chinese literary circles of the 1930s. The complexity of the evolution of this term derives from the fact that in the social situation that prevailed after April 1927, writers linked the terms ‘revolution’ (geming) and ‘love’ (aiqing); literature became imbued with tumultuous erotic passion, while many artists felt a sense of abstract ardor for the ‘tempest.’ They expressed the ‘revolutionary romanticism’ (geming de langmantike) of the age. In 1929, literary circles began universally using the term ‘new realism’ (xin xieshi-zhuyi), which the writer Mao Dun used to introduce the literature of the Soviet Union, although the fully fledged introduction of this term came through the writings of the Japanese literary theorist Kuriyagawa Hakuson, who stressed the principles of the Soviet RAPP (Rossysskaya Assotsiatsia Proletarskikh Pisatelei or Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) theory. Confronting this concept, artists, regardless of their positions in debates or the technical level of their discussion, had to revise the terminology they used and adopt the terminology of the times to establish an objective basis for the ‘narrative poetic’ of the proletarian art they produced. However, among some critics the concept of ‘new realism’ acquired a very different sense, one aptly described by Qian Xingcun: ‘The important requirement of propagandistic literature and art is that it is inflammatory.’ What is the net result of combining realist methods with inflammatory intentions? Applying realist methods in painting popular themes and expression simply resulted in the problematic production of visually obvious works that simply evoked literature.

On July 7, 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident marked the outbreak of open hostilities between China and Japan and the beginning of what is conventionally called the War of Resistance against Japan. Up until this point, the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the Japanese had been complex and ambiguous. Against this background, their critiques on justice and ethics, their knowledge of political aims and social foundations, and their attempts to formulate an analysis of the crisis of nationalism and the principles of the nation-state all took place within a state of increasing ambiguity. As the Japanese invasion became more aggressive, the CPC, which had remained steadfast in its struggles against the KMT government, was now offered political legitimacy by the KMT to engage openly in the national struggle against the Japanese invaders. As a result, in 1938 the KMT and the CPC entered into their second official alliance, forming a united front against the Japanese.

The Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou forced the majority of Chinese in these areas to follow the government in its move westward. In terms of national policy, this military tactic of retreat was deemed a necessary strategy, but, to the individual, terms such as ‘running away,’ ‘fleeing danger,’ and ‘cowering’ seemed more appropriate descriptions of the situation. Thus, with the exception of a handful of traitors and those who simply failed to grasp the reality of events, most people experienced a deep sense of anguish and frustration. A prevailing attitude maintained that it was the soldier’s job to go to war, but for nationally committed artists, there were other weapons at their disposal to aid the War of Resistance, apart from government departments to provide them with organization. Within the KMT-controlled interior, artists used their brushes and burins to create paintings and woodblock prints that served to disseminate news about the struggle against the Japanese and to keep people apprised of the true conditions and issues of the war. Even artists who had clashed ideologically in the past now put aside their differences; with the nation in peril, issues were simplified and artists were liberated from the polarized, endless arguments and labels such as ‘leftist progressives.’ Nonetheless, while some fought with their art, others threw themselves directly into battle.

The war drove the majority of artists into the anti-Japanese movement of national salvation. At the CPC base in Yan’an, where artists were dedicating their efforts to the fight against the Japanese, there was also a strong focus on harnessing art to reinforce the direction in which the CPC was seeking to guide the people. As regards the question of whom art should serve and the creation of art for the masses, Mao Zedong’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (hereafter referred to as Talks) not only became the guiding light for the artists at Yan’an but also had a profound effect on those artists fighting in the Nationalist-controlled interior. Although on a deeper political level, the background of Talks was not unrelated to the internal struggles occurring within the Communist Party at the time, its appearance at a crucial moment when it was necessary to rouse the entire nation to fight the War of Resistance and its articulation of a clear and specific artistic theory and policy that called for art to serve the national purpose were effectively of great significance for artists and had a profound impact on them. The artistic trends based on the concepts of ‘nationalization,’ ‘mass

popularization,’ and ‘ethnicization’ had a concrete impact on the production of politically effective art in both KMT-controlled and liberated areas. In addition to the aim of fighting the War of Resistance, these concepts were also understood to be a logical result of the earlier New Culture Movement.

The end of the eight-year War of Resistance in September 1945 brought neither relief nor stability to the nation or to her artists. As the struggle for political control between the KMT and the CPC became increasingly violent, many artists were impelled to put their skills at the service of exposing the totalitarian nature of the KMT regime and to support and disseminate the policies of the CPC, in particular the Party’s renewed call for a coalition democratic government, an idea the CPC had first proposed in the 1930s and which the KMT had continued to reject in its bid to retain dictatorial power. By the first half of 1949, it was very evident that the CPC had won political leadership of the people and the nation. In July 1949, the First National Congress of Literary and Art Workers opened in Beiping (soon to be called Beijing). Held from July 2 to 19, the Congress was attended by artists, writers, and scholars from all over China. Organized under the skillful and diplomatic leadership of the CPC, the Conference was chaired by artists from both the former KMT-controlled and the liberated areas, including the chairman of the newly formed Chinese Artists Association, Xu Beihong, who was affiliated with the Nationalists, and two vice-chairmen—the Yan’an-trained artist Jiang Feng and Ye Jianyu, who was unaffiliated and had moved freely between the two camps. On the same day as the Conference opening, the National Art Exhibition also had its debut. This wide-ranging, artistorganized exhibition included woodblock prints, oil paintings, ink and brush paintings, sculpture, cartoon art, and picture storybook illustrations (lianhuanhua). The National Conference on Literature and Art and the National Art Exhibition together clearly demonstrated that the CPC had effectively brought all the artistic and cultural arenas formerly under the control of the Nationalists into its own fold. From this point on, the CPC began to exert a far-reaching influence and control over the legal regulation of art and literature in mainland China.

8.

1958, China’s first people’s commune: The establishment of Chayashan People’s Commune in Suiping county, Henan province

Post-1949 China in the early 1950s was imbued with an atmosphere of excitement and possibility. People hailed the new society, and looked forward with great anticipation to an era of peace and construction.

Imperialism—whether Japanese or American—had been driven out of China, and the Kuomintang regime, which had failed and disappointed so many, had fled the mainland for Taiwan. The victorious Chinese Communist Party settled in to rule the nation. For the majority of people, the future seemed untroubled and assured.

During these years, artists from Yan’an, in their capacity as CPC cadres, took over leadership positions in art academies, institutes, and organizations. They immediately set to work establishing new art societies and artists’ associations with the aim of bringing into the fold artists scattered throughout the country. The Yan’an-trained artists and administrators also had tremendous political resources at their disposal: deemed for the most part to be politically reliable, they were entrusted by

9.

Marc Riboud, photograph taken in Shanghai 1949 19

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Huangpu district mercantile capitalists queuing up to hand in ‘confessions’ to members of the ‘Five Anti’ Committee, Shanghai

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the CPC with authority and power as leaders in the art world. Artists who had lived under KMT rule were instructed to accept Marxist thought on literature and art, as well as to learn from Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks. They began to acclimatize themselves to a new reality in which art was to be pressed into the service of workers, peasants, and soldiers, as well as of politics. Most artists more or less agreed with these artistic principles, because wasn’t art intended to serve the majority?

With the launch of the New Year’s Painting campaign and the campaign to transform Chinese traditional ink painting (Zhongguo hua, also called guohua) in 1949, many of the older generation of artists working in traditional modes became deeply anxious. Their patrons had vanished with the collapse of the KMT regime, and they were already faced with a crisis of livelihood. Now they were being exhorted to ‘abandon old tastes,’ to use the expression of Wang Zhaowen, and many expressed the fear that the coming of the new society would spell misfortune for Chinese painting. However, there were other views. In 1950, for example, the ink painter Li Keran made the observation: ‘Six or seven hundred years ago, Chinese painting had already begun to tread the path of decline of feudal society.’

Painters were now facing the necessity of using their brushes to express the process of socialist construction and to eulogize the heroes of the day. A number of artists remained embroiled in endless debates over subject matter, brushwork, artistic heritage versus originality, and other related issues, yet the vast majority lacked the sensitivity towards political concerns expected by the Party. They continually failed to grasp the crucial point that what was needed was a fundamental transformation in both their thinking and artistic sensibility. Some artists strove to maintain their aesthetic tastes and artistic styles while simultaneously meeting the requirements of the Party. Yet, despite their efforts, many suffered in the ensuing political campaigns. A number of traditionally trained artists, such as Fu Baoshi (1904-65), participated in the process of transformation with great dedication and enthusiasm, yet actually they pursued this work in a state of inner anguish, simply because they had no other choice. From the Party’s standpoint, the true meaning of transforming Chinese painting lay in unifying the political stand of all the nation’s artists through the Party’s ideology on literature and art. Art was to reflect reality, meaning the reality of the leadership role of the Party; art was to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers, meaning it was to serve the political objectives of the Party.

Only when art clearly demonstrated its utilitarian nature, the Party maintained, would the people sense that the art profession had become an integral part of that particular historical phase. The creation of new nianhua (New Year illustrations), for example, was intended to meet the needs of the liberated peasants who formed the vast majority of the rural population, as well to effect a political transformation of both traditional and folk art. To portray and showcase socialist construction through art was to publicize the correctness of the Party leadership. Equally, to reform traditional Chinese painting fundamentally was to reject feudal ideology and the decadent thought of the literati. Moreover, it created the possibility of harnessing the power of Chinese painting to ‘re-present’ reality, as well as to communicate political thought. The earlier adoption of the Soviet term Socialist Realism had been a natural outcome of the CPC’s tutelage under the Soviet Union. However, as China’s social construction progressed, the concept of Socialist Realism was replaced by Mao’s new concept of combining ‘revolutionary realism’ (geming xianshizhuyi) and ‘revolutionary romanticism’ (geming-langmanzhuyi),’ a development which demonstrated that in the field of literature and art China had completely divested itself of Soviet control. The plastic arts (zaoxing yishu) of the 1950s and 60s were dominated by a new form of serial illustrations (gushi lianhuanhua) through which the people could follow the progress being made in politics and economics as well as keep abreast with what was happening both inside and outside the Party: the Korean War, the Three Anti and Five Anti Campaigns, Agricultural Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, the People’s Communes, the AntiRightist Campaign, the Socialist Education Movement, etc. For a significant period, there were no objections raised to art being used to reflect this reality. The majority of artists—whether having come from Yan’an or KMT-controlled areas—agreed that art should serve politics, and should be used as a tool for extolling the achievements of the Party. Indeed, the thought and tastes of the feudal-landlord and capitalist classes were regarded as poisonous, and were already becoming targets of criticism.

