The Art of Modern China 0520238141, 9780520238145

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THE ART OF

MODERN

CHINA J U L I A F. A N D R E W S A N D K U I Y I S H E N

1.3 Ren Xio Self-Por Undate Hanging paper, 177.4 x Palace M

The Art of Modern China

i

The Art of

U n i ve rs i t y of C ali fo rnia P ress   Berkeley Los Angeles London

Modern China Julia F. Andre w s and Kuiyi S h en

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the following individuals and organizations. James H. Andrews Carolyn Hsu-Balcer & René Balcer Barclay & Sharon Simpson Laurie & David Ying Arts & Humanities, The Ohio State University University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Every effort has been made to identify and locate the rightful copyright holders of all material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Any error, omission, or failure to obtain authorization with respect to material copyrighted by other sources has been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. cloth ISBN: 978-0-520-23814-5 paper ISBN: 978-0-520-27106-7 ©2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Control Number: 2012941644 Manufactured in United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12  10 9 8 7 6 5 4  3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper). 8 Cover images, from left: Fang Lijun, Series II, No. 2; Ren Xiong, Self‑portrait; Chen Yanning, New Doctor in the Fishing Village

To our parents Shi Weijin and Shen Mi James P. and Catharine A. Andrews for their inspiration and encouragement

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Contents

Acknowledgments / ix Map / xii Introduction / xiii 1

Chinese Art in the Age of Imperialism: The Opium War to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, 1842–1895 / 1  

2

Art in the Creation of a New Nation: The Overthrow of the Qing and the Early Republic, 1895–1920 / 27  

3

Art in the New Culture of the 1920s  /  47

4

Modern Art in the 1930s  /  73

5

The Golden Age of Guohua in the 1930s  /  93

6

Art in Wartime, 1937–1949 / 115

7

Western-Style Art under Mao, 1949–1966 / 139

8

Ink Painting, Lianhuanhua, and Woodcuts under Mao, 1949–1966 / 161

9

Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 / 183

10

Art after Mao, 1976–1989 / 201

11

Alternative Chinas: Hong Kong and Taiwan  /  225

12

No U-Turn: Chinese Art after 1989  /  257

13

The New Millennium, and the Chinese Century?  /  279

 

 

 

 

 

Glossary and List of Characters  /  297 Major Events in Modern Chinese Art  /  309 Notes / 327 Selected Bibliography / 345 Index / 355 vii

Acknowledgments

A book of this scope could never have been accomplished without the help and kindness of too many people—artists, colleagues, friends, students, and family—scattered in too many places, over too long a time, for us to name them all. We are immensely grateful to everyone who has sustained us on this fascinating and unpredictable journey. We would like to thank the curators, librarians, archivists, and collectors we have visited, the art historians who have lent us support and advice, and the artists who have patiently responded to our many requests for help. We owe scholarly debts to a great many individuals. In Shanghai we would like to extend our warmest thanks to curators Shan Guolin, Zhong Yinglan, Li Weikun, Lin Lizhong, Chen Kelun, their former colleague Zheng Wei, and the late directors Ma Chengyuan and Wang Qingzheng of the Shanghai Museum. Chen Xian­xing and Liang Ying of the Shanghai Library have been extraordinarily helpful. At the Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House and Duoyunxuan we particularly appreciate the help of Lu Fusheng, Zhu Junbo, Huang Jian, Qi Lan, Xu Ke, and Mao Ziliang, and at Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House that of Gong Jixian, Deng Ming, Bao Yufei, Ha Qiongwen, He Youzhi, and Zhao Guohui. Lorenz Heibling of Shangart has been very generous with documentary materials. At Pictorial Shanghai, Zhao Songhua has provided essential help, as have the staff members of the Shanghai Museum of History, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and the Shanghai Art Museum. In Beijing our friends and teachers from the Central Academy of Fine Arts—Pan Gongkai, Xu Bing, Xue Yongnian, Shao Dazhen, Jin Shangyi, Zhan Jianjun, Pang Tao, Lin Gang, Yin Jinan, Zhao Li, Wang Huangsheng, Lin Yan, and Jiang Wen— have assisted us significantly over the years. Shan Guoqiang and Yu Hui of the  

 

ix

Palace Museum, as well as their colleagues in the departments of Painting and Calligraphy and Conservation, have been particularly helpful. At the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC, formerly the Chinese National Art Gallery), we would like to thank Fan Di’an, Liu Xiling, Zhang Qing, Xu Hong, and Zheng Zuoliang. At the former Museum of Revolutionary History (now the National Museum of China), we are grateful to Chen Lüsheng, Li Rencai, Huang Gaoqian, Pan Qing, and Yang Yan. In addition, we would like to thank Liao Jingwen, Xu Fangfang, and the staff of the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum; Shui Tianzhong, Lang Shaojun, Liu Xiaochun, and Gu Sen of the Chinese National Academy of Arts in Beijing; Chen Ruilin of Tsinghua University College of Arts; Weng Ling of Beijing Center for the Arts; and Zhu Qingsheng of Peking University. In Nanjing Ma Hongzhen of the Jiangsu Provincial Art Gallery; Wan Xinhua and the staff of the Nanjing Provincial Museum; and Song Yulin, Xiao Ping, Xu Lei, and the late Song Wenzhi and Ya Ming of the Jiangsu Provincial Painting Institute provided great help. We have enjoyed the advice and assistance of Chen Beixin, Cheng Zhen, and Peng De of Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts; Luo Zhongli and Feng Bin of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing; Li Huanming, A Ge, and Xu Kuang of the Sichuan Artists Association in Chengdu; Lin Mu of Sichuan University; Zhou Chunya of the Chengdu Painting Institute; Chen Ying of Guangzhou Museum of Art; Huang Zhuan and Li Weiming of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts; Yang Xiaoyan of Zhongshan University; Pi Daojian of South China Normal University; Dong Xiaoming and Yan Shancun of the Shenzhen Painting Institute; Le Zhenwei at the He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen; and Lu Hong of the Shenzhen Art Museum. Our great thanks go to Christina Chu, Szeto Yuen-kit, and Maria Mok of the Hong Kong Museum of Art; Mayching Kao, Peter Lam, and Harold Mok of the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Johnson Tsong-zung Chang and the staff of Hanart TZ; Claire Hsu and the staff of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Chou Kung-hsin, Wang Yaot’ing, and Ho Ch’uan-hsin of the Palace Museum, Taipei; and Yen Chuan-ying, Shih Shou-chien, and the staff of the Institute of History and Philology, as well as Wang Chenghua and Lai Yu-chih of the Institute of Modern History, at Academia Sinica, Taipei. We have enjoyed the warm hospitality and scholarly support of Chiang Po-hsin of National Tainan University of the Arts; Huang Kuang-nan, former director of the National Museum of History; Ho Chenkuang of Artist Magazine; and the staff of the National Taiwan Museum of Art in Taichung. x

Acknowledgments

The sabbatical year we spent in Tokyo in 2003–2004 was too wonderful for words, and we cannot sufficiently thank our friends Hiromitsu Kobayashi of Sophia University and Keiko Kobayashi, gifted textile artist, for their extraordinary help, hospitality, and friendship. In Kyoto, Nishigami Minoru and Kure Motoyuki of the Kyoto National Museum generously arranged our viewings in the Kansai region. We are also grateful to Ogawa Hiromitsu and Itakura Masaaki of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Tōyō bunka kenkyujo) of Tokyo University for their great help. Ajioka Yoshindo of the Shoto Museum of Art, Shibuya, Yumino Takayuki of the Osaka Municipal Museum, Kawada Masayuki of the Kuboso Memorial Museum in Izumi, and Furuhashi Kenzo of the Kampokan Museum in Shiga have been generous in showing their collections. We are also grateful for the help of Furuichi Yasuko of the Japan Foundation, the staff of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, and the library of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. We are grateful to our colleagues in Europe for giving us the opportunity to see their collections. At Leiden University our work was made possible by Oliver Moore, Francesca dal Lago, and Stefan Landsberger, and at Heidelberg University by Barbara Mittler. Uta Rahman-Steinert of the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin (Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin); Adele Schlombs of the Museum of East Asian Art, Cologne (Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne); Jan Stuart and Clarissa von Spee of the British Museum; and Eric Lefebvre of the Musée Cernuschi in Paris have been generous with their collections. John Finlay in Paris and Lucie Olivova in Prague were particularly kind. Our intellectual debts to our mentors are incalculable, and we are deeply grateful for the teaching and inspiration of James Cahill, Ellen Johnston Laing, Ralph Croizier, and Michael Sullivan. Howard and Mary Ann Rogers have helped us more than anyone else knows. Finally, we are immensely grateful for the scholarly support and friendship of Richard Vinograd, Jerome Silbergeld, Ginger Hsu, Julia White, Joseph Chang, Maxwell Hearn, Joan Lebold Cohen and Jerome A. Cohen, Joshua Fogel, Joan Judge, Jay Levenson, Shengtian Zheng, Wen-hsin Yeh, Xiaomei Chen, Scarlett Jang, Marsha Weidner, Wu Hung, Michael Knight, Katharine Burnett, Myroslava Mudrak, Christopher Reed, Patricia Berger, Sarah Fraser, Hong Zaixin, Jason Kuo, Gao Minglu, Melissa Chiu, Rita Wong, Elinor Pearlstein, Josh Yiu, Anita Chung, Felicity Lufkin, Richard King, Peter Sturman, Hui-shu Lee, Tamaki Maeda, Aida Yuen Wong, Mark Haxtausen, Wu Yi, and Shen Rou’er. It is always an edifying delight to talk about Chinese art with our friend Arnold Chang, as well as with Zhang Hong. This book owes

much to Jane Debevoise for her steady friendship and constant collegial support. We are no less appreciative of the work of many friends and colleagues whose work we have not explicitly mentioned here. Any merit in our book is indebted to our fellow scholars who labor to chart this new scholarly field, but its flaws must remain our own. We would also like to thank our past and present graduate students for their help, particularly Zhang Rui, Tongyun Yin, Lesley Ma, Ying Chua, Su-hsing Lin, Zhou Yan, Wei Lin, Eliza Ho, Christina Burke Mathison, Walter B. Davis, Mayumi Kamata, Yanfei Zhu, Yang Wang, Bonnie Mei-lan Yeung, and Michael Ku. At home our work has also been greatly facilitated by the energetic and effective support of our past and present librarians at Ohio State University: Susan Wyngaard, Maureen Donovan, Amanda Gluibizzi, Guoqing Li, and Miroljub Ruzic; and by James Chen and Victoria Chu of the University of California–San Diego. We are immensely grateful to friends and family members who have contributed financially to the publication of this volume, particularly Laurie and David Ying, James H. Andrews, Carolyn Hsu-Balcer, and René Balcer. The Ohio State University and the University of California, San Diego, have provided further publication subventions. Our research has been made possible by the support of the Fulbright Program (Japan), the Social Science Research Council, the  

 

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Ohio State University, the University of California, San Diego, Ohio University, the East Asian Studies Center at Stanford University, the Sterling Clark Professorship at Williams College, and the HulsewéWazniewski Professorship at the University of Leiden. We would like to particularly thank Christine Verzar, Mark Fullerton, Andrew Shelton, and Lisa Florman at Ohio State, and Norman Bryson, Grant Kester, Jack Greenstein, Paul Pickowicz, Joseph Esherick, Yingjin Zhang, and Wailim Yip at University of California, San Diego, for past and present support and encouragement. To Deborah Kirshman and the University of California Press we would like to express our gratitude for unwavering faith in our project, and for enormous patience in the face of what must have seemed like endless delays. Our great thanks as well to Kari Dalgren and Eric Schmidt for seeing the book through the review, editing, and production process; to Dave Peattie and Amy Smith Bell for editing; and to Nicole Hayward for her thoughtful and appealing design. We dedicate this book to our parents, for whom the enterprise of education has always been so important. We would also like to express our fond appreciation to our children, Ted, Sophia, Alex, and Andy, and our siblings, Gary, Susan, Jim, Luyi, and Marian, for sharing our family life with the art of modern China.

Acknowledgments

xi

Map of China

Introduction

What is modern Chinese art? In the twenty-first century, as skyscrapers rose over its major cities, China was embraced by the international art world. Many of its inter­ nationally oriented artists work in video, digital photography, installation art, and performance, constantly exploring the potential that new technologies offer them. Others experiment with old technologies—ink on paper, prints from wood, oil on canvas, or bamboo and wire. Yet for most, artistic connections to the universal, the international, the global, the central, the present are counterbalanced by ties to the personal, the national, the local, the peripheral, and the past. Further tensions among these identities conspire to break down simple polarities and to subject the individual artist to the pull of a web of aesthetic, social, and economic forces. Which strands in this net make modern Chinese art “modern”? And which make it Chinese? These are essentialist questions that a postmodern society may someday leave behind, but they have comprised the fundamental concepts around which the art of twentieth-century China has revolved. A hundred years ago, when China’s last imperial dynasty was overthrown, Chinese art was a simple concept—its highest achievement could be seen in landscape paintings and calligraphy rendered in ink on paper or silk. Within a decade of that event, however, in pursuit of a new Republican culture, projects to modernize society and culture began to challenge such definitions. From this point, the question of what role the modern and the traditional (and how each should be defined) should play in constructing a new culture for China became crucial. In each period, and to some degree in each region, such tensions have operated in slightly different ways. This book, which begins with the establishment by Western powers of semicolonial treaty port towns on China’s coast, traces the variety of ways  

 

xiii

contemporary aspirations and traditional attachments have intersected to create the art world of modern China. Chapter 1 focuses on the impact of new patronage, both domestic and foreign, new technologies of photography and lithography, and new cultural concerns on the development of styles of Chinese painting (guohua) and calligraphy in treaty port Shanghai between 1842 and 1895. Chapter 2, which begins with China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, examines the introduction of Western art and models of art education to China in the first two decades of the twentieth century. This era, which spanned both the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, when the Qing emperor was deposed, and the New Culture movement of the late 1910s, which sought to build the foundations for a modern civilization, saw the return of the first wave of artists from study abroad. It was also a period of vigorous criticism of the China of the past, including its art, and an intensive focus on Western-style painting (xihua—that is, oil painting, watercolors, and drawing) within newly formulated theoretical structures and institutions of art. Chapter 3 addresses the theoretical, organizational, and artistic responses by Chinese painters to the wholesale Westernization of the New Culture movement. Many of the most influential voices in support of traditional Chinese art in the 1920s were foreign-educated, and the arenas in which they contended were the modern institutions of college, exhibition, journal, and art society. The next two chapters follow the debates of the 1920s to their conclusion. In chapter 4 we turn our attention to the flourishing of a cosmopolitan modernist art in the 1930s and briefly examine the radical art societies that supported it. Among its practitioners were advocates of modern oil painting, woodblock prints, and graphic design in an up-to-date European manner. Chapter 5 provides an account of the contemporaneous flourishing of traditionalist ink painting, an artist-led movement that came to the forefront of a collective effort to build the new Chinese nation and its culture during the Nanjing Decade (1927–37). The 1930s also saw the first broad public access to treasures of the imperial collection in exhibitions that exposed guohua artists to previously littleknown techniques and compositions and inspired an innovative renaissance of ink painting. The dazzling art world of the 1930s fell dark with the Japanese invasion of 1937. Chapter 6 looks at the efforts of artists to save their nation and to survive creatively during the eight-year war with Japan (1937– 45) and the four-year civil war between the nationalists and the Communists. The dispersal of artists from the metropolitan coastal regions, where China’s modern art world had developed, to inland territories had a strong impact on both the geographical reach of modern art and artistic concepts. Six chapters comprise a brief history of art in the People’s  

 

 

xiv

Introduction

Republic of China. Chapter 7 focuses on the ideological justifications for “revolutionary art” in the writings of Mao Zedong, the implementation of socialist realism as the guiding style of art, and the institutionalization of Western forms—most notably oil painting but also sculpture and architecture—as official art. This period is characterized by an economic and cultural isolation from the Western world, the banning of modernism and traditionalism, and the development of novel native forms. The ideologically motivated and politically enforced transformation of guo‑ hua (Chinese painting), lianhuanhua (serial picture illustration), and woodblock prints under the Communist regime between 1949 and 1966 is the subject of chapter 8. Chap­ ter 9 focuses on the art produced under the most extreme form of Maoism during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, and the unexpected effects of the rustication movement, when millions of idealistic young people were sent to the countryside, on the subsequent generation of artists. After the death of Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1976, a gradual reopening to the West began as well as a relaxation of central controls on the economy and culture. A wave of attempts to repair the damage of the Cultural Revolution followed. Chapter 10 focuses on the rejection of socialist utopianism. By the mid-1980s a generation of young artists, inspired by policies advocating an “open door,” broke through the stifling walls of conservatism to escape socialist realism and express their own concerns in a new language. This period ended with the exuberant China/AvantGarde exhibition of February 1989 and the catastrophic Tiananmen Massacre of June 4, 1989. Chapter 11 takes a digression into the art of two former colonial territories, the previously British Hong Kong (1842–1997) and Japanese Taiwan (1895–1945), examining similarities and differences in their colonial and postcolonial experiences. In the 1980s these two “alternative Chinas” provided artistic models urgently sought by mainland artists to replace their Maoist art of the previous decades, but by the 1990s postmodernism brought them into a new relationship with mainland China and with the international art world. Returning in chapter 12 to the mainland, and the period between 1989 and 2000, the aesthetic and political struggles of China’s modern and postmodern art movements are viewed against the background of a socialist realist recent past. Over the course of the decade, relaxation of international travel restrictions and sales of art created a truly open door for individuals and groups of artists to move beyond what was possible domestically. Chapter 13 concentrates on the first decade of the twenty-first century, which is not yet history. Focusing on the rapid and systematic changes that have profoundly transformed the art world in China, the  

 

 

 

chapter discusses new exhibition structures, particularly international biennials; new economic structures, especially domestic auction houses and private galleries; and new classes of patrons, both domestic and foreign, that are contributing to the creation of an unprecedented environment for art and artists. Although visual art rarely moves in lockstep with political events, or even at exactly the same pace as other forms of cultural expression, in twentieth-century China the relationship between art and its social, economic, and political environment has been particularly complicated and intimate. In particular, the sense of social responsibility felt by many twentieth-century Chinese artists, which was in part inherited from the Confucian tradition, led them to respond with both art and social activism to contemporary

events. For this reason artistic, social, and political movements are sometimes inseparable, and we have presented the art of modern China in the context of its times. Many of the aesthetic or theoretical questions raised a hundred years ago, or on the more recent path toward China’s modernization, have not yet been completely answered. Yet perhaps the need to do so is past—a fundamental goal of the twentieth-century reformers, China’s return to the international stage, has now been realized. China’s artists may therefore face the greatest challenge of all. They have fulfilled the twentieth century’s historical burden of restoring China’s cultural stature in the world, but what will be their mission in the twenty-first century? We must conclude this volume without knowing the answer to this question.  

Introduction

xv

1

Chinese Art in the Age of Imperialism The Opium War to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, 1842–1895

Introduction

When did China, with its long history of artistic, cultural, economic, and political development, enter the modern era? When and how did its art become modern? There are many different answers to this question, depending on which of the various definitions of the term “modern” one chooses. Some factors considered harbingers of modernity, such as the dissemination of printing and literacy, the development of a highly commercialized society, or participation in intercontinental maritime trade, may already be found in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a series of international and domestic events brought China face-to-face with the entire modernizing world on foreign terms, rather than its own. The opening of treaty ports served to catalyze China’s natural cultural and economic evolution, yielding rapid and dramatic development in commerce in these cities. In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking concluded the three-year Opium War between Britain and the declining Qing dynasty and forced open five Chinese ports—Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Xiamen (Amoy), and Guangzhou (Canton)—to both international trade and foreign residence. Over the subsequent half century, colonial powers, which came to include not only Britain but also France, the United States, and Japan, acquired trading rights in almost one hundred Chinese cities and towns. At the same time, the foreign powers won by force monetary reparations from the Qing dynasty government. Beyond free trade, they extracted from the court privileges to govern the treaty port territories by the laws and customs of their native countries. On September 24, 1846, the British established the first of what would be called the foreign concessions to provide a special residential area for foreigners. In a few years they  

 

 

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were joined by French traders who settled in concessions to the south of the Yangjing Canal (now Yan’an East Road) and the Americans to the north of Suzhou Creek (also called the Wusong River). An extraterritorial administration called the Shanghai Municipal Council was established in 1854. Such semicolonial status was maintained in the nineteenth century through impressive military hardware and in the face of the extreme weakness of China’s national government. These infringements to China’s national sovereignty led thoughtful officials and intellectuals to examine alternatives to the unsuccessful political, economic, and educational policies then in effect. Although they were unable to save the last dynasty from its own corruption and incompetence, they laid the intellectual groundwork for China’s modernization in the twentieth century. The treaty port period, which lasted from 1842 to 1946, brought a great expansion of trade with the West and also within Asia. Japan, opened to commerce by Admiral Matthew C. Perry’s expedition in 1853, soon became one of China’s most active trading partners. With trade came elements of foreign technology, thought, religion, and culture. The rapid commercial and cultural rise of one of the five original treaty ports, Shanghai, which grew from small city to modern metropolis, was a key factor in the creation of China’s modern art world. Perhaps even more significant than the lure of foreign trade was a domestic war, the thirteen-year Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), which particularly terrorized the citizens of China’s prosperous Yangzi River delta. The troops of the Qing imperial government repeatedly failed to subdue the murderous depredations of the anti-Manchu Taiping army, led by Hong Xiuquan, the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ and ruler of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Hong Xiuquan, after learning something about Christianity from missionary tracts, sought to create a new regime based on his eccentric interpretation of Old Testament Protestantism. He located his new government at Nanjing in 1853, the year in which his army took the old southern capital and decimated the beautiful city of Suzhou, China’s Venice. His attempt to conquer China took his troops north to the Manchu capital at Beijing and west to Jiangxi. Loss of life and property in the middle and lower Yangzi River valley was enormous. As battles were fought to take and retake territory in China’s heartland, cities and towns were repeatedly put under siege and plundered by the contending armies. Needless to say, the constant warfare disrupted most normal economic activity and trade. Destruction and looting dispersed art collections and private libraries. Refugees, including many of China’s wealthiest and most cultured families, poured into the foreign concessions of Shanghai for  

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Chinese Art in the Age of Imperia lism

safety. A rebel group, the Small Sword Society, took advantage of the disorder to seize sections of the Chinese city of Shanghai in September of 1853. In 1860, Taiping depredations throughout the prosperous provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang brought a new wave of officials, rich merchants, and even lower middle-class citizens to Shanghai. Only in 1864 did the Chinese general Zeng Guofan, with assistance from Anglo-French troops, suppress the rebellion. It has been estimated that the population of China fell from about 410 million in 1850 to about 350 million in 1873. Many formerly important trade centers, which relied on inland transportation networks disrupted by the war, suffered severely. The flight of so many people and so much wealth to treaty port Shanghai yielded a major economic and cultural shift. By the end of the nineteenth century, the city, which enjoyed easy access by water to both China’s inland cities and the Pacific Ocean, emerged as China’s new mercantile hub. By the turn of the twentieth century, Shanghai’s population, which numbered about 230,000 at the end of the Opium War, had grown to a million, mainly Chinese, residents. With this concentration of population and money, it soon became China’s artistic center as well. Such massive shifts in cultural geography, while not frequent, had occurred repeatedly during the course of China’s long history. Throughout the previous Ming dynasty, for example, the canal city of Suzhou, a center of silk and cotton production, had served as China’s artistic, cultural, and economic center. The art and culture of Suzhou, at the heart of the Jiangnan (“south of the [Yangzi] river”) region, served as a cultural foil to the political dominance of the two successive capitals to the north, first Nanjing and subsequently Beijing. Later critics wrote of the contrast between literati painting of Suzhou and court painting of the capitals. The political center moved decisively north in 1644, with the overthrow of the Ming emperors and the establishment of the Manchu Qing dynasty. The Manchus, who were not ethnically Chinese, incorporated not only the northeastern Manchu homeland of the imperial house into the Chinese empire but also the northern and western lands of other non-Chinese peoples and nations, such as Tibetans and Uighurs. Changes the Qing made in administration of the salt monopoly produced transformations in the south as well. The transportation node for shipping and taxation, the Yangzi River city of Yangzhou, enjoyed an economic boom based on the imperial salt monopoly, and with wealth came culture to the burgeoning city. Salt merchants constructed extravagant garden estates and spent fortunes on art and other cultural pursuits. By the eighteenth century, Yangzhou had rivaled or surpassed Suzhou, Nanjing, and Beijing as an artistic center.

The Shanghai School

Each economic or cultural center had its own foundations—Suzhou’s agricultural wealth, Yangzhou’s state salt monopoly, Nanjing and Beijing the power and resources of the court. What was new about Shanghai was its unique situation as a treaty port, or its semicolonial status. Ideally located for both domestic Chinese commerce and international trade, with convenient access to both the Grand Canal and the Pacific Ocean, not far from still-­prosperous Suzhou, Shanghai became the primary node for mercantile exchange both within China and between Chinese merchants and those in foreign countries. The extraterritorial rights extracted by the foreign powers from the Qing regime yielded a hybrid city, governed according to the laws of Western countries but inhabited mainly by Chinese. Foreign merchants dramatically expanded ocean and river shipping, and by the 1850s foreign ships crowded the Huangpu river port to unload imports of opium, fabric, and cotton thread for the Chinese market, and take on such exports as silver, silk, and tea. Despite the vast fortunes that were made in China, foreign traders never realized their most optimistic dreams of marketing the products of Europe’s modern industries to every Chinese citizen. Nevertheless, European material culture, brought by traders and missionaries, became increasingly familiar to urban Chinese. By 1876 more than two hundred foreign companies operated in Shanghai. Foreign and domestic capital poured into the city. After the first British bank, the Oriental Banking Corporation, set up an office in Shanghai in 1848, many others followed. British merchants opened five additional banks from the 1850s through 1870s; the French two in 1860 and 1899; American and German investors joined the British to open the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (now HSBC) in 1865; and four Japanese banks were opened between 1880 and 1895. The early twentieth century saw the first American bank, International Banking Corporation (later acquired by National City Bank of New York), open in 1902, followed by American Express in 1918. Belgian and Netherlandish financial institutions appeared in the early years of the century. Chinese bankers, both those who ran the traditional qianzhuang, or money shops, and those in the modern banking sector, also flocked to the city. By rapidly gathering capital from all parts of the country and the world, Shanghai soon became the biggest financial center in China and East Asia. The influx of capital and entrepreneurial spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century began to transform Shanghai into an industrial metropolis, offering a hybrid  

of Chinese and foreign business practices, an array of goods for purchase by domestic and international markets, and the possibility of untold riches to be won. Magnificent bank buildings in the Renaissance manner, like the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, built in 1874, transformed the waterfront. The Chinese customs house, built with traditional frame construction, upturned eaves, and tile roofs in 1857, was soon dwarfed, and in 1891 was demolished and replaced by a red brick structure in the European manner. During the second half of the nineteenth century, artists flocked to Shanghai as refugees and to seek the patronage of wealthy entrepreneurs with an interest in art. They hailed from all over China, and like their patrons were most often natives of the towns and cities of the adjacent provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui. They brought with them local styles and conventions, and sometimes continued to find particular favor in the new metropolis with collectors from their own native places. By the twentieth century, however, it was recognized that Shanghai had developed its own school of painting, one that combined the traditional skills of local areas with novel elements that aimed to please the new collectors in Shanghai. Artists who flourished in the formative period of Shanghai painting, the 1840s and 1850s, were mainly birdand-flower painters who worked in a manner clearly related to major schools of Ming and early Qing painting, but they often used stronger, brighter colors and more naturalistic images. Zhang Xiong (1803–1886), for example, established his fame in his native city of Jiaxing, Zhejiang, before moving to the city in 1862. He painted in an elegant manner that appealed to literati taste [fig. 1.1].1  

1.1  Zhang Xiong (1803–1886), Narcissus and Rock, 1851, one leaf from an eight-leaf album, Flowers, ink and color on gold-flecked paper, 27.8 × 32.8 cm, Osaka Municipal Museum  

Chinese Art in the Age of Imperialism

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1.2  Zhu Cheng (1826– 1899/1900), Bird in Flight and Flowering Branch, 1881, album leaf, ink and colors on silk, Hashimoto collection, Shoto Museum  

The literati aesthetic in painting, which developed most vigorously among scholar-painters of Jiangnan between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, was codified in early seventeenth-century criticism by Dong Qichang (1555–1636) and other scholar-painters. Although the history of wen­ renhua (literati painting) extends from the eleventh century to the twentieth, and its practice was diverse, in the ideal it favored self-expressive brushwork over form-­likeness, exploited the subtle qualities of ink rather than superficially appealing color or compositions, rejected narrative in favor of suggestion, and maintained the principle that the act of painting was for private enjoyment or self-cultivation, not sale. Essential, as well, was the assumption that a painter was a scholar who was also talented in calligraphy and poetry, and whose best work would excel in all three areas. Subtle references to the revered attainments of previous masters of poetry, painting, and calligraphy continually enriched the shared vocabulary of literati painting. Zhang Xiong was an excellent exemplar of this way of life and art. An enthusiast of lyric poetry, he was well educated in music and particularly in the refined southern kunqu opera. His elegant studio in Jiaxing was filled with antique bronzes and paintings, and his reputation was such that aspiring artists sought his instruction. His slightly older Jiaxing compatriot Zhu Xiong (1801–1864) was his pupil, and the brilliant native of nearby Xiaoshan Ren  

 

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Xiong (1823–1857) also sought his acquaintance. These three Zhejiang painters, who shared the same given name, were later lauded as the great painting talents of their age—the Three Xiong. They, along with Wang Li (1813–1879), laid the foundations for Shanghai school painting. Zhang Xiong moved to Shanghai during the Taiping Rebellion, where he soon became known as one of the two most important painters in the city. Not only was his fame known far and wide, but he taught a large number of students who became well known in Shanghai, the core of whom, like Zhu Xiong and his much younger brother Zhu Cheng (1826–1899/1900), were fellow sojourners from Jiaxing. He produced an instruction manual for painting, Zhang Zixiang ketu huagao, and also encouraged his student Chao Xun (1852–1917) to republish the first volume of the illustrious seventeenth-century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1888) using newly imported lithographic methods. Both texts became extremely popular as models for aspiring painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Opening of China’s ports in 1843 and soon after those of Japan led to a rapid increase in inter-Asian cultural exchange. According to an account dated 1857, Zhang Xiong’s fame had “gone beyond the ocean.” His work was avidly sought by Japanese collectors, some of whom visited him in Shanghai, and his painting manual was published  

 

 

 

 

in Japan during his lifetime. Zhang Xiong is pictured in late Qing writings as a conservative, seeking to preserve the classical heritage, working in a style developed from those of earlier masters such as Zhou Zhimian (active circa 1580– 1610) of the Ming dynasty and Yun Shouping (1633–1690) or Jiang Tingxi (1669–1732) of earlier in his own Qing dynasty. Indeed, his work, which is restrained and well ordered while still possessing an air of gentle relaxation, satisfies the highest standards of literati painting in all but one way—he used dazzling color that had an immediate appeal to his patrons. Thus, at its very start, Shanghai painting began to subtly deviate from the literati-painting aesthetic. Zhang Xiong’s many disciples responded more directly to the new environment in which they worked. Zhu Cheng learned from both Zhang Xiong and the more flamboyant Wang Li, developing an appealing, and sometimes rather sweet, personal style that became all the rage among Shanghai merchants. His bird-and-flower painting was typical of the new art: clear, sharp compositions, bright colors, and auspicious themes, as in this work of 1881, with its crisp ink contrasting with the bright, opaque color applied thickly to the surface of the highly sized silk [fig. 1.2].2  

 

 

 

Ren Xiong and His Legacy

One of the most innovative Chinese artists of the nineteenth century was the short-lived Ren Xiong.3 Although his artistic career spanned little more than a decade, the legacy of his unconventional personality and artistic brilliance, so evident in both his surviving paintings and his woodblock prints, were powerful influences on the formation of the new figure-painting style of the Shanghai school. Born in modest circumstances in the Zhejiang city of Xiaoshan, Ren Xiong studied a mixture of elite literary arts and practical skills, including poetry and the classics, along with portrait painting, archery, wrestling, and horseback riding. He was befriended by men of higher social and economic status, some of whom served in his early career as his patrons, and at their introduction married the daughter of a prominent Suzhou literatus. Friends wrote that he was straight­ forward, curious, and principled; he was a connoisseur of tea, could chant and compose poetry, and knew ancient philosophy. He was so passionate about music that he could not only play but also carve a seven-stringed zither (qin) from paulownia wood and cast a flute from iron. In those troubled times, he was recruited into the Qing military by friends who served as officials in the anti-Taiping effort. Although records are incomplete, there are suggestions that he served for a time as a military draftsman, making maps and charts, during efforts to retake the city of Nanjing from the Taipings in about 1854.

1.3 Ren Xiong (1823–1857), Self-portrait, undated, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 177.4 × 78.5 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

Over the course of his brief career, Ren Xiong painted a number of striking and unusual compositions, but the most powerful of all is an undated self-portrait probably executed during the final year or two of his life [fig. 1.3]. While using the technical vocabulary he had inherited as a painter of portraits and figures, he renders his own life-size image in an arrestingly confrontational way. The artist’s intent gaze, Chinese Art in the Age of Imperialism

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staring out from an emaciated face, meets ours with deadly seriousness. His shoulders and folded hands are at rest but suggest latent energy, his entire body poised with the vigor of a martial artist. Yet his long fingernails, a fashion favored by artists and literati, speak to a higher social status than that of the workman or farmer. Like the flower paintings by Zhang Xiong, Ren Xiong’s self-portrait is painted with ink and water-based pigments on the soft absorbent paper favored by artists of his period. His exposed shoulder, neck, and face are carefully outlined with thick and thin strokes of ink, shaded with very dry, diluted ink, and then tinted with flesh tones in the most naturalistic manner known to artists of his time. The blue stubble of his shaven forehead and hollow recession of his sunken cheeks are slightly darkened; his protruding clavicle, cheekbones, and shoulder are left pale, creating an effect of reflected light. The powerful three-dimensionality of his face and upper torso are quite intentionally juxtaposed with an extremely bold but strongly abstracted depiction of his white pants, blue tunic, and soft shoes. The highly artificial manner in which Ren Xiong painted the fabric of his garments is an art historical reference to the painting of the eccentric seventeenth-century figure painter Chen Hongshou, whose great originality had revitalized China’s figure-painting tradition two centuries earlier, and who was a native of the neighboring town of Zhuji. The bold, angular outline strokes, each accompanied by a schematic band of gray shading, further energize the already highly charged image. In purely formal terms, the painting is a powerful statement of self. Although Ren Xiong’s self-portrait identifies with Chen Hongshou, the immediacy of the figure’s naturalistic features and facial expression speak to the present. Ren Xiong’s talent at calligraphy and literature are demonstrated in the long poetic lament he inscribed on the painting. The text speaks of disappointment and disillusionment, a man of ambitious temperament looking back at his failures rather than his successes. The intensity of his personality, so evident in the constantly changing paintings that came from his brush, emerges in a howl of frustration from this painted figure. Despite the passion behind his words, however, he remains vague, or perhaps discreet, about the specific causes of his angst. The undated text does not reveal its purpose: Did Ren Xiong paint this picture in a moment of anger, to purge his soul of an unstated worldly pain? Or, suffering from acute tuberculosis, did he write for the future, recording the despair and self-awareness of one dying much too young? The very modern sense of alienation that one senses in the portrait itself is echoed in the inscription, where Ren Xiong laments not only his sense of failure in pursuit of 6

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reputation and success but, even more poignantly, his disillusionment with the very standards of virtue that were his birthright. In the vast world—what lies before my eyes? I smile and bow and go around flattering people to extend connections, but aware of what affairs? In the great confusion, what is there to hold on to and rely on? [ . . . ] What is more pitiful is that even though the mirror [shows] my black eyebrows exchanged [for white] and worldly dust covering my white head, I am still like a racing steed without plans. What is even more of a pitiable impediment is that the historians have not recorded even a single, light word about me [ . . . ] When I calculate back to my youth, I did not start out thinking this way. I relied on depicting the ancients to display examples [for emulation]. [But] who is the ignorant one? Who is the virtuous sage?4  

Ren Xiong was best known for figure painting and for the remarkable ways in which he synthesized themes from history, mythology, folk religion, and literature as well as his truly extraordinary reinterpretations of old themes. In the hierarchy of Chinese painting criticism of Ren Xiong’s day, portrait painting was regarded as a low-class functional skill. Landscapes and flowers in a less representational style were considered to be more self-expressive and thus comprised art of a higher aesthetic level. Ren Xiong’s early training was essentially that of a folk painter, but he brilliantly combined the conventions of that tradition with the more elevated arts that he learned in the company and collections of his elite friends and patrons. Although landscapes comprise a comparatively small part of Ren Xiong’s body of work, his surviving paintings in that genre are remarkable. One of the most brilliant is The Ten Myriads, which Ren Xiong painted with vivid blue and green mineral pigments on a ground of gold leaf. The landscape imagery glows like gemstones in a golden setting, but despite its highly decorative quality achieves a breathtaking pictorial power. The tumbling waterfalls in the leaf illustrated here, rendered in a closely cropped view [fig. 1.4], cascade into the viewer’s space in a surprising way. At the same time, the fine, even outlines, the carefully delineated and filled-in foliage, and the schematic shading of the rocks would be immediately recognizable to an art lover as referring to the style of Ren Xiong’s seven-

Gold-covered paper was used for fan paintings in the wealthy commercial city of Suzhou during the sixteenth century, but gold leaf as a ground for painting was not very common until two centuries later, after the opening of the treaty ports. Use of gold leaf was not rare in nineteenth-­ century Japanese art, particularly among artists of the Rimpa school. Active trade within Asia facilitated by the opening of ports to international trade expanded the range of artistic models and decorative objects an artistically ambitious artist such as Ren Xiong might have seen, likely bringing some knowledge of Japanese and European imagery. Probably the most important surviving commission of Ren Xiong’s career was his 120-leaf album painted a few years earlier in collaboration with his friend and patron Yao Xie (1805–1864), at whose home in Ningbo he lived while completing the work. Ren Xiong designed and rendered the illustrations in the album over a two-month period in the winter of 1850 and 1851. The images are based on phrases or couplets from Yao Xie’s poetry. Today the paintings are mounted as ten twelve-leaf albums and are organized by general theme. The extraordinary variety of subject matter and approach suggests a familiarity with classical Chinese painting and modern folk art, as well as with Japanese and Western art, although no documents survive that enable us to know precisely what objects he may have studied. One of the loveliest paintings in the album depicts a hummingbird seen through a bamboo curtain on a late summer day [fig. 1.5]. This view, which would have been surprising to Chinese viewers accustomed to the standard conventions of Chinese bird-and-flower painting, seems to emphasize  

1.4 Ren Xiong (1823–1857), Myriad Valleys with Contending Streams, undated, one leaf from the ten-leaf album The Ten Myriads, ink and mineral color on gold paper, 26.3 × 20.5 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

teenth-century idol, Chen Hongshou. The emotional and decorative power of the work is thus mediated by a more intellectual response, as one marvels at both the subtle similarities and the dramatic differences between this work and that of its stylistic antecedent. The boldness of these landscapes makes this one of the most original albums of the period. A line of calligraphy on each of the ten leaves begins with the word “ten thousand” or “myriad”—for example, Myriad Valleys with Contending Streams, Myriad Bamboo in Misty Rain, and Myriad Scepters Worshiping Heaven, which gives the album its title. It was painted for a Suzhou collector and bears inscriptions dated 1856 by close friends of the artist, including the painter Zhou Xian. Zhou Xian refers not to its style, however, but to the early origins of the theme. In his account the Yuan literatus Ni Zan (1306–1374), famous for his calm, monochromatic images, painted a work by this title, as did the Qing dynasty orthodox artist Wang Hui (1632–1717), who was a master at building a landscape from minute, even fussy, details. Ren Xiong’s bright and immediate composition was a distinctly new conception. At the same time, the luxuriousness of its materials attested to the affluence of its patron.  