Yet, while it was understood that art was to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers who constituted the majority of the Chinese population, nobody at the time seemed to have the authority, resources or courage to go and investigate what the masses of peasants, workers and soldiers actually liked.

Artists were instructed only that art had to be healthy, positive, affirmative, and equipped with a political stand approved by the Party. Under the Party’s continued propaganda and education in literature and art, people’s new aesthetic standards and consciousness were honed to such a degree that when, for example, they saw a painting in which too much shadow was cast on the figure of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) pilot, they accused the artist of vilifying the PLA. By the same token, the landscape paintings of Lin Fengmian were criticized as having ‘fundamentally unhealthy ideas.’4 (Ill. 11)

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Red Guards singing in front of Tiananmen Gate during the Cultural Revolution

Although artists already had been subjected to several different political campaigns in the 1950s, before the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (better known simply as the Cultural Revolution), they were still allowed, by and large, to retain their personal understanding of history and reality, as well as to maintain their personal aesthetic tastes, expressed through devices such as the use of gray-scale tonalities prescribed by the aesthetic codes of the period. Even when depicting important historical subjects, artists continued to express their belief that historical truth should be linked with a humanist sensibility. This is why Hou Yimin could create a painting depicting Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969) casually visiting a group of dark-faced miners, and Zhong Han dared to portray the back of Mao Zedong shoulder-to shoulder with a peasant.

No democratic party could ever hope to attain power equal to that of the CPC, and it was struggles within the Party that pushed it to the brink of crisis. Dissenting views arose inside the Party, contributing to ideological disputes and power struggles, and conflicts became white-hot. One result of such conflicts was the loss of power of the political faction represented by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who lost both their political influence and personal freedom amid the clampdown on ‘capitalist roaders’ inside the Party during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In the meantime, a new political faction (later dubbed the ‘Gang of Four’ by Mao Zedong) was formed within the Party, led by Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing, and Yao Wenyuan. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, these four faction leaders became the arbiters, interpreters, monitors, and enforcers of thought on literature and art. In the name of proletarian revolution, they disseminated the ideology of a deterrent force and, in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they implemented a fascist dictatorship. Afire with revolutionary fervor, vast numbers of young students threw themselves into a political movement whose true nature they barely understood. Whether responding to real or imagined exhortations, they whipped themselves and others into a revolutionary frenzy, laying waste to all things related to the past, and became the major force in bringing down every level of leadership, central or local. When the Cultural Revolution had reached a fever pitch, workers moved into the schools to stop the students from continuing to perpetrate the mischief of the rebel factions. Thereafter, thousands of students were sent down to the countryside to be ‘re-educated’ by working with the poor and lower-middle peasants. The PLA was asked to support the ‘leftist’ factions, in order to bring the chaotic situation caused by widespread militant struggles under control. When the entire nation was subsequently exhorted by Lin Biao to ‘learn from the PLA,’ the depth of Lin Biao’s conspiracy of control was effectively revealed, setting the course for the next phase of the Cultural Revolution.

In 1972, the ‘National Art Exhibition Marking the 30th Anniversary of Chairman Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ was held—the first official art exhibition to take place since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Many of the major works on display were created by the new generation of painters. Although the political and formulaic nature of the subject matter showed little variation from previous works, it was in fact possible to discern signs of painters retreating from ‘grand themes.’ At the same time, within the scope of their realist technique, there could be found traces of emerging personal styles in the color palette and brushwork. During this time, while official

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Richard Nixon with Mao Zedong during his visit to China, 1972 21

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University students of Beijing taking part in the National Day parade on October 1, 1984, carrying banners reading ‘Greetings [Deng] Xiaoping’

respect and praise continued to be shown for the arts of the workers and peasants, people could still detect—whether in oil paintings or in ink-and-brush paintings—a distinct heightening in the levels of skill of professionally trained artists, both in terms of technique and language. By 1975, people noted and acknowledged questions of technique and limited artistic taste. In that same year, Mao Zedong recalled Deng Xiaoping to Beijing from Jiangxi province to resume leadership of the central government. Intraparty political struggles were not yet over, however, and these evolved into ever more intensive power struggles. In 1976, in the wake of a period of civil unrest aimed against the domineering influence of the Gang of Four, a group of revolutionary Party veterans arrested the Gang of Four members with the assistance of the military, and subsequently resumed control of the Party leadership as well as of the political situation of the country. They announced to the nation that it was the fascist dictatorship of the Gang of Four that had pushed China to the brink of collapse. The historical phase of ‘class struggle as the key’ was now over, and economic construction was put back on the agenda. Among artists there was a nascent sense of possibility that art could gradually move away from its purely utilitarian history. Although artists were still required to depict the reality prescribed by the Party, there seemed to be some room for richer artistic expression. Prior to 1976, the ‘Great Criticism’ posters of the Red Guards, portraits of Chairman Mao, and images of workers and PLA soldiers had constituted the main content of the art produced during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.

While Socialist Realism was being promoted on the mainland, artists in Taiwan had been continuing the modernist experiments of the Western painting movement that had begun in the early Republican era. In the postwar period, however, the conservative Kuomintang government continued to treat modernist art as heretical. Before martial law was finally lifted in Taiwan in 1987, government cultural and art institutions made every effort to control the direction of the new art being produced on the island. Living under the conditions of a political dictatorship, artists in Taiwan struggled to maintain artistic freedom. A number of influential artists grouped together to form independent art societies such as the Fifth Moon Group and the Eastern Painting Society. Under their leadership and encouragement, Taiwanese artists both absorbed and went beyond modernist movements such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Cubism, and later engaged in the experimentalism of the 1960s and 70s, despite the increasingly harsh political conditions on the island. At the same time, many Taiwanese artists also sought new ways to re-engage with the Chinese painting tradition, and their efforts produced important new developments in this area. Artists who came to Taiwan from the mainland together with those of the new generation on the island helped advance the development of modern art in the context of Taiwan, until it was able to connect and resonate with the new modern art emerging on the mainland. One of the most important aspects of artistic development in Taiwan was that artists managed, through their personal efforts, to maintain a continuity of engagement with Western art movements over the decades. Traversing the path of 20th-century art from modernism on through the experimentations of contemporary art, they ensured that there was no break in the passage of entry and participation of Chinese artists in the emerging global culture.

On the mainland, the 1980s saw the creation of a wide variety of ‘modern art.’ New movements in art were to become part of a collective social force for reform and an important link in the ‘grand structure’ of overall change. Official evidence of this grand structure of change already was apparent in the communiqué issued at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978. The communiqué stated: To realize the goal of the Four Modernizations, and to raise [the present level of our] productive forces on a large scale, inevitably will entail many changes in the relationship between the means of production and the superstructure, which has become incompatible with the development of the forces of production; and also will necessitate a change of all incompatible forms of management and activity as well as modes of thought. Hence, what is required is a far-reaching, profound revolution.

From the first exhibition of the independent Stars group of artists in 1979 to the myriad art forms and styles that emerged during the 85 New Wave movement, the changes occurring in the Chinese art world constituted far more than simply a game of form. Rather, they represented an overall change in society expressed through the language of art. The emergence and development of these artistic forms were the result of artists’ search for a means to express this changing reality and to critique history.

Through increased access to Western art exhibitions, catalogues, art books, and other channels in this period, Chinese artists gradually became more familiarized with works of contemporary Western artists. Like their counterparts in the 1920s and 30s, this new generation of artists eagerly studied the works of the great Western modernists, such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse,

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Dawn, 4:30 am, June 4, 1989: Martial law troops begin clearing Tiananmen Square

Picasso, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. Other Western art movements also were studied and absorbed. In Ma Desheng’s wood engravings of the early 1980s, one can discern the influence of Käthe Kollwitz; in He Duoling’s oil paintings, that of Andrew Wyeth. During the mid-to-late 1980s, artists experimenting in a newly emerging Pop-inspired style showed the influence of Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg, while in many other works there was evidence of the impact of German Expressionism.

It may be true that the inspiration and influence of Western art on these young Chinese artists occurred primarily on a formal level. Yet, it must be considered that, during this same period, Chinese artists were also eagerly absorbing works by major Western thinkers in the fields of psychology, literature, and aesthetics. Works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Jung, Camus, and T. S. Eliot, among others, were translated into Chinese and read, discussed, and disseminated. For Chinese artists, these works no longer belonged purely to the academic or philosophical realms: rather, artists wielded them as ‘ideological weapons’ in their attempts both to understand and to criticize the society and epoch in which they found themselves. The so-called 85 New Wave art movement was an integral part of the movement of ideological emancipation that erupted on the mainland in the 1980s.

In 1985, the critic Li Xiaoshan published an essay, in which he declared that ‘[traditional] Chinese painting has already reached the end of its road,’ but his true motivation in making this statement was to reflect the critique of the traditional art system which was erupting in the art world at that time.

In the late 1980s, the term ‘avant-garde’ (qianwei) gained great currency among art critics, who equated being avant-garde with being revolutionary. Indeed, critics were inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s idea that style and technique—the ontological form and its carrier—reflect the achievement and revolutionary nature of art; and that revolution foreshadows the concrete transformation of society as whole.