 

 

1.5 Ren Xiong (1823–1857), Flying Bird Seen Through a Bamboo Screen, from Album after the Poems of Yao Xie, 1850–1851, one leaf from an album of 120 leaves, ink and color on silk, 27.5 × 32.5 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

 

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unexpected images from the world as actually glimpsed. This leaf is perhaps one of the most poetic in the entire album—an evocative phrase suggesting a much longer text. Ren Xiong shared with contemporary Japanese artists an interest in capturing the empirical world in visual terms. One of the most effective conceits to appear in Japanese prints of the period was that of the figure viewed in silhouette through a paper screen. Ren Xiong’s use of the bamboo blind as a translucent layer through which to see his transitory subject brilliantly conveys the same pleasure of hidden viewing. It was emulated by many later artists in Shanghai. Ren Xiong’s figure paintings in this album are based on a rich repertory of mythological, folk, and religious images found in temples, in book illustrations, and in the huagao, or hand-rendered image-catalogs passed down, often secretly, within the workshops of professional artists. Aspects of his dynamic figure style are frequently seen in the nineteenthcentury popular traditions of China and Japan, including woodblock-printed pictures and temple murals. Indeed, one of Ren Xiong’s major contributions to later Chinese painting was to expand the range of styles and subjects to encompass those associated with the folk tradition. His relationship with popular art was rich—he not only brought its imagery into the fine arts; he contributed to print culture through his design of woodblock illustrations. The prints have had wider circulation than his paintings and have thus been extremely important in making Ren Xiong’s compositions known to later artists. This bright star of midnineteenth-century painting fell ill with tuberculosis in the spring of 1857 and died later in the year, leaving his final print series incomplete.5 Ren Xiong’s unfulfilled artistic legacy was transmitted to his much younger brother, Ren Xun (1835–1893), who outlived Ren Xiong by thirty-five years. If Ren Xiong experimented with a dazzlingly wide range of styles and subjects, Ren Xun successfully followed what may be the most distinctive aspect of his style, the archaistic fine-outline manner. This style may be traced back to an early date in the history of Chinese painting, the time of the legendary figure painter Gu Kaizhi (ca. 344–ca. 401), whose lines were said to resemble the strands of newly spun silk.6 Gu’s manner, and his archaic imagery, were revived in the seventeenth century by the brilliant Chen Hongshou, who protested the disorders of his own day by transforming his painted world into a golden age of distant antiquity. Chen Hongshou came from the same region of Zhejiang province as their own hometown of Xiaoshan, and both Ren Xiong and Ren Xun saw him as an artistic model. Ren Xun’s undated album (inscribed later, in 1890) illustrating scenes from The  

 

 

 

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1.6 Ren Xun (1835–1893), The Romance of the Western Chamber, undated, one leaf from an album of twelve, ink and color on paper, 34 × 35.5 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

Romance of the Western Chamber is typical of his approach, both in its faithfulness to the Chen Hongshou style and in the subtle changes he made to accommodate his own nineteenth-century taste. The subject matter, taken from a Yuan period drama, remained popular in this era when marriages were arranged by family elders and personal choice in romance forbidden. This story of the love at first sight between a talented young man, scholar Zhang, and the beautiful daughter of an official, Cui Yingying, was produced in local dramas and published in many different versions. Chen Hongshou designed a beautiful and psychologically powerful woodblock version of the story in the seventeenth century. The challenge of presenting The Romance of the Western Chamber in a new way was not easy, but Ren Xun’s images have a compelling intensity. In this leaf the lovesick scholar Zhang, bent weakly over his study table, raises his writing brush over the letter he is composing [fig. 1.6]. Hongniang, the maidservant of his beloved, who was a faithful messenger for their illicit communications, looks on with sympathy. The work is painted in the particularly fine, fluid outline strokes that were used to extraordinary effect by both Chen Hongshou and Ren Xiong. Although the delicate lines are roughly the same width throughout the painting, each object is rendered in a slightly different way, the hard-edged furniture with a careful even stroke, the folds of scholar Zhang and Hongniang’s robes much more softly and flu-

idly, and even the banana leaves in the summer courtyard with sharp black lines. The architectural structure of the table is rendered in reverse perspective, the lines of the front and back diverging as they recede in space. This opens the surface of the desk, leaving a place for Ren Xun to display the letter paper, books, antiques, and other objects in fine detail, creating a sense of truth based on what we today might consider an alternative visual system. As in the earliest Chinese painting, and in the work of Chen Hongshou, the background is largely blank, the ground plane sharply tilted, and the environment left largely to the imagination. The contrast of this emptiness with the careful details of the young man’s tasteful possessions seems to emphasize his loneliness as he writes to his beloved. The elongation of the figures, and particularly of their heads, is characteristic of Chen Hongshou’s work and gives the characters their psychological intensity. Ren Yi

Ren Xun carried forth elements of his brother’s style but in general did not break new ground. It was the brilliance and originality of his student Ren Yi (1840–1895), who equaled the elder Ren Xiong in artistic accomplishment and carried the style of the deeply admired elder master forward to the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one can argue that Ren Yi transformed the manner he inherited from Ren Xiong into one so often emulated by his contemporaries and students that it came to be thought of as the Shanghai style. Ren Yi mastered the most virtuoso techniques of the two elder Rens, but his personal style resulted from an unprecedented synthesis of the rich artistic traditions that met in Shanghai—the beautiful ink-wash painting of the literati, the appeal of Chinese folk art, the realism and bright color of Western art, the psychological intensity of Japanese prints, and the powerful techniques of rendering line in ink that he had inherited from the older Ren brothers. Commonly called by his style name, Bonian, Ren Yi was a native of Shanyin, modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang province. He was the son of a rice merchant who also liked to paint, and Ren Yi learned the art of portrait painting from his father. Many anecdotes, but fewer facts, describe an almost miraculous talent for verisimilitude in figure painting. As a child, he was said to have shown his father a painted sketch of a visitor who came while he was away from home. The painting was so accurate that his father instantly recognized the man. Ren Bonian’s father died during the Taiping troubles, in about 1861, and Ren Yi thereafter devoted himself to establishing a career as a painter. A second commonly repeated but apparently apocry 

 

phal tale refers to his youthful brilliance and amazing skill in simulation. In this story Ren Yi found that the fastest way to make money in Shanghai was to sell fake Ren Xiong fans on the street. Ren Xiong happened to pass by and see him in the act, whereupon he quizzed the younger artist about the source of his wares. First claiming to be selling fans made by his uncle, Ren Yi found himself confronted by the real Ren Xiong, who instead of anger showed appreciation for his counterfeit nephew and accepted him as a student. Ren Xiong, who died in 1857, was said to have traveled repeatedly to Shanghai for the purpose of selling paintings, but at the time of his death Ren Yi was only seventeen and had not, according to current evidence, left home. Although many of Ren Yi’s close friends from the last years of his life believed the fan story to be true, they may reflect more a recognition of the true brilliance of his talent and his mastery of Ren Xiong’s style than biographical fact. It was from Ren Xiong’s younger brother and faithful follower, Ren Xun, that Ren Yi learned the outline techniques passed from older to younger brother. One of the earliest dated works on which Ren Yi’s signature appears is a collective fan painting made by Ren Yi and his teacher Ren Xun, along with Zhu Xiong and others in Suzhou, before Zhu Xiong’s death in 1864.7 Ren Yi’s son later recalled that Ren Yi moved to Suzhou and Ningbo in those years. Ren Yi’s early work reflects quite clearly the training in fine-line painting that he received under Ren Xun’s tutelage, but when Ren Yi moved to Shanghai in 1868, he rapidly began absorbing many other techniques and concepts, including those introduced by Jesuit missionaries. The reminiscences of Catholic sculptor and watercolorist Zhang Chongren, who as a teenager studied at the Tushanwan (T’ou-sè-wé) Printing Workshop, suggests a relationship between Ren Yi and the director of this Western painting workshop at the Xujiahui (Zikawei) Catholic church. Catholicism, despite persecutions in the late Qing period, retained influence in the western suburbs of Shanghai, where the family lands of a prominent late Ming official and convert, Xu Guangqi, were located, and the area once again became an active religious center after the treaty port was opened. A Spanish Jesuit artist named Joannes Ferrer (Fan Tingzhuo; d. 1856) arrived in Shanghai on October 24, 1847, to take responsibility for designing church buildings, altars, sculpture, and paintings as well as for training Chinese assistants in drawing and painting to meet liturgical needs.8 Ferrer was the son of a distinguished sculptor and had been sent to complete his artistic training in Rome when he entered the Jesuit order.9 He was sent to China from Naples in 1847. His Neapolitan colleague Nicolas Massa (Ma Yigu; 1815–  

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1876), who had arrived the year before, taught oil painting and Latin to Chinese Christians. When Ferrer designed the splendid new churches at Dongjiadu, near the waterfront by the Chinese city, and Xujiahui, on the old Xu family lands to the west of the city, he asked Massa to paint the icons.10 Ferrer also had the idea of establishing a school to train religious painters and sculptors, and after he began to accept apprentices at the Xujiahui workshop in 1852, he recruited Massa to teach oil painting. Their primary goal was to produce objects for religious life. Ferrer died in 1856, and the following year, Massa assumed responsibility for the Xujiahui painting and sculpture workshops. He asked their Chinese student, Lu Bodu (1836–1880), to assist him. In 1864 they established an orphanage at Xujiahui and three years later, in 1867, a school under Lu Bodu’s direction, the Tushanwan Painting Atelier, was founded. The workshop trained carpenters, leather workers, tailors, sculptors, gilders, painters, weavers, and block carvers. Lu subsequently fell ill with tuberculosis and turned over daily duties to a young priest named Liu Dezhai (active circa 1869–1912), who became director after Lu’s death in 1880. The Tushanwan atelier was thus administered by Liu Dezhai from about 1869 until 1912. In 1876 it also began training lithographers. Liu Dezhai came from the Suzhou area to Shanghai as a refugee during the Taiping Rebellion. After studying with Nicolas Massa and Lu Bodu, he became a priest and joined them at the new Tushanwan atelier. During his most active period, in the 1870s and 1880s, Liu Dezhai was involved in many projects to produce Bible illustrations and religious images for churches. The oral tradition of Tushanwan artists preserves tales of an artistic friendship between Liu Dezhai and Ren Yi. That Ren Yi followed the Western practice of carrying a sketchbook to make pencil drawings provides further evidence of his interest in Western artistic practices.11 Although such oral accounts can never be firmly verified, a portrait Ren Yi painted 1877 demonstrates a startling new realism [fig. 1.7], in a very traditional context. Ren Yi, in collaboration with his friend Hu Yuan, depicted their friend, the calligrapher Gao Yong (1850–1921), at the age of twenty-seven. Gao Yong, in this portrait, sits on a large rock under a pine tree that has been rendered in the soft, loose brushwork typical of literati painting. In contrast to this rather abstract setting, Gao Yong’s distinctive profile and facial features have been carefully outlined and modeled by Ren Yi with light color and ink to create vivid, highly naturalistic effects of volume and chiaroscuro. Even the stubble of the sitter’s beard and shaven forehead, as well as the swell of his Adam’s apple, are clearly visible. The single braid, or queue—required of all Chinese men as a sign of loyalty by the Manchu government—is tucked discreetly behind his  

 

 

1.7 Ren Yi (Ren Bonian; 1840–1895) and Hu Yuan (Hu Gongshou; 1823–1886), Portrait of Gao Yong, 1877, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 139 × 48.5 cm, Shanghai Museum  

 

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shoulder. Such a work could, and did, compete successfully with the photographic portraits then becoming popular in the city. Yet, as distinctive as Ren Yi’s rendering of his friend’s face might be, the figure’s plain white robe completely follows the archaistic conventions of Ren Xiong and Chen Hongshou. This contrast between linear outline and coloristic modeling is further accentuated by Hu Yuan’s addition of the powerfully composed old pine tree, rendered largely in strokes of thick gray ink, that dominates the central part of the picture. While towering overhead, the soft textures also provide a formal contrast to the crispness of the figural image. All elements of the collaboration work together to emphasize the thoughtful and highly naturalistic mien of the young artist, seated under a symbol of longevity, the pine, and clasping his hands elegantly over the knee of his mannered robe. Painter, calligrapher, and patron, Gao Yong was a frequent portrait subject for Ren Yi, but no other paintings are so filled with tension and life as this work from the first decade of his Shanghai period. Hu Yuan wrote the elegant inscription at right, and Gao Yong was so pleased with the work that, a year or two later, he showed it to another artist friend, Yang Borun (1837–1911), who added the inscription at left. A second painting of 1877, Five Successful Sons, demonstrates Ren Yi’s interest in Western effects of foreshortening and perspective as well as a newly naturalistic focus on the eyes of his six figures [fig. 1.8]. The subject itself, literally entitled The Five Fragrant Branches of the Cassia Tree, is highly auspicious, of a kind that might appear in folk new year’s prints. In this more elegant painted form, it would have been a suitable gift to congratulate a man on the birth of a son. The painting depicts the tenth-­century scholar Dou Yujun, a model of benevolence and virtue, whose five sons all passed the most difficult imperial examinations and became high officials. Depicting the wise father with his bright, diligent, and cooperative boys, such a work would appeal to the aspirations for high social status and wealth of the Shanghai merchants, but it is also typical of the uplifting themes found in much of premodern Chinese figure painting. Figural conventions in the first part of the nineteenth century reflected a canon of beauty in which the human form was slender and almost weightless, with long faces characterized by narrow and frequently downcast eyes. Even Ren Xiong’s glaring self-portrait [see fig. 1.3], striking for its challenging gaze, depicts a young man with wide epicanthal folds and narrow eyes. Ren Yi’s attention in Five Successful Sons to the wide-eyed gazes of the boys, the bulging flesh around the eyes of the old father, the plump cheeks of his eager youngest son, and the three-dimensional qualities of  

1.8 Ren Yi (1840–1895), Five Successful Sons, 1877, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 181.5 × 95.1 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

the figures in space—combined with his masterful outline rendering of the mannered garments and naturalistic furniture—are strikingly novel. Whether the new elements result from the artist’s exploration of Western conventions or of art forms outside painting, such as popular opera, they contribute to a slightly exotic sense of hybridity in this work. The overall execution of the figures, furnishings, and vegetation, in the linear vocabulary of Ren Xun, includes oddly abstract shading of folds in the draperies and creates an antique feeling reminiscent of the classical figure painting of Gu Kaizhi. The subject of Ren Yi’s painting is found in one of the best-known plebian morality texts, the Three Character Classic, and is thus very traditional, even conventional, but the painting’s execution brings new European  

 

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elements into the styles of Ren Xun and Ren Xiong in a highly innovative way. As his fame in artistic circles grew, Ren Yi had greater opportunity to study old paintings. By the 1880s he had become interested in another seventeenth-century style, that of Zhu Da (Bada Shanren, 1626–1705), that was essentially the polar opposite of his previous manner. Zhu Da’s iconoclastic bird-and-flower painting in the “boneless” or inkwash manner conveys form and volume without the use of outlines. Rather than leaving behind his previous style, Ren Yi began to bring elements executed in the boneless manner into his outline paintings. One notable example is his Three Knights Errant of 1882, in which the bandit’s donkey is brilliantly depicted with the loose, boneless wash that Bada most frequently employed for flowers, birds, and even fish, rather than with the outline technique usually employed for painting horses [fig. 1.9]. Like Five Successful Sons, this is a quasi-historical narrative that had long made its way into the popular tradition, appearing commonly in performances of local opera and storytelling as well as in marvel tales of the chuanqi genre. Ren Yi painted this romantic story in more than one version, possibly at the request of different patrons. The historical Li Jing (571–649) was a military official of the Sui dynasty who joined the rebellion that brought down his declining dynasty. In fictional versions of Li Jing’s life, Hongfunü, a woman of the Sui imperial harem, recognized his heroic talent and ran away with him. They later recruited a tough character called Curly Beard to assist in their martial mission. For his exploits on behalf of the future Tang dynasty, which became one of China’s greatest epochs, Li Jing’s heroism was legendary. His fictional persona, that of a colorful and virtuous bandit, had the popular appeal of Robin Hood. This painting by Ren Yi is particularly effective for its combination of previously discrete painting techniques—boneless wash for the animal, outline for the trees and figures, and rich appealing color. Even more powerful, however, in this strikingly odd composition, is the psychological effect of the novel placement of the figures. The bold Curly Beard, astride a donkey at front left, twists his body vigorously in space to meet the gaze of the half-hidden hero, Li Jing, who peers out through a screen of branches. This theatrical placement of figures uses one of Ren Yi’s most effective narrative devices—the psychological connection between characters made visible in the meeting of their gazes. Contemporary viewers might have imagined the ballads of local opera ringing in their ears as they enjoyed the painting. Ren Yi explored a wide range of subjects from the popular tradition, and in almost all cases transformed their conventional rendering.  

 

 

 

1.9 Ren Yi (1840– 1895), Three Knights Errant, 1882, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 182.1 × 48.2 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

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1.10 Ren Yi (1840–1895), Bird on a Branch, 1882, from the twelve-leaf Album of Figures, Flowers, and Birds, ink and color on paper, 31.5 × 36 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

A theme for which Ren Yi was equally well known was birds and flowers [fig. 1.10]. Like many of his figures, the white-bellied bird surrounded by blue blossoms fixes our eyes with its own penetrating gaze. Adopting a view from below, Ren Yi creates the bird’s body from blank paper left in reserve against a gray ink background, one that suggests a hazy tree or rock in the background. The surface-covering composition, and the complete absence of outlines, strongly suggests Ren Yi’s familiarity with Western watercolor painting, but the abbreviated, close-up composition possesses the power of poetic suggestion typical of the best Chinese painting. Despite his great technical skill, Ren Yi is unfettered by convention, and he textures the creature’s plumage with variegated strokes of his own invention. Ren Yi’s skillful hand and keen eye are evident throughout: in the posture of the bird, in its claws as they grasp the branch, and in the pale but crisp strokes of bamboo that cross the composition. Once again, Ren Yi transforms convention in a surprising way. Ren Yi developed similarly novel techniques for painting in other genres, including deploying the techniques generally used in flower painting for rendering the images of animals or people. A work of 1888, Portrait of the Shabby Official (also called The Cold and Sour Official ) [fig. 1.11], is a good-humored satire of the unfulfilling administrative career of the artist’s friend, Wu Changshi. An aspiring Confucian official whose family had been wiped out when the Taiping Rebellion swept through his hometown of Anji, Zhejiang, Wu Changshi made his living as a teacher and

1.11 Ren Yi (1840–1895), Portrait of the Shabby Official (Portrait of Wu Changshi), 1888, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 164.2 × 74.6 cm, Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou  

low-ranking functionary during the years when he came to know Ren Yi. In this painting, Ren Yi depicted Wu Changshi in an official uniform, a long yellow gown, a black mandarin jacket, and high-soled boots. The conical Manchu hat, with its rows of red tassels, is in disarray, however, and his awkward posture is one of trepidation. The sitter himself wrote about the painting: “I asked Ren Bonian to paint a portrait for me. It is titled Portrait of the Shabby Official Chinese Art in the Age of Imperialism

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(Suanhanwei), and [I appear] wearing a uniform and standing very properly, with hands joined in obsequious respect. The awkward appearance of the figure really makes people laugh. People who know me all immediately say, ‘This must be Wu [Changshi]!’ I inscribe this to make fun of myself.” 12 In a poem published soon after, he described his ridiculous state, a lowly clerk sweating in the midsummer heat, tongue-tied and absurdly apprehensive before the high official: “I hemmed and hawed . . . my back bent and my arms hanging submissively. I hadn’t had enough breakfast, but it was already lunchtime. Only m ­ iddle-aged, I looked like an old man, my back sore and legs in pain.” 13 This portrait makes unprecedented use of puddled or boneless ink and color wash, a convention most commonly employed for depicting flowers and leaves, but here used to render the human figure. Photographic portraits of Wu Changshi attest to the uncanny likeness achieved in the face of this portrait, all the more startling because of the wet and far more abstract treatment of the garments and shoes. In the last decade of his career, Ren Yi’s technical mastery made possible bold imagery and expressive execution that seems completely effortless. Ren Yi’s success, both commercially and artistically, was so influential that scores of Shanghai painters in the ensuing decades emulated or even forged his style. He brought Western conventions of foreshortening, shading, and coloration into his works in the Chinese media. At the same time, he innovated within the Chinese tradition that he had so brilliantly mastered—using color for techniques previous artists had developed in ink, combining fine line and wash in unexpected ways, violating the norms of Chinese painting technique. He created images that had a compelling psychological power, immediately readable but rewarding of thoughtful contemplation. Ren Yi’s new style resonated with the unsettled society of nineteenth-century Shanghai, and, by breaking down so many traditional boundaries, opened the door to twentieth-century modernity.  

Art Shops

One of the most important changes that occurred in the art world of treaty port Shanghai was the development of a new class of art buyers and new ways of selling art. In premodern times, acquisition of a piece of contemporary art from an artist one did not know might be a complicated transaction, requiring introductions through a mutual friend or go-between.14 The most potentially rewarding way of collecting, for a patron with means and connections, was to invite an artist and his family to live as house guests in his garden estate for long periods of time. Unlike the modern “artist-in-residence,” which such an arrangement resembles 14

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in some ways, this form of hospitality presumed friendship as its primary motivation and thus involved many social and psychological obligations on both sides. The patron would receive paintings from the artist and might enjoy the daily opportunity to discuss art and culture with a man of great talent. The visit of his guest might serve as the occasion for memorable scholarly or artistic gatherings that brought together the elite of contemporary society, fellow lovers of art and culture. For the artist, the relationship similarly extended far beyond simple monetary reward, for it might offer not just friendship but also the opportunity to study major collections of paintings, calligraphy, or antiquities; to learn from the erudition of his host; and to benefit professionally through his introduction into the highest ranks of contemporary society and patronage. In the best of circumstances the wealth and position of the host and the talent of the guest placed them on a social footing based on cultural collaboration that transcended class boundaries. Ren Xiong’s career may have exemplified this ideal. As a professional artist, his social status was far beneath that of his literati patrons. All parties clearly enjoyed and benefited from his stays as a guest in the homes of Yao Xie and Zhou Xian, but his upper-class friends sealed a permanent change in his social status by arranging his marriage to the daughter of a prominent scholar. With the relocation of so many artists to the treaty ports at midcentury, however, the old social relationships were supplemented and then gradually replaced by new modes of marketing, most notably art and antique shops. The most important of these establishments are usually referred to as fan-and-stationery shops (shanjianzhuang), although the scope of their business was so broad that we prefer to call them art shops. China did not develop a Western-style gallery system in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, but the art shop served many of the functions of the Western gallery. By 1909 there were more than one hundred art shops in the city of Shanghai.15 The shops served as the nonexclusive agents for many artists trying to make a living in the city, accepting orders for fans, scrolls, and decorative paintings, and delivering the finished work to the shop’s customers. They served to maintain a standard price list for the artist, one usually based on the size, format, and materials used for the work, as well as to promote his or her celebrity. Zhu Cheng’s circular painting of 1881 may have been intended for mounting as a round fan [see fig. 1.2]. Most art shops offered scroll-mounting services and some also did picture framing, as this Western custom came into fashion in the last decades of the nineteenth century. An anonymous art lover might thus have the opportunity to see examples of readymade work by vari-

ous artists at an art shop as well as commissioned examples that might be awaiting delivery. It was possible to commission a specific subject by a specific artist and even to stipulate that the inscription should be dedicated to a particular individual. The social obligations required in the past were eliminated by an efficient commercial transaction. Even foreigners, most of whom lacked ties within the normal operations of Chinese society, could, and did, buy paintings at art shops. The works of Shanghai artists were taken home by visitors from Europe, Japan, Korea, and the United States, among other places. Most art shops sold supplies for calligraphy and painting, such as paper, silk, ink, brushes, and pigment, as well as writing supplies for ordinary consumers, such as stationery and account books. The owners thus had ample opportunity to interact with both the patrons and the producers of art. The most refined of the shops purveyed their own brands of elegantly decorated letter papers, calligraphy paper ornamented with pale background images, printed xylographically in color, sometimes in a multiblock polychromatic technique. One of the earliest of the Shanghai shops, the Manyunge (Silken cloud pavilion), sold stationery decorated with designs believed to be by Zhong Huizhu, Zhang Xiong’s talented wife. By 1876 there were more than a dozen popular art shops in the Chinese city and the foreign concessions. Among the earliest in the Chinese city were the Deyuelou (Mooncatching hall), in the Yu Garden, and in the foreign concessions were the Manyunge and Guxiangshi (Fragrance of antiquity). Another famous shop, the Jiuhuatang (Hall of nine spendors), was founded in the late 1870s or early 1880s by Zhu Jintang, an art-loving businessman. Examples of elegant letter paper designed by the monk painter Xugu (1823–1896) for him survive, and in 1884, Ren Yi painted a group portrait, Three Friends, apparently at Zhu Jintang’s request. All three figures in the work are depicted wearing plain, almost monastic robes, and seated on the floor; behind them are piled scrolls, albums, and books, the objects of their common enjoyment. Zhu is seated at left, his friend Zeng Fengji at center, and at right an affable image of Ren Yi himself, one of the artist’s very few selfportraits [fig. 1.12]. Although Japanese paintings of the nineteenth century depict gatherings of scholars seated on the floor, this was not so in China, where chairs were customary. The setting of this portrait thus suggests a stylish exoticism, possibly commemoration of a meeting that took place in a Japanese-style interior space, such as one of the Japanese restaurants popular in late-nineteenth-century Shanghai. If not so intended, it evokes customs of a distant golden age, more than a millennium earlier, when the great philoso 

1.12 Ren Yi (1840– 1895), Three Friends (Portrait of Zhu Jintang, Zeng Fengji, and Ren Yi), 1884, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, Palace Museum, Beijing  

phers, poets, and artists of China, too, sat on mats on the floor. Artists who, like Ren Yi, arrived in the city as refugees or sojourners had urgent need for lodging and food as they sought to establish reputations and careers in the city. The art shops provided for these basic needs, often inviting a promising painter to live in one of the second-story rooms above the shop. The landscape painter Pu Hua (1830–1911) lived for a time at the Xihongtang (Hall of playing geese). In 1868, when he moved to Shanghai, Ren Yi was introduced by his older friend Hu Yuan (1823–1886) to the Guxiangshi, which provided lodging and assistance in selling his paintings. The proprietor of Guxiangshi introduced Ren Yi to many wealthy patrons from southern China, particularly Cantonese bankers and Fujianese businessmen, who would otherwise have been outside Ren Yi’s more regionally based social orbit. He became the most famous artist in Shanghai by the end of his life, but as a sign of his gratitude he continued to return every year to paint for the Guxiangshi. The three-character names of the art shops, which may sound rather ornate in translation, are frequently clever references to literary passages with which patrons possessing a classical education would have been familiar. For example, the name Hall of Nine Splendors (Jiuhuatang) refers to the preface of a poem by Cao Cao (155–220), “Ode on the Nine-Splendored Fan,” and would be recognizable as  

 

 

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that of a fanshop. Cloud Studio (Duoyunxuan) refers to a sentence in the New Tang History: “[Wei Zhi] often used five-colored stationery to write letters, and they looked like five clouds (wu duo yun).” Its core business is thus identified as the elegantly decorated letter paper the shop produced and sold. The only early art shop to survive in Shanghai today, Duoyunxuan was established in 1900. Duoyunxuan absorbed Jiuhuatang during the socialist economic restructuring of 1956. A similar company, Rongbaozhai, still remains in Beijing. Both continue to produce and sell decorated stationery and fans, despite expanding into more lucrative new businesses, such as auctions and art magazines, in the twenty-first century. Following nineteenth-century patterns, the staff of Duo­ yunxuan helped the young Sichuanese painter Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien; 1899–1983) find a calligraphy tutor when he first sojourned in the city in 1919. His relationship with this prominent teacher, Zeng Xi (1861–1931), was important for him artistically but also because it opened doors into the Shanghai art world. One of the many documents of their relationship survives in the form of a collaborative memorial to the Leifeng pagoda in Hangzhou, which had recently collapsed. Zhang Daqian created a tiny image of the pagoda from memory to accompany a piece of calligraphy by his mentor, Zeng Xi. Conceived in the framework of premodern collecting practices rather than those of modern archaeology, the two works were then mounted as a miniature handscroll with a woodblock-printed Buddhist image that had been found inside a brick from the pagoda.16  

 

Art and the Publishing Industry

The development of a modern publishing industry in Shanghai has had important ramifications for Chinese society and for the art world. When European printing methods overtook the native Chinese woodblock technology, it was not letterpress printing but lithography that emerged dominant.17 The ease and economy with which lithography could reproduce calligraphy and painting to create a publication that looked like a woodblock made it particularly appealing to Chinese publishers. The Xujiahui Catholic orphanage was one of the first places in Shanghai to teach lithography, beginning in 1876. The following year, at the suggestion of his Chinese comprador, the British owner of Shanghai’s major Chinese newspaper, Shenbao, opened a lithographic printing house that became very profitable by republishing the woodblock-printed texts necessary for imperial examination candidates. The new technology, which was soon copied by many other firms, also made possible reproduction of painting manuals and guidebooks that raised the reputations of artists mentioned within. 16

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In 1884, Shenbao began publishing China’s first illustrated periodical, the Dianshizhai Pictorial, which was issued every ten days as a supplement to the newspaper. Printed lithographically on relatively soft Chinese paper, the result was materially very similar to the publications with which readers were familiar. Some issues included a bonus—a single, large, folded reproduction of a figure painting by one of Dianshizhai’s talented staff artists or even by a famous artist such as Ren Yi. Some of these pullouts were hand-colored with Chinese painting pigments and were suitable for framing, mounting as scrolls, or pasting on the wall. The success of Dianshizhai Pictorial may be attributed to the talented contributions and supervision of its chief illustrator, a Suzhou native named Wu Jiayou (Wu Youru; d. 1893), who had worked as a painter in a local art shop until his home city was overrun by the Taiping rebels and he took refuge in Shanghai. In 1864, after the Qing court commissioned Wu Jiayou to celebrate in pictorial form the heroic deeds of the war of Taiping suppression, his national fame was established. In the new periodical Wu and the Dianshizhai artists painted full-page illustrations in highly detailed black outlines, compositions that combined Chinese figural concepts with the Western perspective and imagery they learned from such models as the London Illustrated News. The Dianshizhai stories were, however, uniquely tailored to their audiences, as each illustration was explained in a sometimes lengthy inscription in classical Chinese. The magazine published images of domestic and international news, including China’s military battles and foreign science and technology, along with tabloid-style scandals, freaks of nature, and science fiction. The eyes of readers were thus opened to the Seven Wonders of the World, views of European capitals, the customs of Japanese and Europeans, goings-on in Shanghai’s brothels, and vignettes of Chinese and foreign residents of the treaty ports. Immensely popular, the pictorial impressed upon the minds of people all over China mental images of the new metropolis of Shanghai and of the international world. Although Dianshizhai hua‑ bao ceased publication in 1898, enough readers collected and bound their copies that it was well known to artists who grew up in the early decades of the twentieth century. Many later recalled childhood perusal of its illustrations as a factor in their own love of painting. At the very end of his life, Wu Jiayou left the Dianshizhai workshop to establish his own pictorial magazine, Feiyingge huabao (Flying shadow pictorial), for which, over the course of three years, he made all the drawings himself. The publication, issued three times a month, was intended to be collectible, and each of the ten features—including news, natu 

 

1.13 Wu Jiayou (d. 1893), Thief in the Flower Garden, 1891, published in the current affairs section of Feiyingge huabao, no. 17, 1891 (issue 2 of the second lunar month)

ral history, famous ladies of the past, and ladies in the latest fashions—was separately numbered. When enough pages had been accumulated, the subscriber’s favorite feature might then be bound as an independent book. The most poignant of Wu Jiayou’s illustrations depicted, in a sympathetic and intimate fashion, the romantic sorrows of ancient ladies of the imperial harem or contemporary courtesans of the Shanghai pleasure houses [fig. 1.13], perhaps foreshadowing the great popularity of such themes in popular fiction of the ensuing years.18 Wu Jiayou’s publication ceased with his death in 1893, but lithographic publishers continued to emulate its style for many decades thereafter. The traditional woodblock printing workshops did not surrender easily to competition from lithography. New year’s prints continued to be produced in rural areas of northern China, where European machinery did not exist, and were often pasted on the walls of peasant homes as decorations. However, even in cities such as Suzhou and Tianjin, famous workshops at Taohuawu or Yangliuqing continued to produce festive polychromatic images for use during the traditional holidays and as souvenirs of festivals and dramas. Lithographic publishers were often located in the foreign concessions, while workshops in the Chinese city of Shanghai produced traditional woodblock new year’s pictures, usually in the delicate Suzhou style. Many of the prints collected by the anthropologist Bernard Laufer in his fieldwork for the American Museum of Natural History between 1902 and 1904 were mounted as scrolls and thus were suitable for temporary display in the dwelling of a family of modest means. The increasing use of Western as  

opposed to native printing technology did not immediately produce a substantial shift in content. Images of modern life and traditional themes may be found in both modern lithographically and traditional xylographically produced books and prints. Perhaps to confront the commercial threat of the Shanghai lithographic printing industry, in the mid-Guangxu era (1875–1908) one of northern China’s most important woodblock centers, Yangliuqing near Tianjin, hired the Shanghaibased figure painter Qian Hui’an (1833–1911) to design new images for their new year’s picture production. Qian was particularly skilled at painting female beauties in the graceful, elongated manner fashionable in the late Qing period, but he also excelled in bringing life to an extraordinary variety of folk themes and popular stories. A painting of 1900 depicts children in snow sculpting a qilin, the mythical quadruped believed to bring sons and good fortune, as a clever vehicle to wish the recipient bountiful harvests, progeny, and prosperity in the coming year [fig. 1.14]. Indeed, like his younger colleague Ren Yi, Qian Hui’an’s success was based on his ability to incorporate novel, up-to-date elements—in his case Western shading and, from time to time, complicated architectural settings—into essentially Chinese themes and compositions. Qian Hui’an, an early migrant to Shanghai, was active in many of the cultural activities of the city from as early as the 1850s. At the end of his life, in 1909, he was elected president of the Yu Garden Painting and Calligraphy Charitable Association, one of the most socially prestigious art groups in the city. It is indicative of the seismic economic and social  

 

 

 

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shifts of the late Qing period that a popular artist such as Qian Hui’an, who had lent his talents to production of the most plebian of art forms (the woodcut new year’s picture), might rise to the apogee of Shanghai’s art world.19 The Monk Xugu

The rapidly changing Chinese society of the late nineteenth century undoubtedly made living a completely conventional life extremely difficult. Of the many artists active in nineteenth-century Shanghai, the monk Xugu (1823–1896) may have been one of the most eccentric as well as one of the most artistically original. A native of Shexian, Anhui, one of Qing-dynasty China’s most important cultural and artistic centers, he is believed to have lived in Yangzhou and to have served briefly in the Qing army during the Taiping attacks on Zhenjiang and Yangzhou in 1853. Soon after, he became a Buddhist monk and abandoned his secular name, Zhu Huaigu, for the monastic name Xugu by which he was later known. Settling for a time in a Suzhou temple, but continuing to travel throughout the region, he was well known and admired by many fellow artists, calligraphers, poets, and patrons in the region, including Zhang Xiong, Gao Yong, Hu Yuan, and Ren Yi. His biographers note that although he was a monk, he did not practice vegetarianism or other standard Buddhist disciplines, and when he needed money, Xugu would sell his paintings and calligraphy. Nevertheless, he remained a monk and after his death in 1896, his remains were returned to his home temple in Suzhou, not to his native place in Anhui. Many paintings dating to the last twenty-five years of his life survive, few more striking than his album of 1895 that is now in the Shanghai Museum [fig. 1.15]. He was a talented portraitist, but his most original paintings, like this album, depict plants, fish, or animals with a particular acuity and sensitivity that may perhaps be attributed not only to his artistic gifts but also to his Buddhist contemplation of the nature of all living things. Although his paintings respond to the Shanghai art market in their auspicious subject matter and bright color, the eccentric brushwork of his calligraphy and painting possesses a restraint and interiority that are the hallmarks of literati painting. The dry linearity of his pictorial rendering and the astringency of his calligraphy reflect the elite styles of his native Anhui, while the bright, optimistic subject matter may be more consciously aimed at the recipients of his paintings in mercantile Shanghai. The leaf reproduced in figure 1.15, painted only a year before he died, represents goldfish, a symbol of academic and official accomplishment believed capable metaphorically of “leaping the dragon gate”—that is, passing the imperial examinations. Moreover, the name of this popular urban pet,  

1.14  Qian Hui’an (1833–1911), New Year’s Prosperity, dated 1900, ink and color on paper, 179.5 × 47.9 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan.  