Another label that must be mentioned is the term xiandai (modern), which had already been used by the early practitioners of Western modernist styles in China. But as used by artists and critics in the mid-1980s, xiandai had a much more specific implication: it now became a referent to the critiques—both in form and in action—undertaken by artists of the 80s, which were aimed at the thought, concepts, images, and forms that in previous decades had grown extremely familiar to Chinese audiences. Clement Greenberg explained how the modernist school ‘reaffirmed the past in a new way and in a variety of new ways.’ The 1990s have been hailed as the age of rapid globalization. With the growing spread of pluralistic values, people found that a commonly agreed upon standard of logic or method was no longer possible; nor was there any recognizably stable, dominant authority. There was not even a power center. This situation carried within it a hidden problem: the problem of the essential truth of art itself. There were many occasions when art became the invitation card for those with so-called curatorial authority to disseminate ideology and materials showcasing the blueprints of cultural strategies. In many situations people frequently discovered that both the artist and the critic had little interest in the artwork itself and that their interest was focused on the other things the artwork could provide for them.5 23

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Knocking down the Berlin Wall, 1989

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November 29, 1999: anti-World Trade Organization demonstrators protesting against global free trade in Seattle

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September 11, 2001: plane about to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center, with the north tower engulfed in flames 24

Here we cannot avoid once again confronting the term ‘critical nature’ or ‘criticality’ (pipanxing), a term used with great seriousness in the 1980s. By the 1990s, however, ‘critical’ had become a dubious modifier fraught with ambiguity, presenting critics and historians with major new dilemmas. 6 This period also saw the emergence of new kinds of terminology, with terms such as popi (rascal/ vagabond) and yansu (gaudy/ kitsch) appearing to describe new trends in the visual arts, and the themes of pizi (the hooligan) and duobi chonggao (spurning prestige) in literature. The questions being asked were no longer as keenly directed as before, and both art critics and art historians were finding it increasingly difficult to work with a terminology that was becoming ever more confused and more chaotically and randomly applied. How ideas could be systematically and persuasively articulated without being negatively impacted by such semantic difficulties became a serious question.

Meanwhile, the power structures of commercialization were rapidly expanding: the language of the market was fast becoming a new force to be reckoned with, rendering both artists’ ideas and creative output increasingly directed by pragmatic concerns.

A socially significant event that brought to an end the three-year period ushered in by the Tiananmen Square Incident of June 4, 1989, was a speech on economic reform delivered in February 1992 by Deng Xiaoping during his famous tour of southern China. These two seminal events exerted a tremendous impact on Chinese society, and form an important and intractable historical link. Yet both the academic and the art worlds in China seemed blind to the significance of the period between those two events. Irrational political impulses were suppressed as people began to realize that sloganeering could not substitute for historical revolution, and conservatives and radicals alike discovered that the so-called ‘power of ideas’ was very limited indeed. What is historical truth? How does the truthfulness of history translate into unshakeable reality? Such questions, it seemed, could no longer be addressed, at least not until those in the academic and art worlds held real authority. In such a climate, morale began to flounder; and in the arena of art, being a ‘scoundrel’ (popi) became a new ideology of resistance.

When circumstances are such that a person is unable to express his position openly and directly, he seeks a way to rationalize and justify his existential state, however hapless it may be. This is precisely where the 1990s differed from the 1980s. Now ‘the new generation’ simply became a banal historical image, one that had cast off the ‘ultimate compassion’ of the 80s, but was not yet at the point of becoming a mere academic paradigm—and thus the age of individualism truly dawned in the Chinese art world.

For some reason, the year 1992 spelled the total collapse of the art world’s ‘metaphysical’ myth.

The controversial 1992 Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair (BAF; the full English title was ‘The First 1990s Biennial Art Fair Guangzhou, China [Oil Painting Section]’) ended in late October amid a series of controversies over problems of art, politics, finance, and legal issues. The ensuing lawsuits made the exhibition notorious. Although it was at this exhibition that ‘Political Pop’ made its debut as an art phenomenon, people generally were more fixated on monetary aspects and the problems of the market that this show brought out.

Even the serious theoretical topic of deconstruction was unable to hasten the birth of new art forms in the 1990s. However, the influx of money spawned a new political reality in which ‘meaning’ was extolled but its true pursuit was effectively obstructed. The complicating factor was the failure to realize at the time that problems of ‘market’ also hinged on the establishment of a new art system in China. This was closely linked to the allegedly imperialistic process of ‘globalization,’ as well as to the collapse of the old structure and the setting up of new systems caused by the free movements of capital, resources and people. The emergence of the market and its related consumerism is not merely an economic phenomenon, as imagined by many artists and critics. Rather, these are the products of combined political, economic, and cultural forces. These phenomena constituted a new means (for many their only means) of resisting the old ideologies. Never before had art critics and art historians faced this kind of situation, where art, money, and power converged, engendering new currents in art and indeed forming a new historical landscape.

Just as the terms ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ were everywhere in the Chinese art world of the 1980s, in the 1990s the term ‘post-modern’ spread like a virus throughout art circles whose members had yet to understand fully what ‘modern’ really meant.7 Names like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Sartre, which were so frequently mentioned in manifestos and articles by artists and critics in the 80s, were now replaced by Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Lyotard, Jameson, and Rorty. Yet it must be noted that the intellectual discourse on post-modernism was carried out in a fundamentally haphazard manner. There was no center, or rather no ‘center and periphery’—rather, there was a developmental hodgepodge: traditional symbols juxtaposed with modernist ones; ideological caricatures; market operations trumping ultimate goals; the cry of feminism; melancholy feelings about the past and discontentment towards the present. This was the thematic hodgepodge discussed by theorists and intuited and expressed by artists.

In art circles, obviously, the adoption of post-modern concepts among Chinese artists occurred not only in painting but also in installation, performance, and conceptual art. Concomitant with this was a growing tide of consumerism and the popular cultural tastes it brought in its wake, which in turn became the support and justification for ‘post-modern’ works. Even at so-called ‘underground’ exhibitions, where acts of political confrontation were taking place, artists were unable to shake off the impulse of seeking ‘selling points’ for their works.

The exhibition ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989,’ which debuted in Hong Kong in January 1993, became a focal point of interest and controversy both in the Chinese art world and abroad. Organized by Johnson Tsong-zung Chang of Hong Kong’s Hanart TZ Gallery, the exhibition subsequently traveled to a number of international venues. The international art community began to develop a more positive understanding of Chinese contemporary art through this exhibition, which was pivotal in propelling Chinese experimental art onto the international stage. Likewise in 1993, the Italian art critic, historian, and curator Achille Bonito Oliva emerged as a key figure in the international promotion of Chinese art. Oliva had a significant impact on the fate of a number of Chinese artists who at this time were seeking to participate directly in the international art scene and the art market. As director of the Forty-Fifth Venice Biennale in 1993, Oliva demonstrated his interest in and support for Chinese contemporary art by inviting a group of experimental artists to participate in the Biennale that year—an event that caused great excitement in the Chinese art world, as these artists were the first representatives of Chinese contemporary art truly ‘to go international.’ Their participation at Venice came to be regarded as the first step in building a bridge between Chinese contemporary art and the international community, and for many years this event would remain a highly controversial topic in Chinese art circles.

In March 1993, another influential exhibition of Chinese experimental art, titled like its predecessor in 1989 the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition, and organized by Hans Van Dijk, opened in Berlin and later traveled to Oxford, England, while in June of that year the exhibition ‘Mao Goes Pop’ opened in Sydney, Australia. In October 1994 a group of Chinese contemporary artists participated in the Twenty-Second International Bienal de São Paulo. In the ensuing years, Chinese contemporary artists increasingly became a presence in large- and small-scale international exhibitions and art events. As Chinese artists began to establish their presence on the international art stage, the question of identity and status also began to emerge. It became an important issue whether Chinese art and artists, after gaining entry to the international arena, were at the center or on the periphery. Since Chinese artists were frequently invited to take part in international exhibitions held in the West, the question of the so-called ‘international identity’ of Chinese art was a dilemma in the Chinese art world.

Compared to previous periods, in the decade after 1997 the Chinese art scene undoubtedly entered an ideological cooling-down period. Post-Cold War issues, military confrontations, regional conflicts, economic crises, religious revivals, geopolitical realignments of power structures, the proliferation of crime, all simply became a background of ‘old news’ that Chinese artists might or might not find interesting; or perhaps they were just fabrications cooked up by the media, or events like those discussed

by Samuel P. Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The events occurring on the international and domestic fronts no longer gave rise to the waves of unified moral response that characterized the 1980s, or raised concerns over issues of rationality and justice.

In China, 1998 was known as the year of ‘shoring up defenses.’ The devastating floods of that year once again flung the country’s heavy historical burden back into the faces of its artists, who in the past had shown so much concern over the fate of the nation. Now, however, they showed no interest in the ‘grand narrative,’ but only indifference. In the personal photo albums of many artists, their images in snapshots from the late 1970s and 1980s are animated by a spirit of openness and idealism, while photos from the 1990s show faces set into expressions of self-centered complacency and an increasingly jaded worldliness. The plethora of art events and the myriad transformations in the arts occurring throughout the 1990s made one thing very clear: the age of essentialism was over.

The Influence of Western Civilization and the Adjustment of Traditional Thinking

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(preceding page) 1.1 Li Tiefu, The Musician, 1918, oil painting, 68 x 56 cm

1.2 Attributed to Mateus Van (Madiaoshi Yun) Martyrs in Nagasaki, Japan, 1640, oil on canvas 28

Background: Developments in the Late Ming and Subsequent Years Early in the 15th century, the Portuguese had already entered southern China. As trade routes continually expanded and reports of a mysterious country trickled back homeward, Christian missionaries who wanted to spread the Gospels to every corner of the world were not far behind. The Chinese people’s first exposure to Western art was in connection with the Jesuit order. In the seventh year (1579) of the Wanli Emperor’s reign (1572-1620), Italian Jesuit missionary Michael Ruggieri brought ‘finely executed color paintings of holy subjects’ for the Chinese people. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was the Jesuit missionary who won greatest renown in China. After arriving in Macau in 1582, Ricci went on to win recognition from the emperor for his polymath talents and was granted permission to set up the first mission house in Beijing. The art objects Ricci presented to the Wanli Emperor included images of Mary and Jesus.1 The contemporary scholar Gu Qiyuan (1565-1628) described how some of the religious illustrations Ricci presented were executed ‘with lifelike effect by applying several colors to a brass plate.’