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1.15  Xugu (1823–1896), Goldfish, 1895, one leaf of a ten-leaf Album of Various Subjects, ink and color on paper, 34.7 × 40.6 cm, Shanghai Museum  

jinyu, is a homophone for “gold in surplus” and makes it a suitable symbol of wealth. The four plump creatures, varied in hue from deep orange to pure white, are outlined in Xugu’s artfully animated dry ink lines, which take the viewer beyond the visual specificity of the subjects’ naturalistic color to a literati-style semiabstraction. Epigraphy and Art

If the artistic career of Ren Yi, which peaked in the 1870s and 1880s, or that of Xugu, most active in the 1880s and first half of the 1890s, may be situated in the newly commercializing treaty port world, with its hybrid society, economy, and culture, that of their friend Wu Changshi (1844–1927) blossomed after the fall of the empire in 1911. A Confucian scholar-literatus of strongly traditional bent, Wu Changshi experienced disruptions and disappointments in his early life, followed by extraordinary success as a professional painter in Republican-period Shanghai. The contours of his life exemplified the decline of the nineteenth-century Chinese empire and the subsequent optimism and idealism of the new Republic in the twentieth century. A seal carver, calligrapher, poet, scholar, and finally painter, Wu was also blessed with the health and longevity that made possible a very productive old age. He may thus serve as an excellent example of the changes that the twentieth century brought to the art and lives of artists in the lower Yangzi valley region. Unlike Ren Yi, who was a professional painter from his early years, Wu Changshi became one only later in life, and in a direct response to the difficulties of the era. Wu Changshi, whose formal name was Wu Junqing, was born in Anji county, Zhejiang, to a family of  

some social status. His father was well educated, a holder of the juren degree, which qualified him to serve in local government. He never took up such an official post, however, and in 1860, when Wu Changshi was sixteen, the battles of the Taiping Rebellion combined with a local famine to force the family to flee their home. Their return in 1862 was lamentably brief, and by 1864 all members of his household except Wu and his father had perished. Upon returning home, Wu Changshi sat successfully for the first-level civil service examination and was awarded the status of xiucai. He remarried and began working as a tutor in Anji. Wu and his father shared a love of seal-carving, and from an early age Wu Changshi devoted a great deal of effort to this art. Unfortunately, his father fell ill and died in 1868, when he was forty-seven and Wu only twenty-four. Wu Changshi later lamented that he had little opportunity to study with his very learned father and grandfather. He traveled throughout the Jiangnan area during this period of his early adulthood, first studying epigraphy and classics with the renowned scholar Yu Yue (1821–1906) in Hangzhou and then accepting the position of assistant to a wealthy official named Du Wenlan (1815–1881) in Suzhou. During the four years Wu Changshi lived in Du’s household, he came to know many Suzhou scholars, including the calligrapher Yang Xian (1819–1896), who later wrote an inscription on his portrait [see fig. 1.11]. In 1882, Wu was appointed as a low-ranking official in Suzhou, and his circle of friends continued to grow, including many local poets, collectors, and artists. In the same year he was given an archaeological relic, an ancient ceramic vessel called a fou. Wu so treasured this object that he often called himself “Old Man Fou” or “Master of Fou Cottage.” A few years before, in the mid-1870s, when he was about thirty years old, Wu Changshi acquired rubbings of a set of late Zhou dynasty (770–221 BCE) textual engravings called the Stone Drums. These rough and eroded inscriptions possessed a power that fascinated the artist for the rest of his life, and he worked and reworked their forms throughout the remainder of his career [fig. 1.16]. The slow, irregular, yet firmly executed characters in his Stone Drum inscription calligraphy would become his unique contribution to the art of calligraphy. He, like earlier masters of the “stele school,” including fellow Zhejiang native Zhao Zhiqian, was not particularly interested in the more elegant and tidy scripts associated with canonical court traditions of calligraphy but instead sought a more authentic aesthetic by returning to long-forgotten inscriptions from archeological finds. Wu Changshi first traveled to Shanghai, which would later become his home, in 1872, where he met painter, calligrapher, and patron Gao Yong, the subject of Ren Yi’s  

 

 

 

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1.16 Wu Changshi (1844– 1927), Stone Drum Script, 1915, set of four hanging scrolls, ink on paper, each 150 × 40 cm, Shanghai Institute of Painting  

slightly later portrait [see fig. 1.7]. By the mid-1880s Wu Changshi had many friends in the Shanghai art world, including the scholar-painter Zhang Xiong and the professional portraitist Ren Yi, and in 1887 he settled for a time in the city. During the next few years, his relationship with Ren Yi became increasingly close. Between 1886 and 1888, Wu Changshi carved many seals for Ren Yi, and Ren Yi repeatedly painted Wu Changshi’s portrait. A masterpiece of this genre, yet one filled with humor and intimacy, is the 1888 In the Cool Shade of the Banana Tree [fig. 1.17], in which Ren Yi makes superb use of the fine-line style he inherited from Ren Xun. The degree to which Ren Yi had deployed this skillful brushwork for new purposes is evident in the powerful three-dimensionality of his corpulent subject. The portly Wu Changshi complained often about the intense summer heat of his native region. Here, having pulled off his shoes to cool his feet and stripped his robe down to the waist, he is caught in a moment of relief from his discomfort. Although much of the paintings’ color is applied in a very conventional fashion—generally flat in tone as was common in earlier outline painting—Ren Yi emphasizes his empirical experience rather than received convention in his coloration of his friend’s body. Instead of a generalized flesh  

 

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tone, he clearly depicts the sunburn on Wu’s face and neck, the dark birthmark on his pale upper arm, and a rounded belly that is remarkable for its paleness—it has evidently rarely been exposed sunlight. The intimacy, informality, and naturalism of this image are remarkable. Anecdotes that have been handed down suggest that Ren Yi offered Wu Changshi helpful advice for his painting— to use seal script strokes for branches and cursive script for flowers, and thus make the most of his strength as a calligrapher and seal carver. A three-character seal Wu Changshi carved in 1893 is typical of his rough and powerful knifehandling in seal script, even when he chooses to render delicate forms [fig. 1.18a]. Ren Yi’s portrait of Wu Changshi was inscribed, much later, in an unusually long seal-script colophon that pays homage to the sitter’s accomplishments as a calligrapher and seal-carver [see fig. 1.17]. Wu Changshi began painting his favorite theme, the plum blossom, twenty years before meeting Ren Yi, but with Ren Yi’s advice his painting became more original, the quality of his line increasingly reflecting the weathered power of ancient scripts. By this time he had, like Ren Yi, become interested in affinities between his work and that of freely brushed flower-and-rock paintings by masters of the past,  

 

1.18 Seals: (a) Wu Changshi, Jiaoyanzhai, 1893, zhuwen seal, 2.1 × 2.2 cm, Shanghai Museum; (b) Zhao Zhiqian, Ding Wenwei, 1859, baiwen seal, 2.1 × 2.2 cm, Shanghai Museum; (c) Zhao Zhiqian, Wuxian Pan Boyin pingsheng zhenshang, 1871, zhuwen seal, 2.1 × 2.2 cm, Shanghai Museum

1.17 Ren Yi (1840–1895), In the Cool Shade of the Banana Tree (Portrait of Wu Changshi), dateable to 1888, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 129 × 58.9 cm, Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou  

particularly the seventeenth-century individualists Shitao and Zhu Da, the Ming literati Xu Wei and Chen Chun, and the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou. Yet for most of his contemporaries and his collectors, the compelling quality in his work was its epigraphic flavor, a quality of composition and brushwork that recalled eroded stone steles, patinated bronze vessels, or the slow knife-strokes engraved in the cool, smooth surface of a seal. A painting Wu gave to his Japanese friend Nagao Uzan in 1914 is an excellent example of his plum painting in the epigraphic manner [fig. 1.19].

1.19 Wu Changshi (1844–1927), Plum Blossoms for Nagao Uzan, 1914, hanging scroll, ink on satin, 134.8 × 42.1 cm, Kyoto National Museum, Nagao Collection  

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1.20  Zhao Zhiqian (1829–1884), Flowers, 1859, one leaf from a twelve-leaf album, ink and color on paper, 22.4 × 31.5 cm, Shanghai Museum  

An interest in epigraphic effects in calligraphy and painting was not new—the Hangzhou calligrapher and painter of the seventeenth century Jin Nong (1687–1764) wrote in a manner that was closely related to his own interest in archaic scripts. In the nineteenth century, however, this scholarly interest spread to other art forms, including painting, and became impetus for experimental trends. An important precursor of Wu Changshi was Zhao Zhiqian (1829–1884), a fellow Zhejiang artist, born in Kuaiji, near Shaoxing.20 From a merchant background, Zhao Zhiqian studied relentlessly, even during the perils of the Taiping Rebellion, to achieve his goal of becoming an official. He was a talented seal-carver and calligrapher as well as an enthusiast of ancient scripts. The Zhao Zhiqian album leaf reproduced here, dated 1859, is a work of his early maturity, painted when he worked in Hangzhou as an aide to a prominent scholarofficial, Miao Zi (1807–1860), his intellectual mentor, during his period of study for the civil service examination system. In this period Zhao Zhiqian’s creative exploration and reinvention of archaeological models were also at their height [fig. 1.20]. The inscriptions on Zhao’s paintings are often works of art in themselves. In this case, with great design flair, he has titled the work in large, bold characters, at upper right, and then shifted into a smaller, more casual script for the text and signature that follow to the left. His writing is plump and his characters rather horizontal, all traits of the Han and Six dynasties scripts so thoroughly admired by adherents of the “stele school” of calligraphy. Less obvious, but important to the epigraphic aesthetic, is the striking balance between areas of substance and areas of void, or painted surfaces and blank paper. The com 

 

 

 

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plex assemblage of separate elements of color and vegetation is conceptually parallel to the intricate arrangement of strokes within a character and of characters within the bounded rectangle or square of the seal format and is felt by seal-­lovers to fill the painting with the flavor of archaic inscriptions. In this painting from a twelve-leaf album, Zhao Zhiqian has depicted the rather unusual subject of poppies, experimenting with color, matching the veins in each flower to the softer, lighter tone of the petal, and mixing greens and yellows in a complex way not often seen in earlier flower painting. He renders the folds and bends of the leaves, petals, and stalks with careful observation, but at the same time he pulls back from naturalism, creating startling contrasts by painting a few leaves in dark gray ink, even highlighting them with fine, gold lines, and carefully managing the intense blankness of the paper left in reserve between the twisting and turning blossoms. With its powerful calligraphy and subtle ink washes, this work recalls literati painting, but the unassertive restraint of that tradition is quite confidently subordinated here to Zhao’s dazzling vision of the bright flowers. Whether or not the innovations in Zhao Zhiqian’s painting were stimulated by the changes in material life gradually brought about by international trade, including importation of the “Western red” or carmine that he uses for the pink poppies, or best viewed as the almost accidental products of individual genius, by the end of the nineteenth century Zhao Zhiqian’s work was recognized by ardent followers as highly original. Two examples of his seal carving attest to his creativity in this art. The first, carved in 1859 for prominent fellow seal enthusiast Ding Wenwei, renders the three characters of Ding’s name in intaglio [fig. 1.18b].

The intentionally naïve manner leaves the strokes of the iron knife particularly evident in the single character at right: Ding 丁. The second, a larger and more formal work of 1871 in the standard small seal script, is a connoisseur’s seal carved in relief with the fine curvilinear strokes of a Tang dynasty stele [fig. 1.18c]. Despite their great differences in style and motif, the two seals demonstrate the sophisticated balances of symmetry and asymmetry; character and ground; line, grid, and square of a master seal carver. Zhao Zhiqian’s seals were particularly admired for their originality in incorporating new forms found in antique stone steles, Buddhist statues, bronze mirrors, and a range of other archaeological specimens. The nine symmetrically organized characters of the 1871 seal read, beginning at upper right: “Authenticated by Pan Boyin of Wu [Suzhou].” Unlike the previous bai‑ wen (white character) seal, this one is carved in the more conventional and elegant zhuwen (red character) format. The subsequent generation of epigraphically minded artists such as Wu Changshi greatly admired Zhao Zhiqian. Even Shanghai designers of the 1930s, such as Qian Juntao (1906–1998), found inspiration in his seals. Not only was he admired by fellow artists in China but with the opening of Sino-Japanese trade, Zhao Zhiqian’s work was avidly sought by Japanese Sinophiles. Epigraphic taste was not limited to earnest scholars of ancient calligraphy. Collecting and appreciating antiquities became such a fashion that scores of showy paintings incorporating archaeological motifs were produced, presumably for newly wealthy collectors who wished to demonstrate their high taste without losing the sensory delight of rich color found in popular art. Often called bogu (ancient erudition) paintings, these works incorporate ink-squeeze rubbings of archaic bronze ritual vessels, rubbings that are artfully manipulated to create illusionistic effects of threedimensionality. This example of 1872, one panel of a set of four scrolls, includes, at front, a rubbing of a Shang dynasty spouted wine vessel with three legs, called a jue, and, from the Western Zhou dynasty, at back, a two-handled food-vessel, a gui, with its lid placed in front [fig. 1.21]. Between the vessels are displayed two rubbings of the dedicatory texts ostensibly found inside, most likely in the lid and the interior of the gui basin. The archaic texts of the cast-bronze were completely comprehensible only to those who had seriously studied ancient scripts, but enough of the characters can easily be read to make such a work an amusing topic of conversation at the social gatherings for which it might serve as backdrop. In the era before art historical photography, ink rubbings were a way of collecting documents about archaeological objects one did not own. In this  

1.21 Ren Xun and Zhu Cheng, Bogutu, 1872, one from a set of four hanging scrolls, ink and color on paper, 177.5 ×46.9 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan

work two painters, Ren Xun and Zhu Cheng, worked collaboratively to convert this scholarly apparatus into a set of four still-life paintings by adding a colorful array of auspicious flowers, lingzhi fungus, and fruit. In his signature Zhu Cheng claims credit for the white chrysanthemum, the fruit, and other flowers. The documents of epigraphic study are here brought into an art form that can appeal to more popular taste, thus blending literati and merchant culture. Wu Changshi’s late work, Loquats and Wild Roses, takes another approach to the problem of blending his literati school aesthetic with the more sensual tastes of the new class Chinese Art in the Age of Imperialism

23

those of more plebian taste, a popular taste informed by every kind of image that flooded into the city with its commercial prosperity. Japanese Collectors and Students

Art shops in Shanghai provided a way for artists to make a living and for the new collectors, many of whom were merchants not scholars, to directly express their taste by the work they commissioned. Another novel factor that strongly affected the lives, careers, and aesthetic interests of some Chinese artists was the expansion of the market for Chinese art to other countries of Asia after the opening of the ports. Foreign buyers, including Japanese, Europeans, and Americans, began purchasing Chinese work in urban art shops. Recent scholarship has shown that some Chinese artists and businessmen, including the manager of the Gu­ xiangshi art shop, traveled to Japan as early as the 1870s.21 As a result, some Japanese art enthusiasts began seeking firsthand contact with Chinese artists. In contrast to the domestic Chinese art world, where nouveau-riche Shanghai collectors sought to acquire all the novelty and color possible in their own hybrid society, Japan was already engaged in wholesale Westernization, and some of its collectors in reaction turned their interests to the most erudite of Chinese arts, seal carving, stele-style calligraphy, and literati painting. In 1891, for example, the Japanese calligrapher Kusakabe Meikaku (1838–1922), who had previously studied calligraphy with a Chinese diplomat in Tokyo, visited China to seek out men of similar interests. He met Wu Changshi as well as a number of other calligraphers at the highest levels of Chinese society, including the Suzhou literati Wu Dacheng and Yang Xian and the Hangzhou master Yu Yue. Kusakabe studied with Wu Changshi during his brief visit to China, and the two remained friends for the remainder of their lives. Wu Changshi was one of a number of Chinese artists whose reputation at home and abroad would be built, in part, through his connections with Japanese artists and collectors. In 1900 the Japanese seal carver and calligrapher Kawai Senrō (1871–1945) traveled to China in the company of the owner of a Tokyo book company, Bunkyūdō, to become Wu Changshi’s student. From 1904 to 1931, Kawai visited China almost annually and like his mentor, Kusakabe, promoted Wu Changshi’s reputation in Japan. Possibly under Wu Changshi’s influence, Kawai acquired almost a hundred examples of Zhao Zhiqian’s work, all of which unfortunately perished with him when his home was destroyed in the Tokyo fire-bombing of 1945. Japanese art collectors were nothing new in treaty port Shanghai, but they marked a turning point for aspiring  

1.22 Wu Changshi (1844–1927), Loquats and Wild Roses, 1920, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 151.1 × 82.8 cm, Shanghai Museum  

of patrons [fig. 1.22]. His rigorous composition of crossing vertical and diagonal lines and firm brushwork is enough to delight any calligraphy enthusiast, but for the benefit of his merchant collectors he adds bright yellow and “Western red” (marketed by Pelikan and other firms as “carmine”). The inscription begins without subtlety—“the loquat is yellow like gold . . .” As a new business-­oriented society grew in Shanghai, the tastes of art patrons in this city similarly shifted. Artists who lived by selling their paintings to these collectors accommodated themselves, in one way or another, to their hopes, needs, and desires. The wealth of Shanghai in the nineteenth century provided ample support for Chinese art of all kinds. The new economic and social relations, however, stimulated the development of fresh styles of art, those that appealed to a new class of patrons by combining the conventions of scholarly painting with  

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official Wu Changshi. Having concluded, after serving for a month as magistrate in 1899, that the official career for which he was educated was not to his liking, in 1903 he established his first price list and became a professional artist. Soon after, he and the Japanese scholar Nagao Uzan, who was employed as Japanese editor and translator at Shanghai’s Commercial Press, became close friends. Kawai Senrō and Nagao Uzan became the only foreign members of the Xiling Seal Society in 1904, a group for which Wu Changshi served for a time as director. In 1914, Wu gave Nagao a farewell gift as he returned to Japan, a plum blossom painting in which one may see, if so attuned, the seal script lines and cursive script flowers for which Wu was famous [see fig. 1.19]. The decade of the 1890s saw significant changes in the art world with the deaths of many of the artists discussed in this chapter. Ren Xun died in Suzhou in 1893 and Wu Jiayou in Shanghai the same year. Yang Xian and Xugu both died in Shanghai in 1896. A major loss to the Shanghai art world was the passing of Ren Yi in the last months of 1895. At this time China suffered a disaster that not only affected the lives of its artists and citizens but changed the course of the nation’s history, eventually bringing down the Qing dynasty government. In 1894, Wu Changshi accepted a staff position under the influential Suzhou official, collector, and calligrapher Wu Dacheng, with whom he shared a passion for seals. Wu Dacheng, who had served with distinction as governor of Hunan province, was one of many reform-minded scholar-officials who urged the court to take a strong military stance against threatening foreign powers, particularly Russia, France, and Japan. In late 1894, following the outbreak of hostilities with Japan, Wu Dacheng was ordered by the Qing court to lead military defense of China’s northern coast. Despite his fervent idealism, patriotism, and theoretical commitment to updating China’s military technology, Wu Dacheng’s command suffered one of the most significant military defeats in modern times. This debacle struck the death knell for China’s traditional administrative system, with its classically trained officials, and ultimately for the dynasty itself. At the individual level, it ended the political career of Wu Dacheng, who would devote the remainder of his life to his calligraphy, seal carving, and collecting, and dashed the aspirations of his protégée, Wu Changshi, for a substantial career as a bureaucrat. Indeed, the political and psychological shock experienced by the citizens of Qing dynasty China in the wake of this massive defeat by another Asian nation would mark the beginning of a new era. China had been the dominant power in East Asia for two thousand years, almost since the beginning of recorded history. Although the Chinese empire had absorbed many cultural and technological concepts from

outside its borders, it was proud of having transmitted its writing system, modes of governance and thought, and civilization to neighboring countries. Just as Latin was the common written language of premodern Europe, so did classical Chinese serve as the lingua franca of East Asia, making it possible for communication among people speaking many different tongues. To Chinese, these border nations were considered tributary states that declared their peaceful intentions by sending gift-bearing envoys to the Chinese emperor. Victory by the technologically superior European powers in the mid-nineteenth century was distressing enough, but that tiny Japan could also gain military superiority was unimaginable. At the end of the nineteenth century, even the most committed and loyal Confucian scholar-officials recognized that China’s educational, administrative, military, and financial systems needed massive reform. The scholarly skills so diligently mastered by aspiring officials of Wu Changshi’s generation were no longer enough to govern China, and, as we shall explore in the next chapter, the coming century would be one of great change. The nineteenth century saw, over the course of several generations, the gradual absorption of foreign motifs and techniques into traditional art. At the same time, the boundaries between popular and elite arts became more porous, a new class of patrons emerged in treaty port cities, and new economic structures for buying and selling paintings appeared. The importation of photography and photo-lithographic printing brought a wealth of new imagery into the popular imagination—ideas that spread to people who lived in cities along all major transportation routes.22 While the transformations in Chinese art and society were profound in the late nineteenth century, it should not be overlooked that the modernizing trends occurred against a relatively traditional and local backdrop. The paintings and prints discussed in this chapter were (with one exception) all produced using Chinese materials (ink and waterbased colors on paper or silk) and relied on brushes and brush techniques perfected over previous centuries. Thus, despite developments brought by international commerce and travel, the nineteenth-century art world was still conceived in Chinese terms. Innovative artists gave a fresh look to old subjects and genres, and thus wrote a vigorous new chapter in the development of China’s own painting tradition. If the nineteenth-century economic changes yielded new ways of life for some artists, particularly those who settled permanently in the treaty ports, the coming political revolution would produce powerful new institutional forces and would thrust artists and their art into a world often conceived in Western terms.  

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2

Art in the Creation of a New Nation The Overthrow of the Qing and the Early Republic, 1895–1920

One of the most important artistic developments in twentieth-century China was the adoption of Western artistic practices. Xiyanghua (Occidental painting)—by which was meant drawing, watercolors, gouache, and oil painting—perceived as novel and exotic in earlier centuries, came to be considered a functional necessity by the early twentieth century. The establishment of a new educational system in the waning days of the Qing dynasty and the development of modern forms of art education led to fundamental changes in the purposes and meaning of art. As we will see in later chapters, oil painting became an essential part of the mainstream as a result of this new institutional support. This chapter explores the institutional origins of the diverse ways Chinese artists engaged with cosmopolitan cultural forms in the early twentieth century. Jesuit missionaries, including Matteo Ricci, had introduced Western paintings and prints to China in the late sixteenth century. Although these objects and the murals in the newly constructed churches were of interest to curious Chinese, the practice of oil painting had little impact on Chinese artists in that period. A new wave of missionary activity in the eighteenth century brought the Italian priest-painter Guiseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), along with several colleagues, to the court of the Qianlong emperor, where he enjoyed great favor for his ability to render in a lifelike manner the emperor, the harem, and even the highly prized imperial warhorses. Castiglione, known in Chinese as Lang Shining, pleased the court by painting in Chinese mineral pigments on a ground of Chinese silk. His naturalism was emulated by fellow court artists, and such elements as architectural perspective even spread into popular woodblock prints. Castiglione and his colleagues, however, largely abandoned European oils and canvas in favor of Chinese formats and mediums for their work at court.  

 

 

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With the development of European ports in Portuguese Macao, British Hong Kong, and Canton (Guangzhou), Chinese artisans were hired and trained to make export paintings, for the first time producing large numbers of images painted in oil on canvas. Not intended for a local audience, however, the influence of these works on the mainstream Chinese art world of the day was fairly insignificant. A dramatic change occurred by the end of the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, the threat of European and Japanese colonial ambitions so alarmed both the Chinese imperial court and the Confucian administrative elite that an active program of military modernization was embraced by influential figures in government. New ideas to strengthen the empire emerged from Chinese officialdom, and many proposals took account of the technological tools by which Western nations had achieved their colonial aims. It was in this urgent practical context that Western art, as a part of the intellectual world of science and technology, percolated into the mainstream of Chinese culture. In 1912 the Republic of China’s new minister of education, Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), began promoting his theory of aesthetic education (meiyu). Recently returned from four years of study in Germany, Cai’s understanding of art’s enormous philosophical and ethical importance encompassed art in Western techniques and thus greatly expanded the role of Western artistic forms in Chinese society and education.  

Art and Late Qing Reforms in Education

As early as the 1860s, Western-style drawing was required in the government-run college of Western studies, the Tong­ wenguan, in Shanghai. How-to-draw books were translated into Chinese during the 1870s and 1880s at the Jiang­nan Arsenal, and various other such primers appeared in the late nineteenth century. The purpose of learning Western art was clearly functional. The preface to The Engineers’ and Machinists’ Drawing Book, which was rendered into Chinese by John Fryer (1839–1896) in 1872, opined, “drawing is the beginning and the foundation of making machines.” 1 Despite efforts to introduce Western technology to China, however, progress was slow and erratic, as conservatism and self-­interest on the part of both the court and the elite hindered reforms within the Chinese governmental structure. The stunning military victory of Japan over China in 1894 marked a turning point. When the Sino-Japanese War concluded in 1895 with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the weak Chinese state signed away territorial rights to the island of Taiwan, which remained a Japanese colony until 1945, and agreed to pay large indemnities to Japan. The lesson of this defeat was obvious to  

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all but the most narrow-minded—in only a quarter of a century, by adopting Western science and culture, a small island country had acquired the military might to defeat East Asia’s major power. Japan’s victory, in the opinion of prominent Chinese, resulted from its embrace of all forms of advanced foreign technology and science, and their dissemination through modern schools. Within the Qing government even conservative officials such as Zhang Zhidong (1827–1909), Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), and Liu Kunyi (1830– 1902) joined reformist political thinkers like Kang Youwei (1858–1927) [fig. 2.1], Liang Qichao (1873–1929), and Yan Fu (1854–1921) to emphasize the need to save the nation through education. Calls for reform could no longer be ignored. In 1898, Kang Youwei attracted the attention of the youthful Guangxu emperor (1871–1908) by his proposals for thorough institutional and educational reforms modeled on those of Japan, Germany, and even czarist Russia. With Kang’s advice the young emperor, who had studied foreign languages and become an enthusiast of “Western studies” himself, promulgated a series of radical reforms between June and September of 1898. The earliest and most longlasting elements of the Hundred Days Reform—the establishment of a national school system of primary, higher, military, and technical schools, and revision of the civil service examination system—would soon have profound social and intellectual results. In 1905 the Confucian civil service examination system, which had for more than a millennium examined aspiring officials in the canon of literary, historical, poetic, and philosophical classics, would be completely abolished in favor of more practical curricula of the “new learning.” Unfortunately, by the fall of 1898 the wellintentioned political reforms had so offended the self-interest and privilege of the Manchu aristocracy and the court that the powerful empress dowager Cixi moved to unseat the Guangxu emperor. She arrested and executed reformist leaders, placed the emperor under permanent house arrest, and ruled as regent until her death ten years later. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao escaped to Japan, where they wrote and published even more urgent proposals for China’s future course. The court’s self-serving decision to suppress political reform ultimately yielded the complete overthrow of the Qing empire a decade later. Revolutionary movements began to develop, with the regime’s opponents working both within China and in exile. Some activists found safe haven in nearby Japan, where they continued their organizational work. For those abroad, exposure to foreign ways of life and thought, and particularly growing awareness of constitutional and democratic ways of governance, fueled their  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

government. The Qing dynasty formally ended with the boy-­emperor Puyi’s abdication on February 12, 1912. Although the empress dowager’s 1898 coup d’état postponed needed political, fiscal, and military reforms, the educational innovations decreed in the Hundred Days Reform were implemented and had profound effects on art, as on Chinese society as a whole. The first decade of the twentieth century saw Chinese educators, encouraged by the Qing court’s belated understanding of the need for modernization, embark upon a two-tiered program of educational development. First, modern schools were established to teach Western learning, and through an agreement with the Japanese government, Japanese teachers were dispatched to schools throughout China. Second, some Chinese students were provided with government scholarships to study abroad, and others were strongly encouraged to do so at their own expense. Several new schools, including a Western-style military and technical school that trained young men in such practical subjects as mining and railway construction were established immediately. In 1902, however, a more comprehensive system of modern schools, based on those in Japan and the West, was initiated. To further the aims of science and technology, a subject called tuhua (drawing and painting) was required at all levels of the curriculum. In the belief that only education could save the nation from annihilation, late Qing educational reformers also began implementing a system of normal schools that would exponentially accelerate the spread of modern knowledge by training teachers. The first school—Sanjiang Normal Academy (Sanjiang shifan chuanxisuo), later renamed the Liangjiang Normal School (Liangjiang shifan xuetang)—was established in Nanjing in 1902 to train middle and high school teachers in the provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Jiangsu. The famous poet and educational reformer Chen Sanli (1853–1937) and the scholar-official-artist Li Ruiqing (1867–1920) were successive heads of the school, which trained many intellectuals, artists, and teachers active in the early twentieth century. In 1906, Liangjiang Normal School and the other major teacher’s college of the time, Beiyang Normal School in Baoding, near Beijing, added painting and crafts to their teacher-training programs. Liangjiang Normal School’s curriculum was based on that of the Tokyo Higher Normal School and employed almost a dozen Japanese faculty members, along with some Chinese teachers and interpreters. Thus, along with courses in education, the required curriculum in the art department included courses in painting and handicrafts, with elective courses in music and culture. What was called “painting” was neither traditional Chinese painting nor Western fine arts but practical skills  

 

 

 

2.1 Kang Youwei (1858–1927), Calligraphy, undated, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 152 × 41 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

revolutionary zeal. The Revolutionary Alliance, founded by Sun Yat-sen and others in Tokyo in 1905, formed a revolutionary network that stimulated armed uprisings. It culminated in the Xinhai Revolution, named after the Chinese calendrical cycle for the year 1911, and which dates its beginning to October 10 of that year. By the end of 1911, fifteen provinces had declared independence from the Manchu

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in both Western and Chinese painting, representational drawing in an Occidental manner, deemed the most scientific and useful, predominated. Two classes of art students, a total of sixty-nine young men, graduated by 1910 and formed the core personnel for the new art education in China, gradually replacing Japanese instructors who taught the first generation of students in the new normal schools. In the early twentieth century, therefore, the normal school system played a key role in dissemination of Western concepts of art among China’s future leaders and throughout the public school system.2 Study Abroad in the Late Qing (1896–1911)  

A second and equally important component of the push to modernize Chinese education was the promotion of study abroad. The earliest programs to send students to foreign countries, such as the group sent to the United States from 1870 to 1882, enjoyed the full support of neither the bureaucracy nor the court. Yet after Japan’s 1894–95 victory in the Sino-Japanese War, a Western-style education became not only acceptable but increasingly necessary. The Meiji government’s decision to open its schools to foreign students met with substantial interest in China, and the first group of thirteen Chinese students went to Japan in 1896.3 By 1906 more than seven thousand Chinese students were enrolled in Japanese schools and universities. While art students represented a tiny minority, between 1905 and 1920 forty-five Chinese students enrolled in the highly selective Tokyo School of Fine Arts; thirty more followed in the next decade.4 Of particular importance for the art world in the late Qing generation of Japan-educated students were Li Shutong (1879–1940) [fig. 2.3], Chen Hengque (also known as Chen Shizeng; 1876–1923), Lu Xun (1881–1937), and Gao Jianfu (1879–1951). Chinese students in Japan followed several patterns. The brightest and most highly disciplined matriculated into degree programs in the best state-run schools, some of them even surpassing their Japanese classmates in academic achievement. Chen Hengque, who graduated in 1909 from Tokyo Higher Normal School, and Li Shutong, who graduated in 1911 from Tokyo School of Fine Arts, were such students. Not all of this group completed their course of study, however. The lure of modern science and technology gave way in some cases to a fascination with literature, the arts, or politics, leading some talented young people to return home without completing their degrees but with new missions in life. Lu Xun, who gave up his medical studies for the career of an educator, writer, curator, and editor, was typical of this group. Still others, such as Gao Jianfu and his brother Gao Qifeng (1889–1933), did not  

 

2.2  Xiao Junxian (1865–1949), Pine and Cypress, Eternal Spring, 1925, ink and color on paper, 133.5 × 66.4 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

in drawing: rendering of light, volume, and perspective. Crafts included skills suitable for a teacher, such as carving bamboo and wood, pouring plaster casts, molding clay, and making paper cuts, papier-mâché, and origami. Director Li Ruiqing, like many other school leaders in the period, had visited Japan to survey its educational system and used Japanese textbooks in his school. In a small gesture of resistance to all-out cultural Westernization, however, he hired a traditional Chinese painter, Xiao Junxian (1865–1949) [fig. 2.2], to work in this modern school, side-by-side with the many Japanese instructors who taught such Western subjects as chemistry. Although the school thus offered classes  

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2.3 Li Shutong (1879–1940), Self-portrait, 1911, oil on canvas, 60.6 × 45.5 cm, The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts  

enroll in formal degree programs but instead studied at private schools, at individual ateliers, or completely informally. An even greater number of students and educators visited Japan only briefly, simply to see with their own eyes the art of contemporary Japan and the great modernization that had taken place since the Meiji restoration. Regardless of the degree of earnestness or focus with which young artists pursued formal education in Japan, they collectively formed the core of China’s new art world upon their return. Recognition of the flawed nature of the traditional Confucian educational system in preparing citizens for a modern nation became so great that even the classically educated official Cai Yuanpei, who earned the highest degree (jinshi) in the imperial civil service examination, embarked for further study in Germany in 1907, at the age of thirtynine. As an educational administrator, Cai Yuanpei may have had the most powerful impact on the development of Chinese art in the twentieth century of any individual. From Utilitarianism to Idealism: Cai Yuanpei and Aesthetic Education

Profoundly patriotic and idealistic, Cai Yuanpei (1868– 1940) cut short his studies of philosophy, psychology, and art history at the University of Leipzig in 1911 to take up  

the post of minister of education in the newly established provisional Republican government. Throughout his career, whether as head of the ministry of education or at the helm of Peking University or finally at Academia Sinica, he vigorously promoted both art and science. Perhaps most significant for the art world of the early years of the Republic was Cai Yuanpei’s conviction, based on his study of aesthetics, that art was more than a functional skill. In a particularly influential policy statement of 1912, he advocated what he called “aesthetic education” (meiyu), along with four other subjects (universal military education, utilitarian education, moral education, and education for a worldview), clearly separating the study of art from utilitarianism and providing a philosophical basis for training young people in the fine arts.5 Cai claimed the authority of German philosopher Immanuel Kant for his philosophical premises. After a second period of study in Europe in the mid-1910s, Cai returned to deliver an even more pointed speech in 1917, “On Replacing Religion with Aesthetic Education,” in which he argued the importance of aesthetic education to freeing the minds of China’s citizenry from selfishness and hatred.6 Although there was more than one factor that led to the reevaluation of the importance of art within the new social and economic world of early Republican China, Cai Yuan­pei’s efforts on behalf of aesthetic education may have turned the tide, giving artists and teachers the theoretical justification they needed for pursuing the fine arts. Cai argued that China’s people needed a highly developed aesthetic sensibility and the detachment it produced for the nation to function as a modern country. He believed that love of beauty could eliminate greed and prejudice. Thus, learning to appreciate art would spur the development of a new way of perceiving reality, and this new perception could transform Chinese society. Committed to the ethical value of art for both the spiritual well-being of the individual and the harmony of society, he went so far as to advocate the superiority of aesthetics over religion. The logical steps to implementing this educational policy included establishing museums and exhibitions as well as introducing an art curriculum to institutions of higher learning. With art elevated to the realm of the sacred, it was no longer a tool but a core humanistic activity. The Arts and New Learning

One of China’s foremost early art educators, Li Shutong, began his studies in Shanghai at the Nanyang Public School (Nanyang gongxue; now Shanghai Jiaotong University) in 1901, studying under Cai Yuanpei. This school had been established by the industrialist Sheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916)  

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and North American missionary educator John C. Ferguson (1866–1945) even before the Hundred Days reforms. Li Shutong then entered the Western painting department of the prestigious Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1906. The French-trained oil painting professor and aristocrat Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), who advocated plein air painting and encouraged up-to-date impressionist and postimpressionist styles, was at the height of his influence in Tokyo during Li Shutong’s student years. In 1896, Kuroda, then a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, established a loosely structured painting club called the White Horse Society (Hakubakai) to promote a rebellion against the nineteenthcentury academic styles that dominated Western art in Meiji Japan. The Hakubakai held exhibitions, edited publications, and organized like-minded artists for fifteen years, until its disbanding in 1911. Based on what little evidence survives today of Li Shutong’s early oil painting, his sympathies were in the modern camp. In 1911 he graduated from the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, one of the first two Chinese students to complete its program. Graduating students in his department were required to leave small graduation self-portraits at the school. Despite standardization in size, the varied styles of the self-images convey well the young artists’ aspirations to artistic and personal individuality. Li’s self-portrait of 1911 is rendered in a beautifully colored pointillist style [fig. 2.3], an up-to-date manner transmitted from Paris to Tokyo and mastered by the young Chinese artist with surprising rapidity. Li Shutong returned to a China on the verge of revolution. Even constitutionalists like Liang Qichao had begun calling for overthrow of the incompetent Manchu regime, which soon occurred. Thus, after acquiring knowledge of modern Western art and culture in Japan as a subject of the Qing empire, Li Shutong returned to teach citizens of the new Chinese Republic. In 1912 he was hired by the director of the Zhejiang First Normal College, Jing Hengyi (1877– 1939), who was himself a graduate of Tokyo Higher Normal School, to establish a department of arts and crafts at the Hangzhou school. Li Shutong took the opportunity to institutionalize many Western practices that were completely new to China, such as drawing plaster casts of famous European sculptures, painting outdoors, and, in 1913, drawing from nude models. While pursuit of technical mastery was thus assumed as a goal of art education, Li’s teaching took his students far beyond the functional requirements of Qing dynasty drawing and painting instruction into a realm that prized creativity and self-expression. This approach to art, and to art pedagogy, closely coincided with the views of Cai Yuanpei, whose 1912 speech articulated so persuasively and so appropriately what foreign graduates like Li  

 

 

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Shutong had learned abroad in those years. His curriculum was widely emulated, and such practices as xiesheng (a classical term that literally means “painting life”), which included drawing and plein air painting, were adopted by instructors at other schools. Li Shutong threw himself wholeheartedly into inculcating his students with the modern Western cultural practices he had absorbed in Japan. To the surprise of his colleagues, he abandoned teaching in 1918 to become a Buddhist monk, adopting the religious name Hongyi fashi. In his brief six years in the classroom, however, Li Shutong powerfully influenced a generation of innovative artists, musicians, and graphic designers. For the Cantonese painter Gao Jianfu, engagement with Japan took a rather different form and ultimately yielded a new style of Chinese ink and color painting referred to as the Lingnan school.7 Gao had, at the age of fourteen, apprenticed himself to the well-known local flower painter, Ju Lian, in Panyu, Guangdong, now part of the modern city of Guangzhou. Ju Lian excelled at refined painting in the “boneless” manner, rendering objects with delicate color rather than outlines, and also taught his pupils various methods of puddling water, dry pigment, and paint on the surface of the damp silk to create vivid, accidental effects. These techniques were called zhuangshui and zhuangfen (infusing water and infusing powder). It was under Ju Lian’s instruction that Gao Jianfu thoroughly mastered a highly detailed and naturalistic manner of painting and also where he met his lifetime friend, Chen Shuren, who would go on to become an official and diplomat in the Republican government. In 1903, Gao Jianfu left Ju Lian’s atelier, where he had studied for eleven years, and enrolled at a college in the nearby Portuguese colony of Macao. He began earnestly studying Western art and later recalled learning charcoal sketching from a French painter. A four-panel work on silk—Flowers, Melon, Fish, and Insects—of 1905, while lyrical and unassuming at first glance, is truly a virtuoso performance in the techniques Gao Jianfu had mastered in Ju Lian’s studio [fig. 2.4]. It is distinguished by the controlled use of accidental effects, particularly sprinkling dry pigment into water puddled directly on the highly sized silk or infusing clean water into wet pigment, combined with the highly naturalistic rendering of plants and insects. After two years of study Gao began working as a teacher himself, and a Japanese colleague, Yamamoto Baigai, who tutored him in the Japanese language, urged him to go abroad for further study. Around 1905, Gao wrote one of his earliest surviving theoretical statements, “On Painting.” In keeping with concepts  

 

2.4 Gao Jianfu (1879–1951), Flowers, Melon, Fish, and Insects, 1905, set of four hanging scrolls, ink and color on paper, each 98 × 28 cm, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

then current in reformist circles, he argued that art might only be of use to the society and the nation if it were realistic, used light and shade as well as perspective and anatomy, strong compositions, and the techniques of Euro-American art. Gao Jianfu, a highly accomplished practitioner of the art of Chinese painting, seemed then to believe that Chinese painting could not satisfy these necessary functional aims. In the following year, Gao Jianfu traveled to Tokyo. It is unclear where he studied, or if he enrolled in a school at all, although some biographies claim that he joined oil painting societies such as the Hakubakai and the Meiji Painting Society. It is evident from the changes that took place in his ink painting style over the subsequent decade that he was strongly influenced by nihonga, a modern Japanese form of painting that is informed by eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European naturalism. A syncretic manner of Japanese painting had appeared in Kyoto in a highly decorative form even before Japan began modernizing, and it was this manner that most appealed to Gao Jianfu and his talented younger brother, Gao Qifeng, who soon joined him in Japan. Gao Qifeng studied in Japan with a well-known nihonga painter, Tanaka Raishō (1868– 1940), and thereafter specialized in delicate and lyrical paintings of animals, birds, and flowers. His hazy Spring Rain by the Willow Pond [fig.  2.5] is thoroughly imbued with the  

2.5 Gao Qifeng (1889–1933), Spring Rain by the Willow Pond, undated, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 180 × 100 cm, Shanghai Museum  

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2.7 Gao Jianfu (1879–1951), Flying in the Rain, 1932, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 46 × 35.5 cm, Chinese University of Hongkong Art Museum  

2.6 Gao Qifeng (1889–1933), Monkeys and Snowy Pine, 1916, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 177 × 91.5 cm, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

2.8  Chen Shuren (1883–1948), The Songs of Fall, 1934, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 95.4 × 43 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  

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lyrical charm of contemporary Japanese painting. Monkeys and Snowy Pine, a favorite subject of Kyoto school painters, is so skillfully executed that its technique seems to vanish in the face of its immediate romantic appeal [fig. 2.6]. In the years after the Gao brothers returned from Japan, Gao Jianfu’s compositions, in contrast to the emotional restraint of his brother’s work, became bolder, his brushstrokes larger and more forceful, and Western elements, such as foreshortening, perspective, and light and shade, fill his work with power and drama. His ink paintings were so strongly imbued with effects normally associated with Western art that his contemporaries considered him a representative of the “eclectic” (zhezhong) style. A notable example of the type most strongly criticized by conservative ink painters, Flying in the Rain, painted somewhat later, in 1932, deploys the hazy ink and romantic effects of color developed within nihonga landscape painting to express his wonder at mechanical flight [fig. 2.7]. In his own mind this modernized version of Chinese painting was a form of revolutionary art that paralleled his commitment to radical political change. While in Japan, Gao Jianfu, his brother Gao Qifeng, and their friend Chen Shuren converted to the Republican cause. Gao Jianfu joined the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui) in 1906 and became a loyal follower of the anti-Manchu cause and of its leader, Sun Yatsen, who would briefly serve as president and who is considered the father of the Chinese Republic. On orders of the Revolutionary Alliance, the Gao brothers returned to Guangzhou in 1908 to form a revolutionary cell. Gao Jianfu was involved in a political assassination group that targeted Manchu officials and is believed to have organized bomb construction, using art shops and his ceramics factory as front organizations. In September of 1911 the Qing governor of Guangdong, Feng Shan, was blown up along with about a dozen other Manchus. A young painter recruited into the Revolutionary Alliance by Gao Jianfu was later credited with carrying the fatal bomb. Gao Jianfu took part in one of the armed uprisings that brought down the Qing government, but once the Republic was established, he declined to serve as governor of Guangdong and instead turned his attention to a revolution in art. In 1912 he and his two brothers opened the Aesthetic Bookstore in Shanghai, which published over the next year seventeen issues of a beautifully produced pictorial journal, The True Record, that promoted their political and artistic ideals. The journal was, in the words of the art historian Ralph Croizier, “a combination of news, social and political commentary, ‘modern knowledge,’ and information about art.” 8 It reproduced both modern and pre-

modern paintings, including those of the most important Lingnan school painters—Chen Shuren, Gao Qifeng, and Gao Jianfu—along with some of the earliest art historical and theoretical essays to appear in a modern journal. Many of the articles urged the reform of art and further development of art education. The publishing firm, which sold reproductions of works by the Gao brothers and other artists, remained in operation until 1918. The Gao brothers were also important for their work as teachers. Over the course of his career, Gao Jianfu taught both in his private studio, Spring Slumber Studio (Chunshui huayuan) and at numerous Western-style schools, including, in the 1930s, National Central University, in Nanjing. Gao Qifeng, who was a particularly popular teacher, trained more than a thousand students at his private studio. They, their colleague Chen Shuren [fig. 2.8], and their many followers created what was called the Lingnan style, a label that refers to their home region, “south of the mountains.” The theoretical hallmark of the Lingnan school was Gao Jianfu’s formulation of a theory of “new national painting” (xin guohua) as an “art to save the nation.” He came to believe, after his experiences in Japan, that rather than simply abandoning Chinese painting, synthesizing Chinese and foreign art was necessary to revolutionize national painting. Realism and subjectivity should be combined, subject matter updated, and yet spiritual resonance and expressive brushwork must be maintained as part of Chinese painting’s national identity. In his attempts to leave behind the delicate brushwork of his master, Ju Lian, he sometimes adopted the bold strokes more commonly seen in nihonga painting. Eagle, of 1929, representative of his mature style, is one of a number of patriotic paintings he produced in the new manner to represent the power of the Chinese Republic and its people [fig. 2.9]. Gao’s depiction of the fierce bird of prey—with its foreshortening and contrasts of light and shade, rich ink tones, and naturalistic effect—is a very successful example of the synthesis of Eastern and Western art that he so powerfully advocated. It is typical of the Lingnan school. A rather different approach to synthesis of foreign and Chinese styles may be found in the painting of Chen Hengque during the 1910s. Chen Hengque (often called Chen Shizeng), whose scholarly father and grandfather were deeply involved in building the new educational system, entered the Jiangnan Military and Technical School (Jiangnan lushi xuetang) in Nanjing in 1898. Upon graduation in 1902, Chen Hengque traveled to Japan, where after studying Japanese at the government-run language school, he majored in natural history at the Tokyo Higher Normal School. He returned to China in 1909 and embarked on  

 

 

 

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2.9 Gao Jianfu (1879–1951), Eagle, 1929, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 167 × 83 cm, Chinese University of Hongkong Art Museum

2.10  Chen Hengque (1876–1923), Viewing Paintings, 1918, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 87.7 × 46.6 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing

a lifelong career as a teacher, beginning at the Nantong Normal School, not far from Shanghai. Among his writings of the time was a 1911 translation from the Japanese that introduced trends in contemporary French painting. While disseminating modern learning to the future teachers under his guidance, Chen Hengque took the opportunity to study Chinese painting, calligraphy, and seal carving informally with Wu Changshi, who had moved permanently to Shanghai not long before [see figs. 1.19 and 1.22]. Chen Hengque’s painting never resembled that of the older master, but it is evident that the two men shared

an enthusiasm for the “epigraphic” aesthetic and for bold, simple, direct, compositions. During this period Chen Hengque contributed illustrations and articles about Western art to Pacific Monthly (Taipingyangbao) for which his friend Li Shutong served as editor. Like many talented foreign graduates, Chen accepted a governmental position in Beijing soon after establishment of the new Republican capital there, and in 1913 he became an editor in the Ministry of Education. He painted an amusing thirty-four-leaf album entitled Beijing Customs during his early years in Beijing, 1914 and 1915, which appeared in the newspaper and was

 

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later called China’s first modern cartoon (manhua). Beginning in 1915, Chen concurrently taught natural history at two schools, Beijing Women’s Normal School and Beijing Women’s Higher Normal School, while also teaching painting at Beijing Higher Normal School. The art courses he taught at Beijing Higher Normal included lectures on the history of Chinese painting. A 1918 painting by Chen Hengque, Viewing Paintings [fig. 2.10], demonstrates the sense of civic duty shared by many artists of the time, and the work itself engages in cultural advocacy at multiple levels. In subject matter this casual painting represents ways art might serve modern society and participate in public life. According to the artist’s inscription, Viewing Paintings records a benefit exhibition held in Beijing early in 1918 to raise funds for flood victims. This kind of philanthropy flourished throughout the Republican period, both because of the strong civic commitment of many artists and because they saw that the government was unable to provide necessary relief for the many natural disasters that befell China’s impoverished rural population. Art could, at the most fundamental material level, contribute to the lives and welfare of China’s populace. Furthermore, Cai Yuanpei’s emphasis on aesthetic education and social responsibility encouraged a feeling that private collectors had a duty to share their art with the public. According to the artist’s inscription, six hundred or seven hundred paintings from major Beijing collections were displayed on a daily rotation at the Central Park exhibition site. The exhibition depicted in Looking at Paintings served the public in several ways—besides the obvious opportunity it presented to artists and collectors to study works they may never before have seen, it gave any ticket-purchaser, regardless of social background, the opportunity to learn from these rarely accessible works. The painting thus bears witness to an admirable and uncommon event in the Beijing art world and preserves its likeness for posterity. Despite whatever drawing skills Chen Hengque may have acquired as a student of natural history, there are few traces of Western realism in this rather eclectic work. The boneless wash of Shanghai school painting depicts the padded winter jackets of the viewers, but Chen largely avoids shading, chiaroscuro, or architectural perspective. The only exception is his dramatic use of a darkened floor plane instead of the blank paper on which figures in Chinese paintings usually stand. This Western element, however, serves less to define the interior space, which is accomplished by the overlapping of figures, than to illuminate the art works on display by its contrasting tone. The artist employs the age-old Chinese convention of reverse perspective in which the table is sharply tilted in space, its  

more distant edge longer than the nearer one, to present a larger surface for the loving description of the exhibition’s treasures—a long handscroll, much darkened by age, several albums of painting and calligraphy, and on the rear wall two powerful examples of landscape painting. Although Chen Hengque did not paint in a style we associate with Western realism, he nevertheless responded to Cai Yuanpei’s mandate. The artist recorded a contemporary scene to which he was an eyewitness rather than painting images from his imagination, as was more common practice among literati painters. Carefully chosen details and a composition crowded with jostling spectators successfully convey the contemporary and public nature of the event. The quasi-documentary quality of the work is made even more convincing by thoughtful variation of physical types among the exhibition viewers, which include foreigners and women. The places of honor are reserved for the exhibition’s offerings: treasures of ancient painting carefully placed on a white tablecloth in the painting’s center and soaring above the viewers’ heads on the back wall. Despite its naïve quality, the specificity of Chen Hengque’s figure drawings was immediately recognized as something new, and his rejection in such work of the lofty poetic themes of traditional literati painting was seen as modern. Here, both in his execution and in the subject he depicts, old habits of painting and looking are redirected for modern purposes.  

Shanghai Art Academy: The First Decade

We have seen official sponsorship of Western artistic forms in the late Qing dynasty for very practical purposes—those of science and technology. Another functional use of oil painting that flourished, particularly in Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was purely commercial: illusionistic backdrop painting for purposes of entertainment. Frequently used in fashionable photo studios to allow the sitter to choose the interior décor in which he or she preferred to be portrayed, backdrop paintings were also increasingly in demand by new theaters and even cinema companies. One of the first places to teach oil painting in twentieth-century China was a small school run between 1910 and 1923 by Zhou Xiang (1871–1933). As a child, Zhou himself had studied figure painting with Qian Hui’an [see fig. 1.14], his uncle by marriage, and then, according to some accounts, had learned oil painting from a teacher at the Tushanwan Painting Atelier. In 1911 he held a threemonth-long Backdrop Painting Program (Bujing chuanxi suo) that offered the hope of a career in Western-style commercial art to its students. Whether dissatisfied with Zhou Xiang’s old-fashioned instruction and painting style or simply filled with ambi 

 

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tions of their own, his students Wu Shiguang (1885–?), Yang Xingxing, Xia Jiankang, and Liu Haisu (1896–1994), along with their friend Wang Yachen (1894–1983), decided in the fall of 1912 to open a competing school, the forerunner of the Shanghai Art Academy, which they named Shanghai Drawing, Painting, and Art School (Shanghai tuhua meishu yuan). Wu Shiguang led the effort and provided initial funding; subsequently, Liu Haisu’s father invested in their enterprise. These modest efforts created China’s earliest, if quite unsystematic, art schools. Although Shanghai Art Academy would be significant in decades to come, its programs were rather ineffective at first, and it was most important as a place where aspiring artists met before going abroad. On January 28, 1913, the new school advertised its course offerings as Western painting and Western-style photography, copper-plate printmaking, and English-language instruction. The school operated, according to its notice, from a house at No. 8 Zapu Road in the American settlement at Hongkou. When it formally opened in March, with a skeletal faculty, it provided a two-year undergraduate program and a one-year accelerated course. At the same time, the school offered a correspondence program based on Euro-American models. In 1914 successful commercial artists Zhang Yuguang (1885–1968), Xu Yongqing (1880–1953), Shen Bochen (1889–1920), and Chen Baoyi (1893–1945) were recruited to join the faculty roster. In August, Zhang Yuguang took over the academy directorship, a post he held for five years before resigning in the spring of 1919 to pursue stage design and other interests. The school moved at least four times in its first two years, and 75 percent of the 894 students to register between 1913 and 1918 were correspondence students. Moreover, of those who actually studied on campus, only seventy-one stayed long enough to receive a degree or certificate. In its first five years, the very small staff advertised an ambitious curriculum that included watercolor landscapes and figures, pencil drawing, oil painting, cartoons (huajihua, literally, “funny pictures”), charcoal drawing, female beauties in watercolor, pen and ink, brush painting, and “national essence painting” (guocuihua). Instruction in Chinese painting was, however, either lacking or minimal, and most other lessons involved imitating copybooks.9 Although the correspondence school remained a key part of the operation, by the fall of 1918 the faculty had grown to about a dozen teachers. In January of 1917 the school took a crucial turn by the hiring of Jiang Xin (1894–1939), a fresh graduate of the oil painting department of Tokyo School of Fine Arts, to take charge of revising the curriculum [fig. 2.11]. By March the school’s new program, based in part on  

 

 

 

 

 

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2.11  Jiang Xin (1894–1939), Self-Portrait, 1918, oil on canvas, 60.6 × 45.5 cm, The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts

the curriculum of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, had been approved by the regional authorities. Students on campus were taken on field trips to paint outdoors and instructed by means of models in class. A 1918 publication illustrated the school’s exhibition of student work, which included some drawings of plaster casts. The administration had shifted repeatedly over this first decade but from this time maintained a stable structure. By 1919, Liu Haisu became director and devoted the remainder of his career to the school. The faculty roster tells us a good deal about the changing nature of the Shanghai Art Academy and of the infancy of Western-style art in China. As of 1918, the faculty was still fairly conservatively trained, emerging from a background in commercial or religious art. Director Zhang Yuguang was a commercial artist who previously taught painting at the Chinese YMCA. Academic dean Ding Song (1891–1969) had studied with Zhou Xiang. Instructor Chen Baoyi had studied with both Zhang Yuguang and Zhou Xiang, while instructor Xu Yongqing learned painting and drawing at the Tushanwan Atelier, the art training and production center established by Jesuit missionaries in 1867 at their Xujiahui (Ziccawei) orphanage. According to Ding Song, the Jesuit school taught portraiture, watercolors, oils, charcoal, and  

pencil drawing. Copying model books was an important part of the learning process and was codified in 1907 by two Tushanwan publications: A Primer of Painting (Huishi qian­shuo) and Copybook for Pencil Drawing (Qianbi lianxi huatie). This workshop approach to teaching art, along with its practicality, was the only model for many would-be Western painters in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Artists Zhang Yuguang, Ding Song, Xu Yongqing, and Shen Bochen all made their marks as commercial artists in Shanghai’s burgeoning modern publishing industry. Xu Yongqing, whose strength was in watercolor painting, was selected by Commercial Press as artist for a series of rather sweet cover designs for the first volume of the new Ladies Journal (Funü zazhi) that depicted young women engaged in a variety of modern activities, including easel painting. His art academy colleague Shen Bochen became the most famous cartoonist of the early twentieth century, publishing his political satires in the new popular press. In 1918, after visiting Japan, he founded a Chinese version of the venerable humor magazine Puck, which he called Shanghai Puck. The history of the Shanghai Art Academy was thus inextricably tied to Shanghai’s booming modern publishing industry and its need for commercial art. Chen Baoyi, by contrast, left the Shanghai Art Academy faculty to study at Tokyo School of Fine Arts between 1916 and 1921. He would become one voice among those who brought modern Western fine art practices to the Shanghai art world. Proud of its birth in the first year of the new Republic, the Shanghai Art Academy played, over the course of its fifty-year existence (1912–52), a vital role in the development of both fine and commercial art in China. Nevertheless, as a privately financed institution in an uncertain economic and political environment, the school encountered serious challenges. Between 1911 and 1927, the warlord period, China had six presidents and twenty-eight national governments. The Shanghai Art Academy archives are filled with submissions to the frequently changing governmental authorities seeking certification of its course offerings and degrees.  

Art and the New Culture Movement

Cai Yuanpei’s mission to institute aesthetic education took an important step forward when he was able to establish the Beijing Art School in 1918, China’s first such government-funded institution of learning. The school had only two departments, painting and design, and aimed to train teachers who would bring art and aesthetic education into the curriculum as well as designers who would raise the quality of China’s manufactured goods. Cai Yuanpei’s encouraging speech at the opening ceremony suggested that

when funds became available, the school’s two departments be expanded by adding calligraphy to the Chinese painting program and sculpture to Western painting. By the early 1920s the faculty included teachers trained in Japan, including Chen Hengque, and oil painters trained in Europe and the United States, such as Wu Fading (1883–1924) and Li Yishi (1886–1942). When named chancellor of Peking University in 1916, Cai Yuanpei assumed another influential position in which he could experiment with the implementation of his ideals. In 1918 he established an extracurricular institute within the university, the Painting Methods Research Society (Huafa yanjiuhui), which instructed students and engaged in certain scholarly debates on the future of Chinese art that set the agenda for the nation as a whole. Speeches delivered at the autumn matriculation ceremony suggest that Cai’s goals were to encourage the modernization and revitalization of Chinese art by absorbing into it the best elements of Western art. Throughout his career as an educational administrator, he also encouraged freedom of expression and intellectual debate, strongly supporting artists and art educators who advocated a range of different approaches to improve Chinese art and culture. Among the instructors he hired in 1918 to teach at the Painting Methods Research Society were the iconoclastic young Xu Beihong and Chen Hengque, already well established as an educator in Beijing. Xu Beihong, who had spent six months in Japan in 1917, delivered an impassioned speech as the school year began in the fall of 1918. He soundly condemned the dire state in which Chinese art then found itself. Perhaps influenced by seeing in Tokyo the exquisite academic drawing and oil history paintings of artists he met, such as the French-trained oil painting professor Nakamura Fusetsu, Xu Beihong declared with hyperbole that as world civilization progressed, Chinese painting was the sole example of art that had fallen into decline. With this extreme state of decadence, he claimed, no Chinese art (meishu) deserved the name “art,” and no one in China took art seriously. He spoke on behalf of his colleagues at the new Painting Methods Research Society, saying that they aimed to save Chinese art by leading it onto the right track. The following year, in far more measured and rational terms, Cai Yuanpei described his goals for the new institute. Published in the university’s monthly journal in October 1919, this talk had impact far beyond the walls of the research institute itself. Cai Yuanpei encouraged the practice of drawing from life, urged abandonment of both the careless ink play of the literati and the moribund copying of the artisan painters and praised the spirit of Western science. Arguing that Western artists from the Renaissance to  

 

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the Rococo had readily adopted the best elements of Asian art, he stated his hopes that Chinese painters would similarly absorb the strengths of Western realistic painting. Xu Beihong’s ink and color paintings of 1918 and 1919 are so skilled and naturalistic that they resemble the paintings made by the Italian missionary Guiseppe Castiglione for the eighteenth-century Chinese emperor. Yet Cai urged much more than technique. With some sympathy he analyzed the habits of mind that might lead Chinese artists to copying rather than creativity and exhorted students both to break free and to work hard: “Although beauty largely depends upon talent, skill requires practice.” Cai Yuanpei’s theories of education, and particularly the moral value of aesthetic education, continued to resonate. In 1918, in the first issue of the Shanghai Art School’s journal Art (Meishu), Liu Haisu wrote: “The way to save the nation must be to promote aesthetic education, using it to inspire people’s loftiness and purity of spirit and to comprehend the real beauty of nature.” Reformist officials within the provincial educational administration supported establishment of an art research society in Shanghai, which sponsored lectures by artists who had studied abroad, including Tokyo School of Fine Arts professor Isshi Hakutei, then returning from Europe, and two Shanghai Art Academy professors with recent experience in Japan, painter and sculptor Jiang Xin and oil painter Wang Yachen. Liu Haisu spent several months in Japan in 1919, traveling to Tokyo and Kyoto, and attending the opening of the Imperial Art Academy. “Now,” according to Cai Yuanpei, “[Liu Haisu] has a certain authority in Shanghai.” 10 Based on the few surviving examples, it appears that Liu’s earliest painting was inspired by turn-of-the-century Euro-American commercial art.11 His trip to Japan, however, opened his eyes to a new artistic world. In the fall of 1920 the Shanghai Art Academy was restructured to better realize its mission of achieving the standards of a Western art school. Liu Haisu, who was able to compensate for his lack of an advanced degree with his innate administrative talent, educational ambition, and entrepreneurial zeal, was now director. Called at that time the Shanghai School of Fine Arts (Shanghai meishu xue­ xiao), it offered degrees in Western painting (xiyanghua) and teacher training. Coeducation, an innovation sought by Cai Yuanpei, was introduced in that year, with young men and women mixed in the various classes. Of the eighteen faculty members, one oil painting professor, the Americaneducated Zhou Shujing, was female.12 Among the female students was Wu Shuyang (1901–1966), daughter of school founder Wu Shiguang, who would go on to become an art professor herself. As Chinese students began to return  

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2.12 Guan Liang (1901–1986), Cutting Firewood at West Mountain, 1927, oil on canvas, 46.7 × 53.2 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

from abroad in greater numbers during the 1920s, the academy’s instructional quality improved, and the curriculum became more coherent. A more systematic approach became increasingly possible as more Chinese artists studied in Japan. In July 1919 the second issue of the academy’s journal ran a number of features introducing foreign art and art education to its Chinese readers.13 The most detailed reports discussed art education in Japan and were clearly intended to serve as references for advanced art education as it was established in China. Over the course of the next several years the Shanghai Art Academy and most other Chinese art programs implemented a pedagogical structure almost identical to that of the Japanese. A number of artists with close ties to the Shanghai Art Academy studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts between 1913 and 1922. Besides Jiang Xin and Wang Yachen, other influential figures to study at the Tokyo school and settle in Shanghai were Chen Baoyi and Ding Yanyong (1902–1978), who graduated in 1925.14 Japanese-trained Guan Liang (1901–1986) joined the Shanghai Art Academy staff in 1923 [fig. 2.12]. As government officials and civic-minded citizens actively pursued an agenda of modernization, firsthand experience of formal art education in Japan flowed back to China in multiple ways; the institutional structures associated with the practice of art in China were in a state of constant development. Of greatest interest to students and professors alike, however, was up-to-date knowledge of Western art, and that required firsthand experience at the source of modern Western art: Paris. Even those with degrees from Japan would, if they could, go abroad again to France.  

 

2.13 Liu Haisu (1896–1994), Qianmen, 1922, oil on canvas, 64 × 80 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

Many artists in this period aspired to nothing less than the creation of a cosmopolitan art world in China as sophisticated and vibrant as that of Paris. But the fragmentation of China’s government during the warlord period and the constant turnover of administrations left China’s cultural world largely unsupported by governmental authorities. This situation left ample room for individual and group activities and may have, contrary to expectation, played a positive role in the growing pluralism and diversity of China’s art world. This manifested itself particularly in Beijing and Shanghai, with the growth of art schools and art societies, along with a boom in publishing. Destruction of so many works of art and so much property in the warlord battles of the 1910s and 1920s coupled with the Japanese bombing of the 1930s left little evidence for us to analyze the degree to which artists succeeded in achieving their modernizing aims. A small number of early works by the largely self-taught director of the Shanghai Art Academy, Liu Haisu, survive. He held an exhibition in Beijing in January of 1922, and during the same trip painted a work that is in his most typical postimpressionist style. His

oil painting, Qianmen (Front gate), is an image of the old imperial gate directly to the south of Tiananmen, a juxtaposition of the old architecture of the imperial city and the new buildings in central Beijing [fig. 2.13]. Although influenced by Cezanne, Liu Haisu was particularly inspired by Vincent Van Gogh, whom he perceived as a rebel genius, and he began painting Chinese subjects with the thick, bold brushstrokes associated with the manner of the European master. In this period he began using the term pantu, or “renegade,” to label those, like Van Gogh, who he believed possessed such individualistic creative genius. The American-educated writer Hu Shi (1891–1962), who promoted development of literature in the colloquial language, was to Liu Haisu literature’s renegade, and by the mid-1920s Liu had adopted “art’s renegade” as his own penname.
At the same time, Liu began experimenting in ink painting. His early ink paintings were often more ambitious in composition than successful in execution. Nevertheless, they remain important because they so well exemplify general trends of the period, including rejection of the Qing court orthodoxy of the Four Wangs (after its ­seventeenth-­century progenitors) and enthusiArt in the Cre ation of a New Nation

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2.14 Liu Haisu (1896–1994), Grave of Yanzi, 1924, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 149.6 × 79.7 cm, Liu Haisu Museum, Shanghai  

asm for styles of seventeenth-­century individualists such as Shitao. Grave of Yanzi [fig. 2.14], a scenic area at Yushan in Zhejiang, is one that Liu had painted in oils two years earlier. As the warlord battles of the mid-1920s became increasingly frightening to civilians, many residents of the Chinese city of Shanghai fled to the foreign concessions. The evening of September 20, 1924, alone in his studio and robbed of sleep by the noise of artillery fire, Liu Haisu examined his earlier oil painting and idly created this ink painting to remember quieter days. The painting bears two inscriptions of 1926 by Cai Yuanpei and Wu Changshi, which Liu asked them to write before publishing the painting in Pictorial Shanghai (Shanghai huabao). Another of the few artists whose early works have survived is Xu Beihong. Cai Yuanpei assisted Xu in his desire to study abroad, and in 1919 Xu was able to obtain a scholar-

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2.15  Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Drawing of a Female Nude, 1924, charcoal and white chalk on paper, 50 × 32 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, Beijing

ship to study art in Europe, becoming one of the very few Chinese artists to have earned a formal degree from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris when he returned to China in 1926. He brought back with him the delicate drawings he did during his time studying under Pascal-Adolphe-Jean DagnanBouveret (1852–1929) [fig. 2.15]. In these works he achieves Cai Yuanpei’s ideal “beauty,” along with highly developed technical skill in the École des Beaux-Arts manner. Romantic portraits of his young wife, Jiang Biwei, from the same period, such as Sound of the Flute, imbue her with luminosity and sensuality [fig. 2.16]. Although Xu Beihong became convinced after his return to China that his mission was to teach and create monumental history paintings, his sensitive and personal drawings and paintings from life, particularly his portraits of the women and children he loved, are among the most intimate and moving works of the period.  

Attacks on Tradition

Cai Yuanpei’s ideas merged into a powerful movement for social and intellectual reform in the late 1910s that was stimulated by returned students from abroad and by the new intelligentsia produced by China’s Western-style educational system. Current affairs were a constant undertone to the academic careers of patriotic students—distress at the continued occupation of Chinese soil by colonial powers, unfulfilled desire for an effective government of national unity, and the perception that foreign businessmen exerted excessive influence over China’s economy. They blamed China’s traditional culture for its technological, military, and diplomatic weakness. The intense debates of the period about how to produce new cultural forms to cure China’s ills came to be known as the New Culture movement. Replacement of classical Chinese, the written language used in China for more than a millennium, with a more easily understood vernacular (baihua) was one important reform urged by the modernizers. Awkward attempts were made throughout the 1910s to write articles and political treatises in this newly developing style. Lu Xun published his first and most famous short story in the vernacular in 1918, “The Diary of a Madman,” which harshly satirized the failings of traditional Confucian society. Pathbreaking for its brilliant use of language as well as its content, the publication of this work was also Zhou Shuren’s first use of the pseudonym Lu Xun, by which he is known today. Although Lu Xun’s brilliance as a writer may have been unequaled, he was certainly not unique in his diagnosis of the fundamental sources of China’s weakness— its Confucian ideology. Debates raged over how, or how much, to change Chinese culture. Many of Lu Xun’s fellow reformers believed that to achieve modernization, China must be Westernized and the old ideas, ethics, and culture from its feudal past completely rejected. Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), editor of the influential journal New Youth, published this Darwinian opinion in 1916: “To build a new, Westernized country and a new, Westernized society, so that we can survive in this competitive world, we must solve the basic problem of importing from the West the very foundation of the new society. . . . We must get rid of the old to achieve the new.” 15 As the historian Hao Chang has written of the new intellectuals: “The scope of their moral iconoclasm is perhaps unique in the modern world; no other historical civilization outside the West undergoing modern transformation has witnessed such a phoenix-like impulse to see its own cultural tradition so completely negated.” 16 The New Culture move 

 

 

2.16  Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Sound of the Flute (Portrait of Jiang Biwei), 1926, oil on canvas, 79 × 38 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, Beijing  

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ment went far beyond the ideas of the n ­ ineteenth-­century reformers, many of whom had thought that Western science and technology could be grafted onto the existing Chinese culture. Modernization, the new generation argued, urgently required that the old ideas, ethics, and culture from China’s feudal past be replaced by those from Western democracies. Such politically divergent personalities as Chen Duxiu, who would later become a founder of the Chinese Com­ munist Party, and Kang Youwei, who advocated reestablishing the imperial system with a Confucian constitution, agreed that China’s old art had no place in modern China. In 1919, in an editorial response to a letter by the scholar Lu Cheng published in New Youth, Chen Duxiu called for a thorough revolution in Chinese art.17 Particularly critical of the orthodox painting of the Qing period, he argued that this style had a seriously damaging influence, its artists satisfied to imitate or copy ancient paintings, with no creative elements of their own. In his view the Four Wang manner was the most serious barrier to importing Western realism and reforming Chinese painting and should therefore be abandoned.18 He advocated with particular fervor that Chinese art should be revolutionized with the realism of Western art. A year later Chen Duxiu wrote a definition of the New Culture movement in which he stipulated that the new art should play an active role in the education of society, that it should apply the realistic methods of Western art, and that it should be a creative rather than imitative art. Writing a preface to his own collection catalog in 1918, Kang Youwei similarly urged a turn toward Western realism, or back to the art of China’s Tang and Song periods, when realism rather than self-expression was the goal of art.19 These views were very much in keeping with those instituted as part of the new educational system—that Western art, which was characterized by the ability to depict reality, was essential to China’s modernization. Against this background, even the most subtle works in the literati manner were banished to the quiet private studios of their scholarly practitioners. An example from 1910, Lodge in Green Mountains after Xu Ben, by the Suzhou collector-painter Gu Linshi (1865–1930), depicts an empty mountain dwelling beside a rushing stream [fig. 2.17]. The artist’s accompanying poem, at center, describes autumnal breezes soughing through pine branches as though accompanied by the melancholy tones of the seven-stringed zither. The pleasure of the work is in part poetic, and in the imagination of the viewer—suggesting the auditory pleasure of music and wind, the visual enjoyment of a clear stream and verdant mountains, as well as the physical delight of crisp breezes in the mountain forest. The painting itself assists in these mental wanderings but brings a  

2.17 Gu Linshi (1865–1930), Lodge in Green Mountains after Xu Ben, 1910, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 57.4 × 29.4 cm, Shanghai Museum  

 

 

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different kind of aesthetic satisfaction—enjoyment of the abstract qualities of ink on paper—the subtle contrasts of pale dry ink and rich wet wash, moist black dots of distant foliage and feathery dry strokes of pine needles. The gentle contrasts of blank paper and ink texture create the subtle visual drama of the work. The artist further writes that he is painting in the style of Xu Ben, a fourteenth-century literatus. The gentle striation of “hemp fiber” texture strokes on the mountain, as well as the horizontal repeated dots, are  

 

references to this antique inspiration, but the gently asymmetrical composition and soft brushwork is very much Gu Linshi’s own. In 1910 the artist’s like-minded friend Wu Changshi praised Gu in his inscription on the mounting above the painting, while other friends and a later student, Wu Hufan, similarly marvel at Gu’s creative reinterpretation of the classical art of the Yuan dynasty. The beautiful brushwork and quiet, contemplative mood of this work were of no interest, however, to men like Chen Duxiu, who sought revolutionary action. In May of 1919 students in Beijing learned that China, which was a member of the victorious alliance that ended World War I, had agreed to the Versailles Peace Treaty, which transferred Germany’s colonial territories in Shandong to Japan instead of returning them. Outraged that China’s government would accept such second-class status, they held massive demonstrations on May 4 in protest of the government’s weakness and vowed to fundamentally change their nation. For this reason, the New Culture movement, which lasted for a decade beginning around 1916, is often called the May Fourth movement. In light of the totalistic attack on “tradition” that intellectuals of the period considered essential for China’s modernization and the emphasis on establishing Western-style schools, it is not surprising to find the almost complete domination of Western painting in the curriculum for China’s modern school system during the first decade of the new Republic. The Shanghai Art Academy was typical: despite its advertisement of a wellrounded curriculum, it offered no Chinese painting major until 1923. Western practices of art and art education, often as interpreted in Meiji Japan, became the new standard. Indeed,

by the end of the 1910s the very vocabulary of art in the Chinese language had changed. The term meishu was coined in nineteenth-century Japan as part of a new way of thinking about and practicing art. It is a literal translation of the French beaux-arts and is usually rendered in English as “fine arts.” A group of scholars in Shanghai, including the painter-scholar Huang Binhong, compiled a compendium of important art texts they called Meishu congshu (A compendium of the fine arts), the first installment of which was published in 1906. Although their goal may be viewed as a conservative one, to preserve knowledge of China’s premodern artistic traditions, they modernized the scope of the texts by including three-dimensional arts and other subjects that might be considered “art” in the West but were not highly valued by premodern Chinese aesthetic canons. This was an early attempt, predating the New Culture movement, to present the documents of China’s art history and system of aesthetic values in a manner that acknowledged, or perhaps even competed with, those of the modern West and Japan. The term meishu was in common currency in China by 1912, when the Shanghai Art Academy took its name. Its school journal, initiated in 1918, was called Meishu. In the context of the national reconstruction movements of the late Qing and the early Republic, from approximately 1900 to 1920, the development of art became an integral part of the building of a new educational system. Western-style art and art education were strong currents within the wave of modernization that washed back to China from Japan. Would China’s own traditions of painting survive? Should they? Or did modernization require total Westernization? At the beginning of the 1920s, these questions remained to be answered.