Figurative illustrations were, understandably, an important proselytizing medium for the missionaries from the outset, and so Jesuits from Portugal and Spain invariably brought with them religious pictures, illustrated tracts, and a variety of woodcuts. Given that more than 400 religious books were translated into Chinese by the end of the 18th century, one can surmise wide dissemination of Western images by that time. Initially in order to circumvent the visual confusion that had arisen among some potential Chinese converts between the Madonna and Bodhisattva Guanyin, ‘Provider of Sons’ (Songzi Guanyin), a Jesuit named Giovanni Niccolò (1563-1629), who had accompanied Matteo Ricci to Macau in 1583, painted The Savior—perhaps the first Western painting to be created in China— attempting to render a distinctly un-Chinese image by showing Jesus with an orb in one hand and a cross in the other. Niccolò, described by Ricci as ‘the first master to teach European painting techniques to the Japanese and Chinese,’2 was sent in 1601 to Nagasaki where he founded a fine arts school at which he taught oil painting and etching. You Wenhui (1575-1633), a pupil whom Niccolò took to Japan, produced many religious paintings on his return to China. Although Ricci disparaged his talents, You Wenhui’s Portrait of Matteo Ricci (1610) still hangs in a Jesuit church in Rome and is thought to be the earliest extant work by a Chinese oil painter. Another artist who emerged from this school in Japan was Jacques Niva (1579-1638). After reaching China in 1601, this painter of mixed Chinese and Japanese parentage traveled frequently to Macau, Nanjing, and Beijing, and from 1601 to 1610, as Niccolò’s student, Niva painted many works in oil treating religious subjects for various Catholic churches in Beijing, Macau, and Nanchang. Those recorded in documents include Saint Luke and the Holy Mother Holding the Infant Jesus (December 1603) painted in Beijing; the altar painting The Assumption of Mary painted in 1606 for the restoration of the Church of Saint Paul, which had been damaged in a fire; and The Savior and The Holy Mother Mary painted for two new churches in Nanchang in 1607. In 1610 he again entered the capital to paint murals for a new church and decorative pictures for Matteo Ricci’s tomb. Jacques Niva was considered an outstanding painter, and the painting of Archangel Michael still housed in Macau’s Saint Joseph’s Seminary is probably his work.

Although the technique is Western, one can easily associate the use of line, proportions, and ornaments with Japanese and Oriental painting.

The painter Giuseppe Castiglione was a visible figure at court during the reigns of three emperors—Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong. He arrived in Beijing in the winter of 1715, and like other Western missionary painters he received a high official title from the emperor. However, they were obliged to paint according to the emperor’s demands. The result was a unique Sino-European style characterized by accuracy of shape and attention to structure, but minimizing chiaroscuro in order to work in a flat, decorative style reflecting Chinese taste.

China Trade Painting In 1685, the Qing government re-opened China to maritime trade, and established four customs authorities (Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangnan). It was not long before Westerners began engaging in trading activities in a leased area on the banks of the Pearl River to the west of Guangzhou that came to be known in English as the Thirteen Factories. 3 According to accounts, Giuseppe Castiglione lived there for a time. From around 1720 onwards, what are today called China Trade Paintings (waixiao-hua) began to make their appearance, and these gradually came to include oil paintings, paintings on glass, watercolors, and crayon drawings, that took as their subject ceremonies, events, maritime scenes, buildings, people, production, flowers, birds, animals, customs, and urban life. The appearance of these paintings is easily explained by the fact that these were painted illustrations that foreigners in China for trade or travel could take home with them to show their friends and family something of the scenes and customs of China and satisfy their curiosity.

Workshops were established that could paint pictures in wholesale batches. The pictures favored by Westerners were works painted on paper, or sometimes with colors applied to wood or glass. Because these workshops produced pictures to be sold in Europe and America, art historians gave them the name China Trade Paintings. At first the subject matter concentrated on the production of silk, tea, and ceramics, or on plants and flowers, but later it widened to a more abundant range of subjects.

Most of the painting shops and the studios producing these works were located in Jingyuan and Tongwen streets (which the foreigners called ‘China Street’) within the area of the Thirteen Factories.

After 1800, even though problems compounded in Sino-Western relations, the contact and understanding continued. From 1757 to 1840, Guangzhou was the only Chinese port and it became the city in China most visited by foreigners.4 As trade and personal contacts increased, the use of illustrations to transmit information matured. In a series of paintings on a ceramic service executed between 1770 and 1790, we can see that the painter was clearly influenced by perspective in Western paintings, although in handling the relations of perspective he showed naivety and laxity. Yet one can see that the painter mostly paid attention to the stages of manufacture and the expression of an exotic charm.

The painter used watercolors, so the wash technique was unnaturally unlike that of Chinese painting.

A series of paintings on tea production from around 1800 is quite similar in its mode of expression, in perspective, chiaroscuro, and its stylistic treatment of trees. The explanatory intention of the work also remains important. The intended buyer and viewer of these pictures was undoubtedly European.

The painter’s treatment of the subject concentrates on stages of cultivation, picking, processing, and purchasing, and the artisan painter or the master of the atelier clearly believed that the viewer would be interested in these stages of production.

The subject matter of China Trade Paintings gave abundant expression to life in Guangzhou, with vendors, performers, monks, stonemasons, scribes, Western buildings, distilleries, knife-sharpeners,

1.3 You Wenhui (Manuel Perdra Yeou), Portrait of Matteo Ricci, 1610, oil painting on wood

1.4 Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining), Grazing Horses on Pastures at Edge of City, Qianlong period of Qing Dynasty, colored ink on silk, 51 x 166 cm

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1.5 Repairing Bowls, c.1790, watercolor on paper, 36 x 46 cm 1.6 Selling Books, c.1790, watercolor on paper, 36 x 46 cm 1.7 Fluffing Cotton, c.1790, watercolor on paper, 36 x 46 cm 1.8 Making Stone Mills, c.1790, watercolor on paper, 36 x 46 cm

tailors, cotton fluffers, millers, glassmakers, food stalls, one-man shows, bookstalls, singers, fortune tellers, and street-side militia members providing a panorama of city life under the Qing Dynasty, and providing a rich visual source for understanding the social life of the time.

1.9 George Chinnery, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 23 x 18.5 cm 30

The Influence of Western Painters Early China Trade Paintings were close to Chinese paintings in expressive style. From the 19th century onwards there was a tendency towards realism, and at the height of such trade, there were dozens of shops employing thousands of artisan painters to produce China Trade Paintings. The scale was astounding. Yet it is not clear how painters from Europe influenced Chinese painters and through them the artisans in the workshops. Obviously, the numerous art reproductions that Westerners brought with them must have been the models from which a great many anonymous painters learned.5 Subsequently, imitations of Western art done by Chinese artists were shipped off to be sold in Europe and America.

So frequent were the exchanges that soon after the departure of a traveling European painter, his style and techniques would give rise to a large number of reproductions done in the workshops. Examples are the painters August Borget (1807-77) from France and Marciano Antonio Baptista (1826-96) from Portugal. The former arrived in Guangzhou around September 1838 and only remained for ten months in China, but his painted works had a prolonged influence on trade painters. The latter was a student who the English painter George Chinnery (1774-1852) thought highly of. Baptista eventually became a painting teacher in his own right and left numerous highly praised works. There were quite a number of Western painters who had similar influence,6 but Chinnery was more important than the rest.

George Chinnery was highly trained. In 1792 he was admitted to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Unlike the patchy art training received by the missionaries, he was educated by the widely honored head of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Chinnery’s portrait of Mrs Da Silva Pinto, Wife of the Portuguese Governor of Macau, painted in 1840, has a style reminiscent of Reynolds.

In May 1802, in order to flee his wife, he traveled to India, where he made a living by painting portraits, and in 1807 on arriving in Calcutta he won a reputation for his portrait of Sir Henry Russell, the Chief Justice of Bengal. By 1825, Chinnery had reached Macau, where he would live until his death.

Here we need to fill in some background to Chinnery’s work in China. By 1839, over 300 foreigners from America, Germany, Holland, France, Denmark, and other countries were already living in the Thirteen Factories district, and aside from the normal shops, offices, and warehouses, there was a library, an armory, and Western-style refectories. One could hear English spoken everywhere and see the families of Western merchants any time. The Westerners had what amounted to their own little

1.10 Auguste Borget, The Square Outside the Temple of Magu, 1838 colored lithograph, 29 x 41.5 cm

world. In an oil painting of a gathering held in one of the mercantile factories, done by an anonymous painter around 1840, we can see a gathering in a completely Western-style salon. Given such a setting, it is not hard to understand why Western painting was popular in the Guangzhou area. Before Chinnery came to China, the mainstream taste was Italian and Dutch style, but after the arrival of this English painter, the English style became more popular. Unlike many missionaries, Chinnery’s reason for coming to China was probably quite personal. He had lived in India for twenty-three years, and he came to China to get away from his wife and creditors. He normally lived in Macau, but whenever he heard news that a creditor or ‘the ugliest woman I have set eyes upon’ was due to arrive, he would pick up his portfolio and hide in the Thirteen Factories or along the small streets of neighboring Guangzhou. Usually he sought refuge in the offices of the merchants of Imperial Austria. In the Thirteen Factories, he came to be invited by Western merchants of means to give painting lessons to their family members. Chinnery was widely respected in this new environment. He received commissions to paint portraits and landscapes; at the same time he completed many paintings reflecting the daily lives of Chinese people. In Macau, Chinnery completed over 1,000 sketches and sketchbooks using pencil, steel-tipped pen, or pastels to depict the streets of Macau, dwellings, churches, forts, beaches, markets, and a variety of people ranging from fishermen, soldiers, and merchants to priests and temple-goers.