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3

Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

The wholesale attack on tradition in the second half of the 1910s had profound effects on the aspirations of many young artists. Yet there were many moderate thinkers who valued science and democracy, as did they, but questioned whether abandoning the best in China’s traditional art in favor of conventions imitated from the West was the only solution to China’s problems. By the early 1920s their calm voices began to emerge from the cacophonous attacks on Chinese painting. Defense of Traditional Painting

Chen Hengque and the Value of Literati Painting

Tokyo-trained Chen Hengque was one of the most influential of those to provide a significant theoretical response to the New Culture critiques. Chen’s essay, “The Value of Literati Painting” (Wenrenhua de jiazhi), published in the January 1921 journal of the Painting Methods Study Society (Huafa yanjiuhui), offered an important counterargument to the wholesale Westernization and attack on Chinese tradition that dominated the discourse of the May Fourth period, particularly at Peking University.1 It did so not by criticizing cultural modernization but by redefining the terms of progressive art. The early Republican reformers sharply attacked Chinese literati painting, which they identified with the Four Wang orthodoxy of the Manchu court atelier. The two older Wangs—Wang Shimin (1592–1680) and Wang Jian (1598–1677)—were Chinese scholar-officials who survived the Manchu conquest of 1644 and 1645. The two younger Wangs served at the new Qing dynasty court. Wang Shimin’s grandson, Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715), was appointed by the Kangxi emperor to serve as court painting  

 

 

 

 

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connoisseur, a position in which he authenticated works in the imperial collection and supervised editing of a massive encyclopedia of writings on Chinese painting and calligraphy, the Peiwenzhai shuhuapu. Wang Hui (1632–1717), a disciple of Wang Jian, was commissioned by the throne to take charge of pictorially documenting the Kangxi emperor’s southern inspection tours, thus contributing to the legitimization of the conquering dynasty. In its most fundamental definition, literati painting (wenrenhua) should be the self-expressive, independent, and sometimes rather abstract visual art of China’s educated class, a work like Gu Linshi’s [see fig. 2.17].2 After the reign of the Kangxi emperor, however, the literati painting style of the Four Wangs became orthodox for court artists, thus subjecting it to the desires of China’s most powerful and demanding patron in late-­imperial China. A transformed, or even distorted, understanding of the term “literati painting” acquired some currency; it was informed by the views of twentieth-­century revolutionaries that service in the Qing regime was immoral collaboration with the conquering foreign dynasty. Repetitive and unoriginal nineteenthcentury versions of the Four Wang style came to be seen as a visual symbol of the decadence of the Qing regime and the nation’s culture in decline. Overly zealous New Culture writers incorrectly equated all literati painting with the Four Wang style, which they ridiculed, and argued that literati painting should be replaced by painting that was realistic. Chen Hengque’s 1921 defense of literati painting was not a defense of the Four Wang manner. Indeed, as though he aimed to seize literati painting back from its misappropriation by the Manchu court atelier, he emphasized its philosophical, self-expressive, and modern qualities. Chen promoted ideas of the ethical and spiritual grounding for wenrenhua that, while based in principles to be found in standard painting theory, were also in keeping with Cai Yuanpei’s philosophical approach. Significant in the context of his time, Chen appealed for a Chinese practice of painting that was not realistic, and therefore not simply a functional skill, by arguing that literati painting was progressive by virtue of its conceptual similarities to modernist European painting. He wrote, “That literati do not seek formal likeness is progressive for painting.” 3 Chen elaborated that a painter will seek accuracy of form when first learning to paint but gradually, after mastering representation and memorizing the forms of objects, will no longer need to concentrate on likeness—resemblance will come intuitively. The experience of the individual, for Chen, exemplified the historical development of Chinese painting. In Chen’s view literati painting, which describes the spirit not the form, is only possible  

 

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after the artist passes through the stage of seeking formal likeness; it is not the lack of resemblance found in paintings by beginners. Chen directly challenged those we might call the functionalists by pointing out that realism was outdated in Europe: “If we say that the paintings of Westerners are very concerned with formal likeness, what about the current schools of ‘new painting,’ which completely destroy the conventions of the past? How do the paintings of the socalled futurist or cubist schools resemble actual forms?” 4 In a revised publication of the essay the following year, Chen further explained: “While nineteenth-century Europeans sought likeness in painting, in concert with their scientific pursuit of light and color, the post-impressionists have overturned this approach in pursuit of subjectivity. The advent of cubism, futurism, and expressionism [in the West] makes clear that formal resemblance is inadequate to express the transformations in their thinking and also shows that formal likeness is not enough to demonstrate the strength of art. Therefore, they must turn in a new direction.” 5 Chen Hengque thus argued that literati painting is not only progressive in terms of the internal dynamics of Chinese painting but also in terms of its intellectual and spiritual parallels with the most advanced contemporary European artistic practice. His cultural world—that in which the modern practice of Chinese art history was born—was a cosmopolitan one. When Chen’s essay was republished in 1922, the expanded version was in classical Chinese. Both the form of the essay and its content thus argued for the preservation of the best of China’s literary and artistic traditions. The essay appeared in the same volume as Chen Hengque’s translation of a defense of the Japanese tradition of literati painting (bunjinga) by the Tokyo School of Fine Arts professor Omura Seigai (1868–1927). By considering wenrenhua in implicit relationship to the Japanese school of painting— bunjinga, which was written with the same three Chinese characters—Chen was able to reopen the term, and the practice, to a fundamental reinterpretation and return it to the poetic, philosophical, and ethical roots of the earliest literati painting theory. It is thus all the more significant that he chose, as his personal manner of painting, not the European-style oil painting he witnessed in Tokyo but a simple, direct style of ink painting. The Song dynasty literati painter and theorist Mi Fu had advocated an aesthetic value he called tianzhen, which means naturalness or innocence. Although Chen Hengque’s seemingly naïve style does not directly follow that of the early master, he sought the same quality of authenticity in his painting. One of his most compelling works is a twelve-leaf album on the theme of the twelve months. Each leaf, which takes the elongated shape  

 

 

 

 

3.1  Chen Hengque (1876–1923), Album of Miscellaneous Paintings in an Elongated Format, 1922, one leaf from an album of twelve, ink and color on paper, 35.9 × 9.8 cm, Shanghai Museum  

of a miniature hanging scroll, is accompanied by an inscription by Yao Mangfu, the artist’s colleague at the Beijing Women’s Normal School [fig. 3.1]. Chen Hengque was also responsible for discovering and establishing the career of the artist Qi Huang (usually called Qi Baishi; 1864–1957), who would become far more influential than Chen himself as a painter. Qi Baishi was a native of Hunan, where the Chen family had lived during the official careers of Chen Hengque’s father and grandfather, and the two men thus spoke a similar local dialect. A professional painter of humble origins, Qi Huang began his career as a craftsman rather than fine artist but worked hard to acquire mastery of painting, calligraphy, and seal carving. While selling his paintings and seal carvings at the art and antique market in Beijing’s Liulichang district, he attracted the attention of the younger Chen Hengque. Chen, himself a seal carver and calligrapher, was charmed by the simplicity, straightforwardness, and authenticity of Qi Baishi’s seal carving, and urged him to realize this epigraphic aesthetic in his painting. Qi Baishi became widely known only after his  

3.2  Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Lotus Pond, 1924, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 182 × 96 cm, Shanghai Museum  

introduction to Beijing society by Chen Hengque, and his painting style became much freer and more direct as a result of Chen’s encouragement. Work in Qi Baishi’s new manner was shown in the SinoJapanese joint exhibitions of the early 1920s, where it was enthusiastically received by Japanese collectors. This success established Qi Baishi’s international reputation and, in a pattern that would become increasingly significant, acclaim abroad earned Qi Baishi respect at home, thus overcoming many of the prejudices within the traditionalist art world, which tended to favor men of elevated family backgrounds and classical educations. Qi Baishi would later be appointed as a painting professor, despite lacking a modern diploma. Qi Baishi painted prolifically and experimented in all subjects, including landscapes, but was particularly famous for his paintings of shrimp, fish, crabs, and birds. Like Chen Hengque, he painted whatever simple, mundane subject might catch his eye. A hanging scroll painting of 1924, Lotus Pond [fig. 3.2] is typical of his work of the period. It depicts a subject that is visually and emotionally powerful Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

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but not conventionally beautiful—the dry, wind-battered leaves and seed pods of the autumnal lotus. His work possesses a childlike daring that is at once primitive and modern. This painting shows evidence of the artist’s debt to earlier masters (such as Zhu Da, Shitao, and Wu Changshi), but Qi achieved a distinctive style that captured a vibrant impression of his chosen subject.6 His originality of vision and directness of approach stimulated many younger artists.  

Traditionalist Painting Societies in Beijing: The National Essence Movement

The reaction against the wholesale Westernization of Chinese art, of which Chen Hengque’s work may be the most theoretically sophisticated, became increasingly important in the 1920s. It is sometimes called the National Essence (guocui) movement by association with a culturally nationalistic journal of the late Qing period, Guocui xuebao (National essence journal). The absence of Chinese painting from the academic curriculum particularly concerned those worried about the survival of China’s cultural heritage, and private individuals began to organize to correct this deficiency. In 1920, Beijing painters, including Jin Cheng (1878–1926), whose collection was a subject of Chen Hengque’s Viewing Paintings [see fig. 2.10], launched the Chinese Painting Research Society. The society met weekly at Central Park to provide instruction in painting, calligraphy, and connoisseurship, and to serve as a casual forum for the development of the theory and practice of Chinese painting. The society ultimately reached a membership of more than five hundred artists, including officials from the south, Manchu aristocrats, and a younger generation of aspiring painters. The group held nineteen annual members’ exhibitions, published journals, and even organized a series of joint exhibitions with ink painters in Japan. Some of the most avid supporters of Chinese painting, like Jin Cheng, had extensive experience abroad that enabled them to see their culture in a comparative light and to appreciate its unique values. Jin Cheng studied law in London and, after establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911, traveled in Europe and the United States to examine Western judicial and penal systems. Appointed to high political position, he devoted his professional career to modernizing and rationalizing China’s governmental institutions based on his training in and knowledge of the West. His private passion, however, was Chinese painting, which he collected and practiced with great enthusiasm [fig. 3.3]. He vigorously supported a practice that many reformers condemned—learning Chinese painting through copying and imitating masterpieces of the past. He was particularly keen on art of the Tang and Song periods, the era of Chinese  

 

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3.3  Jin Cheng (1878–1926), Landscape in the Style of Xiao Zhao, 1918, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 68 × 34 cm, Collection of You Wei Du Zhai  

painting’s greatest “realism,” and did not encourage perpetuation of the Four Wang tradition. Like Chen Hengque, Jin Cheng considered the related arts of classical poetry, calligraphy, and seal carving to be important parts of the cultural context in which painting should be practiced and was thus a strong advocate for preservation of these art forms. For this reason, Jin Cheng was appointed by the government to direct the Exhibition Office of Ancient Artifacts (Guwu chenliesuo), which exhibited artworks brought from the former imperial palaces in Jehol and Mukden to the old palace grounds in Beijing. His effort in this early period to inventory the collection gave Jin Cheng and those who assisted him the opportunity to view and copy paintings that had been hidden from ordinary Chinese for as long as five hundred years. Some paintings, for example, bore Ming dynasty inventory seals of the

fourteenth century, while others had been given to the court in the 1700s. This privileged familiarity with the greatest examples of Chinese painting seems only to have confirmed the commitment of Jin Cheng and other Beijing connoisseurs to preserving China’s artistic heritage and to making it public. The Palace Museum was finally established in 1925 and began, as far as possible in the unstable military and political situation, publishing and exhibiting items from the collection. Jin Cheng’s life was cut short abruptly in 1926, when he died on his way home from the last Sino-Japanese exchange exhibition. His surviving work rarely transcends the imitative practices he felt important for an artist’s period of study. Nevertheless, through the activities and publications of the Chinese Painting Research Society and its successor, the Lake Society, founded in 1926, his influence on the development of Chinese painting from the 1920s through the 1940s was very significant. Among the cosmopolitan reformers like Chen Hengque and Jin Cheng were many who believed that progress in Chinese art should be based on its own history and its own aesthetic standards. Some writers assert that the conservatism of Beijing, the old Manchu capital, made the city a natural center for the National Essence movement. It is true that many members of the Chinese Painting Research Society and Lake Society were trained in the old court styles. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that leaders of the movement, including Jin Cheng and Chen Hengque, were southerners called to the capital to serve the new government, and their goals for Chinese painting—the art that distinguished their nation and culture from those of others on the globe— were generally in tune with the agenda of the modern state. Labeling the movement to save Chinese painting simple conservatism, as some reformers have done, is misleading.  

 

Traditionalist Painting Societies in Shanghai

Throughout China’s recorded history, informal cultural gatherings had been organized at semipublic places, such as Buddhist temples, or at the garden homes of wealthy patrons. Shanghai had seen such activity even before the opening of the treaty ports, with accounts surviving of the Xiaopenglai Calligraphy and Painting Society, established by the collector Jiang Baoling (1781–1841) at his home in the old city in 1839.7 The Duckweed Flower Club (Pinghuashe), founded by Wu Zonglin in 1851, met in the Temple of Lord Guan Yu in the western part of the old walled city.8 Around 1895, however, the nature of these informal social groups in Shanghai began to change into organizations with a more strongly professional function, broadening their membership to all artists, without earlier concern  

for social status and classical erudition, and gradually evolving into something more like a business guild. In existence from the mid-1890s until 1926, the Shanghai Tijin Hall Calligraphy and Painting Club (Haishang tijin guan shuhuahui) was typical of those that helped traditional painters make the transition from the economic and professional patterns of imperial China to those of the modernizing urban society. With classical learning no longer a route to government position, how might this hard-won erudition be transformed into a marketable skill? This society of painters, calligraphers, seal carvers, and connoisseurs met in the evening to enjoy paintings and antiques, to offer artistic advice and criticism, and perhaps most important, to buy, trade, and sell art. The society, guided by its elders, served as agent for its members’ works, fulfilling both the crucial legitimizing function of establishing their price lists as well as that of carrying out the actual sales. This guildlike cooperative organization served as an alternative to art shops for the marketing of art. Its membership was comprised of the most notable artists in the city, and it ultimately functioned as a place to learn, to do business, and to socialize with fellow artists. Wu Changshi [see figs. 1.19 and 1.22] had served as vice director of the group, and when the founding director died in 1915, he became the society’s titular leader, assisted by Ha Shaofu (1856–1934) and his own disciple, Wang Zhen, who served as vice directors. In 1909 the Yu Garden Calligraphy and Painting Charitable Society (Yuyuan shuhua shanhui) was established in Shanghai. On March 3, 1909, the painter and patron Gao Yong, the subject of Ren Yi’s 1877 portrait [see fig. 1.7], was initially elected as director of the society. He, however, modestly declined and recommended Qian Hui’an for the position. Headquartered on the second floor of the old Deyuelou art shop in the Yu Garden in Shanghai, this artistic and literary group soon became a quasi-commercial cooperative organization with a formal written charter. It also served as a center for its members to meet and discuss matters old and new, and offered instruction with the purpose of transmitting the national essence to younger painters. The group recognized the primacy of Shanghai as a center for socially beneficial organizations, particularly for the work of philanthropists who aided the needy. “We painters, however, only tend to our brushes and ink,” they wrote, “and conscientiously cultivate the fields of our inkstones. We are not able to help the cultural notables to reform society. We also are unable to help support the poor. We inhabit the same city, and thus feel shame.” 9 With an understanding that even small contributions could help impoverished fellow citizens, the group established itself as a charity. The Yu Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

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Garden Calligraphy and Painting Charitable Society maintained a price list for each artist. Half the price of work sold would be returned to the artist and the other half would be invested in a Chinese-style bank (qianzhuang), with the interest used for donations. The charitable cause to which investment income would be contributed was decided by a meeting of the group; in winter they frequently purchased rice and in summer bought medicine. Surviving letters attest that Wang Zhen, as one of the founders of the society, consistently encouraged artists to participate in public service and philanthropic work. Chinese painting, the roots of which were inextricably entwined in the culture, society, and economy of imperial China, had largely lost its traditional networks of support with the establishment of the Republic and the new Western educational system. It was through the organization of such private art societies that traditional painting continued to flourish, and through collective advocacy that it was eventually returned to an equal position in the developing art world of Republican China. Many important Shanghai school painters participated throughout their lives in the activities of these art societies. Wang Zhen (1867–1938; Yiting), as founder, board member, or major member of almost two dozen art societies, played a key role in organizing numerous exhibitions for international exchange, charitable works, and patriotic activities.10 He had begun his own career modestly, apprenticed to an art shop in 1881, at the age of fourteen. There he met two men who would be extremely important to his life, the artist Ren Yi, who became his painting teacher, and an art-loving banker from his ancestral home of Ningbo, Li Weizhuang, who recognized Wang’s intelligence and talent for business. By his early twenties, Wang Zhen had risen to one of the highest positions in the financial empire of the wealthy Li family. He continued to study painting and by the 1890s had perfected a bold and technically refined figure style that was almost identical to that of Ren Yi. In the year 1902 he became a comprador, or Chinese manager, for the Japanese firm Osaka Shipping Company in Shanghai. From that time until 1931, he maintained close relationships with Japanese business circles. His accomplishments in charity, religion, education, and art were made possible by the fabulous wealth he accumulated in his business dealings at the apogee of East Asian society. After Wu Changshi took up permanent residence in Shanghai in 1911, Wang Zhen became his disciple. The two men shared a common admiration for and friendship with the late Ren Yi that dated to the 1880s and had come to know one another in the context of the painting societies to which they both belonged. During this period Wang  

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Zhen’s style shifted from the comparatively fine, virtuoso brushwork of the Ren Yi manner to a much looser, freer manner of painting—one that combined the boldness of Wu Changshi’s epigraphic style with the mastery of threedimensional space and lively action that was a hallmark of Ren Yi’s. Although the styles of the two close friends, Wang Zhen and Wu Changshi, sometimes converged in the 1920s, Wang Zhen’s training and temperament gave his work a distinctive character midway between the nineteenth-century Shanghai school and the epigraphic manner of his teacher and friend Wu Changshi. Wang Zhen was also the most important promoter of Wu Changshi’s art in Japan. With his network among Japanese in Shanghai and in Japan proper, Wang Zhen introduced many Japanese scholars, artists, and businessmen to Wu Changshi. He also organized numerous exhibitions for Wu Changshi in Shanghai and abroad.11 Wang Zhen is known to have served in the leadership of at least eighteen charitable organizations, focusing particularly on disaster relief, aid to refugees, support for needy women and children, medical aid, education, and promotion of Buddhism and Buddhist charity. His connections to Shanghai’s economic elite, and his willingness to call upon the generosity of both artists and his business friends, guaranteed philanthropic buyers for paintings sold at charitable exhibitions. His later figure painting, like that of Chen Hengque, is imbued with a consciously learned naïveté, as he rejected the slick brushwork of the Shanghai school and attempted to bring a simplicity and sincerity to his renderings. A typical example of Wang Zhen’s mature figure style, as well as a window into the nature of his collaboration with Wu Changshi, is a pair of hanging scrolls, Fate, of 1922 [fig. 3.4]. In the right-hand painting, Wang Zhen used a blunt brush to depict two figures, a man wearing a tall hat and a boy carrying a bundle. At left, in two columns of large characters, the artist inscribed a Buddhist chant that seems to give voice to the man who vigorously waves his abacus. In Chinese an abacus is called a suanpan (counting tray), and the ditty, written in four-character rhyming lines, plays on the word suan, variously meaning count, calculate, plan, or scheme, to convey the impossibility of predicting one’s fate. Wang Yiting, as he is most often called, was not only an artist and one of Shanghai’s most successful businessmen but also a pious Buddhist. This pair of paintings is a reflection on the emptiness of material pursuits. At left a blind fortune teller exhorts his audience in the inevitability of karmic retribution. Wu Changshi’s accompanying inscription reiterates this theme and concludes by urging charity. The admonitory inscriptions testify to the active Buddhist faith  

3.4 Wang Zhen (1867– 1938), Fate, 1922, pair of hanging scrolls with inscriptions by Wu Changshi, ink and color on paper, each 120 × 61 cm, Duoyunxuan, Shanghai  

of Wang Yiting, as painter, poet, and calligrapher, and to the sympathy of Wu Changshi, as his inscriptional respondent. It is likely that this charming collaboration was conceived in the context of the many charitable activities in which the two men were involved. Also in 1922, with Wang Zhen’s help, the Sino-Japanese Art Society (Zhong-Ri meishu xiehui) was established. Between 1922 and 1931, Wang Zhen organized five joint exhibitions in Shanghai, Nagasaki, and Tokyo. In 1930 he founded the Sino-Japanese Art Colleagues Association (Zhong-Ri yishu tongzhihui) and organized several groups of Chinese artists to visit Japan to participate in the exhibitions.12 In the last few years of his life, particularly following the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Wang retired from his Japanese business connections and turned his attention exclusively to art, philanthropy, and Buddhist practice. One of the most original of his late works is the 1934 painting of the red-robed Chan Buddhist patriarch Bodhidharma [fig. 3.5]. Wang Zhen’s vision of this most venerated of Chan

(Japanese: Zen) masters is conveyed powerfully and directly by his inscription and painted image. The painting itself offers a compelling contrast between wild motion and calm. The Indian monk, who is conventionally depicted in a frontal manner, or occasionally in profile, is instead rendered as though seen from behind. Although Bodhidharma is still recognizable by his heavy beard, the unexpected perspective startles the viewer, potentially yielding a flash of Chan enlightenment, or at very least, a more thoughtful examination of this iconic religious teacher. Wang Zhen rendered his Bodhidharma with comparatively few strokes, which are largely obscured by layers of semi-opaque red pigment, and thus form a bold pyramidal shape that dominates the lower half of the scroll. The figure seems to sit perfectly still on a straw meditation mat placed parallel to the painting’s lower edge, which establishes a stable base for the entire composition. The viewer approaches the Buddhist sage as might all other seekers of understanding who wished to study with the Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

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3.5 Wang Zhen (1867–1938), Bodhidharma Facing the Wall, 1934, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 137.8 × 34 cm, Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts, Izumi  

3.6 Huang Binhong (1865–1955), A Pair of Landscapes, 1922, pair of hanging scrolls, ink and color on paper, each 172 × 21 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

­master—viewing the same cliff, the same back, the same impenetrable meditation. The formal contrast between the quick, energetic, even frenetic execution of the cliff and the careful constraint of the figure echoes Wang Zhen’s calligraphic text:  

After facing the wall for nine years, he leaves his shadow on the stone. One must know that reckless action cannot compare with stillness. Writing and painting with reverence, I realize this. This painting, in addition to its proselytizing function, thus served as a part of Wang Zhen’s religious practice and as document of his spiritual progress. During the 1920s and 1930s, with the advocacy of Chinese painting enthusiasts like Wang Zhen, at least eighty-five major Chinese painting societies were established, the majority of which were active in Beijing and Shanghai. Many groups published journals in support of their calling. Of particular importance to both the practice of Chinese painting and the development of Chinese art history were specialized publications that culled and reprinted theoretical and historical texts of Chinese art from traditional sources. The most influential of these was Meishu cong­shu, which eventually published 120 fascicles and remains an essential source for scholars today. With the increased popularity of photography and the availability of collotype printing, good reproductions of Chinese art also became available to artists, collectors, and students. Artist and art historian Huang Binhong (1865–1955) took as his mission in life research on China’s national art and the popularization of traditional Chinese culture. His favorite period of Chinese painting was the late Ming and early Qing (late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries), and his own painting of the time recreates the slightly abstract styles of late Ming literati painters without directly copying their compositions [fig. 3.6]. Of the many editorial projects on which Huang Binhong worked, The Glories of Cathay (Shenzhou guoguang ji; 1908–1912), one of the first publications in China of large-scale reproductions of Chinese painting and calligraphy, was particularly important. Among the earliest of a burgeoning number of publications on Chinese art that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, it provided the visual imagery to support increasing interest in China’s artistic heritage. Pictorial newspapers such as Pei-yang Pictorial News (Beiyang huabao) in Tianjin and Pictorial Shanghai also began publishing photographs of art objects in prominent private collections, and antiquities gradually became a part of the new culture disseminated through the modern publishing industry. For some  

 

cultural leaders, reform meant not the elimination of elite traditional culture but instead the sharing of this privileged knowledge with the public. Thus the traditionalist defenders of Chinese painting used modern means for collective action and to disseminate their views—art societies; modern publishing, including periodicals, books, reproduction albums, and encyclopedic series; and art exhibitions, both domestic and international. Finally, they began to involve themselves actively in art education and in the establishment of Chinese art history as a modern discipline.  

Chinese Painting in the Modern School Curriculum

In its formative period the Shanghai Art Academy taught only Western-style drawing, painting, and watercolors, aiming to train artists for the new internationally oriented forms of commercial art developing in the treaty port city. According to surviving records, all eleven of the regular faculty members in 1918 taught Western-style painting, while only one offered any Chinese painting instruction. Between the school’s founding and 1918, all of the regular graduates majored in Western-style painting. Among the 666 correspondence school students, only 36 studied Chinese painting. By contrast, when the Beijing Art School was established in 1918, its painting department offered instruction in both Western and Chinese painting, as did a number of other Beijing schools in the early 1920s. In the fall of 1922 the Shanghai Art Academy was granted only provisional accreditation by local educational authorities because of its failure to offer a full curriculum in Chinese painting. To comply with the new policies, which increasingly emphasized Chinese (or national) Studies (guoxue) as well as Western learning, the Shanghai Art Academy thus established a Chinese painting (guohua) major in 1923 and finally gave Chinese painting equal status in a curriculum previously dedicated to Western-style art. Pan Tianshou (1897–1971), an independent-minded admirer of Wu Changshi, was hired at Shanghai Art Academy to teach ink painting in that year. The school yearbook of May 1925 proudly illustrates both the Chinese painting department and a life drawing class in the Western painting department. The proportion of students studying Chinese painting at the school gradually increased: of the 1927 school graduates, sixteen majored in Western painting and ten in Chinese painting. By 1931 one half of the school’s thirty faculty members were in the guohua department. When Cai Yuanpei established the National West Lake Art Academy (later called National Hangzhou Art Academy) in March of 1928, Chinese painting was set up as a major within the Painting Department, along with Western-style  

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painting. The European-oriented school also had departments of sculpture and design and a research institute of painting. At the first exhibition of the West Lake Art Academy, held in the same year, eleven students showed work in Chinese media. Western art history was introduced in the modern Chinese educational system as part of the project to explain the meaning and value of Western-style art. Numerous textbooks on the subject were translated or written. Only in the 1920s, however, were Chinese art history classes for the first time integrated into the modern curriculum. This body of knowledge proved extremely important both in legitimizing the continued practice of Chinese painting and in establishing art history as a modern discipline.13 Chen Hengque, in his position of Chinese painting professor at Beijing Higher Normal School, was one of the first modern educators to begin teaching Chinese art history. Using materials from his own studies in Japan, he supplemented the school’s Western art history curriculum with an outline of Chinese painting based on a Japanese history of Chinese art, Shina kaiga shi, by Nakamura Fusetsu and Oga Seiun. Soon after Chen Hengque’s untimely death in 1923, his student Yu Jianhua compiled his previous year’s class notes and published them as one of the first textbooks written in modern colloquial Chinese (baihua) on the history of Chinese painting. Similarly, in Shanghai, Pan Tianshou added Chinese art history as a component of the new curriculum in Chinese painting. By 1925, using his translation of the same Japanese textbook, he began offering a new class on the history of Chinese painting at the Shanghai Art Academy. In 1924 an art historian recently returned from Japan, Teng Gu (1901–1941), became the first professor of art history at the Shanghai Art Academy, and in 1926 he published the first original Chinese art history text authored (rather than translated) in modern China. In 1929, Teng Gu began his doctoral studies in Berlin and thereafter shifted his art historical approach, with a new periodization based primarily on stylistic analysis. He was strongly influenced by the methodology of the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin (1847– 1945), who had earlier taught in Berlin. Although Teng Gu’s work is influential today, the histories translated from Japanese were more important in their own time. Another seminal publication in the formation of the new discipline of Chinese art history was written by Zheng Chang (also known as Zheng Wuchang), head of the art division of one of China’s major modern publishing houses, the Zhonghua Publishing Company in Shanghai.14 Zheng Chang emerged later, in the 1930s and 1940s, as a particularly talented ink painter in his own right. His art historical periodization links the history of painting to social and

intellectual movements of the time, a new approach based on his synthesis of readings in classical Chinese, Japanese, and European languages. Of particular interest was his belief that Chinese art had moved through four stages: functional, ritual, religious, and literary. The final period in Zheng Chang’s art history encompassed Chinese painting from the Song through the Qing dynasties and gave a positive evaluation to the later centuries of Chinese painting, thus implicitly arguing against the most extreme rhetoric of the New Culture radicals. Zheng Chang’s book, when published in 1929, was considered an exemplary text by modern educators of the period, including Cai Yuanpei, then a trustee of the Shanghai Art Academy. The establishment of a modern, Western-style art history, along with a new art historical canon for Chinese art, was an important step in relegitimization of China’s native traditions of painting. Over the course of the 1920s, more schools began teaching Chinese painting and, along with it, Chinese art history, employing the historical framework first developed in Japan and subsequently modified by Chinese writers on the basis of China’s rich heritage of art historical and critical writing. As Chinese painters sought to find their place in the modern world, they expanded the art world to the point that something quite unprecedented was created—a realm based on fresh audiences, new patrons, and novel venues. They moved into the modern schools and also out into the international market. By the end of the 1920s ink painters had succeeded in saving Chinese painting by creating a place for it within China’s modern institutions of art.  

The Heavenly Horse Society

 

 

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Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

A unique organization, in the context of the rapidly changing and open environment created in the Shanghai art world, was the Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui).15 Founded by teachers and graduates of the Shanghai Art Academy in 1919, the society contributed to the development of modern oil painting, design, and photography of the 1920s in significant measure. Equally important, however, was its recognition of ink painters as members and exhibitors. Its patterns of publication, exhibition, and organization were as crucially important to the survival and health of guohua as solidifying oil painting’s position in the core of the new art world. The first Tianmahui exhibition, held December 20– 29, 1919, in Shanghai, included about two hundred works and was divided into four categories: Chinese painting, syncretic (zhezhong) painting, design, and Western painting. Shanghai Art Academy instructors Liu Haisu, Jiang Xin, and cartoonist/graphic designer Ding Song served as jurors for the Western-style works. The Chinese painting section  

was selected by some of the most prominent men in Shanghai, including Shanghai school masters Wu Changshi and Wang Zhen. Chinese paintings by Wu Changshi and Wu Shujuan, syncretic paintings by Gao Jianfu, and Western paintings by Shanghai Art Academy instructors Jiang Xin, Wang Jiyuan, Wang Yachen, and Chen Guoliang impressed critics of the time. Wu Changshi brought epigraphic taste and Shanghai school painting into the twentieth century [see figs. 1.19 and 1.22], while Gao Jianfu was a proponent of “new guohua” [see fig. 2.7]. Wu Shujuan (Wu Xingfen, 1853–1930), an elderly female landscape painter, painted large and powerful landscape paintings and served as a mentor to some younger female artists. In 1919 her paintings were reproduced on the cover of twelve issues of Ladies Journal (Funü zazhi), a publication of Shanghai’s Commercial Press, and were frequently sold in charity benefit exhibitions.16 The second Tianmahui exhibition of July 1920 consisted of four galleries equally divided between guohua and Western art. Again, major exhibitors in Chinese painting were Wu Changshi, Wang Zhen, and Gao Jianfu. Wang Yachen, Chen Guoliang, Yu Jifan, Li Chaoshi (recently returned from France), Jiang Xin, and Liu Haisu showed Western art. The third exhibition, held early in 1921, expanded to six galleries and was still equally divided between Chinese painting and Western painting. One journalist wrote that the works on display were representative of the current situation of “our nation.” It was reported that the national flag and the club crest, designed by Zhang Chenbo, were displayed, and the society’s manifesto, which committed the Tianmahui to a policy of making art public (yishu gongkai zhuyi), was posted in the gallery. As time passed, the number of important artists whose work was exhibited in the society’s exhibitions grew. The fourth exhibition, in 1921, included Western painting by Li Shutong, work that may have been painted before 1918, when he left secular life. Kang Youwei visited the fifth exhibition in 1922, which showed two galleries of ink paintings and four of oils. In contrast to his more commonly cited criticism of Chinese painting, he wrote favorable comments in the visitors’ book about both its innovation and its transmission of tradition. The year 1922, the publication date of Chen Hengque’s book on literati painting, seems to have marked a watershed for guohua. Proponents of Western art awakened to the incompleteness of their program and made room in the newly developing Chinese art world for their Chinese painting colleagues. An organizer of the sixth Tianmahui exhibition, Wang Jiyuan (a Shanghai Art Academy oil painting professor), quoted jury member Wang Zhen as praising the quality of work in which the spirit of guocui (national essence) fills the paper.  

Art theory and criticism increasingly made reference to the nation, and as a symbol of the nation ink painting often featured in public discourse. As the political and military situation in Jiangsu province, around Shanghai, deteriorated in the mid-1920s, the Tianmahui faced increasing difficulty in maintaining its exhibition schedule. Tianmahui organizer and Shanghai Art Academy professor Jiang Xin undertook further study in France from 1920 to 1927. Liu Haisu took over as chief administrator of the Tianmahui. Despite all efforts, however, the frequency of Tianmahui exhibitions shifted from twice a year to once every two years. By contrast, the success of the increasingly frequent and ambitious Sino-Japanese joint exhibitions of ink painting in the early 1920s gave Chinese artists reasons for optimism about contemporary art. Tianmahui juror Wang Zhen, one of the most active figures in Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges in the early 1920s, advocated even greater efforts to increase the size, quality, and inclusiveness of works shown in the Tianmahui exhibitions. He particularly urged planners to see beyond the art world of Shanghai, by expanding the Tianmahui exhibitions to include artists from all over China, to increase the number of works exhibited, and to think in terms of a national audience in order to attract viewers who might travel from long distances to see the exhibition. Implicit in Wang Zhen’s suggestions was the idea that the Tianmahui event might lead to a national exhibition. Indeed, as early as 1922, Cai Yuanpei and Liu Haisu had made such a proposal to the educational authorities. By 1927 the Tianmahui exhibition had expanded to include works by modernist artists living abroad, such as Chang Yu (Sanyu, 1901–1966) [fig. 3.7], a few works by foreign artists, and a section on art photography.17 Development in Shanghai of pictorial newspapers and richly illustrated pictorial magazines, of which the most notable was Young Companion (Liangyou), provided a publication venue for the new art and traditional art alike. Young Companion, which somewhat resembles the later American periodical Life magazine in its format, echoed the curatorial approach of the Tianmahui by publishing many examples of art photography on its pages. Through their extensive social and professional networks, including the worlds of education and publishing, the Tianmahui organizers greatly expanded the reach of art into urban society. Tolerance and support of foreign-educated oil painters for their colleagues who specialized in ink painting was all the more important in light of the celebrity status the group enjoyed. As a privately organized and financed art society, the Tianmahui relied on a web of intersecting social and artistic networks to create a flourishing artistic  

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3.7  Chang Yu (1901–1966), Reclining Nude on an Oriental Textile, undated, oil on canvas, 79 × 127.5 cm, private collection, Paris  

structure during a period of great political instability. Many of the talented individuals associated with the group worked in a variety of modern arts and cultural enterprises, ranging from journalistic writing to photography, drawing, and fine arts oil painting. The Tianmahui held its last exhibition in 1928, as the warlord era drew to a close. The structure of the modern Chinese art world that they defined through their exhibitions became the standard and was reflected quite directly in the First National Art Exhibition of 1929. In the 1920s, as traditionalists recognized the necessity of modernization, and reformers increasingly understood the value of China’s own cultural past, a rich cross-fertilization between the Western-style and Chinese artists developed. The diverse group of thoughtful and ambitious artists who came together under the auspices of the Tianmahui shared a common goal of promoting the development of the best of Chinese art. They thus laid the groundwork for the golden age of modernist art in the 1930s as well as the traditionalist revival, which brought forth innovation in the old forms of Chinese painting. Their activities came to a close with the establishment of the new Nanjing government in 1928, when it appeared that the new nation was finally ready to bring peace and prosperity to its citizens at home and redeem the nation’s reputation abroad. 58

Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

The Beginning of a National Architectural Style

The tomb of revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen in the hills outside Nanjing is one of the most impressive artistic manifestations of the national dreams of the Guomindang political party and the new Republican government established by China’s first president and his followers in 1912. Constructed on thirty acres of mountain forest, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum transformed a vista of awesome beauty into a massive and inspiring temple to the spirit, in both the religious and political sense, of the man who is usually considered to be the founder of the modern Chinese nation [fig. 3.8]. Its dedication ceremony, in 1931, marked a high point in the political and cultural aspirations of the territorially reunified Republic of China. In the years leading up to this moment, Western political philosophies of various kinds, from anarchism to Marxism, offered ideas that brought hope of a new social order. Yet the fervent dreams of patriotic idealists that a reformed China might join the world of nations as equal members were often dashed on the battlefields of contending warlords. As early as 1916, military leader Yuan Shikai attempted to hijack the revolution and declare himself emperor. The 1917 Bolshevik

3.8 Mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, Nanjing, completed 1931, design by Lü Yanzhi, photo by the authors

Revolution in Russia brought Communism to the forefront as a potential solution to China’s problems, and by 1921 a small group of men whom it inspired had established the Chinese Communist Party in the French concession of Shanghai. Soon after, Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Nationalist Party and an admirer of Vladimir Lenin, accepted the assistance of the Soviet Union in his effort to reunite China and expel imperialism. From 1923 until his death in 1925, Sun sought, by military and diplomatic means, to bring the territory fragmented by warlords back together. Late in 1924, Sun made a final attempt to reunify his wartorn country by journeying from his base in Guangzhou, via Japan, to the northern capital of Beijing. It was there that he died on March 12, 1925, leaving reunification unaccomplished but willing an inspiring set of political theories to his followers in the party. His final instruction was that he should be entombed on the Purple Hills outside Nanjing, the city he chose as China’s capital. His wish stimulated one of the most significant architectural commissions of the era and the codification of a new nationalist vision of Chinese public construction. The day after Sun’s death, a committee was formed to plan his tomb, which was to be called a ling, the same term used for an imperial mausoleum. The mausoleum site would be to the east of the imperial tomb of

Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, who was much admired in Republican China. As a military strategist, Zhu was credited with expelling the preceding Mongol regime, and as a leader, he had established China’s last successful dynasty to be ruled by Han Chinese. Parallels between the building of his post-Mongol capital at Nanjing in 1368 and the post-Manchu national government initiated by Sun Yat-sen were made symbolically explicit by the siting of Sun’s tomb. China’s first president was thus to be buried in a quasi-imperial style. The selection committee held an international competition to identify the architect for Sun’s mausoleum and from forty entries chose the design of a Chinese graduate of Cornell University, Lü Yanzhi (1894–1929). Lü had lived in Paris as a child, attended high school in Beijing, lived briefly in Washington, and upon graduation had worked for two years in New York. The selection committee consisted of a civil engineer, Ling Hongxing, who was president of Nanyang University in Shanghai; Li Jinfa (1900–1976), a French-educated sculptor who taught at the Shanghai Art Academy; Wang Yiting, an ink painter, businessman, Buddhist, and loyal supporter of Sun Yat-sen; and Emil Busch, a German architect then working in Shanghai. The committee instructed entrants that they should prepare a  

 

 

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plan in the classical Chinese style but with distinctive and monumental features.18 It was also to be constructed of marble and reinforced concrete, and to have room for the ceremonial assembly of fifty thousand citizens. Educated in the beaux arts tradition that dominated American architecture schools of the time, and then trained further in the New York office of Henry Murphy while the firm designed the Jinling Women’s College in Nanjing, Lü Yanzhi artfully combined the most satisfying elements of classical European architecture with certain Chinese forms in his plan for the mausoleum. Entered through a series of gates and approached from a long entrance walkway, the monument is approached through what resemble the ritual gate and spirit path of an imperial tomb. Quite distinctive, however, is the magnificent staircase that conspicuously ascends the hillside. The staircase—100 feet wide and 550 feet long, punctuated by massive landings capable of accommodating crowds of citizens as they might gather for commemorative services—offers the space for an open spectacle. The most sacred parts of the complex, the sacrificial hall and tomb itself, were conceived by architect Lü in terms that combine Chinese imperial architecture with forms found in the cities of Europe and America. Lü’s design shares distinctive features with Napoleon’s tomb in Paris and Ulysses Grant’s tomb in New York, particularly the sunken placement for Sun Yat-sen’s sarcophagus. There are also explicit references to the Lincoln Memorial (completed 1922), which was under construction during Lü’s studies in the United States, in the sculptural arrangement of the sacrificial hall.19 In a further parallel to the design of the Lincoln Memorial, Sun’s political writings were engraved on the walls. Juror Wang Yiting wrote in rejecting a competing submission: “It is in the ancient Chinese style, but it seems not to correspond to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s thought of combining China with the West.” 20 By contrast, Lü Yanzhi’s more cosmopolitan design—which combines the axial plans of Chinese and Western classical architecture; the upturned eaves and dougong bracketing of Chinese buildings with marble and modern reinforced concrete; the multibay Chinese structure of visible columns with the proportions of European classical architecture—created a particular kind of public space, one praised as “open monumentality,” and led to evaluations that the design for the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum (or Zhongshan Ling) was “extremely close to . . . Sun’s character and spirit in both its form and quality.” 21 The Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum remains one of the most imposing sites of Republican period architecture. Although Sun’s failure to conclude the peace agreement before he died  

 

 

 

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Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

made it impossible to begin construction in the militarily contested city of Nanjing, it was finally dedicated six years after his death. A second commission awarded to Lü Yanzhi, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Auditorium in the Nationalistruled city of Guangzhou, which exemplified the same blend of Western architectural principles and Chinese motifs, was constructed more quickly. Echoing the syncretic nature of the building itself, the Guangdong government purchased paintings, Eagles, White Horse, and Lion, from the Lingnan school artist and former anti-Manchu revolutionary Gao Qifeng for display in the octagonal hall in Guangzhou.22 Unfortunately, the architect Lü Yanzhi himself died at the age of thirty-five, before either structure was complete. This style of modern public building, derived from a SinoWestern hybrid that American architect Henry Murphy, one of its early practitioners, called “adaptive architecture,” became the hallmark of official architectural commissions of the Republican period. It would be replicated decades later in structures such as the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The 1920s Generation Return from Abroad

The new movements in art and architecture of the Republican era took place in an atmosphere of rising Nationalist sentiments and increasing concern over the plight of China’s people. Artists who returned from education abroad became key figures in the debates that characterized the 1910s and early 1920s. Lü Yanzhi, who returned to China in 1921, may be considered a younger member of that well-educated generation. A second large cohort of students traveled to the United States, Europe, and Japan at the end of World War I, a large number of them with government sponsorship, and many of them to France. As might be expected, some of the students who traveled overseas for college engaged themselves not only, or even primarily, with their studies but instead threw themselves into the cultural and political currents that swirled through Europe between the wars. Future Communist leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were radicalized by their difficult experiences as foreign students in France. Among the pathbreaking artists who spent an extended period in France were Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), who grew up in a rural village near the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, and Xu Beihong (1895– 1953), from Yixing in Jiangsu province, near Shanghai. Both returned home just as the new Nationalist government was taking shape. With the establishment of the Nanjing government in 1928, which promised to end the warlord strife, came the far greater possibilities for artistic development offered by a peaceful society.  

 

Lin Fengmian

Lin Fengmian, who returned to China with his young French wife in 1926, had spent his formative years in Paris and Berlin, and soon became the most influential advocate in China of modernist French and German styles of oil painting and new patterns of art education. Born to a craftsman’s family in Meixian, Guangdong, and trained to paint by his father, Lin attended the new-style high school established in the county seat after the revolution, graduating in 1918. The following year, Lin and a few of his close high school friends won scholarships to Europe on the government work-study program. Landing in Marseille early in 1920, Lin worked first as a sign painter but soon settled at the Dijon Art College to study oil painting. In September of 1920, with an introduction from Ovide Yencesse (1869–1947), the director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, Lin Fengmian moved to Paris to become a pupil of Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), an oil painting professor at the École des Beaux-Arts through whose private atelier had passed many well-known artists, including Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Émile Bernard, and Vincent Van Gogh. During those years Lin Fengmian and fellow art students Liu Jipiao (1900–1992), Lin Wenzheng (1903–1990), Wang Daizhi (dates unknown), and Wu Dayu (1903–1988) established an art club in Paris they called the Phoebus Society. Completing his tutelage under Cormon in 1923, Lin Fengmian and his close friend Lin Wenzheng moved to Berlin for a year of further study. Although much of Lin Fengmian’s oil painting shows similarities to that of French cubists such as Ferdinand Leger (1881–1955), Andre Derain (1880–1954), or Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), in Berlin his work began to take on a strongly expressionistic quality and was often filled with a profound sense of angst or even melancholy. Bold, rapid execution and an emotional tone became hallmarks of his personal style. His works of this period survive only in poor reproductions, but they suggest a deep engagement not only with French painting but also with that of Germany, as the environment and culture of Berlin permanently transformed his art. Similarities have been noted between Lin Fengmian’s work of this time, such as Berliner Café and Nude, with its black outlines and vivid color, and that of Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, as well as more generally with innovations of the other German expressionist artists associated with The Bridge in Dresden and The Blue Rider in Munich.23 It was also in this period that Lin’s belief in the possibility of merging Chinese painting and European modernism developed. Upon returning to France in 1924, Lin Fengmian showed  

 

 

 

 

 

 

forty-two of his paintings, twenty-eight in traditional Chinese materials and fourteen in oil, at the Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Chinese Art in Strasbourg. The single example of his work reproduced in the catalog, a somber ink-and-color painting of predatory cats entitled Will to Live, reflects the artist’s engagement with the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. A similar tone pervaded the exhibited work that Lin’s colleagues found most memorable, a large expressionistic oil entitled Groping, in which he depicted truth-seekers such as Homer, Dante, Hugo, Michelangelo, Ibsen, Galileo, Goethe, Jesus, and Tolstoy.24 The Strasbourg exhibition was one of Lin Feng­­ mian’s first major undertakings as artist-curator, and it borrowed 485 works by 26 artists, including pieces by Xu Beihong, Liu Jipiao, Wang Daizhi, and the woman painter Fang Junbi, from Chinese artists and collectors in Europe. Cai Yuanpei, then living in Strasbourg, served as honorary chair; he wrote a preface for the catalog that identified the Phoebus Society and the Work-Study Art Club as the exhibition’s organizers and described its contents as including antiques, Western-style works, and Chinese-style art that had absorbed Western aspects. The melancholic strand evident in Lin Fengmian’s art, undoubtedly a product of both his own temperament and the environment of Weimar Germany, was deepened by his personal experiences, which included first the death of his father and then, tragically, after only a year of marriage the death his young German wife, Elise von Roda, and their newborn infant in the fall of 1924. Lin Fengmian’s acute awareness of human sorrow seemed not to hamper but to fuel his art. Perhaps typical of his revolutionary generation, he retained passion and a certain degree of optimism for the larger mission of improving China through art. He was soon involved in organizing another Chinese art exhibition of ambitious scope, the Chinese submission to the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. Despite the increasingly unstable situation of the Chinese government, which withdrew promised funds in the midst of its civil war, Lin rallied his friends in France, including art historian Lin Wenzheng, painter Wang Daizhi, and architect/designer Liu Jipiao, to the cause and created an extravagantly decorated exhibition space celebrating the Republic of China.25 From this time forward the four friends would take modern art education as a common mission. The combination of idealism and competence with which Lin Fengmian approached both these projects, as well as the quality of his painting, strongly impressed Cai Yuanpei. Cai urged him to return to China, and in early 1926 Lin was appointed

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director of the Beijing National Art School, an institution Cai had founded eight years earlier. Lin soon recruited his friend from Dijon, André Claudot (1892–1982), to help him implement a modern art curriculum but also engaged the elderly ink painter Qi Baishi, whose simple, sometimes whimsical paintings immediately struck a chord with artists and collectors of modernist sensibility. Institution-building proved particularly difficult during the warlord period, and Lin Fengmian worked in Beijing for little more than a year before the Beijing government fell to the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin. In the summer of 1927, Lin Fengmian joined Lu Xun and the many colleagues who had moved to the south. With establishment of the new national government in Nanjing in 1927, Cai Yuanpei became head of its University Council (Daxueyuan), an institution established to implement and supervise a centralized plan for higher education. In Nanjing, for example, National Fourth Sun Yat-sen University was founded in the fall of 1927, as a merger of eight schools, including a campus used by the Liangjiang Normal School in the late Qing dynasty. In 1928 it was renamed National Central University and became one of the nation’s major institutions of higher learning.  

National Hangzhou Art Academy

3.9 Wu Dayu (1903–1988), The Girl, 1930s, oil on canvas, now lost, from the Young Companion’s series of contemporary paintings by Chinese artists, section II, Occidental, no. 5 (1932)

Cai Yuanpei recruited Lin Fengmian to join him in 1927 as head of the University Council’s Art Education Committee and served as his mentor throughout the Nanjing decade (1927–37). At the end of 1927, under Cai’s leadership, the Art Education Committee approved two important initiatives: (1) to establish a national art school, and (2) to hold a national art exhibition. Lin Fengmian and his colleagues from Paris, Lin Wenzheng and Wang Daizhi, were asked to take charge of the former, and the scenic Southern Song capital city of Hangzhou was selected as the location of the school. The school mission was to train specialized artistic talent, to lead what they called “the art movement,” and to promote social aesthetic education (shehui meiyu). Its motto would be: “introduce Western art, organize Chinese art, harmonize Chinese and Western art, and create the art of our time.” Above all, it rejected traditionalism. Thus, with Lin Fengmian’s help, in 1928 Cai Yuanpei realized an important part of his educational agenda with the founding of the National West Lake Art Academy (later named the National Hangzhou Art Academy), on the shores of West Lake, one of China’s most poetic sites. Cai handpicked Lin Fengmian to be director and by doing so created an institution in which devotion to creative freedom and to the pursuit of innovation within the most contemporary of cosmopolitan trends would dominate the curriculum. Lin Fengmian’s

personal commitment to modernist art, which he realized both through his example and through his hiring decisions, dominated the Hangzhou academy for the subsequent two decades and remained an inspiration for faculty and students in the late twentieth century who sought to overturn socialist-realist artistic canons. The new national art academy opened in the spring of 1928 with about seventy students and thirty instructors. Lin Fengmian was director, his friend Lin Wenzheng was dean and art history professor, and a well-balanced mix of faculty taught in four visual art departments: Western painting, Chinese painting, design, and sculpture. The French-trained modernist Wu Dayu (1903–1988) headed the Western painting department [fig. 3.9]. Pan Tianshou, an independent-minded admirer of Wu Changshi, directed guohua instruction. Western painting professors were— like Cai Weilian (1904–1939), Fang Ganmin (1906–1984), and Li Chaoshi (1894–1971)—trained in France or—like Wang Yuezhi (1894–1937)—in Tokyo. The majority of the design department’s faculty, including Sun Fuxi (1898–1962) and Tao Yuanqing (1893–1929), were trained in Japan, but department chair Liu Jipiao and Lei Guiyuan (1908–1989) had studied in France. Sculpture department chair Li Jinfa

 

 

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had also studied in France. Several foreign instructors of the visual arts were engaged, including the French painter (and anarchist) André Claudot, who would head the research department; a Japanese artist, Saitō Kazō (1887–1955), who taught design; along with Russian and British instructors. The music department employed many other European faculty members. Wang Daizhi was appointed as the school’s representative in Europe in charge of purchasing plaster casts, books, and art supplies. The school offered a five-year program: two years of fundamental training followed by three years more for the undergraduate degree. The student enrollment rose to eighty in the fall of 1928, and at that time the two painting departments were merged into one. In this somewhat controversial plan, all painting students would be exposed to both Western and Chinese painting. Lin Fengmian himself pursued with little fanfare in this period a personal and self-­expressive hybrid mode of painting in the traditional Chinese media. One rare surviving work from this period, his Autumn Out‑ ing, was acquired by his friend Fang Junbi (1898–1986) after an exhibition in Belgium in 1930 and is now in Boston.26 Painted in loose strokes of ink and watercolor on Chinese silk and mounted as a hanging scroll, it suggests a melancholy narrative. The mysterious identities of the horsemen he depicted and the allusive nature of their journey give it an introspective tone that is characteristic of much of Lin Fengmian’s work. This painting is very similar in imagery and format to his now lost Horse Drinking in an Autumn Stream from the 1925 Paris show. Lin Feng­mian’s easy familiarity with human and animal anatomy, such devices of perspective as foreshortening and hazy atmosphere, his richly patterned surface of light and shade, and the implication of an unstated narrative all make the work essentially Western in its artistic conception, even if painted in traditional materials. This series foreshadows Lin’s synthesis of Eastern and Western artistic conventions that emerged in a particularly distinctive form in the 1940s. In addition to promoting modern Chinese art through formal pedagogy, Lin Fengmian, Lin Wenzheng, and Li Puyuan worked to further the public display and dissemination of art. On August 18, 1928, the three established the Art Movement Society, a group “founded on absolute friendship, and uniting the new power of the art world.” It aimed “to focus effort on the ‘art movement,’ and promote the renaissance of Eastern art.” 27 They published a journal called Apollo, and began organizing the first of four exhibitions, one of which would be held in Japan. The first show took place in Shanghai in 1929 and displayed both recent works and those brought from abroad. Lin Fengmian’s mon 

 

3.10 Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), Composition, ca. 1934, oil on canvas, lost, from Meishu zazhi [Studio] No.2 (February 1934)  

umental oils—his Humanity of 1927 and Suffering of 1929— appear in poor black and white reproductions to represent human figures writhing in agony. Striking and psychologically powerful, they reportedly provoked unwanted attention from the authorities, who read into them a message critical of the new regime. Lin’s more formalist oil, Composition, published in 1934, is typical of his cubist approach and is the only surviving illustration to suggest the intensity of his palette [fig. 3.10]. The period between establishment of the academy in 1928 and abandonment of its campus in the face of Japanese invasion in 1937 saw an extraordinarily rapid absorption and development of modernist European art in China. Unfortunately, no work from the Hangzhou studios is known to have survived the Second World War. One published example by Lin Fengmian’s colleague Fang Ganmin, a 1933 painting of nudes in a style related to synthetic cubism [fig. 3.11], may be typical of the era.  

 

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3.11 Fang Ganmin (1906–1984), Melody in Autumn, 1933, oil on canvas, lost, from Meishu zazhi [Studio] No.2 (February 1934)  

The First National Art Exhibition of 1929

Planning for China’s first national art exhibition was the second major item in Cai Yuanpei’s program for art and education at the beginning of the Nanjing decade. First proposed to the government as early as 1922 by Cai Yuanpei and Shanghai Art College director Liu Haisu, it was only with Cai Yuanpei’s appointment as China’s highest educational authority in June of 1927 that it became possible to implement his aspiration. The ambitious exhibition, held April 10–30, 1929, demonstrated the range and accomplishments of Chinese artists of the early Republican era. Artworks were shown in seven categories: (1) painting and calligraphy; (2) epigraphy and seal carving; (3) Western painting;  

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(4) sculpture; (5) architecture; (6) arts and crafts; and (7) art photography. While the exhibition had an extremely important function in presenting and canonizing a range of different styles and artists, almost as important was the effect of the organizational process on the art world of the day. The complicated collaborations and negotiations be­­ tween artists of different beliefs and backgrounds who served on the organizational committees stimulated a great deal of debate about art and certainly catalyzed future artistic developments. Indeed, the almost immediate proliferation of small art societies that promoted everything from surrealism to traditionalist ink painting, photography to woodblock prints, throughout the 1930s seem to reflect the stimulus of this extraordinary national cultural effort. Reaching an audience that was not only domestic but also international was another ambition of the organizers. The educational ideals that lay behind Cai Yuanpei’s promotion of art were thus combined with an increasingly nationalistic desire for international recognition of China’s cultural stature. Success in mounting the exhibition, despite all the impediments encountered by its organizers, required a great deal of individual work as well as a temporary subordination of individual or group interests to the common goal. Vigorous differences of opinion about what constituted the right direction for modern art were temporarily laid aside. One could argue that the ardent commitment of China’s art world to realizing the long-delayed national exhibition, and the mediation of Cai Yuanpei, Wang Zhen, and other civic and cultural leaders, brought forth a process in which these artist-citizens and their government, however briefly, were as one. Cai Yuanpei himself took on the role of exhibition director in 1927, while Lin Wenzheng was appointed exhibition secretary. Planning proceeded throughout the year, and in the fall of 1928, to expand the international significance of the event, an invitation was issued to Japanese artists to participate in the exhibition. With help from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Japanese sent an excellent selection of eighty-two oil paintings by their most important Western-style artists to the exhibition. As Cai Yuanpei later wrote: Horizontally [the 1929 National Fine Arts Exhibition] included works from the Japanese Imperial Fine Arts Academy, the Nikakai [Second division society], the Shun’yōkai [Spring Sun Society], and the Kokugakai [National Painting Society], as well as recent works by European and American artists living in Shanghai. Vertically it also displayed the ancient art works loaned by private collectors, as well as masterpieces

by recently deceased artists, all of which were rotated on a daily basis. These works were all displayed as reference works. Therefore, we can say that this exhibition included all that should be included, without limitation.28 The list of Chinese exhibition organizers initially provided to the Japanese included men who came from China’s most important arts and educational institutions. Besides the core organizers Cai Yuanpei, Lin Wenzheng, and Lin Fengmian, and their many colleagues at the National Art College in Hangzhou, they included representatives from major Shanghai publishers, such as Shenbao, Liangyou, and Youzheng and educators from as far north as Beijing and as far south as Guangzhou.29 Among them were the Beijing ink painter Qi Baishi, who taught at Beijing Art School during Lin’s directorship; architect Lü Yanzhi, recorded as an employee of the University Council; Liu Haisu, who was about to depart for Europe; and Wang Zhen. Although the initial plan included only painting, sculpture, architecture, and arts and crafts, by the time of the opening, both its modernist and traditionalist scopes had been expanded, thus including photography on the one hand and calligraphy, epigraphy, and seal carving on the other. A previously unstated subdivision between Chinese painting and Western painting also became a conspicuous feature of the organizational plan. A restructuring of the national government in 1928 led to Cai Yuanpei’s resignation from the University Council and reassignment of administrative duties to staff of the new Ministry of Education. Responsibility for the exhibition, previously centered at the academy in Hangzhou, changed in early 1929, and the exhibition was moved from Nanjing (where it had been planned for National Central University and Jinling University) to the New Mass Education Hall (Xin puyu tang), a former orphanage in Shanghai’s Chinese city. From this point in the organizing process, members of the Shanghai artistic elite, particularly leaders of the Tianmahui, who had developed an excellent national network over their previous decade of curating exhibitions, played a significant role in exhibition implementation. Lin Fengmian and Lin Wenzheng remained involved, with Lin Fengmian exhibiting his expressionist oil painting Contribution and accepting responsibility for managing the exhibition site. The curatorial plan was expanded to reflect the somewhat less avant-garde tastes of the Shanghai cultural elite as well as of traditionalist groups in the North and thus became a broader and more inclusive, if somewhat less artistically progressive, snapshot of China’s artistic field in 1929. Lin Fengmian and his Hangzhou colleagues presented

their own modernist curatorial view at the Art Movement Society exhibition in Shanghai, held soon after the national exhibition.30 As finally published in 1930 by Youzheng Book Com­ pany, the catalog’s selection of oil paintings by Lin Feng­ mian and his colleagues at the National Art College in Hang­zhou, most notably Cai Weilian, Wu Dayu, and Li Puyuan, exemplify the new cubist or expressionist tendencies many of them had absorbed in Europe. By contrast, the Shanghai Art Academy, represented by Wang Jiyuan (1893– 1975), Jiang Xin, Wang Yachen, Li Yishi, and Liu Haisu, was dominated by impressionist and postimpressionist tendencies most closely associated with Japanese oil painting of the period. Jiang Xin, for example, whose 1917 graduation selfportrait from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts was in a postimpressionist manner [see fig. 2.11], here exhibited a realist portrait sculpture of his friend, the writer Shao Xunmei (1906–1968) [fig. 3.12]. Further development of Wang Jiyuan’s postimpressionist style may be seen in a painting of 1932 that survived in the collection of an art-loving Japanese diplomat [fig. 3.13].  

 

3.12  Jiang Xin (1894–1939), Portrait of Shao Xunmei, before 1929, sculpture, from Funü zazhi (Ladies Journal), vol. 15, no. 7 (1929), p. 61  

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3.13 Wang Jiyuan (1893–1975), Hangzhou Lakeside, 1932, oil on canvas, 50.4 × 71.2 cm, Kyoto National Museum (Suma Collection)  

The selection of oil paintings for the First National Art exhibition stimulated a particularly lively debate that was played out in the press during the course of the exhibition. The Japanese section of the show was accompanied by a catalog published in Tokyo that illustrated all eighty-two Japa­nese oil paintings. From Nakamura Fusetsu’s academic history painting to Wada Eisaku’s (1874–1959) postimpressionism, and finally to the intense and brightly colored expressionist works of Satomi Katsuzō (1895–1981), it presented a range of oil painting styles then practiced in Japan’s art academies. Although the merits of these different Japanese styles do not seem to have been explored in much depth by the Chinese art journalists who reported on them, a heated debate about European and Chinese oil painting styles enlivened the pages of the exhibition’s newspaper, Art Exhibition (Meizhan), which was published every three days during the show. The first bombshell, an article entitled “I Am Perplexed,” was launched against modern painting by Xu Beihong, an oil painting professor at National Central University in Nanjing. The British-educated romantic poet Xu Zhimo (1897–1931) returned fire in “I Too Am ‘Perplexed,’ ” thus initiating a public debate between two cultural-world celebrities.31 The article by Xu Beihong, who did not show his work in the exhibition, castigated the representatives of modern painting, specifically Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard, to argue in favor of realism. An article by Xu’s colleague at National Central University, Li Yishi (1886–1942), supported Xu’s position. Xu Beihong and Li Yishi had both studied in Europe—Xu at the École des Beaux Arts, Paris,  

 

 

 

 

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in the early 1920s, and the elder Li at the Glasgow School of Fine Arts (class of 1916); both had absorbed a conservative form of academic realism. Xu Zhimo, serving as the journal’s editor-in-chief, passionately defended modernist freedom of artistic expression, a position backed by most of the exhibition jurors. This vigorous epistolary exchange among the two friends and their colleagues was to be one of the most vividly remembered aspects of the show. The public spectacle stirred interest in the exhibition and probably also helped sell the newspaper in which it was published. This position statement was not just a publicity gimmick, however, for it marked Xu Beihong’s unshakable dedication to realism on the one hand and, with Xu Zhimo as its representative, the Shanghai cultural community’s support for modernism on the other. Liu Haisu and the Nude Model Controversy

Liu Haisu, the Shanghai Art Academy’s youthful director, had himself stimulated uproar in the art world only a few years earlier. Largely self-taught after having taken a course in backdrop painting at the school run by Zhou Xiang, Liu had traveled to Japan in 1919 in the company of Japanese-speaking colleagues to see exhibitions of the Nihon Bijutsuin and the Nikakai. The trip was a profound experience for Liu, who drew inspiration from the Japanese artists’ rejection of academicism. He thereafter came to see his own mission as artist, theorist, and art educator of overturning the status quo. With his rather limited access to European traditions, Liu formed his own artistic rebellion

around the works of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he admired as an uncompromising hero, and the seventeenth-century monk-painter Shitao, who claimed in his writings to reject all previous methods and paint in his own style. Late in 1921, Liu Haisu visited Cai Yuanpei in Beijing and early in 1922 he rendered one of Beijing’s landmarks, Qianmen, in oil, in the style of Vincent Van Gogh [see fig. 2.13]. This work marks the fruition of the new trends he had observed in Japan, specifically a shift in his painting from the slick, illustrator’s style he had learned in the commercial art world of Shanghai to one based more on contemporary fine art models. In 1925, Liu published an article in praise of Van Gogh, labeling the Dutch master “yishu pantu,” which may be translated as “art renegade” or “traitor to art.” He came to identify himself with Van Gogh’s individualism to such a degree that he began signing and publishing his work under the sobriquet “Art Renegade.” In 1920 the Shanghai Art Academy adopted the practice of drawing from nude female models that was common in European academies. The pedagogical necessity of life drawing for students of Western art and anatomy was widely accepted among modern art educators with experience abroad.32 Both Zhejiang Normal School and the Shanghai Art Academy itself already taught from male models at this time. By 1926 several newer schools in Shanghai, including China Arts College (Zhonghua yida), Shanghai Arts College (Shanghai yishu daxue), and Shenzhou Girl’s School also taught life drawing. What may have distinguished the Shanghai Art Academy during these years was not so much this practice as Liu Haisu’s public promotion of its nude drawing courses, which were prominently advertised in Shanghai’s leading newspapers. In June of 1925 a new literary and entertainment tabloid, Shanghai huabao (Pictorial Shanghai), which employed several artists with close ties to the Shanghai Art Academy, published on the front page of its inaugural issue the photograph of a nude model posing for Shanghai Art Academy students.33 The Shanghai Art Academy was at that time located on the edge of the French concession, and although it naturally sought certification of its degrees from the Chinese authorities, it enjoyed a certain degree of protection from Chinese law by the extraterritorial power of the foreign government. On September 8, 1925, Liu Haisu sent a letter of complaint to the Jiangsu provincial authorities who administered the Chinese city of Shanghai, objecting to a ban on nude models, at the same time publishing a copy in the newspaper. Two weeks later, he gave a radio address on the same topic. Liu’s letter to the educational authorities initially had the desired results—they responded that they had not banned  

the educational use of models but only the sale of pornography. However, his publicity campaign attracted the attention of an ambitious young official, Jiang Huaisu, who was concerned about the Shanghai sex trade and was committed to improving public morality. Jiang responded with outrage to Liu Haisu’s comments defending the pedagogical use of the nude and demanded legal action against him from the provincial authorities. The battle between Liu Haisu and Jiang Huaisu was played out on the pages of Shanghai newspapers and in official channels for the remainder of the academic year, a period during which the military victories of the warlord Sun Chuanfang brought Shanghai under his control. Although the European pedagogical practices of the Shang­hai Art Academy enjoyed strong support from the educational establishment, Jiang Huaisu found the warlord sympathetic to his demands for public morality. By July of 1926, Sun Chuanfang had rejected all Liu Haisu’s arguments and ordered the academy to cease using nude models. The French authorities had agreed to enforce the ban. Liu Haisu, faced with the warlord threat to close his school, acquiesced. Fortunately for the Shanghai Art Academy, over the subsequent year the warlord was defeated by the nationalist army’s Northern Expedition. Cai Yuanpei, a strong supporter of Liu Haisu’s work as an art educator, returned from Europe to administer China’s universities. The nude painting controversy, in which political authorities attempted to interfere in a mainstream curriculum, garnered Liu Haisu and the Shanghai Art Academy substantial support within reformist circles. Even though one might conclude that he had stimulated, if not manufactured, the crisis by his provocative statements and actions, and had been defeated, from this time forward, Liu Haisu became identified as the man who stood up to the warlord in defense of the nude. Painting the nude, considered by most twentieth-century art educators to be essential basic training in technique and anatomy, became a symbol of the West, of the modern, and of freedom. Not surprisingly, it featured as a prominent theme in the catalog of the 1929 National Exhibition. The Shanghai Art Academy, which employed many ­foreign-trained artists and enjoyed the financial and moral support of important educational and social leaders such as Cai Yuanpei, Huang Yanpei (1878–1965), and Wang Zhen, was the most influential art school of the period. Despite the association of Liu Haisu’s name with the nude, his surviving body of work consists primarily of landscape paintings. It was the postimpressionist style practiced and taught by so many Shanghai Art Academy faculty members that permeated the Shanghai art world in the 1920s and 1930s and from there was disseminated throughout China.  

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trained designer Chen Zhifo (1896–1962) was hired in 1930, and in 1934 and 1935 Xu hired two of his students who had returned from study in Europe, Lü Sibai (1905–1973) and Wu Zuoren (1908–1997). In the same two years art historian Fu Baoshi and art historically minded guohua painter Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) were hired under his direction. In oil painting he sought to implement a Euro­pean academic curriculum, with classes devoted to drawing plaster casts, live models, still-life painting, and copying old masterpieces. Experimentation in ink painting yielded some uniquely conceived syntheses of classicizing and Westernizing tendencies. Xu’s own major efforts of the period included several history paintings based on historical tales from China’s classical past. He worked on a monumental oil, Tian Heng and His 500 Retainers, throughout the period of the first national art exhibition but did not finish it in time to exhibit. Indeed, its final form must be viewed as a confrontational response to the generally modernist tone of the oil paintings in that exhibition [fig. 3.15]. His allegorical painting, set in the third century BCE, suggests multiple acts of self-­sacrificial loyalty. Defeated leader Tian Heng bids farewell to his followers, whom he endeavors to protect at the cost of his own life. Soon after his suicide, however, ensue those of his two trusted lieutenants and finally all five hundred retainers fall upon their swords in testimony to their faithfulness to their leader, country, and cause. In depicting this historical tale, Xu deploys the vocabulary of European academic painting but substitutes for biblical or Greco-Roman themes a classical iconography now based on China’s own past. As a champion of “new guohua,” Xu recruited its senior theorist and practitioner, Gao Jianfu, to teach at National Central University along with younger ink artists such as Jiang Zhaohe (1904–1986). His colleague, the bird-andflower painter Zhang Shuqi, developed a new way of using opaque pigments without outline that acquired a distinctively modern flavor. A Sino-Western synthesis was one of the goals of the art department in Nanjing, but one that valued naturalism or realism rather than modernism. Indeed, by the end of the 1930s, many of the artists working in guohua had begun to share certain stylistic features, which included Western touches in the modeling of volume and light and shade, and preference for watercolor-like washes over outline or Chinese-style texture strokes. The distinctive style developed at National Central University would become most recognizable during the war years, as we will see in chapter 4. In the years between the first national art exhibition of 1929 and the second, of 1937, held in Nanjing on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, China’s three major art programs developed distinctive identities and approaches to modernizing art that characterized the mainstream of the  

Xu Beihong

Lin Fengmian and Liu Haisu were two of a triumvirate of pioneers in Western-style art and pedagogy in China. Xu Beihong, the third, returned permanently to China in 1927 and accepted a post teaching at the South China Arts Academy, a small school organized by his dramatist friends Tian Han (1898–1968) and Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962). The following year, he took a concurrent position as head of the painting section in the art major of the College of Education at the newly constituted National Central University in Nanjing. This appointment, to which he would eventually devote his exclusive attention, placed him in a department built on the much modernized and expanded foundations of the old Liang­jiang Normal School. In strong contrast to the modernist or postimpressionist orientations of the Hangzhou and Shanghai schools, the painting program developed at National Central University and identified with Xu Beihong had a French academic orientation. Xu Beihong particularly advocated art that was, in his terminology, realistic (xieshi). For that reason he believed that all oil painting should be based on drawing and that Chinese painting should also be modernized according to the same principles. Many beautiful academic studies from life that Xu rendered as preparation for his paintings in oil and ink survive. During his fifteen years on the faculty in Nanjing, Xu Beihong put great effort into recruiting like-minded colleagues to teach. In 1929 he hired European-trained oil painter Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) [fig. 3.14] and syncretic ink painters Gao Jianfu, Zhang Shuqi (1890–1957), and Wang Caibai (1886–1940). Academic oil painter Li Yishi served as chair of the art education division in 1929. The Japanese 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.14 Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) and her oil painting of a skull, 1929 photograph by Lang Jingshan, from Shanghai huabao, no. 505 (September 9, 1929)  

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3.15  Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Tian Heng and His 500 Retainers, 1928–30, oil on canvas, 197 × 349 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, Beijing  

 

Republican period. They were not the only arts institutions of their time, however, and these were not the only artistic concerns to be aired. Indeed, their graduates, along with artists returned from abroad, established their own schools and programs that produced a remarkable pluralism, if not a boom, in art during the 1930s. The Burgeoning of Art Education

Among the large number of art schools and programs established during the 1920s was the New China Arts Academy (Xinhua yizhuan; later called New China Arts College), which was founded in December of 1926 after a schism within the faculty and student body briefly closed the Shanghai Art Academy. Initially employing many faculty members who had resigned from the latter institution, and closely following its curriculum, the academy gradually expanded, with an emphasis on Western and Chinese painting as well as teacher training. Tokyo School of Fine Arts graduate Wang Yachen returned from travels in Europe in 1930 to help administer the school, which he directed until the seizure of Shanghai’s foreign concessions by the Japanese in 1941. The school campus was demolished during the Japanese invasion in November of 1937, but the faculty reconstituted what could be saved of the library holdings and plaster casts at a six-classroom site in the French concession. New China Art Academy thus survived until the end of Shanghai’s “orphan island” period.

Another well-respected private art school in the Jiangnan region was the Suzhou Art Academy, founded in 1922 by Yan Wenliang in the scenic center of the canal city of Suzhou. During its thirty-year existence, the school trained many art teachers and some influential artists. Yan Wenliang himself studied in France between 1928 and 1932, shipping back to China more than four hundred plaster casts of important classical European sculptures and more than ten thousand art books. From this time on, the Suzhou Art Academy was renowned for the quality of its facilities. During the AntiJapanese War the school moved to the foreign concessions of Shanghai and after 1945 operated from both campuses until the school closed in 1952. Ardent about teaching and blessed with longevity, Yan continued to informally mentor and encourage art students at his home in Shanghai even during the Cultural Revolution. The Guangzhou Municipal Art School dates its birth to the same year, 1922, when Hu Gentian, a graduate of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and Feng Gangbai, who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, were appointed to establish the new school. Oil painters themselves, they began by setting up the Western-style painting department and five years later, in 1927, added an ink painting department and a teacher training program. The school was permanently closed following the Japanese invasion in 1938, but in the course of the decade and a half of its existence, it trained many prominent Cantonese artists. Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

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Besides the art schools already discussed, the 1920s saw the burgeoning of private studios and small art programs run by artists trained in modern schools in China or abroad who sought to disseminate their newly earned knowledge and technical skill according to their own curricular ideas. A private studio that enjoyed a particularly high reputation in Shanghai was the Yiyuan (formally registered as the Yiyuan Painting Research Institute), established by oil painter Wang Jiyuan, along with the Tokyo- and Paris-trained sculptor Jiang Xin, the Japan-trained Zhu Qizhan (1892–1996), and the female ink painter Li Qiujun. The institute provided its fifteen graduate students with courses on oil painting, drawing, and watercolors and also invited fifteen senior fellows, including Pan Yuliang, Ni Yide, Chen Chengbo (Chen Cheng-po), Zhang Xuan, Fang Ganmin, Chen Shuren, and Li Zuhan, to work freely in the studio, which became famous for its open and liberal atmosphere. Wang Jiyuan and Jiang Xin taught classes at the well-appointed five-story studio building they shared in the French concession. The Yiyuan organized several formal exhibitions and published a journal, Yiyuan, which was edited by Wang Yachen.34 The White Goose Painting Club (Bai’e huahui) was established by four Shanghai artist friends—Pan Sitong, Chen Qiucao, Fang Xuehu, and Du Xueou—in 1924 to provide instruction in Western-style art for working adults and amateurs. Among those who passed through its doors were future Communist organizers such as Jiang Feng and Ai Qing. Although the clubhouse was destroyed in battles of the 1932 war, the program continued to operate until World War II, providing a free atmosphere for the development of many alternative trends in the Shanghai art world. The Aurora Art Club and China College of Arts, both established by Chen Baoyi in the 1920s, transmitted up-to-date Japanese styles of oil painting. The influential Chen Baoyi had studied in Zhou Xiang’s backdrop painting class in 1911 and then gone to Japan. Upon his return to China in 1914, he became one of the first Shanghai Art Academy faculty members with experience abroad. In 1916 he went once again to Japan, where he first attended the private Kawabata Painting School before formally enrolling at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts under the oil painting professor Fujishima Takeji. Chen Baoyi graduated from the oil painting department in 1921, returning to Shanghai to establish the Aurora Art Club (Chenguang meishuhui). In 1925, following the graduation of Ding Yanyong from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, the two established a private school in Shanghai grandly named the China College of Arts (Zhonghua yishu daxue). Chen Baoyi settled not in the foreign concessions but in Jiangwan, the newly developing Chinese-administered area  

 

 

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Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

to the northeast of the foreign concessions. The Shanghai municipal government would build its offices and new cultural institutions in this region in the 1930s. His photogenic European-style studio represented to his art world colleagues the epitome of the modern, foreign artistic milieu and was a source of fascination to the mass media as well as to the film industry, which used it as a filming location. Unfortunately, Jiangwan was a site of particularly fierce fighting during the brief Shanghai war of 1932, and the studio and all its contents were destroyed. Private studios trained many talented students who either went on to study abroad or to enroll in formal degree programs in China. One of the most gifted to emerge from such tutelage was Chen Baoyi’s pupil, and the subject of one of his surviving portraits, Guan Zilan (Violet Kwan; 1903–1986). After graduating from China College of Arts in 1927, she followed her mentor’s footsteps by undertaking further study in Japan. There she was encouraged by Chen Baoyi’s teacher, Fujishima Takeji, and held a well-reviewed solo show in Tokyo early in her stay. Her painting was also accepted for exhibition in the Fourteenth Nikakai, the first time a female Chinese artist had been so honored. Upon her return to Shanghai, she was hired to teach at China College of Arts and held a large and well-publicized solo show in 1930. Guan Zilan’s pure colors and thick pigment are typical of the Fauvist styles popular in Tokyo in the 1920s and 1930s. An oil painting she exhibited in 1930, Portrait of Miss L, now cataloged as Portrait of a Girl [fig. 3.16], is clearly influenced by the styles of Henri Matisse and Yasui Sotarō. In the works of Matisse, elements such as oriental robes, furniture, or fans would be attributed to Japonisme. Chinese costumes and chairs, when appearing in Japanese paintings of the day, as they did, might suggest chinoiserie. Yet these same elements in a Chinese oil painting might be read quite differently by a Chinese spectator. Miss L is actually garbed in the latest Shanghai fashion, with a high Mandarin collar and a stylishly short haircut similar to one the artist herself sported in 1928. She wears a vest, as did Guan Zilan at her exhibition opening in 1930, and a brightly colored qipao, the sheath dress that was a la mode in Republican Shanghai. These elements of costume are thus either part of daily life or high modern style for the Chinese oil painter. The exotic element would not be Miss L’s oriental garb but instead the vivid color with which it is rendered and the Occidentalizing lapdog, since pets (whether real or a stuffed replica) were not considered suitable attributes for sitters in traditional Chinese portraits. The 1920s saw the return to China of artists who had studied in Japan and Europe, the establishment of the  

3.16 Guan Zilan (1903–1986), Portrait of Miss L, 1929, oil on canvas, 90 × 75 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

Nanjing government, and the systemization of art education on Japanese and European models. The tomb of Sun Yat-sen blended commemorative conventions from Europe, the United States, and imperial China to establish a national architectural style. Contending trends in modern art became institutionalized at the three major schools of the day and were displayed for all to see in the first national art exhibition of 1929. This seminal public event, detailed in chapter 4, served to summarize developments of the 1920s. At the same time, however, it catalyzed formation of a pluralistic art world. Art societies of all descriptions burgeoned after 1929, many founded by participants in the national exhibition. Although this event aimed to be expansive and all-encompassing, the 1930s would also see the appearance of art groups that were sharply focused on one particular approach to art. Their agendas might range from surrealist oil painting to bird-and-flower guohua painting, but they

shared a commitment to accelerating the development of art in a specialized area. Along with this trend, modern exhibition practice expanded and was institutionalized. Exhibitions of all kinds proliferated—solo and group shows, department store and benefit shows—all contributing to growth of a lively art market and intellectual milieu. Finally, the contents of the national exhibition would stimulate a variety of new developments—among others, the high quality and large number of guohua paintings led to a renewal of interest in this form of art and the complete absence of printmaking may have stimulated, in reaction, the birth of the new woodcut movement. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which developments of the 1920s served as a foundation for the lively and increasingly sophisticated artistic activities of the eight-year period between the first national exhibition of 1929 and the Japanese invasion of 1937.  