In The Canton Register of December 8, 1835, we can read the following in an article titled ‘Chinese Painters’: ‘Today our attention has been drawn to a Chinese painter whose works are far above those of mediocre artisan painters. This is Lamgua, outstanding apprentice of the painter George Chinnery.’

There was more than one painter known by the name Lamgua (‘Lin Gua’). The Lamgua whom for now we can confirm to be Lin Gua was commonly known as Guan Qiaochang. A large number of works bear his name, which he signed in English as Lamgua. Guan Qiaochang (1801-54) was born at a time when the Chinese painter Shi Beilin (Spoilum) was at the height of his fame, and Shi was the model Guan looked up to before 1825 when Chinnery arrived in Macau. Shi Beilin’s portrait on glass of English ship’s captain Thomas Fry was completed in 1774 in Guangzhou. Other works by him have been discovered, marked with the years 1805 and 1806. Thus we have reason to believe that he was active from the 1770s to the early 1800s, and that he was the first China Trade painter to be famous for his oil portraits in Guangzhou. People have also noticed the name Guan Zuolin and some surmise that Guan Zuolin and Shi Beilin were identical, or that the former was the latter’s son. The important thing is that this Guan Zuolin, who also went by the name of Lamgua, was an influential oil painter.

Nanhai County Gazetteer records: Guan Zuolin, with the soubriquet Cangsong, was a native of Zhujing village in Jiangpusi. Being poor in his youth, he wished for an occupation to support himself, 31

1.11 George Chinnery, Director of the Macao Ophthalmic Hospital Dr Thomas Kerridge and Chinese Patient, c.1835, oil painting

but he did not want to learn an art that would subject him to others. He attached himself to a cargo ship and traveled to America and countries of Europe.

He liked the verisimilitude of their oil painting, so he sought ways to learn and master it. He returned to China and set up shop in the Guangzhou city. His lifelike portraits were highly admired by viewers. In the middle years of the Jiaqing reign this skill was just beginning to enter China. Westerners were amazed at this work that was far beyond their expectations.

Basically this ‘Lamgua’ named Guan Zuolin was active in the middle years of the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820), and no later than 1825, but the Lamgua who was Chinnery’s student (Guan Qiaochang) was an important painter active in the mid-1800s.

After Guan Qiaochang became Chinnery’s student, not only was there a change in his style, it even became difficult to distinguish his works from his teacher’s. Within a few years, Guan Qiaochang set himself up in his own premises. From written accounts we can imagine his studio, which was much like that of a present-day artist. On the wall hung an English portrait painting that he used as a model of technique, and on all sides he had placed art reproductions brought to him by Western clients. Visitors streamed into his studio steadily, asking to have portraits painted. The important thing is not that he absorbed a foreign style—namely the ‘grand manner’ pioneered by Reynolds.

Guan Qiaochang’s importance lies in his remarkable mastery of Western technique and taste. When his works were exhibited in America, they were thought to be ‘comparable with the most academic American or English painters of the time.’ This is obviously related to the painter’s natural talent, yet it also demonstrated that even someone with a background in Chinese literati painting could apply oil paints to canvas with great sensitivity, using a horizontally held brush in the Western manner, and create outstanding works.7 Documentation shows that Guan Qiaochang, in one way or another, can be called Chinnery’s pupil, because the latter agreed to lend his works to Guan, albeit with compensation, so that Guan could copy their style; Chinnery often visited Guan’s workshop to buy paints and materials and left his works at Guan’s establishment so that Guan could act as his sales agent. For a Chinese painter gifted enough to learn simply by copying works, conversing, and collaborating in business, this was an excellent form of training and instruction.

The open-door policy in the second half of the 19th century invigorated Shanghai’s economy. After 1852 Shanghai’s annual trade figures were already ahead of Guangzhou’s. Shanghai held greater appeal for artists who wanted to sell a lot of paintings. For instance, the Guangzhou painter Chow Qua (Zhou Gua) went to Shanghai and opened a painting shop to make his living. Documents record that Chow Qua ‘was skilled at painting portraits, houses, miniatures, and marketplaces.’ On most of his works were labels bearing his name, written in calligrapher’s ink. One landscape of Shanghai is signed with his name, and the style is similar to that of Samgua. Chow Qua’s paintings are remarkable for fine depiction of detail. 8 In his Waterfront Scene, we can see the painter’s absorption in the scenery of this colonial city.

Dianshi Studio Illustrated The opening up of Shanghai led to the rapid introduction of Western culture to that city. Shanghai’s Dianshi Studio Illustrated, an illustrated journal of current events, chronicled that development over fourteen years from 1884 onwards. Its founder Frances Major seemed to have been convinced that unless his pictorial reported horrific and sensational news events it would not attract readers, and so he encouraged the artist Wu Youru (died 1893) to do his utmost to depict current events, including some from abroad. The illustration from Dianshi Studio Illustrated accompanying an item titled English Prince Viewing Lanterns on the Bund in Shanghai is remarkably similar to a photograph taken in 1887 of festivities and bunting along Shanghai’s Bund. True-to-life reportorial pictures were very popular, and people were more receptive than ever to news images reflecting everyday life. The celebrated Wu Youru came from Wu county, Suzhou. He must surely have seen many traditional woodblock illustrations, and would have been familiar with the line-drawing techniques used in their execution. Wu Youru adapted readily to perspective and other newer techniques, although he often retained the traditional use of parallel lines in depicting buildings. In keeping with the periodical’s grab bag of content, the subjects of Wu Youru’s illustrations ranged from current events, urban life, and folklore, to foreign exotica. People tended to view them for their informative or narrative interest. His pictures along with their captions resembled explanatory popular reading matter: there were no graceful, captivating trees or flowers, nor did his brushwork have traditional ‘resonant force.’ 9 Literati inhabiting the old courtyards and the remnant members of waning clans did not take such illustrations seriously as art, but they relied on pictorials and other media to understand the outside world. In fact, it was the

1.12 George Chinnery, Mrs Da Silva Pinto, Wife of the Portuguese Governor of Macao, c.1840, oil painting

1.13 Lam Qua (Guan Qiaochang or Cantonese: Kwan Kiu Cheong), Patient of Dr Peter Parker (Po Ashing) After an Operation, c.1836-37, oil painting 33

1.14 Sum Qua, Album Illustrating the Tea Trade, Set of twelve plates: (1) Hoeing the Fields; (2) Broadcasting Seed; (3) Scattering Fertilizer; (4) Collecting Tea Leaves; (5) Selecting Leaves; (6) Drying Leaves in Sun; (7) Re-Selecting Leaves; (8) Roasting Leaves; (9) Rolling Tea and Sifting Tea; (10) Packaging Tea; (11) Transporting Tea; (12) Selling Tea; 1843, each 13.7 x 23.5 cm (opposite page) 1.15 Shi Beilin, Portrait of an Englishman, c.1770, greasepaint on glass, 38 x 28 cm

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1.16 Chow Qua (Zhou Gua), Waterfront Scene, 1850-85, watercolor, 28 x 52 cm

new-style media like Dianshi Studio Illustrated that introduced new knowledge and informed people of the events in Shanghai and beyond that were daily changing people’s understanding of the world.

Tushanwan and its Influence In 1847 the Spanish monk Joannes Ferrer (1811-56) was dispatched to Shanghai. Ferrer had received excellent training in art from an early age. Later he was sent to Rome by his father to continue his studies, but he followed his inner feelings and became a monk. His main job in Shanghai was to preside over design of the church at Dongjiadu. At the same time, he was to paint sacred images and engage in sculpture projects. The church was to be decorated with religious art. Because of work requirements, he set up a workshop to train assistants and guide the work of craftsmen. With the support of Father Admianus Languillas, he added an art classroom where he trained apprentices in art and sculpture on the foundation of the workshop at the southeast corner of Saint Ignatius Church in Xujiahui. In 1852 Ferrer accepted Lu Bodu, a student recommended by Father Languillas, but the number of students he accepted was quite small. When he died in 1856, Father Nicolas Massa, who had

1.17 Dianshi Studio Illustrated [Dianshi-zhai Huabao], page showing illustration of General Ulysses Grant on his Sickbed

1.18 Photograph taken in 1887 showing Roman Catholic celebration on the Bund in Shanghai 36

1.19 Dianshi Studio Illustrated [Dianshi-zhai Huabao], page showing illustration of English Prince Viewing Lanterns on the Bund in Shanghai

entered Ferrer’s Xujiahui workshop back in 1851 as a teacher, took over leadership of the workshop at Saint Ignatius Church. The Chinese monk Lu Bodu continued his training under Massa, who transmitted additional specific knowledge of painting technique and pigment manufacture. At the end of 1864, the orphanage run by the Catholic Church at Dongjiadu was moved to Tushanwan along the shore of Zhaojiabang, in south Xujiahui. It was probably around this time that the monk Lu Bodu became the first Chinese head of this painting and sculpture workshop (a position he held until 1869). Three years later the orphanage was expanded, a chapel was added, and the number of orphans reached 342.

Documents record that although the fine arts school founded in 1852 by Ferrer was incorporated into the orphanage in 1864, the school’s site remained at the rectory in Xujiahui. A single fine arts school expanded into a fine arts factory with multiple capabilities. In 1867 Lu Bodu and his student Liu Dezhai moved the fine arts factory to Tushanwan. Due to Lu Bodu’s chronic illness, from 1869 Liu Dezhai presided over the painting and sculpture workshops in his stead.

Liu Dezhai (1843-1912), whose secular name was Liu Bizhen, was a friend of Ren Bonian.10 He was a native of Changshu county (now Changshu city) in the Suzhou area. He probably became Massa’s and Lu Bodu’s student after Ferrer’s death. After Lu Bodu’s death, he served as head of the Tushanwan atelier for over twenty years. Documents record that Liu Dezhai’s variant holy image Chinese Madonna and Child was a revised instance of the subject, done according to his understanding as a Chinese painter. However, we can only make a simple judgment based on an indistinct photograph.

We can make out that the characteristics of the Madonna-image are unmistakably Chinese, and even that she is wearing Qing-era garments.

As an important part of the Tushanwan fine arts factory, the atelier gave instruction in watercolor, pencil, fountain pen, Chinese brush technique, charcoal, and oil painting. Subject matter almost always touched upon religion. The workshop also copied European oil paintings and produced stained glass works for sale. Quite a few Chinese orphans learned techniques of Western painting and sculpture here, which had an effect on the future dissemination of Western art materials and methods.

Although the scope and artistic purpost limited the young students’ further consideration of the ideas that might lie behind these methods, nevertheless, grasp of perspective, chiaroscuro, and related knowledge would naturally elicit new ways of examining the actual world in the minds of sensitive students. Moreover, they were likely to use those ways in their observation of things. Tushanwan paintings went through the workshop’s period of decline and the destructive effects of political chaos.

1.20 Painting atelier at Tushanwan (T’ou-Se-We)

1.21 Photograph of 1912 taken at the time of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Tushanwan (T’ou-Se-We) studios 37

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The only documents that might help us understand that period are books remaining from Tushanwan, such as Simple Explanation of Painting, and Studies in Pencil Drawing. These books explain sketching, perspective, human anatomy for oil painting, and watercolor techniques. These texts provided model drawings for the orphans to trace or copy.

Right after his graduation, the Tushanwan student Xu Yongqing (1880-1953), used materials that put him outside of tradition. He opened a watercolor studio and turned out commercial illustrations.

Xu Yongqing never gave up his studies of traditional ink art, but even at the age of sixty he was willing to learn Western painting techniques from Liu Dezhai. He was quite sensitive to the pictures and icons that were to be seen everywhere along streets and alleys; he was willing to design and execute pictures for commercial use—cover designs and illustrations, landscapes, portraits, and other commercial paintings, whether landscape, human figure or portrait. In the artworks and applied commercial art that appeared in the colonial city of Shanghai, whether as backdrops for photography studios, stage sets, or as advertising pictures, one could see that within a limited context, the rich expressiveness of perspective, chiaroscuro, physical structure, and abundant color were coming into acceptance.

The idea of illustrated monthly calendars (yuefen pai) can be traced back to 1896 with the Shanghai Prosperity Scenes, distributed as gifts by the Hongfulai Company. Early in the century, monthly calendar paintings emerged as an integration of traditional ink art and Western techniques from the brushes of painters who pursued innovation in art. As painters grew in their ability to exploit this medium, monthly calendar paintings constituted the most widespread form of imagery to be 1.22 Photograph of 1910 showing the newly completed church of the French Jesuits, Saint Ignatius in the Zikawei (Xujiahui) district of Shanghai

1.23 Li Zheng (signed), The Suffering of Christ, oil on canvas, 32.5 x 25 cm 38

1.24 Reproduction of four individual pages of a sketchbook produced by the Tushanwan (T’ou-Se-We) Painting School in Shanghai

seen in everyday life. The resulting calendar paintings—accessible and expressive of new urban life— proved popular. Although traditional calendar woodcuts and the ubiquitous advertising illustrations provided the ‘genes’ of monthly calendar paintings, only the transmission of Western art methods could have stimulated the birth of this new painting form. In fact, the process that gave birth to this style of painting was a reconciliation of tradition and Westernization. It allowed people of this period to undergo gradual, ongoing change in their visual habits. Zhou Muqiao is considered the most famous representative of the early monthly calendar painters. He was a student of Wu Youru and an important contributor to Dianshi Studio Illustrated and Feiying Hall Pictorial. As a nimble-minded, fashionable painter, he helped commercial painting in its transitional phase to quickly gain approval.

On a foundation of traditional fine-brush paintings and calendar woodcuts, he added techniques of chiaroscuro and texturing. Even in old-style landscapes and human figures, his treatment conveyed plenty of depth and solidity. His subjects were mostly taken from history and mythology, but his pictures gave an effect of delicacy and highly Western taste. He painted many early advertisements for foreign companies.

Later one could see the even more fashionable paintings of Zheng Mantuo (1888-1961), whose works were described as ‘foreign calendar paintings’ and who ushered in the true heyday of monthly calendar paintings. In his early years, Zheng had set up a painting room in a photography studio in Hangzhou. He had abundant experience retouching photographs for professionals. Thus it was easy for him to use graphite as a base, sketching the subject’s outline and light-shadow relations, and then on the foundation of this black and white sketch applying watercolors, layering on color until the picture surface looked rich and saturated. People called this ‘textured watercolor’ (ca-bi shuicai).

Especially worth noting is the painter’s penchant for fashionable beauties, producing images that were worlds away from the aristocratic womens with which people were familiar in figurative works.

With the help of modern garments, accessories, and other commercial icons, the painter executed widely circulated works capturing modern aesthetic taste. Zheng Mantuo won the favor of Shanghai businessmen with his scenes of lovely women.

The famous calendar painter Hang Xiying (1901-47) was from Yanguan town in Haining, Zhejiang.

At the age on thirteen he went to Shanghai, where Commercial Press hired him as a drawing apprentice and he was personally trained by Xu Yongqing. Advertising assignments at Commercial Press aroused Hang Xiying’s painting talent. In 1920, Hang set up his own establishment, just when color separation print technology appeared. This created favorable conditions to disseminate Hang’s fashionable taste in advertising and packaging design. Besides his special talent at designing packages for products, his way of combining advertising design with monthly calendar paintings made him a model for other painters at the time. Market demand and his confidence in his own painting eventually

1.25 Zhou Muqiao, 1914, advertising poster for the Xiehe Trading Company, 75 x 53 cm

1.26 Xie Zhiguang, A Different Interest by the Pool, late 1930s, poster, 63.5 x 41 cm 39

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led him to set up his own famous studio. He accepted apprentices and hired colleagues to specialize in commercial design and calendar art. Li Mubai and Ji Xuechen were both members of his studio.

Among calendar painters who were active in the 1930s we can enumerate names like Ding Yunxian, Hu Baixiang, Xie Zhiguang, Jin Meisheng, and Zhang Biwu. As monthly calendar paintings developed, painters used more implements and materials of Western painting. Relying on their gifts of observation, a great many calendar painters made wide use of Western techniques to paint Chinese subjects.

In the future this would have an effect on new calendar paintings and other types of Chinese-inflected new painting.

Zhou Xiang (1871-1934), who was thought by Xu Beihong to have been ‘steeped in knowledge’ from the Tushanwan, is possibly the first Chinese painter to open a school for new fine arts instruction. On December 28, 1910, Shanghai’s Minli Bao published Zhou Xiang’s Charter of the Shanghai Oil Painting Institute. The Charter told readers that the school ‘provides special instruction in new style pictorial arts and researched knowledge and techniques needed for pictorial arts, to train specialists who can effectively engage in education and applied arts.’ 11 The Charter listed the following content of its oil painting curriculum: color mixing, light-and-shadow method, depth of field method, life drawing method, landscape painting method, and figure painting method. These instructional methods obviously appropriated the instructional methods for painting techniques that Westerners had used in China. The pencil drawing techniques mentioned in the Charter—texturing and shading method, light and dark method, actual object drawing method, outdoor drawing method—were already quite close to the concept of ‘sketching’ that would later become familiar. From 1909 to 1922, Zhou Xiang founded the Visual Arts Vocational School, Visual Arts Intensive Program, Shanghai Oil Painting Institute, Chinese-Western Visual Arts Correspondence Academy, Backdrop Painting Instruction Center, and China Fine Arts University, which were thought to have given training to over 1,000 students.

Decades later, when Xu Beihong looked back at the early stage of the new art movement, he made this evaluation: ‘Tushanwan was the cradle of Western painting in China. Yet no confirmable Tushanwan paintings survive. The blame for this is usually laid upon the final depredations of the Cultural Revolution. The picture chosen for this book is one of the extremely few Tushanwan works that can still be seen. Embedded in the frame is a brass plate with these words etched in small regular characters: ‘In the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-Six, on the Eighteenth of May, we congratulate Brothers Mao Lun, Dai Aihua and Feng Aowu on their ordination, presented by the firstlevel students at Lord’s Heart Orphanage in Xuhu.’ This painting depicts Jesus suffering on the Cross, but unlike other works of its kind, the portrayal is rich in authenticity; the painter took care to make the skin lifelike; the warm and cold light from right and left give this Christ a rich three-dimensional feel. Moreover, complex gradations reveal the painter’s interest in the effects of light and color.

1.27 Zheng Mantuo, advertising poster for Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, early 1930s, 104 x 30 cm

1.28 Zhiying Studios, Song of the Pipa, 1929, Mingzhi Zhitang Company advertising calendar 1.29 Liang Saizhu performing on the pipa, Beiyang Huabao (Northern Pictorial), Tianjin, December 7, 1927 40

1.30 Photograph (c.1925) of calendar artists.

From left to right: Zhou Bosheng, Zheng Mantuo, Pan Dawei, Ding Song, Li Mubai, Xie Zhiguang, Ding Yunxian, Xu Yongqing, Zhang Guangyu

The Adjustment of Traditional Thought Western influence and China’s naval defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 prompted deep reflection among the brightest thinkers at the court. In 1898, Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), the official in charge of foreign affairs during the Guangxu reign, issued Exhortation to Study, in which he called on people to study diligently, emulate the West, and prepare lucid and well-argued popular academic reading materials. He also made clear what viewpoint he thought the Chinese should adopt: ‘The Four Books, The Five Classics, China’s histories, works on statecraft and ancient maps are all “old studies”; Western politics, Western arts, and Western history constitute “new studies.” The old studies form the corpus of tradition, but the new studies are practical and cannot be neglected.’ (Exhortation to Study, ‘Implementing Study,’ Chapter 3) He also equated Chinese learning with the old and Western learning with the new: ‘Chinese learning is directed inwards while Western learning is directed outwards; Chinese learning is for cultivation of the mind, while Western learning is used to tackle world affairs. One should not be confined by the classics, nor obstinately follow the meaning of the classics.