 

 

Art in the New Culture of the 1920s

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4

Modern Art in the 1930s

One of the most distinctive features of the period between the first national art exhibition of 1929 and the second, of 1937, may have been the proliferation of art soci­eties of all kinds. Scholarly societies, poetry clubs, and groups of painting friends have a long history in China, but the phenomenon of modernist painting groups in Western countries and Japan made this traditional social form of scholarly organization suddenly appropriate to the modernizing Chinese art world. Moreover, as debate intensified about the most suitable direction for the development of Chinese art, art societies served as centers for formulation of aesthetic theories and for the implementation and display of new ideas in the making of art. Chinese students abroad in Europe and Japan had formed art clubs in the 1910s and 1920s, and the Tianmahui in Shanghai provided, in the absence of governmental support, an expansive network that became the de facto art establishment between 1919 and 1928. Cai Yuanpei and Lin Fengmian expressed particular enthusiasm about such grassroots cultural organizations during the Nanjing decade, and Lin himself put substantial effort into organizing the exhibitions of the modernist Art Movement Society. The academy at Hangzhou gave birth to an early student club called the Eighteen Art Society (founded in the eighteenth year of the Republic, 1929, with eighteen members) that was initially encouraged by Lin Fengmian and by 1931 had garnered Lu Xun’s support as well. Art societies in this period generally presented alternatives to the art of the mainstream, sometimes from an oppositional or even antagonistic stance, and at the same time often gave new or younger artists the opportunity to show their work. In so doing, they created a new sector of the cultural field, which provided social and some73

times financial support for artists and promoted previously unseen trends in art. Many of them appeared after the national exhibition of 1929, as though in response to its canonization of certain trends as mainstream. The 1930s was certainly the heyday of China’s modern art societies, and among the hundreds of groups that appeared, some aimed to further develop trends introduced in the national exhibition and others sought to promote forms of art that had been excluded from it. Avant-Garde Oil Painting of the 1930s

Western-style painting began to enter the mainstream of Chinese art in the 1910s, but the styles that prevailed were academic realism, impressionism, and postimpressionism. Avant-garde concepts such as cubism may first have been introduced to China in July of 1917, in an article by Lü Qingzhong in Eastern miscellany (Dongfang zazhi) titled “Concise Introduction to New Schools of Art.” The author introduces modern styles of art and theories of postimpressionism, pointillism, futurism, and cubism, which he states had been current for a decade in Japan but were unknown in China.1 In 1921, Lü Cheng (1896–1989), in his lecture “Western Art History,” also introduced modernist schools of painting, including French postimpressionism, cubism, neoromanticism, symbolism, expressionism, Italian futurism, and German expressionism.2 In the same year Yu Jifan (1891–1968), who had studied art education at the Tokyo Higher Normal School, began to publish a series of articles in Eastern Miscellany about the various schools of modernist art. Even Chen Hengque, in his article “The Value of Literati Painting,” compared the abstract and subjective qualities of Chinese scholar-painting to current Western schools of art, particularly futurism and cubism. Although the Chinese art world thus came to know of the existence of these new trends, their practice did not appear in China until the 1920s, when a group of artists, including Lin Fengmian, returned from studying abroad. Beginning around 1930, a new wave of avant-garde oil painting, including such trends as surrealism and constructivism, flowed into China from Japan, Soviet Russia, and Europe, along with the students returning from abroad in the early Nanjing decade. Many returning art students in the late 1920s and 1930s were filled with reformist fervor and returned to China committed to changing the status quo and creating a new art world based, at least in part, on the most up-to-date trends in Europe. Although modernism ultimately may have had limited impact on the Chinese art world as a whole, especially outside academia, in the late 1920s and early 1930s it enjoyed increasing popularity among artists in China’s urban centers, particularly in  

 

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Modern Art in the 1930s

Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou, and permeated the worlds of design, publishing, and architecture. The Storm Society

The Storm Society (Juelanshe), one of the most notable groups formed to promote previously neglected forms of avant-garde art, was established in the fall of 1931 as this swell of modernist enthusiasm rose.3 Indeed, its name in Chinese means a “great wave,” and Duan Pingyou, one of the most steadfast early participants, wrote that the society wished to “hit the rotten art of contemporary China with a powerful wave.” 4 The new society was formed by artists returned from France and Japan who were united by an ardent belief that China’s art world urgently needed reform. Pang Xunqin (1906–1985), who returned from Paris in 1930, was a key figure among a number of talented artists in the group [fig. 4.1]. He and two other friends who had recently returned from France to teach at the Shanghai Art Academy, the painter Zhang Xuan (1901–1936) and the writer Fu Lei (1908–1966), began planning a new oil painting society dedicated to the most avant-garde of contemporary styles. Born to a prosperous family in Changshu, Jiangsu, Pang Xunqin initially studied medicine at the French-­language Aurora (Zhendan) University in Shanghai. In 1925 the ­nineteen-year-old Pang, having determined to study art instead, left Shanghai for Paris. During his five years in France he attended first the Académie Julian and then, on the advice of modernist colleagues, including Chang Yu (Sanyu), he abandoned his original plan to enter the École des Beaux-Arts and studied instead at the Grand Chau­ mière. Upon his return to Shanghai from Europe, Pang taught at Changming Art Academy and held an honorary title at New China Art Academy. He also opened a private atelier with his colleague, Wang Jiyuan, began designing advertisements and book covers, and served as a substitute instructor at the Shanghai Art Academy. Pang was strongly impressed in this period by a slightly older artist who had become his close friend in Paris, Zhang Xuan [fig. 4.2]. Zhang had graduated from the Western Painting Department of the Shanghai Art Academy in 1922, studying under the Paris-educated Li Chaoshi. After graduation Zhang followed the example of his teacher, traveling to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and upon his return he was hired to teach oil painting at his alma mater. He became increasingly frustrated with the postimpressionist and pointillist vocabulary he had learned, however, and in 1929 briefly returned for further study in Paris, where he made a breakthrough in his use of line and color. From that time forward, Zhang was known for the purity of his  

 

 

4.1 Pang Xunqin (1906–1985), Composition, 1934, oil on canvas, approximately 92 × 73 cm, destroyed in 1966, Courtesy of Pang Tao  

4.2  Zhang Xuan (1901– 1936), Girl, 1935, oil on canvas, 44 × 36.5 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

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color—a quality that had a powerful impact on his students and younger friends. Zhang Xuan’s classmate at the Shanghai Art Academy, Ni Yide (1901–1970), had recently returned from Japan inspired by the same reformist mission as the Parisian group [fig. 4.3]. Like Zhang Xuan, he had assumed a teaching position at the Shanghai Art Academy immediately upon his graduation in 1922, his talents particularly appreciated by his undergraduate adviser, Li Chaoshi, and academy director Liu Haisu. In the fall of 1927, Ni Yide departed for Tokyo to study at the Kawabata Painting School under Fujishima Takeji, an environment in which Ni was exposed to more avant-garde European trends than he might have seen in Shanghai. In 1928, however, in protest over Japanese military incursions into Shandong, he returned to China. Ni taught first at Guangzhou Municipal Art School, then at Wuchang Art Academy in Hubei, and finally he returned to his alma mater as an oil painting professor in 1931. Knowledge of the Japanese art world was almost as important to founders of the Storm Society as their Parisian ideals. When Ni Yide returned to the Shanghai Art Academy after his years in Tokyo, he was eager to remake the Chinese art world and approached newly reappointed art academy director  

 

Liu Haisu to publish a journal and organize an art society based at the academy. Ni Yide’s ideas of organizing a painting society that would change the uninspired and derivative nature of painting in China converged with those of Pang Xunqin, and the Storm Society was born. The two founders jointly planned and wrote its manifesto, charter, and membership policies. Ni Yide, the more experienced teacher, and an acute writer about art, was able to supply substantial practical experience to the organizational process. On September 23, 1931, the group held its first meeting at a restaurant in Shanghai, with five organizers present: Pang Xunqin, Ni Yide, Chen Chengbo [fig. 4.4], Zhou Duo, and Zeng Zhiliang. They chose the name Storm Society and set a date for the first exhibition of January 1, 1932. Although Japanese incursions in the fall and winter, and particularly the devastating Shanghai war of 1932, disrupted the city and caused a postponement of the first exhibition, ultimately the group presented a series of four exhibitions between 1932 and 1935. The major members of the society were Wang Jiyuan, Zhou Zhengtai, Duan Pingyou, Zhang Xuan, Yang Taiyang, Yang Qiuren, and Qiu Ti, along with founders Pang Xunqin, Ni Yide, and Zhou Duo. Others—including Guan Liang, Liang Xihong (1912–1982), Li Zhongsheng (Li Chunchen), Liang Baibo, Chen Chengbo, and Zeng Zhiliang— exhibited with the group only once or twice before leaving Shanghai. Most Storm Society artists also belonged to two other important societies of the period. The earlier Societé de deux mondes (Taimeng huahui), was organized in October of 1930 by Pang Xunqin and Zhou Zhengtai and had about twenty members.5 Their exhibition preface took a progressive, even leftist stance, attracting the attention of the government, which banned it in January 1931. Ni Yide founded the second such group, the Muse Society (Moshe), at the Shanghai Art Academy in the summer of 1932 and assumed responsibility for editing and publishing a new journal, L’Art (Yishu xunkan).6 The academybased art magazine became an important vehicle for Storm Society publications, providing the first public venue for its manifesto and most of its exhibition news. Indeed, the reputation of the Storm Society was based largely on the society journal. In the October 1, 1932, issue of L’Art, the artists of the Storm Society were introduced as follows:  

 

 

4.3 Ni Yide (1901–1970), Summer, 1932, oil on canvas, lost  

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Modern Art in the 1930s

The Storm Society is a recently established avant-garde art society. It is a gathering of a number of progressive young artists. They all possess the sharp sensibility of modern men, in pursuit of a novel, unique art. They are all unsatisfied with the vulgarity, decadence, and weakness of China’s current art world, so they have

4.4  Chen Chengbo (Chen Cheng-po; 1895–1947), Dyeing Fabric in Suzhou, 1929, oil on canvas, 45.5 × 53 cm, Taipei Museum of Fine Arts  

gathered together to construct a new edifice and initiate a new era. This movement is like the Fauves, who appeared in the French art world in 1905, aiming to break the bonds of tradition, smash the fetters of the academic school, and create a free and independent world. Their goal is to research pure art in order to open a new road for the Chinese art world.7

quo that had been drafted by Ni Yide, was published in Yishu xunkan. Expressing a nationalistic longing for China’s ancient greatness that was shared by most young people of the time, Ni declares the group’s independence from the existing art world and states their commitment to a pure painting, unrestrained by past conventions or the demands of naturalism:

The first exhibition of the Storm Society was finally held October 9–16, 1932, at the China Society for Study of the Arts (Zhonghua xueyishe) on Route Victor Emmanuel III (now Shaoxing Road) in the French concession.8 Works were exhibited in a variety of styles that reflected modernist modes then current in Europe, from postimpressionism and Fauvism to cubism and the more avant-garde surrealism. At the same time, the “Storm Society Manifesto,” an iconoclastic and militant statement of disdain for the status

The atmosphere around us is stultifying; mundanity and vulgarity completely surround us. The dabbing of countless dullards, the clamour of myopic minds. Where has the genius of our antiquity gone? Where has the glory of our ancient history gone? Our entire art world today is decadent and diseased. We can no longer tolerate this compromising climate. We cannot simply allow [art] to die.

 

Modern Art in the 1930s

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Let us arise! With passion like a whirlwind but reason like steel, let us create a world at the intersection of our color, line, and form! We recognize that painting is not an imitation of nature, and is not a dead repetition of a skeletal form. We want to use our very lives to nakedly express our straightforward spirit. We believe that art is never the slave of religion, nor is it an explication of literature. We want to freely, synthetically, construct a world of pure plastic form. We are disgusted by all old forms, old color, and revolted by all mundane low-class skill; We want to use new techniques to express the spirit of the new age. In the twentieth century, European art manifested a new atmosphere. The passionate voice of the Fauves, the distorted forms of the Cubists, the shock of Dadaism, the dreamscapes of Surrealism. [ . . . ] The twentieth-century Chinese art world must bring forth a new atmosphere. Let us rise up! With passion like a whirlwind but reason like steel, let us create a world at the intersection of our color, line, and form!9 Ni stresses that the purity of their modernist artistic mission is never subordinate to the literary text, and despite the leftist sympathies of some members of the group, the statement is silent on the society’s social function. The artists wrote elsewhere of their passion for art—“painting is our life, and our life is our painting”—and of their militant mandate: “Carrying the mission of the New Art, fiercely pushing forward without cease, this is the spirit needed by warriors of the Art Revolution. It is with this spirit that the fellows of the Storm Society fight on.” 10 The Storm Society exhibitions featured works inspired by almost everything then popular in Europe: Fauvism, cubism, symbolism, expressionism, futurism, abstractionism, and surrealism. Special features reproducing their new paintings were published in mass-media pictorial magazines such as Liangyou (Young companion), Shidai (Modern miscellany), and in Shanghai newspapers, thus disseminating the modernist images widely [fig. 4.5]. Some of the published works, including Ni Yide’s landscapes, initially resembled the postimpressionist styles popular in Japan and shown at the 1929 national exhibition, but in his writings,  

 

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Modern Art in the 1930s

Ni Yide enthusiastically advocated more up-to-date modes. He began to realize these aspirations in his own steadily more abstract painting, creating his cubist-inspired painting Summer in 1932 [see fig. 4.3]. Others in this stylistically diverse group strove harder to push against the boundaries of representation. Pang Xunqin himself experimented with work he called “decorations,” fragmented images of urban life. Some of them may be read as commentaries on the alienating nature of modern society, but they are often in a surrealistic style. His powerful surrealistic painting Composition (Goutu) [see fig. 4.1], shown in the third Storm Society exhibition, depicts figures of a robot and a Chinese peasant girl, as though joined in dehumanizing bondage to industrial machinery. Other works, including Such Is Paris [fig. 4.6] and Such Is Shanghai superficially celebrate the moneyed life of urban leisure but negate its purported pleasure by the hardness and vacuity of the human faces. Pang Xunqin later told his daughter that these works were stimulated by his revulsion against the overwhelmingly crass emphasis on money that he found in Shanghai society after his return from Paris. The Storm Society awarded its only exhibition prize to a female artist, Qiu Ti (1906–1958), who had painted a highly stylized still life with red leaves and green flowers for the second exhibition. The painting, published in 1933, apparently drew enough criticism from the realist camp that Ni Yide felt compelled to defend it in an article published the following year. Qiu Ti (originally named Qiu Bizhen, pseudonym Schudy) had graduated from the Shanghai Art Academy’s three-year oil painting program in 1928, then studied for three years in Tokyo, and finally returned to the Shanghai Art Academy as a graduate student in 1931. She went on, in the third exhibition, to show a crisply painted modern still life [fig. 4.7]. The painting explores her interest in the formal beauty of everyday objects, many of which, like the percolator and thermos bottle, are products of modern industrial manufacture.11 She and Pang Xunqin were soon married and for the duration of its existence made the Storm Society their common mission. Although the Storm Society was to a great degree inspired by the school of Paris and devoted to “art for art’s sake” rather than to social causes, the hardships suffered by China’s people in this period began to appear as subjects in Pang Xunqin’s art. His Son of the Earth of 1934, inspired by the Jiangnan famine of that year, depicts a dying child accompanied by his parents in a Pieta-like composition. The finished painting, a large oil, was shown in the third Storm Society exhibition but was destroyed by the artist at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution along with his Composition.  

4.5  A special feature on the Storm Society’s second exhibition, from Modern Miscellany (Shidai) 4, no. 7 (1933)

4.6 Pang Xunqin (1906–1985), Such Is Paris, 1931, watercolor on paper, destroyed 1937  

4.7  Qiu Ti (1906–1958), Still Life, 1931–33, oil on canvas, 44 × 53 cm, Collection of Pang Jun, Taipei  

 

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Chinese Independent Art Association

A group of modernist artists who first came together in Japan pushed even further than did the Storm Society into nonobjective styles. Planning for the Chinese Independent Art Association (Zhonghua duli meishu xiehui) was initiated in Tokyo in 1934 by a group of Cantonese students, two of whom (Liang Xihong and Li Zhongsheng) had been members of the Storm Society.12 The decade when these Chinese students studied in Japan saw waves of European modernist movements such as Dadaism, constructivism, and surrealism pour into Japan and the formation of many avant-garde art groups. In 1930 some young Japanese artists determined to hew a new artistic path by forming an art group that would be independent of any preexisting soci­ eties. The artists of the Independent Art Association, as they called themselves, expressed in their manifesto great dissatisfaction with the situation of the Japanese art world and announced their ambition: to study new art, to bring fresh air into the Japanese art world, and to create “a new era of art.” They enthusiastically advocated modern European art, including surrealism, cubism, and constructivism and held their first group exhibition in January of 1931 in Tokyo. The establishment of the Chinese Independent Art Society must have been inspired by these Japanese colleagues’ acts. Indeed, some members of the Japanese Independent Art Association, such as Satomi Katsuzō (1895–1981), were teachers of the Chinese students. Even before the Chinese society was formally established, the young artists organized a show, Ten Chinese Painters in Japan, at the Tokyodō Gallery in Jimbōchō. Held from July 31 to August 14, 1934, it included the works of Zhao Shou, Li Zhongsheng, Su Wonong, Li Dongping, Fang Rending, Liang Xihong, Bai Sha, Huang Langping, Zeng Yi, and Yang Yinfang, many of whom were then students at Nihon University or the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The works they exhibited were mainly fauvist, cubist, and surrealist. At the end of the year, during the process of organizing the painting society, Liang Xihong and Zeng Ming also opened an atelier called the China Independent Art Institute, which attracted more than a dozen fellow participants. Although many members of the Chinese Independent Art Association returned to China in late 1934, before their first official meeting, the society was formally established on January 10, 1935, at a Cantonese restaurant called Sansuiro in Hibiya. At this carefully selected site, exactly five years earlier, the Japanese Independent Artists Association had been established and it was here that the new society drafted its manifesto. The members involved were Liang Xihong, Zhao Shou, Li Dongping, Zeng Ming, and  

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Modern Art in the 1930s

4.8  Zhao Shou (1912–2003), Color, 1934, oil on canvas, 92 × 78 cm, Guangzhou Municipal Art Museum  

a Frenchman named Andre Bessin. The Cantonese soon rejoined their colleagues in Guangzhou, where they reorganized the association. The Chinese Independent Art Association held its first exhibition at the Guangzhou Education Center between March 16 and 25, 1935. Most of the thirty paintings on display manifested modernist tendencies—most notably, those of surrealism. Some artists active in Guangzhou who were not members of the group, including their former teachers Ding Yanyong and Guan Liang, also participated in this show, as did a few of their Japanese colleagues. In his 1948 memoir, Liang Xihong wrote in a historical vein that the Chinese Independent Art Association was inspired by the various schools of modern art and accepted new ideologies, new subject matter, and new methods. Li Dongping embraced the spirit of the Neo-Fauvists, advocating extreme modernism and freedom; Zhao Shou’s paintings attempted to transcend reality through surrealism or abstraction [fig.  4.8];13 Zeng Ming wished to capture in his painting a classical beauty; while all the other artists sought new artistic paths in their desire to pursue their own individual inclinations. As is the case for the artists of the Storm Society, most works of the period by the Chinese Independent Art  

Society painters were lost to the fires of war and devastation of social upheaval. The only examples known to survive are a few works by Zhao Shou, including some pieces he exhibited in their group shows. Zhao Shou met members of the Storm Society as early as 1931, when he traveled to Shanghai after his graduation from the Guangzhou Municipal Art School. Increasingly interested in modern art, in 1933 Zhao Shou went to Japan, where his period of study at Nihon University corresponded with the introduction of surrealism among Japanese avant-garde artists. He was strongly influenced by his teacher, Satomi Katsuzō, and classmates, becoming an enthusiastic admirer of Pablo Picasso and the Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Thus, when Liang Xihong and his fellow artists sought to organize the Chinese Independent Art Association in 1934, Zhao became one of its most active members. He exhibited five works, including Color, in their first group show, Ten Chinese Painters in Japan. He showed Color again, along with a number of other works, at the first exhibition of the group in Guangzhou in 1935. Zhao Shou was particularly engaged with surrealism because of his belief in its capacity to represent a “nonrealistic reality,” one with its source in the imagination rather than in visual experience. His early paintings were always executed with very bright pigments, large brush strokes, clear forms, and powerful, thick outlines. His striking colors may have been inspired by the vivid and startling hues of teacher, Satomi, but are more reminiscent of folk art in their simplicity and purity. Zhao Shou was silent for four decades until the Guangzhou Art Museum held an exhibition of early Cantonese oil painters in 1993; his conception of painting was incompatible with post-1949 requirements. In May 1935 the Chinese Independent Art Association published a four-page newspaper entitled Independent Art in which appeared their manifesto. They advocated most strongly freedom and independence of creation and claimed to be a movement for “pure art.” With a particular salute to the French Societé des Artistes Independents, established fifty-two years earlier, and with admiration for l’esprit nou‑ veau, they praised tolerance of all new approaches and “isms.” They further hoped that the independent and free submission system for their exhibitions would establish a more creative atmosphere in China and might help Chinese art catch up with the best of international art. As part of this project, the Chinese Independent Art Association also tried to disseminate knowledge about the most up-to-date modern Western art through articles and translations. Zeng Ming, Li Dongping, and Liang Xihong contributed essays to a special issue on surrealism for the Shanghai journal Yifeng (Art wind) that introduced Dali and appealed to artists to free themselves from “the constraints of their envi-

ronment.” Liang Xihong served as editor of the magazines New Art (Xin meishu) and Studio (Meishu zazhi), tirelessly explaining modern Western art to Chinese readers. Zeng Ming and Li Dongping edited and published an art journal, Modern Art (Xiandai meishu). In 1935, Zeng Ming published in Tokyo a volume of reproductions called Famous Modern Paintings of the World. The Chinese Independent Art Association held its second exhibition in October 1935 at the site of the first and last Storm Society exhibition in Shanghai, the China Society for Study of the Arts. Among its sixty exhibited works was Zhao Shou’s vivid painting Let’s Jump. The influential pictorial magazine Modern Miscellany (Shidai) published photos of their works on the same page as a report of the fourth exhibition of the Storm Society, thus linking the two groups in the public mind. During this time Liang Xihong opened the Independent Painting Research Institute on Lafayette Road, in the French concession of Shanghai, a few blocks from their exhibition site. Following the second exhibition, however, this group, like their Shanghai friends of the Storm Society, never again organized a group exhibition. The following year, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, both groups disbanded. To the artists of the Independent Art Association as well as those of the Storm Society, modernism was a synonym for individuality. The four exhibitions of the Storm Society and the two shows of the Independent Art Association held in succession between 1932 and 1935 brought great excitement to the Chinese art world but had not yet converted a sufficiently large segment of the wider society to their modernist viewpoint. China at the time still lacked internal factors, most critically the support of patrons and collectors, for the growth of modern art. On the one hand, with its short history of Western-style art, China had not experienced the course of development from realism to nonobjective art that had occurred in the art world of Europe. On the other hand, traditional values in art remained strong, and even some intellectuals, who were presumed to be the acceptors of new ideas, resisted modern art. Furthermore, the introduction of modernism’s most extremely non­ objective forms corresponded with a period of national crisis. Artists in twentieth-century China were considered to be part of the intellectual elite. Despite radical critique of China’s Confucian legacy, the strong consciousness of social responsibility that prevailed among premodern literati remained deeply imbedded in the minds and hearts of the new educated class. They thus took up the task of rescuing their nation from the peril of foreign invasion. With the outbreak of war in 1937, celebrations of the individual imagination became an unacceptable luxury. Modern Art in the 1930s

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The Modern Woodcut Movement

An avant-garde art form that is closely related by its iconoclasm and idealism to modernist oil painting is the Modern Woodcut movement (Xinxing banhua yundong). Indeed, many of the young artists who adopted this practice trained first as oil painters before discovering the extraordinary visual power of the black and white print. Equally important to many of those who gravitated to the woodcut was its potential for public service through its reproducibility. Woodcut artists initially shared with modernist oil painters their pursuit of individual creativity and self-expression. They diverged, however, when the printmakers began employing this striking new form of art to express their social and political concerns.14 Lu Xun (1881–1936), usually considered the father of China’s modern woodcut movement, was not primarily a visual artist but a brilliant writer, sensitive editor, and charismatic teacher. First trained in practical science at the School of Mining and Railways in Nanjing beginning in 1898, and from 1902 to 1909 in medical and literary studies in Japan, he became convinced that the spiritually liberating character of modern literature and art made these humanistic endeavors as crucial to the modernization of China as science and medicine. Although he is best known for his contribution to Chinese literature, Lu Xun was appointed by Cai Yuanpei to a position at the Ministry of Education in Beijing in 1912, where his portfolio of responsibilities included art and exhibitions. Throughout his life he enjoyed a passion for collecting antique rubbings, European and Japanese prints, and Chinese books and letter papers. Lu Xun’s idiosyncratic art and book collection ranged from Han dynasty rubbings to European and Japanese prints, Chinese books and letter papers, and even ink paintings by such friends as Chen Hengque. This global view of the arts parallels the synthesis of foreign and Chinese styles in his own fiction, which is extremely individualistic, totally Chinese, and yet fully modern in an international sense. In 1926, following a crackdown on student demonstrations in which one of his students was killed, Lu Xun departed for the south, first teaching in Xiamen (Amoy) and then in Guangzhou (Canton). By 1927 he had settled in Shanghai. There, in the last decade of his life, Lu Xun took as one of his missions the promotion of European art, particularly art that seemed to deal with problems similar to those faced by China. In 1929 he translated a history of modern European art and subsequently organized a number of events at which young artists had the opportunity to view his collection of European woodcuts and hear his views on the potential importance of this art for improving China’s  

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art and society.15 With five friends who called themselves the Morning Flower Society, he published between 1928 and 1930 five volumes of foreign woodcuts, which ranged in style from the English art nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) to Russian constructivism.16 Between 1930 and 1933, with the help of his Japanese friend Uchiyama Kanzō (1885–1959), proprietor of the Uchi­ yama Bookstore on North Sichuan Road in Shanghai, Lu Xun organized several foreign woodcut exhibitions.17 The first show, German, Russian, and French Woodblock Prints, which was held at a Japanese union hall near the Uchiyama Bookstore in October 1930, attracted more than four hundred visitors in two days.18 In June of 1932, Lu Xun organized the German Woodcut Exhibition at the Shanghai German Bookstore (called Yinhuan Bookstore in Chinese). Another two-day exhibition, Modern Artists’ Woodcuts, which included twenty-six prints from Germany, nineteen prints from Russia, and seven by Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, and Arab artists, was held in October of 1933. During the exhibition period Lu Xun also gave lectures to young woodblock printmakers. In December of the same year, he organized at the YMCA an exhibition, Russian and French Woodcut Illustrations, which showed ten Russian woodcuts and thirty reproductions of French works.19 By the early 1930s Lu Xun had become increasingly interested in left-wing art and political theory. In 1930 he sponsored the printing of a ten-panel woodcut series by Carl Meffert (1903–1989) entitled Cement.20 The literary work it illustrated, by Fyodor V. Gladkov (1883–1958), was first issued in 1925 and published in English translation in 1929 and is considered to be one of the earliest Soviet “proletarian novels.” Lu Xun’s preface recounts with approval this Russian tale of development from desolation to industrial prosperity, but at the same time expresses aesthetic admiration for the young German artist’s range of prints on this and other topics. Lu Xun’s reprint sought high aesthetic quality rather than mass distribution; it was a limited edition collotype on high-quality Chinese xuan paper. In order to commemorate his young collaborator, Rou Shi (1902–1931), who was executed after a Nationalist sweep of Communist sympathizers, Lu Xun published a print of the German Expressionist woman artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), The Sacrifice, in the first issue of the literature journal Beidou in 1931.21 He personally sponsored a number of other publications, including in 1936 a high-­quality anthology of the prints of Kollwitz, for which he and American journalist Agnes Smedley wrote the introductory texts. Although sympathetic to the Communist Party, by temperament and intellectual inclination he was no more likely to have accepted the Stalinist artistic doctrines it promoted  

 

 

 

 

 

after his death than he was to have supported the anti-­ Communist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek in his lifetime. By the summer of 1931, Lu Xun had successfully stimulated interest in woodcuts by his publications and lectures. After the Nationalist crackdown of early 1931, however, Lu Xun lived in semiseclusion in the Japanese district of Shanghai, only able to continue his cultural work under the cover of his relationships with trusted friends like Uchiyama.22 It was under these difficult circumstances that Lu Xun gave birth to the modern Chinese woodcut movement by organizing his Woodcut Training Class from August 17 to 22, 1931. A frequent visitor to the Uchiyama Bookstore, Lu Xun happened to drop by just as the family’s younger brother, Kakichi, on holiday in Shanghai, was showing some homework prints by his elementary school students to his older brother Kanzō. Excited by what he saw, Lu Xun asked the young man to teach a brief course on printmaking to Chinese artists.23 With help from his contacts in left-wing organizations, thirteen students were recruited for the woodcut training class, which was held at a Japanese school in Shanghai.24 Lu Xun lectured on the history of prints in his collection, from ukiyo-e to the German Expressionists, and Uchiyama, with Lu Xun by his side as translator, lectured on and demonstrated the practical art of making woodcuts. Most of the students, drawn from public and private art schools and clubs in the Shanghai-Hangzhou area, would pursue careers as printmakers and teachers and formed the core around which later developments in woodcut art developed in China.25 Eventually they spread their enthusiasm for this new art to the different parts of China from which they came—Guangdong, Sichuan, and Zhejiang—thus seeding the development of important centers of printmaking over the subsequent decade. While the young artists inspired by Lu Xun in the late 1920s and early 1930s were excited by their belief that the art of the woodcut was Western, modern, and completely new, Lu Xun himself would have been more than aware of the connections that might be made between modern woodcuts and those of China’s past. For almost a millennium, the most elegant imperial encyclopedias, the state-sanctioned religious canons, poetry anthologies, and the classics of history and philosophy, as well as cheap popular how-to books, medical manuals, dramas, stories, and elementary textbooks were xylographically reproduced and then distributed throughout the Chinese empire. In one respect the students’ ahistorical view of the new woodcut movement was correct—the artists of the modern woodcut movement in China initiated significant changes in the practice of making prints. In contrast to the production of Ren Xiong’s brilliant Drinking Cards with  

 

 

Illustrations of the 48 Immortals of 1854, artists of the 1930s dispensed with the division of labor that had characterized Chinese printing since at least Ming times. Whereas Ren Xiong turned his paintings over to a highly skilled friend for carving on pear-wood blocks, the twentieth-century printmakers learned to carve and print their own blocks. An additional distinction between the work of the 1930s and that of earlier times is that artists of the modern woodcut generally printed with European oil-based printing inks rather than traditional water-based inks. The modern woodcut in the 1930s was thus a form of art that, from its inception, fully synthesized the cosmopolitan aspirations of its practitioners with the particularities of their Chinese situation. Although surviving evidence may be incomplete, one of the earliest modern artists to promote the woodcut was Li Shutong. He was remembered by his students at the Zhejiang First Normal College in Hangzhou, in which he established a Western-style art curriculum modeled on that of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, for having exhibited European prints and student printmaking projects during the 1910s.26 However, it was not until two decades later that the modern woodcut began to flourish in China. The intellectual ferment of the late 1920s that produced the artistic radicals of the Storm Society and the Chinese Independent Art Association also brought the woodcut movement into existence. Thus, during the last decade of his life, Lu Xun strove to encourage visual artists to realize the same cosmopolitan originality that he promoted in literature in the visual arts. Unlike the more formalistic work of the oil painters, the activist, socially critical stance that Lu Xun took in fiction found pictorial expression in some of the prints by the young converts to this new art. In particular, the social distress conveyed in European expressionist prints seemed to parallel the circumstances in which Chinese artists found themselves. As writer and editor, Lu Xun was thoroughly committed to the potential of printing to create a new culture and enlighten the people. Thus, at the same time that he appreciated the aesthetic and emotional effectiveness of the bold, raw woodcut images, he recognized the social utility of the woodcut as a medium of social activism. Lu Xun stressed the importance of both art and activism, encouraging his followers to disseminate the new prints through exhibitions and publications. The new print movement spread first in Shanghai, as graduates of Lu Xun’s woodcut class, along with their friends, organized new printmaking clubs. Chen Tiegeng, from the academy in Hangzhou, had collaborated with Jiang Feng and other friends to establish the Shanghai Eighteen Art Society in 1930. In 1932 he joined with several fellow Cantonese at the New China Art Academy, includModern Art in the 1930s

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4.10  Chen Tiegeng (1908–1969), Glimpse of the Esperanto Exhibition, 1933, woodcut, 9 × 14 cm, in Woodblock Prints, vol. 1, no. 1 (1933), Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

4.9 He Baitao (1913–1939), Street Scene, 1933, woodcut, 27 × 21.2 cm, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai

4.11  Jiang Feng (1910–1982), Kill the Resisters, 1931, woodcut, 14 × 17.7 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

ing Chen Yanqiao (1911–1970) and He Baitao (1913–1939) [fig. 4.9], to organize the Wild Grain Woodcut Society at that school. The new recruits also became loyal disciples of Lu Xun and the woodcut, faithfully attending Lu Xun’s print exhibitions, producing political posters and flyers, and, on April 15, 1933, releasing the society’s inaugural journal, Woodblock Prints (Muban hua). They published two issues of the hand-printed journal in the same year before it closed under pressure from the authorities. Their work dealt with political concerns, such as the Japanese incursions, and observations of daily life. Chen Tiegeng’s Glimpse of the Esperanto Exhibition published in the first issue suggests their internationalist dreams [fig. 4.10]. Less than a month after Lu Xun’s course had concluded, on September 18, 1931, Japan attacked Chinese troops in Man­churia. On January 28, 1932, Japanese troops bombed

the Chinese business district of Zhabei that adjoined the Japanese residential area in Shanghai, causing many civilian deaths and destroying such cultural institutions as the Commercial Press and the Oriental Library. By February a puppet government had been installed by the Japanese in Manchuria, which declared independence from China. The bloodshed in Shanghai, the Japanese conquest of northeastern China, and the inaction of the Chinese government provoked great anger among China’s students, which manifested itself as opposition to Japan and to the Nationalist government. A small print of this early period, although comparatively crude in execution, convincingly conveys the passion of the young artists [fig. 4.11]. The work, which is signed with the artist’s real initials, C.H. (for Chou Hsi), depicts troops of the Nationalist government aiming rifles at the crowd as

 

 

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4.12 Hu Yichuan (1910– 2000), To the Front, 1932, woodcut, 23.2 × 30.5 cm, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

terrified demonstrators flee in chaos. The artist, later known by his pseudonym of Jiang Feng, gave Lu Xun several antigovernment, anti-Japanese prints during this period. Other early works, such as Hu Yichuan’s To the Front, of 1932, reflect both the stylistic boldness and the emotional intensity of the prints of this period [fig. 4.12]. Hu Yichuan (1910– 2000), like Chen Tiegeng, attended the Hangzhou West Lake National Arts Academy, where he studied under the French oil painter André Claudot. An organizer of the influential Eighteen Art Society, in 1930 Hu joined the League of Left-Wing Artists, and by 1931 he was closely involved with Lu Xun and the Woodcut Movement. Even though he did not participate in Lu Xun’s summer course, Hu was expelled from the Hangzhou academy for his political work in 1932, whereupon he moved to Shanghai. Hu Yichuan’s print was exhibited in mid-June of 1932 at an exhibition held by the Eighteen Art Society’s successor, the Spring Earth Painting Research Center, at the Shanghai YMCA. Among the club’s other members were Lu Xun’s students Jiang Feng, Huang Shanding, and Li Xiushi as well as Shanghai Art Academy student Zheng Yefu. The leftist group’s manifesto was as militant as those of the modern painters but more collectively and didactically oriented: “Modern art must follow a new road, must serve a new society, must become a powerful tool for educating the masses, informing the masses, and organizing the  

masses. The new art must accept this mission as it moves forward.” 27 The exhibition included roughly a hundred oils, cartoons, gouaches, and woodcuts as well as a collection of fifty or sixty German prints assembled by Lu Xun and a German friend. Lu Xun purchased ten prints at the exhibition, of which the two reproduced here by Jiang Feng and Hu Yichuan may be examples. Shortly after their exhibition, Jiang Feng and several friends in the Spring Earth Society, including Li Xiushi, Huang Shanding, and Ai Qing, were arrested and spent the next several years in jail, temporarily leaving the development of Chinese printmaking to their friends. Such difficulties seem to have intensified the young printmakers’ resolve, and the movement flowered despite, or perhaps because of, the Nationalist government’s attempts to stamp out political dissent. Lu Xun was particularly thoughtful about corresponding with these young activists in jail between 1932 and 1935. He not only mentored young artists in the classroom setting but exchanged letters with a great many others, providing advice, criticism, and occasionally even money to poor art students. Chen Yanqiao and Zheng Yefu, for example, were not members of his class but corresponded with him often, as did Luo Qingzhen (1904–1942). After his graduation in 1931 from Shanghai’s private New China Art Academy, Luo returned to Guangdong to work as a teacher. He sent Lu Xun many prints and a woodcut journal he pub 

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sometimes translated as the Wooden Bell Society), was established at the West Lake National Art Academy in February of 1933. Member Li Qun recalled that they chose a derogatory name to distinguish themselves, artists of larger purpose, from the “clever” students at the school. The Eighteen Art Society, with such members as Hu Yichuan, had by this time been disbanded, but the younger artists at the academy were all familiar with their work. Amid their earnest emulation of the school of Paris in postimpressionist, fauvist, or cubist oil paintings, the contemporary woodcut emerged in the minds of these art students as a more meaningful form of art. Two months later, they held their first exhibition in one of the academy classrooms. The catalog was handmade—each artist printed 120 copies of his or her woodcut, which the group bound together with wire. The catalog preface concludes: “Using wood to make this bell, we clearly know that it won’t sound if it is struck; but at the very least, we hope that it will someday ring out a gigantic noise.” 28 The group held another exhibition, with a large catalog, in June, but on October 10 three of its key organizers, Li Qun (1912–2012), Cao Bai (1914–2007), and Ye Luo (1912–1979), were arrested. Rushing into the void, but with a name that speaks of their danger, the Unnamed Woodcut Society published their catalog in October of 1934, explicitly seeking to perpetuate the work of earlier groups. The Uchiyama Bookstore distributed their compilations and played a major role in encouraging the movement. The movement began to move into the mainstream as young artists resolutely continued to publish and organize. Popular magazines, such as Young Companion (Liangyou), Modern Miscellany (Shidai), Art and Life (Meishu shenghuo), and Literature (Wenxue) began to reproduce the new prints, thus giving them an institutional legitimacy that they had previously lacked. In 1934 Lu Xun published twentyfour prints, many of them socially critical, in his anthology Woodcut Progress (Muke jicheng), a project that aimed to document and promote developments in the new woodcut movement. Although these prints were varied in subject matter, a number reflected sympathy for the downtrodden by depicting the painful lives of urban factory workers or rural peasants, or in this example by Zhang Wang (1916– 1992), Head Wound, police brutality against a social activist [fig. 4.14]. Lu Xun expressed despair in 1934 after the fierce political crackdown had all but eliminated the Shanghai print movement. In June, however, the most sustained and creative of the woodcut groups, the Modern Woodcut Society, was established in the less tightly controlled city of Guangzhou. Building on the solid foundations established by the first generation of Lu Xun’s print students, the Guangzhou  

4.13  Chen Tiegeng (1908–1969), Mother and Child, 1933, woodcut, 12.8 × 11 cm, in Huilan Woodcuts, vol. 1 (1935), Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

 

lished at his school and stayed in close touch with his network of Shanghai friends until he joined the war effort in 1937. Because of the frequent arrests of the Shanghai and Hangzhou leftist printmakers, political suppression of their organizations, and political and financial difficulties, one print club succeeded another with dizzying rapidity. The names of the core members of the Shanghai-Hangzhou print movement remain fairly consistent, however. The MK Society (a name written in the European alphabet, not characters, but presumably taken from the Romanized form of the Chinese word for woodcut, muke) was established at the Shanghai Art Academy in 1932. It included talented members of other groups in its exhibitions, artists such as Hu Yichuan, Chen Tiegeng, Zheng Yefu, Xia Peng, Chen Yanqiao, and He Baitao, and thus expanded the woodcut group to a membership of about fifty or sixty young artists. Lu Xun attended the last of their four exhibitions, held on the Shanghai Art Academy campus at Caishi Road in October 1933. Lu Xun particularly admired Chen Tiegeng’s Mother and Child (also published as Waiting) [fig.  4.13], which represented the impoverished family of a rickshaw puller Chen had befriended as part of his labor activism. Nevertheless, the group was destroyed by the arrest of four of its members, including Hu Yichuan, and the seizure as evidence of the group’s prints, equipment, and supplies. A third important student woodcut group, the Dumb Bell Woodcut Research Society (Muling muke yanjiuhui; 86

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4.14  Zhang Wang (1916–1992), Head Wound, 1934, woodcut, 24.3 × 15.2 cm, Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum, Nanjing  

group continued to develop until the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1937. The organizer of the Modern Woodcut Society was Li Hua (1907–1994), an adventurous young teacher at the Guangzhou Municipal Art School who began teaching himself and his students printmaking [fig.  4.15]. The twenty-seven initial members first held weekly critiques of new prints and then, in September of 1934, held their first formal monthly exhibition in the school auditorium. For their second exhibition, in October, they moved to a public venue, the Guangdong Provincial Masses Education Hall. By December, after six months of progress, they exhibited at the Guangzhou YMCA. The Modern Woodcut Society’s first anniversary exhibition was large enough to be split between two venues, the Provincial Masses Education Hall and the Zhonghua Bookstore. In addition to exhibiting 286 works by members, the show also presented premodern woodcuts, folk prints, Japanese prints, reproductions of European prints, publications about prints, and printmaking tools. The most important surviving evidence of the Guangzhou group’s activities in this period is its biweekly journal Modern Prints, of which eighteen numbers were issued in 1935 and 1936. Except the first issue, all were hand-printed, usually in editions of fifty copies. Although the military, social, and economic problems that affected China during this period are frequent themes for art in Guangzhou, as in Li Hua’s China, Roar! [fig. 4.16], they are clearly not the

4.15 Li Hua (1907–1994), Romance of the Sea, 1935, woodcut, 32 ×27 cm, from Ten Polychromatic Prints by Li Hua, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

 

4.16 Li Hua (1907–1994), China, Roar! 1936, woodcut, 23 × 16.5 cm, in Modern Woodcut, vol. 14 (1936), Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

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4.17 Li Hua (1907–1994), Drizzle, 1935, polychromatic woodcut, 15.9 × 12.4 cm, from the series The Suburbs in Spring, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

only concerns of the young artists. Li Hua himself published solo albums of landscapes [fig. 4.17] and of Picassoesque polychromatic nudes, and for a time organized an active collaboration with a printmaking group in Japan, the White and Black Society. Li Hua was remarkable for both his printmaking and his curatorial activities, the last of which became critical to the development of the movement after Lu Xun’s death of tuberculosis late in 1936. Outstanding among his colleagues’ works are those of Lai Shao­qi (1915–2000) [fig. 4.18] and Tang Yingwei (b. 1915) [fig. 4.19], which reflect concerns as varied as new poetry, folk art, social ills, and military invasion, and experiment with diverse styles.29 A roughly contemporary northern woodcut society called the Pingjin (Beiping-Tianjin) Woodcut Research Society organized a national woodcut show in 1935, to which the Guangzhou group contributed 160 works. This Beijingbased group was developed in 1933 and 1934 with a socially broad spectrum of artists from colleges, the publishing industry, and the theater as well as self-taught amateurs. The large show, the first of its scale and visibility, was held at the Taimiao (the modern Workers Cultural Palace) in Beijing, and then traveled to Tianjin, Jinan, Taiyuan, Hankou, Shanghai, and other cities, bringing the new woodcut movement to public attention all over the nation. By mutual agreement, the Modern Woodcut Society in Guangzhou

4.18 Lai Shaoqi (1915–2000), Breaking Out! 1936, cover of Modern Woodcut, vol. 16 (1936), woodcut, 11.2 ×10 cm, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

 

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4.19 Tang Yingwei (b. 1915), Forward! 1936, woodcut design for cover of Woodcut World, vol. 4 (1936), 26.4 × 19.3 cm, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai

took responsibility for the second national print exhibition, to be held in 1936. It opened on July 5, 1936, with six hundred prints, at Guangzhou’s Provincial Library. Using the postal service for shipping, a practice that would continue to serve the printmakers in later years, the exhibition then traveled to more than two dozen cities, large and small. Lu Xun visited the show in Shanghai on October 8, 1936, only eleven days before he died. Lu Xun believed, above all, that artists should create an art of their own time. Although a strong believer in creative autonomy, he evoked in his 1929 preface to Itagaki Takao’s History of Modern Art Alois Riegel’s kunstwollen— the artist’s will to form—arguing that the great artist, “even the genius, is nothing but the executor, the supreme fulfillment of the kunstwollen of his nation and age.” 30 In this light he recognized the potential of art to crystallize the desires of the human spirit, to influence the populace, and to propagate the social change he believed was needed. At the same time, the artworks left from this tumultuous period offer the viewer an insight into what China’s people were experiencing. Himself a master at crafting prose, Lu Xun recognized that no text can say more so quickly, or with such genuine expression as a single, well-chosen woodcut print.  