If one has the mind of a sage and acts like a sage, then one will have a morality based on filial concern and loyalty to the truth, and a political attitude which respects one’s master and protects the people; in the morning one will drive a a car and in the evening take a train, none of which will tarnish one’s sagely behavior.’ (Exhortation to Study, ‘Understanding,’ Chapter 13) Such thinking demonstrated that the traditions of the Chinese literati could no longer compete with the practicality of Western skills, and also signified that knowledge from the West together with Confucian intellectual traditions had their own social or inner applications and were not contradictory. Such an attitude was of course an acceptance at that time of Western science, technology, and related knowledge.

Of course, the changes in the intellectual climate in the late Qing period were extremely complex and academic debate was in the main limited to the confines of the Han and Song interpretations of the Confucian texts. This had a complex intellectual history, and those taking part in the raging debate that gripped intellectuals could never be simply classified as falling into the school of Han studies, Song studies, or the new text schools. The schools evolved and divided in response to different times and different situations. Yet, prior to the 1898 Reforms, ‘Han studies, Song studies, and the new text schools, in accordance with actual demands of statecraft, effected compromises.’ 12 These had the aim of bringing order to government in times of turmoil. From an ethical standpoint, most people could have an inner expectation that society and the nation were waiting for reform that would facilitate healthy development, but complex conflicts of ethnicity, interests, and civilization frequently toppled the walls of that fragile morality. Like Confucian civilization, Western civilization was itself a naturally self-sufficient structure; what complicated matters was the situation whereby a missionary could provide an item of knowledge drawn from Western civilization, but how was this isolated item able to play a rational role within another system of civilization that was undergoing a process of complex change? History provides so many examples of how a chance misunderstanding or conflict can bring about total rejection or conflict within a specific context in another civilization. At different times, changes ranging from politics, economics, military matters, to the entire material transformation of social life saw a change from a categorical rejection of Western studies, to the pretence that Western studies had originated in China, a view favored by the Kangxi Emperor, to the call for new studies that were practical. The result of these changes in approach brought about social changes, at the same time as they reflected them. For this reason, when the constant conflicts between the Qing government and the Western powers elicited 41

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1.31 The first batch of thirty Chinese children sent by the Qing government to study in the USA, 1872

different responses, Zhang Zhidong made the following assessment of the situation: Those who seek to remedy the present situation talk of new learning; those who fear that it will impede the Way hold fast to the teachings of the ancients. Both groups are unable to reach agreement. The conservatives resemble those who give up eating because they have difficulty in swallowing, while the progressives are like a flock of sheep that has arrived at the crossroads and does not know where to turn.

The former do not know how to adapt; the latter are ignorant of what is fundamental.

Not knowing how to adapt, the conservatives have no way to confront the enemy and deal with the crisis; not knowing what is fundamental, the innovators regard the teachings of the sages with contempt. Thus those who cling to the old order increasingly despise the innovators who in turn violently detest the conservatives.

As the two groups are engaged in mutual recriminations, imposters and adventurers who do not hesitate to resort to falsification and distortion pour out their theories to confuse the people. Students are consequently in doubt as to which course to pursue, while perverse opinions spread throughout the country. When the enemy comes, we do not fight him; yet when the enemy does not come, we fight among ourselves. I fear that China’s crisis does not come from abroad, but is fomented right here inside China.’ (Exhortation to Study, ‘Implementing Study,’ Chapter 3) Resembling the complex debates raging in intellectual circles regarding ‘the Confucian tradition’ (daotong) or ‘the orthodox tradition’ (zhengtong), theoretical divisions also appeared in calligraphy and painting circles, for example the ramifications of Dong Qichang’s arguments about southern and northern traditions of painting, and according to individuals’ personal tastes and inclinations, notions of ‘orthodoxy’ (zheng) and ‘heterodoxy’ (xie) gradually emerged. Ordinarily, for those who venerated the painters of ‘the southern school’ (nanzong), the northern school was ‘heterodox,’ and this viewpoint had held ever since Dong Qichang first proposed the theory of southern and northern schools. The basic reason for this state of affairs was the high regard for ‘literati’ tastes emanating from the literati class. Put simply, the southern school had come to be seen as an encapsulation of literati tastes and as having a line of continuity harking back to the ‘spirit of the idea’ or ‘ideational spirit’ (yiqi) proposed by Su Dongpo and others.

The taste of the northern school was regarded as somewhat cruder, as described in the Ming Dynasty

by Shen Hao (1586-1661): ‘Chan Buddhism and painting both have southern and northern schools, and at the same time as they are separate their spirit is also diametrically opposed […] The northern school is structured on the painting style of Li Sixun, which is strident and unique and is executed with urgency and toughness, but painters such as Zhao Gan, Boju, Bosu, Ma Yuan, and Xia Gui, down to Dai Wenjin, Wu Xiaoxian, and Zhang Pingshan exemplify a mediocre inheritance of his tradition.’ (Hua chen) 42

This critical ranking and categorization naturally comes with the hallmark of individual taste or authority. Later, in arguments discussing painting and the practice of calligraphy and painting, the concept of ‘heterodoxy’ was applied to painting that lacked clear sources and such a situation hampered and vexed people. By the beginning of the Republican period, the spirit and practice of these long chewed over traditional principles of painting were simply summarized by those with Western learning as hackneyed, so that ‘for the entire 300 years of the Qing Dynasty there was no painting,’ to quote Chen Xiaodie.

However, in fact, even when Western studies had not yet been introduced to China’s traditional academies, there was debate regarding the position and authority of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy,’ and the artistic tastes and advantages of these relative positions. Yet, when confronted with the entry to China of Western art and when traditional painting and the foreign painting from the West were compared, especially in the encounter between ideas and standpoints, the different traditional standpoints all tended to lose their antagonistic edge and impact, as in the following evaluation of Western painting by the painter and salt merchant Zheng Ji (1813-74): Now in foreign paintings, we see neither brush nor ink, and only the shapes of objects are selected and the given the semblance of life. Confucian scholarly painters pay careful attention to the techniques of ink and brush. They may draw the outline of an object, concealing the internal force of its spirit and differentiating its external features. If the work is vigorous and powerful, its dimensions may have the strength of Taishan mountain or of the mighty Yangtze; if the work is unadorned and leisurely, the paper may simply evoke the flow of autumn streams or an expanse of sky. Then there are works like Ma Yuan’s portrait of the deity Guan Di, which can evoke his ferocity with a few simple strokes for eyebrows.

Glorious is the millennia-old tradition which can be so encapsulated. Surely this is something that foreign painting could never dream of? (Menghuan-ju huaxue jianming) Anyone who understood Western art could see that such criticism was wide of the mark. Zheng Ji had received a traditional Confucian education from childhood and was well versed in calligraphy and poetry, and this background determined that despite living in Xinhui in Guangdong he was clearly oblivious to the China Trade Paintings that were all the rage in the nearby coastal areas of Guangdong and Macau at that time, or of even anything interesting about Western painting. In general, those within the world of traditional painting, regardless of the position they adopted in debate, never ventured beyond the bounds of defending China’s traditions of calligraphy and painting, and when Western art and its accompanying ideas flooded into Chinese cities and revolutionaries emerged in political and intellectual circles, it is easy to understand how in cultural circles extreme positions calling for the defence of tradition or for ‘complete Westernization’ emerged.

In the same way as Zhang Zhidong spoke of ‘Western arts’ (xiyi) in his Exhortation to Study, Liang Qichao also used the term ‘Western arts,’ for example in Table of Books on Western Studies. However, believing their own research on Western art to be limited, their understanding of Western art could largely be likened to their use of vocabulary that evoked that used to describe the efforts of missionary painters of the late Ming period, which lumped together all Western art from the Renaissance to the eve of Impressionist painting and did not mention any debates about different styles that existed within this misperceived art. However, the mention of this art did to some extent set it apart from traditional arguments about painting and questions of schools, and the new vocabulary showed the possibility of new paths of understanding. In fact, the problem remained as follows: if the knowledge generated by new studies and by Chinese studies was so different, and Zhang Zhidong and others clarified the differences and capacities of ‘Chinese studies’ and ‘Western studies,’ then what methods could facilitate interchange and understanding between these two different civilizations? In fact, from the time when missionaries first proselytized Western culture, they and the Chinese literati had failed to find a methodology which could accommodate these two systems of civilization; Castiglione, for example, could only do his utmost to preserve his own painting methods as long as he served the demands of taste imposed by the emperor. Basically speaking, in the history of pre-modern and modern art in China, ‘synthesis,’ ‘eclecticism,’ and ‘combination’ largely characterized the technical contest that arose to meet the demands of accommodation within different art systems. The missionaries maintained their proselytizing ideals, and made the appropriate adjustments in themes, colors, shading, and scale to satisfy the demands placed upon them, while Chinese painters because of their background education and training as well as the tools and methods with which they were familiar also had difficulty in obviously changing their own painting tastes and methods.

1.32 Photograph of Zhang Zhidong

1.33 Photograph of Li Hongzhang 43

T H E I N F LU E N C E O F W E S T E R N C I V I L I Z AT I O N A N D T H E A D J U S T M E N T O F T R A D I T I O N A L T H I N K I N G

1.34 Feng Gangbai, Portrait of the Grandfather of Huang Jusu, 1924, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm

1.35 Group photograph showing Hu Gentian (1st on left), Li Tiefu (2nd from left) and Feng Gangbai (3rd from left) in Guangzhou, 1930 44

Early Overseas Students during the Reforms The late Qing government was in an inextricable political crisis. Although Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao became fugitives for their role in the abortive reforms of 1898, less than two years later, when the Empress Dowager Cixi and her officials fled to Xi’an from the Eight-Power Allied Armies, she had no choice but to prompt the Emperor Guangxu to issue a reform edict. A crucial part of the reforms was the educational restructuring based on the ‘Memorial on Transforming Government by Giving Priority to Developing Talents, with Proposals Tendered upon Imperial Request,’ one of the ‘Three Joint Memorials from Jiangsu, Hunan, and Hubei’ written by Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi. The government began an all-out program to motivate young people to study abroad and pursue studies in the new-style academies.13 In 1904 Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Baixi, and Rong Qing drafted the ‘Memorial to Set up Academy Charters,’ which were educational codes. In the following year, the government announced that the imperial examination system would be totally dismantled in 1906. As a result, not only was the continued transmission of Confucian classics plunged into total crisis, but the intellectual foundation of the original power structure was profoundly shaken. The image of the Chinese intellectual as a scholar-official or would-be scholar-official henceforth changed. Intellectuals no longer stayed close to their home districts, because they no longer needed to participate locally in the hierarchically ascending civil examination. Foreign capital made inroads and the industries that emerged as part of the Westernization movement, along with the urban trades they brought into being, caused society’s divisions of labor to grow rapidly more complex. People discovered that by possessing the

new knowledge rather than the impoverishing training in the Confucian classics, they could each become useful members of society. The long-term efforts of missionaries and the mass of printed material put out by private and official agencies caused the media to become a focus of attention for scholars, who took various newspapers and magazines to modern salon-like meeting halls and academies, where they passed them around, discussed them, and judged their merits. What is more, their lively meetings, which were so charged with a sense of regeneration, gave rise to new thinking and led to the formation of organized groups, until eventually out of this came concrete political, cultural, or other social action.

The outcome of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 had a decisive influence on China’s Manchu government and on ordinary young people. China’s defeat and the subsequent signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 wounded the self-esteem of China’s scholar-official class more than anything had before. Rational intellectuals petitioned the imperial court to learn from the Japanese. The first group of Chinese students sent to Japan embarked in 1896, and by about 1907 the number of young Chinese studying in Japan had already reached 20,000. Among them, of course, were young Chinese who went to Japan to study ‘Western art.’

Among the early overseas students, those whose systematic study of Western art can be documented are Li Tiefu, Feng Gangbai, Li Yishi, and Li Shutong.

We do not know if the first stop in the travels of Li Tiefu (1869-1952) was America or not, but documents record that he received an art education in Canada, then part of the British Empire. We should not view Li Tiefu’s distant travels as a quest to change China’s fate; rather, it was to earn a livelihood. Li spent nine years as a student in Canada, and around 1896 went to the United States.

Although Li Tiefu was the first Chinese artist who studied abroad and achieved remarkable things, his position in art history is largely symbolic: his colleagues in America looked on him as an outstanding student from abroad, but young people in China knew little about him. After the return from Japan of artists like Li Shutong and even younger overseas students, the Western art trend within China had already reached a fever pitch. Li Tiefu took part in activities of Sun Yat-sen’s political revolution: starting in 1909, he served as standing secretary of the Tongmenghui’s New York office for six years.

This painter’s committed role in a revolutionary party revealed his political enthusiasm and idealism.

As Li Tiefu’s classmate at New York Academy of Arts, Feng Gangbai (1883-1984) was relatively fortunate. This was not only because of his longevity but also because of the sustained fame he won during the course of his life. Like Li Tiefu, Feng Gangbai gained an opportunity to study abroad in the process of seeking a livelihood. Feng Gangbai entered Mexico’s National Art College in 1905 to study oil painting. Five years later he went to San Francisco, where he studied art for a short period, then continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1912, upon entering the Student Art Research Society of the New York Academy of Art, his studies of oil painting technique went deeper.

In this respect, people were amazed because his understanding of light and color reminded people of Rembrandt. However, Feng clearly took an eclectic approach to his canvases. He saw a great many renowned works and reproductions, among which we can cite works by the American painters Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, and Robert Henri, behind whom was the European tradition of realism, and thus painters from the Renaissance, including Titian and Rubens, also seem to have influenced this Chinese painter to some degree. However, we see no sign that Feng Gangbai modeled himself after any particular Western painter in a sustained way. Thus one day his teacher Robert Henri, who had once studied at Académie Julian and the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, gave him advice that would prove beneficial for the rest of his life: ‘With your talent, there is nothing for you to learn in America. Why do you not go back to your own country?

You are a Chinese, and Chinese people have their own colors.’ 14 For this young man, there was clearly much challenge and fascination in seeing what might come of using oil paints to express things in a Chinese way. Thus when someone in New York informed him that Peking University president Cai Yuanpei was inviting painters back to teach in China, Feng Gangbai returned to Guangzhou in the early fall of 1921. What ensued was quite different from what happened to Li Tiefu. Feng Gangbai’s seventeen years of overseas study made him one of the first painters to transmit knowledge of Western painting within China. He later explained his artistic conception: ‘A person’s image is not just pasted against the canvas: there is space back there for you to reach around and touch the back of his head.’ Why was this painter so interested in achieving such a realistic effect? Wasn’t such an ideal far removed from the qualities of character and cultivation demanded by traditional Confucianism?

Obviously, such a taste for verisimilitude was a response to the urban environment in this industrial and modernizing age. Many years later, Feng Gangbai could still remember Robert Henri’s advice, and he was even interested in the visual ‘blush of blood circulating beneath the skin.’ In fact, the painter’s subjects were just ordinary persons, still life objects, or landscapes, and he was concerned

1.36 Li Shutong, Female Nude, before 1910, oil painting

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with them as ‘things’ in their own right. He incorporated this concern into his teaching and through his students spread it further. For those who were fed up with trivial exercises of the ink brush, in the process of focusing on such ‘things’ and of understanding light in physical nature rather than as an abstract concept, a fundamental change was underway in their perceptions, and eventually their ideas, about nature and society.

Li Yishi (1886-1942) went with his brother to Japan in 1903, where he studied first at a law school and then at an officers’ school. Not until 1907, when he passed the entrance examination of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in Scotland did he begin his strict Western academic training in painting. Li Yishi was capable of rigorous logical analysis and had a probing intellect. He loved science, and was more knowledgeable about art history and theory than other early overseas students.

Li Yishi’s family background was different from Li Tiefu and Feng Gangbai, who went abroad to earn a living. Li Yishi’s father was a painter, and his uncle Li Baojia was the author of an important late Qing satirical novel, Officialdom Shows its True Face. His painting entitled Palace Enmity, completed in 1931, had the subtitle, She Leans on the Censer Canopy, Sitting up Till Dawn, and like other Chinese painters, Li Yishi found inspiration in lines from ancient poems, the theme for this painting coming from a poem by Bai Juyi. From this work one can see that Li Yishi was interested above all in adopting realist methods in trying to express a Chinese poetic atmosphere. The scene of Consort Mei leaning against the censer canopy as she maintains a vigil until dawn is somewhat desolate. What distinguishes her from a figure in a traditional Chinese painting is that this scene is detailed, and the painter hopes that the viewer can perceive the lack of freedom in the recesses of the palace simply by looking at the concrete objects in the scene depicted.

Li Shutong (1880-1942), who went to study in Japan in 1905, was a figure of legendary proportions. In early years his way of life in Shanghai could easily be associated with one of the literati wonder boys of ancient times: bursting with talent, wine-drinking, poetry-chanting, and keeping in close proximity to lovely, talented singing girls. Li Shutong was a native of Pinghu in Zhejiang, and later he lived in Tianjin. His father was a banker, and his family background made it easy to receive an excellent education. Along with being adept at poetry, seals, and calligraphy, Li Shutong evinced a fancy-free temperament that contrasted strongly with his decision in 1918 to shave his head and become a monk. In 1905, Li Shutong traveled to Japan with a group of young men and women.

Because he did not arrive in time for that year’s entrance examination, he did not enter Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo Fine Arts University) until the following year.

Li Shutong’s teacher was the most influential plein air painter of the Meiji period, Kuroda Seiki.

Knowing this, it is easy to understand why we find Impressionist-style landscapes among Li Shutong’s oil paintings. At the same time, he also went to a music school to study piano and composition, and studied stage plays under mentorship of the dramatist Fujisawa Asajirô. Thus, unlike a great many overseas students in Japan who studied in this or that special field, Li Shutong as a student in Japan let his inner nature run free. The sudden acquisition of new knowledge, on top of the traditional grounding he had received in a private school as a child, did not draw him into the political struggles of revolutionary party members. While in Japan he and Ouyang Yuqian organized the Spring Willow Troupe (Chunliu Jushe); Li Shutong went on to play the female protagonists Marguerite in The Lady of the Camellias and Emily in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Activities of the Spring Willow Troupe had an impact on the theater back in China, and even led to the genesis of ‘spoken drama’ in China. At the same time Li Shutong founded Little Magazine of Music and wrote compositions himself. People can still derive enjoyment from his songs:

1.38 Li Shutong, Self-Portrait, 1910, oil on canvas, 60.6 x 45.5 cm (opposite page) 1.37 Li Yishi, Enmity in the Palace, 1933, oil painting

Past the way station, beside an ancient road, fragrant grass is green against the sky.

Late wind caresses willows; flute sound grieves hills beyond hills at sunset, At the edge of sky, in this corner of earth, half my close ties have fallen away, A pot of dregs to finish the revels, dreams at parting make the night feel cold.15 In this lyric the sadness is stirred by contrast of mundane time with enduring nature, which touches clearly on the inner state of intellectuals of that era, while revealing Li Shutong’s particular temperament. Such a temperament was an important reason that he later left the realm of red dust to become a monk. In the memoirs of his student Feng Zikai, we get a sense of Li Shutong’s gifts as a teacher: in teaching students to sketch plaster models, in taking them outdoors to draw from life, and in teaching Western art history (he compiled Lecture Materials on Western Art History), he was among the path breakers. His use of human models as a teaching method for classes at Zhejiang Junior and Superior Normal School shows his bold uninhibited character. Along with Liu Haisu’s precedent of using nude models for classes, this marked a pivotal event in the history of China’s 20th-century art.16

1.39 Photograph of 1913 showing Li Shutong (standing at center of the back row) at a live modeling class for painting students at Zhejiang First Normal School.

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