 

Modern Design

This chapter has emphasized the modernist inclinations of certain artists who emerged in the exuberantly pluralistic golden age of the 1930s. It is striking, particularly in contrast to the situation in neighboring Japan, to consider the extraordinarily small number of authentic oil paintings from the 1930s that survived the forty difficult years that followed their creation, disrupted as they were by the wars between 1937 and 1949 and then the suppression of bourgeois art by the Communists between 1949 and 1979. As we look at mass media and high culture publications of the Republican period, however, we find that, particularly in Shanghai editions, a modernism that may be recognized as such by the Western eye was indeed widespread. In the 1930s the magazines in which the exhibitions of the Storm Society and the Chinese Independent Art Association were reported—Young Companion, Modern Miscellany, and Arts and Life—carried advertisements, typography, photography, and even cartoons created in the Western modernist idiom. The large quantity and variety of the surviving twodimensional imagery testifies to the existence in Shanghai of a truly cosmopolitan visual culture in which the most upto-date aspects of international design were quickly spread. The development of a mature modernist design vocabulary may be associated as well with the appearance of pro 

 

fessional designers who prospered and took pride in their careers.31 This is not the place to tell the entire history of modern commercial art in China, nor even the full story of book and magazine cover design in the twentieth century, but some aspects of its development are so closely related to those of the modernist oil painters and printmakers that they warrant mention. Shanghai emerged as the center of China’s commercial art world in the late nineteenth century, when the introduction of photolithographic printing made possible the large-scale production of such entertainment publications as Dianshizhai huabao. Early lithographically produced or typeset books, even translations, tended to be ornamented only with some variation of the traditional calligraphic label pasted on a blue paper or cloth wrapper. By the turn of the century, however, Western-style book covers with complex Victorian designs became common. As Shanghai’s Commercial Press and its competitors began publishing more periodicals, fiction, and textbooks, ornate covers, some of which show the influence of art nouveau, appeared. Commercial Press’s magazine of current affairs Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), established in 1904, which was stapled in the Western fashion, commissioned more strident cover designs and cartoons to suit its more worldly aims. For Ladies Journal (Funü zazhi), however, in its founding year, the press selected charming color lithographs of young women by Tushanwan atelier graduate and sometime Shanghai art school instructor Xu Yongqing. The rise of more creative modern cover designs is usually attributed to the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and 1920s, particularly to the circle around Lu Xun. In the practice of design, Lu Xun was himself a talented amateur, and his effort to promote good design was significant. He sought a modern look, which in many cases found its roots in Japan, but he also began advocating the use of native imagery so as to create a particularly Chinese style. He designed the cover for a collection of short stories by Gao Changhong in 1926. In keeping with the title of the book, the decorative image he created for Exploration of the Heart [fig. 4.20] relies on motifs from his collection of Han and Six dynasties rubbings to suggest something of a mysterious inner life. The carefully conceived surface that integrates reserve space into the design creates strong, expressive contrasts. Lu Xun’s most important work in design may have been as an editor and patron. Committed to the visual integrity of the book as an object, he sought effective modern designs for the covers of those that he edited. In Beijing in 1924 he met a young oil painter, Tao Yuanqing (1893–1929), who came from the same hometown of Shaoxing. Lu Xun  

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4.21 Tao Yuanqing (1893– 1929), cover design for Hometown, stories by Xu Qinwen, edited by Lu Xun, published by Beixin Book Company, 1926, 20 × 14 cm, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

4.20 Lu Xun (1881– 1936), cover design for Exploration of the Heart, text by Gao Changhong, edited by Lu Xun, published by Beixin Book Company, Beijing, 1926, 20.5 × 14 cm, Lu Xun Memorial, Shanghai  

first asked him to try his hand at creating a new-style cover design for his own translation of Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbol of Depression.32 The example that is reproduced here, also for a project edited by Lu Xun, is the 1926 cover for a book of short stories, Hometown, by Tao’s fellow townsman Xu Qinwen [fig. 4.21]. Lu Xun and the designers he liked were strongly influenced by the boldness and simplicity of Japanese design, but Lu Xun constantly urged them to seek Chinese character in their work. Tao had earlier worked at Eastern Times (Shibao), where, through Ge Gongzhen, he met and was able to study the family collection of the newspaper’s magnate Di Chuqing. He also studied the antique paintings and Japanese and Indian designs owned by the Shibao subsidiary, Youzheng Book Company. Later, at Shanghai Arts Normal School, he studied Western painting with Li Shutong’s disciple Feng Zikai and the Japanese-trained Chen Baoyi. He thus was considered knowledgeable in Chinese painting, Oriental patterns, and Western painting. Tao Yuanqing based the bold image that appears on Xu Qinwen’s book on his own oil painting, Big Red Robe. It was inspired by a female character in local Shaoxing drama posed as though about to take her own life. Her head raised in sorrowful defiance, she demonstrates her strength through upright posture and valiant gesture. The swordplay is borrowed from a Peking opera pose, while the bright blue, red, and white of the robe conveys a sense of antiquity while simultaneously creating a powerful harmony of design. Tao Yuanqing achieved well90

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deserved fame for these designs and was hired to teach in the design department of the new academy in Hangzhou in 1928. Tragically, he contracted typhoid and died in Hangzhou on August 6, 1929, at the age of thirty-six. An artist with an even greater impact on modernist Chinese design was Tao’s younger colleague, Qian Juntao (1906– 1998), who was blessed with both talent and longevity. Lu Xun met Qian Juntao in 1927, when Lu Xun paid a call on editor Zhang Xichen at the Kaiming Book Company in Shanghai. Qian Juntao admired and emulated the design of Tao Yuanqing, but Lu Xun urged him to develop his own style. Soon after the initial meeting, he invited the two young designers to his home to see the antique rubbings that had inspired his own design of the previous year. Qian was thoroughly steeped in Japanese principles of design. He had only recently graduated from Shanghai Arts Normal School (Yishu shifan xuexiao), where he studied with three of Li Shutong’s disciples—Wu Mengfei, Liu Zhiping, and Feng Zikai (1898–1975)—in the fields of design, music, and painting. His early work, very Japanese in composition, theme, and feeling, often took flora and fauna as its motifs. Around 1929, however, a new interest in modern typography and lettering as well as Western styles and themes comes to the fore. For Great Love (Weida de lianai) of 1930, he first adopts strongly cubist forms over which he diagonally superimposes the title, a Chinese version of art deco lettering [fig. 4.22]. A student of Esperanto, Qian Juntao was particularly creative and playful in his use of language  

 

 

 

4.22  Qian Juntao (1906–1998), cover design for Great Love, 1930, 20 × 13.7 cm, published by Kaiming Book Company, Shanghai

4.23  Chen Zhifo (1896–1962), cover design for Literature (Wenxue), vol. 2, no. 1 (1934), published by Shenghuo Book Company, Shanghai

 

 

and lettering in the 1930s, and many of his later works take text as the primary elements in a sleek modern design. Chen Zhifo (1896–1962) was one of China’s earliest professionally trained graphic designers. The first foreign student of design to matriculate at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, his stay in Tokyo from 1919 to 1923 overlapped those of oil painters Chen Baoyi, Guan Liang, Ni Yide, Wang Yachen, and Ding Yanyong.33 He was also close to Li Shutong’s student, Feng Zikai, with whom he shared an interest in design. He returned home in 1923 to a society in need of good design but as yet unprepared to support it. He fulfilled some commissions for Lu Xun and various progressive publications, explored modern typography, and published several textbooks on design. He taught design at a series of schools in Shanghai while at the same time running China’s first private atelier, Shangmei Design Studio, to train modern fabric designers. He also taught briefly at Guangzhou Municipal Art School in 1929 before, in 1931, accepting Xu Beihong’s invitation to join the faculty at National Central University in Nanjing. In addition, between 1925 and 1935 he was particularly prolific as a designer of books and journals for major publishing houses, creating the magazine covers for the prominent publications Eastern Miscellany, Short Story Monthly, and Literature, among many others. His body of work well illustrates the stylistic changes to be found throughout the industry, developing from art nouveau to art deco to geometric abstraction. Chen’s bold 1934 cover for the progressive literary  

monthly Literature (Wenxue) clearly aimed at a contemporary international look [fig. 4.23]. By the mid-1930s, China’s designers were expected by Shanghai publishers to be fully up to date. The versatile Chen adopted here an abstract design in the modernist aesthetic of the Russian, European, and Japanese publications that inspired the journal’s cosmopolitan authors. As one of the earliest professional practitioners and educators of modern design, Chen Zhifo’s work had a very strong impact on Chinese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. In later life, after commercial publishing was abolished by the Communist authorities, he devoted much of his effort to the exquisitely detailed bird-and-flower paintings for which he is best known today. In these few works we examine what might be considered an elite form of Chinese high modernism. Although these artists produced designs for sale, thus making them commercial artists, they were primarily book designers, and their work was commissioned by patrons in the literary, cultural, and educational realms rather than the broader commodity culture. But even operating at the level of high culture, the book, as a mass-produced object, was not the same as a singular modernist oil painting, which existed in only one place at a time. By creating these beautiful objects, by increasing the expressive power and sensory pleasure of reading and owning a book, they contributed to beautifying the material world through which their fellow citizens passed every day and to rendering the modernist agendas of New Culture writers even more compelling. Modern Art in the 1930s

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5

The Golden Age of Guohua in the 1930s

The establishment of a new government in the old southern capital of Nanjing in 1928 concluded the constant military strife of the 1910s and 1920s. The optimism inspired by the end of the warlord era was accompanied by ambitious dreams among intellectuals and politicians of a new fluorescence of China’s culture and creation of a cosmopolitan Chinese art. For a time, individual and civic concerns converged around the prospect of building the nation, both improving China domestically and achieving a position of respect among the family of nations. Private initiatives were met with public support; public works were facilitated by private donations. For many artists of the 1930s, aspirations as creative individuals and a sense of duty to the needs of their society and nation were never completely separate. Thus patriotism among ink painters might also manifest itself as cultural nationalism. This chapter examines some of the ways in which China’s artistic traditions were reexamined and promoted in the name of the newly strengthened and unified Republic, how guohua (literally national painting, or Chinese painting) was developed domestically and what it meant when displayed abroad, as well as the function of exhibitions of premodern art in furthering the goals of contemporary Chinese painters.1 Finally, we consider how architectural design and construction served and symbolized the new Chinese state. Along with all cultural pursuits, the visual arts, and especially the revitalized practice of guohua, flourished during the comparatively peaceful Nanjing decade. In previous years, leading figures in the world of Chinese painting made progress in their struggle to protect this traditional art against the wholesale Westernization so vigorously advocated in the New Culture movement. In the 1920s educators and artists sympathetic to guohua overcame great obstacles to create a secure place for Chinese painting in 93

the Westernizing curriculum of art education. Building on this success, in the 1930s a new generation of guohua artists sought to move beyond simple preservation of Chinese painting to transform it into a fundamental driving force in the construction of China’s modern culture. With the support and encouragement of the new Republican government, artists became actors in culturally nationalistic performances of a self-consciously Chinese art suitable for the world stage. In this regard the National Art Exhibition of 1929 looked to the future as much as to the past. Of the 287 modern Chinese works published in its catalog, 192 (roughly twothirds) were guohua paintings [fig. 5.1]. There were only forty-six oils, twenty-nine photographs, and no woodblock

prints. In his catalog preface Cai Yuanpei, whose talented European-educated daughter Weilian was now an oil painting professor, expressed hope for further growth of Westernstyle art, but he acknowledged that Chinese painting remained the mainstream. The continued vitality of the traditional art of painting in the context of the cultural, educational, and social ferment following the 1911 revolution was not to be assumed. The continued importance of oil painting within the educational system, and the steady growth of the idea that Western art was superior to Chinese, limited the role art schools might play in supporting native artistic practices. Thus in the 1930s a large network of impassioned individuals, and the private painting societies they organized, played the most powerful role in preserving, promoting, and stimulating innovation in Chinese painting.2 Painting Societies in the 1930s: The Lake Society (Hushe)

One of the longest-lasting Chinese painting groups, the Lake Society, traced its origins to the private organization founded by Jin Cheng in Beijing in 1920 under the name Chinese Painting Research Society. This earlier group organized nineteen members’ exhibitions and four SinoJapanese joint art exhibitions between its founding and Jin Cheng’s death in 1926 and was a vital part of the effort to preserve and publicize Chinese painting in the 1920s. Indeed, the warm reception the Chinese work received in Japan gave the Beijing guohua artists confidence to contend against art world Westernizers. In 1927 two hundred followers of Jin Cheng, including his eldest son, Jin Kaifan, split from the earlier group and established the Hushe, or Lake Society. In a sign of respect for the deceased master, they adopted as the group’s name the second character in Jin Cheng’s sobriquet (Ouhu), and many took pseudonyms of their own that ended with the same character. Jin Kaifan, for example, took the name Yinhu, and his colleague Hui Jun (1902–1979) called himself Hui Zhehu. January 1927 saw the launch of their journal, The Lake Society Monthly (Hushe yuekan), which was, for nine years and 150 issues, to promote the study and practice of Chinese painting. The journal was distributed not only in China but internationally, in Japan and Hong Kong, as well as in Chinese cultural communities as far away as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Canada, and Cuba. The Beijing-based Lake Society was significant in two ways.3 Although its mission was to argue for the value of guo‑ hua painting, it did so by means of a distinctively modern institutional structure, which included a board of trustees. Its adaptation of practices common in the modern international art world, such as organizing and publicizing exhibi 

5.1.  Yang Xuejiu (1902–1986), The Great Wall, 1923, ink on paper, exhibited in the First National Art Exhibition in 1929  

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tions and publishing a specialized journal, suggest not simple inheritance of traditional customs but a self-­conscious promotion of a modern cultural mission. Although what they advocated was the value of their indigenous art, underlying the Sino-Japanese art exhibitions they organized in the 1920s was a desire to participate in modern international culture on their own terms. Thus, in the difficult circumstances of the early Republican period, their work not only assisted individuals to survive as artists but began to establish a larger community that agreed on the mission of preserving East Asian cultural values. Guohua painters in Shanghai, led by Wang Yiting, sought similar artistic connections and commercial outlets in China and Japan for exhibition and sales of their painting.4 Most importantly for the subsequent history of the Lake Society, the art it promoted was based on distinctive ideas about how the modern practice of art related to the art of the past. Although it is useful to distinguish these artists from those who, like Xu Beihong or Lin Feng­mian, looked to the West for the formal basis of their art, or, like Gao Qifeng and Gao Jianfu, sought more synthetic forms of art based on modern Japanese models, it is impossible to write of a single “traditionalist” style. Never­ theless, for the Hushe members—and for others who identified themselves with the mission of preserving the “national essence” in art—researching, understanding, and emulating works from the past were crucial to their vision of the future. The millennium-long history of Chinese painting provides canonical examples of earlier art to which Western labels ranging from realism to expressionism might be applied. However, in an era before photography, Chinese artists, even the most iconoclastic, tended to form a personal style based on what they could see, which was often the work of the particular masters or schools with which they had a regional, familial, or social connection. Most obviously, professional artists worked from model books passed down in the workshops of their masters and were held to high technical standards. Literati painters learned their art from paintings in the collections with which they were personally familiar and were judged by the sincerity or originality of their selfexpression. Conventional social links and aesthetic preconceptions were weakened, if not abandoned, in the twentieth century as modern publications, photography, and museums broadened access to art of the past. In the twentieth century all past styles became equally available for exploration, and the artistic results were at times brilliantly innovative while at others merely eclectic. Jin Cheng himself experimented in a variety of styles. Perhaps most significant to his own artistic project was a reinvention of tradition based on study of the previously inaccessible imperial collection. In a reconceptualization of the

value system of Chinese painting, which had placed literati painting above court or artisan painting, many of his followers emulated the styles of court painters.5 Jin Cheng himself often painted in the manner of the Southern Song court academy, but ranged freely through the history of art [see fig. 3.3]. In other works he occasionally emulated Western effects of light, volume, and color—a further demonstration of the open-minded nature of his experimentation. His follower Yu Fei’an (1887–1959) became a specialist in the birdand-flower style of the twelfth-century Huizong emperor [fig. 5.2]. Rather than limiting themselves to one tradition, however, they crossed boundaries that would have been unthinkable in a previous era, when literati and court artists worked in very separate traditions. A prince of the imperial  

 

 

 

5.2.  Yu Fei’an (1887– 1959), Birds and Flowers, 1936, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 111.2 × 46.5 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

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clan, Puru (1896–1963), for example, painted on occasion in court styles but also excelled in the manner of the sixteenthcentury literati style of Suzhou, the Wu school [fig. 5.3]. He was undoubtedly familiar with paintings by Wu school master Wen Zhengming from the imperial collection. The concentration of artistic talent in the national capital during the early years of the new Republic resulted in part from recruitment to Beijing of many talented officials and educators who interacted there with the old Manchu elite. Jin Cheng’s death in 1926 occurred on the eve of a shift in political power to the south, however, leaving behind a far less dynamic cultural world in Beijing. Over the following decade, focus on mastering techniques of the past seem to have gradually turned the Beijing art world against theoretical positions that might support substantial innovation within Chinese painting, and particularly against syncretic forms of art. Among the many painters in the group, those who focused on preserving China’s traditions rather than creatively exploring the possibilities they offered for contemporary art produced increasingly repetitive works. Although such a trend has led to the label “conservative” being applied to the Beijing school, conservatism was far from the universal attitude within the Lake Society.6 Xiao Sun (1883–1944), for example, sought to revive and further develop the rather idiosyncratic brushwork and highly abstract style of the seventeenth-century Anhui painter Mei Qing. His work has a boldness of composition that suits it to exhibition display, as one may see in his submission to the 1929 national exhibition or by a similar work painted in 1932 [fig. 5.4]. The Hushe may have been the best organized art group in China in the late 1920s and was well-represented in the 1929 National Art Exhibition. The catalog includes, in addition to works by Jin family members and other wellknown Hushe participants, almost two dozen artists immediately identifiable as Lake Society partisans by their use of sobriquets ending in the character “hu.” By 1930 the Lake Society had moved to establish a more national profile that encompassed north and south. Northern talents included Hu Peiheng (1891–1962) and Chen Shaomei (1909–1954) [fig. 5.5]. Because the Beijing-based Jin family was originally from Zhejiang, it had close ties to the Shanghai art world. A membership list compiled in 1930 shows that two of the eight members of the board of trustees, Wang Yiting and Pang Yuanji, were Shanghai residents of Zhejiang ancestry. Three others, all natives of the south—Fang Ruo from Zhejiang, Sun Runyu from Jiangsu, and Wang Yongquan from Anhui—lived in Tianjin. Only three, Jin Cheng’s daughter Wang Jin Zhang, Yang Baoyi, and He Sui, actually resided in Beijing. The twenty-six-person advisory board included, along with Manchu prince Puru (P’u Hsin-yü;  

 

 

5.3. Puru (P’u Hsin-yü; 1896–1963), A Village in the Summer Time, 1939, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 124 × 31.9 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

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1896–1963) and Xiao Sun, such Shanghai artists of Zhejiang ancestry as Wang Yiting’s son, Wang Chuantao, and Ren Yi’s step-­grandson, Wu Zhongxiong (1899–1989). Despite these efforts to grow beyond its origins, the group as a whole never moved beyond Jin Cheng’s initial project of preserving Chinese painting. Bringing new life to the old form was a focus of effort in new groups established in the 1930s.  

Antiquarian Societies and Publishing

Like Beijing, Shanghai functioned as a magnet for artists, particularly those from southern China. In this treaty port city, art societies with a modern sensibility and a growing self-consciousness of the position of Chinese painting (or feared lack thereof ) in a global cultural economy began to appear in the 1920s. Located in the center of China’s new publishing hub, many were closely connected to this industry. Huang Binhong (1865–1955), for example, became director in the mid-1920s of a group called the Chinese Epigraphy, Calligraphy, and Painting Study Society (Zhongguo jinshi shuhua yiguan xuehui), based at Youzheng Book Company on Weihaiwei Road in Shanghai. The group met quarterly, and one of its primary group efforts seems to have been its scholarly journal, Yiguan, which ran from 1926 until August of 1929. The society argued that all civilized countries venerated their own past art, and its aims were therefore to “preserve the national essence and carry forward the glory of our nation; research arts to inspire in people loftiness of mind.” 7 By this time, Huang Binhong had already dedicated more than two decades of his career to publishing works of art and art theory that might assist in this effort.8 As a younger man, in the early years of the twentieth century, he had openly supported efforts to reform the Qing regime and to revive access to scholarly writings that had been banned by earlier Qing emperors. As a result, he was forced to flee to treaty port Shanghai in the last years of the dynasty. A native of Anhui, Huang later joined the Shanghai Literary and Art Club (Haishang tijinguan), where he came to know many of the artists gathered in Shanghai. In Shanghai, in 1907, Huang Binhong met leaders of the anti-Manchu National Essence movement, Deng Shi (1877–1951) and Huang Jie (1873–1935), and soon became involved in a number of their publishing efforts, including some antiquarian projects with revolutionary implications. He worked to promote the culture of pre-Manchu or anti-Manchu China as an editor for National Learning Compendium (Guoxue congshu), National Essence Monthly (Guocui xuebao; 1907– 11), and a periodical dedicated to illustrating China’s cultural greatness, the Glories of Cathay (Shenzhou guoguangji; 1908–18). He would be involved in efforts that, between  

5.4.  Xiao Sun (1883– 1944), Pine Trees and Waterfalls, 1932, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 101 × 32.9 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

 

 

5.5.  Chen Shaomei (1909–1954), A Hermit Resting by a Bamboo Stream, 1937, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 102.7 × 22.8 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

 

 

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1911 and 1947, produced A Collectanea of the Arts (Meishu congshu), a compilation of primary sources that remains an essential art historical resource today. He continued to work for the Shenzhou guoguang publishing house until it closed in 1924. Although an enormously productive contributor to the literature on Chinese painting, Huang Binhong was far from alone in his art historical pursuits. In the mid-1920s, for example, an influential group called the Wind Society (Xunshe)—comprised of Shanghai-based elders, Beijing notables, and younger talents—came together in Shanghai around the publication Dingyi, which featured reproductions and commentary on Chinese antiquities. The 1929 national exhibition in Shanghai and its catalog offered a venue for antiquarians in its large “reference” section, which was particularly strong in its rotating displays of premodern paintings and objects from private collections. Beginning in 1929, the newly established Palace Museum also took up the publication cause, presenting to the public what we might call a virtual museum of art objects.9 From national day in 1929 (held on October 10) until April 25, 1936, the museum published Palace Museum Weekly (Gugong zhoukan), a large-­format weekly periodical that reproduced objects from the museum’s collection in collotype, and soon it published similar series dedicated only to paintings and calligraphy.10 These reproductions made classical paintings available to aspiring artists, even those who possessed no art collections of their own.  

 

The Chinese Painting Society

The national exhibition of 1929, by bringing artists and art educators from diverse backgrounds together to plan and implement the work of its various organizational committees, made evident the potential that cooperative effort held for fruitful developments in the Chinese art world. Among the many initiatives catalyzed by this massive project was the creation of new painting societies with increasingly diverse points of view. Many of them, regardless of artistic viewpoint, were built on open and civic-minded foundations and laid claim to patriotic or culturally nationalistic values. In 1929 a group of prominent guohua painters based in Shanghai, many of whom had served as organizers of the National Art Exhibition, established the Bee Painting Society (Mifeng huashe).11 In selecting their name, they intended to demonstrate the collective industriousness of the members, who would work together selflessly to harvest the best essence of Chinese art, and like the bees, turn it into a product to be enjoyed by others. The name thus spoke to their altruism, cooperative spirit, and productivity. The organizers, led by Zheng Wuchang, included Zhang Shanzi, He Tianjian, Li Zuhan, Qian Shoutie, Lu 98

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Danlin, and other painting friends.12 Among the many members who joined them were Yu Jianhua, Wang Geyi, Xie Zhiguang, Wang Yiting, and Zhang Daqian as well as women artists such as Wu Qingxia (1910–2008) and Li Qiujun (1899–1971). Although all members were expected to share a passion for Chinese painting, membership was not limited to painters of a single region or lineage and, like the Lake Society, the Bee Painting Society included women. The society sponsored lectures on guohua, published a journal called Bee Journal and other occasional publications, such as Paintings by Modern Masters (Dangdai mingjia huahai). It had an elaborate written charter and a published members list, held formal monthly meetings, and organized an annual exhibition. The club, where members could gather at their leisure, collected antique paintings and calligraphy for study. The Shanghai-based Bee Painting Society, like the Beijing-based Lake Society, utilized a modern organizational structure, with exhibitions and publications to promote its activities. The activities of guohua artists and collectors in the 1920s to maintain Chinese painting as a living art and to collect and research antiquities provided the foundation for a new development in the 1930s, when guohua was mobilized as a part of the construction of a new national identity. In 1930 retired official, calligrapher, and collector Ye Gongchuo enlisted the help of Huang Binhong and art critic Lu Danlin to organize a new guohua group, the Chinese Painting Society, which would serve as an authoritative national and modern organization. The group was founded on the existing network of the Bee Painting Society painters but built on it. The opening statement of the new group—“Guohua Artists must Unite” (Guohuajia jiying lianhe)—was drafted by Lu Danlin and published in one of the last issues of Bee Journal.13 The Chinese Painting Society ran a regular program of exhibitions and published a professional journal that promoted theoretical and technical examination of the principles of Chinese painting from both a domestic and international perspective as well as a series of reproduction albums, including Modern Chinese Painting (Xiandai zhongguo huaji). The society also promoted networking among artists. The journal essays often possessed a culturally nationalistic tone. Such heartfelt reflections on the situation of their art and their land were increasingly welcome in government circles in the 1930s, particularly as Japan’s territorial incursions became more and more worrying. The journal also had a practical side: publishing members’ price lists, including those of Huang Binhong, Yu Jianhua, and lesser painters, both male and female. Members of the society were also, over the course of its twenty-year existence, fre 

 

 

 

quently involved in organizing submissions to exhibitions abroad. Far more ideological than any society that preceded it, the group’s first manifesto begins by deploring the “decrepit state” of the Chinese art world, which it compares unfavorably with those of the West, the “civilized countries” of Europe and America. Manifesto author Lu Danlin asserted that all promote traditional culture to display their national character and to develop among their people a sense of harmony. China—beset in recent decades by civil war, military coups, and constant political crises—had failed, in his opinion, to do so, and as a result, the international world considered Japanese art to be representative of Asia as a whole. Lu Danlin thus viewed lack of support for traditional culture as a failure of national policy on both the domestic and international fronts, diminishing the Chinese nation in the eyes of its own citizens and those of other countries. Adopting an aesthetic point of view that had been dominant in China for a millennium, but that paralleled modern Western values, the Chinese Painting Society was founded on the principle that painting was a site where the most elevated aspects of human nature might be lodged. Chinese painting’s expression of the genius and subjective feelings of its makers resembles in some ways, noted Lu, the symbolist art of their own day. In this he implicitly criticized the idea that only realistic art that presents an objective image of reality can be modern and socially progressive. Instead, he argued for the value of spiritual and subjective values inherent in China’s literati painting tradition. The Chinese Painting Society thus defined its mission as: “(1) to develop the age-old art of China; (2) to publicize it abroad and thus raise China’s international stature; and (3) to plan for artists’ financial security and mutual assistance.” 14 In all three contexts the modern practices of exhibition, publication, and sales were crucial. Nearly all exhibitions, whether domestic or abroad, were composed of objects that could be purchased, both facilitating the dissemination of art into the hands of collectors and museums and providing financial support for artists. In addition, the society established price lists for its members and validated them through published testimonials of its most senior and wellrespected artists. In this period, however, artists also began publishing their own price lists without the social mediation of their elders. Such notices appeared in the journal of the Chinese Painting Society, Guohua yuekan (Chinese painting monthly), as well as in newspapers and popular magazines of the day. Based on the contact addresses that appear in the advertisements, many venues for selling paintings existed outside the formal exhibition setting. The old art and fan shops continued to play a role in marketing art but so did  

 

new art societies and publishing houses. Some artists preferred to sell directly from their homes, relying on family members for any assistance they might need, and certain transactions were conducted entirely by mail. The Chinese Painting Society explicitly declared itself to be more than a social club; it was a systematic organization that would, in modern professional terms, unite and promote artists. Despite the group’s primary emphasis on perpetuating China’s traditions, however, these Shanghai-based artists claimed an explicitly modern self-identification. For them, tradition was not simply inherited but was something to be constantly reconsidered and redefined in their roles as Chinese artists working in a contemporary international context. With this in mind, they looked not only to the past but also to the present. Perhaps most important, they advocated innovation within tradition and found precedent for innovation not only in the contemporary West but also in China’s past. Although they certainly did not oppose the virtue of copying old paintings as a method of technical and compositional training, some denigrated those traditionalists who might display straightforward copies as though they were art. Huang Binhong, although one of the oldest artists in the Chinese Calligraphy Society, was also one of the most adventurous in his stylistic explorations. Already in his late sixties when he helped organize the new society, its mission perfectly corresponded with the activities that had comprised his life’s work. He reflected in the inaugural issue of Guohua yuekan that Chinese scholars needed to reexamine themselves rather than focus on the strengths of others and that they could not maintain the honor of their tradition without studying it earnestly. For this reason, his calling in life was to conduct research on “the national essence” and to popularize traditional Chinese culture.15 Huang was also instrumental in organizing like-minded scholars into societies. In addition to those already mentioned, he was one of the initiators, along with Wang Yiting, Wu Daiqiu, and others, of the Shanghai Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Preservation Society (Shanghai Zhongguo shuhua baocunhui) in 1929, which aimed, like the slightly later Chinese Painting Society, to preserve the national essence and promote art. Huang seems to have thrown himself into the project of realizing in the present the values of the past. His own painting of the 1920s demonstrated his enthusiasm for and competence in the styles of Dong Qichang and the Four Wangs, but as he approached the age of seventy he began to move beyond the precision and comparative tidiness of this earlier manner into a far more self-expressive mode of painting. This paralleled his increasing interest in early The golden age of guohua in the 1930s

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he suggests an appreciation of the aesthetically and ideologically more appealing painters believed to be anti-Manchu Ming loyalists such as Shitao and Kuncan in addition to Cheng Sui. Although this painting is dedicated to a private individual, the boldness of the dark and light contrasts gives it a compositional strength as readily suitable to exhibition as to private display. Perhaps most important, Huang Binhong achieves a synthesis of past conventions with contemporary expressive concerns in an innovative, personal style. It is one proof that successful innovation within tradition was still possible. Once established, the Chinese Painting Society gained strong support from a younger generation of artists, some of whom assumed administrative responsibilities for its continued growth. For some, the collegial experience of painting, examining and discussing antique paintings, exhibiting their art, and publishing theoretical essays seems to have yielded the results for which the society’s organizers hoped—the appearance of original, strongly personal styles that may exemplify the power and subtlety to be found within China’s multiple traditions of painting. Like Huang Binhong, the much younger He Tianjian (1891–1977) was very active in traditionalist theoretical circles as well as in painting. As early as 1920, he and a friend founded the Xishan Calligraphy and Painting Society in their native Wuxi, Jiangsu, to which they invited painters active in Shanghai, such as the young Zhang Daqian, Wu Hufan, Xie Gongzhan, Shang Shengbo, and Lai Chusheng. A few years later, the two established the Wuxi Art Academy. He Tianjian later taught at various schools in Nanjing and Shanghai. By 1929, when he exhibited in the First National Exhibition and joined the Bee Painting Society, he had settled in Shanghai. He later served as an organizer of the Chinese Painting Society and took over as editorin-chief of the society’s journal, Guohua yuekan, beginning with the fourth issue. During his tenure at Guohua yuekan, He Tianjian published a number of sharply worded articles, including “The Theoretical Principles of the Chinese Painting Society,” “Calligraphy and Painting Societies: Their Right and Wrong Ways of Operating,” “The Morbid State of Chinese Landscape Painting Today and the Way to Heal It,” and “About Painting Standards.” 16 He also made his opinions known on the pages of the popular magazine Art and Life (Meishu shenghuo) in such articles as “My Opinion on Chinese Painting” and in the theoretical journal Huaxue yuekan, to name only a few publications.17 His first solo painting exhibition, according to a contemporary magazine article, was held April 3–5, 1936, at the Ningbo Native Place Association, a frequent venue for guohua exhibitions during the period.18  

 

5.6 Huang Binhong (1865–1955), Entertaining a Friend in a Mountain Dwelling, 1935, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 152.2 × 82.2 cm, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

Qing painting of his native region, work created by scholar-­ painters and monks who passively resisted the newly established Manchu dynasty. A 1935 painting is typical of the last part of his career. In creating it, Huang Binhong seems to have been inspired by the heavy, dark brushwork of Anhui artist Cheng Sui, about whom he had published a monographic art historical treatise [fig. 5.6]. The inscription mentions the artist’s travels, which were frequent in this period, although the great abstraction of the work makes it difficult to know whether the image itself was inspired by scenery Huang had actually seen or only by the occasion. Wellcomposed of clearly organized sections that zigzag down the painting in a series of asymmetrically organized turns, the work is structurally similar to those of such seventeenthcentury masters as Dong Qichang or Wang Yuanqi. Yet the loose brushwork with which Huang outlines and textures his rocks is much dryer, darker, sketchier, and wilder than that of the orthodox masters. In these qualities of execution, 100

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He Tianjian’s theoretical and practical work during the first decade after establishment of the Chinese Painting Society was realized aesthetically in his bold 1939 painting, Conversation in the Autumn Woods [fig. 5.7]. Although many of his earlier works were rather fragmented in composition, the landscape elements are here unified with a powerful simplicity. Dominated by a strongly vertical central peak and a stream rushing into the foreground, both of which are reminiscent of the Northern Song manner, the composition is energized by the thrusting of the middle-ground mountains, the zigzagging waterfall, strong contrasts of white paper against densely textured forms, as well as twisted cun strokes applied to the rocky surfaces. The latter create a disquieting sense of movement more typical of the unsettling works of the seventeenth century. The fabric of striated texture strokes and the repeating rhythms of foliage—dense, dark pine needles and fragile, autumnal leaves—unify the painting, while the sometimes contradictory directional flows and thrusts of the large mountain masses create a tenuously balanced composition that is energized by its potential instability. While in his daring landscape constructions He Tianjian pursues the naturalistic power of Song and Yuan painting, at the same time he makes a virtue of brushwork that is slightly hard and even mechanical to render the landscape in abstract terms. Such eclecticism, his willingness to combine elements from all periods of Chinese painting history, is what makes him a peculiarly modern artist. The somewhat younger Qian Shoutie (1896–1967), who was also from Wuxi, did not fare well as an artist under the post-1949 regime and is therefore best known today for his great contributions to traditionalist painting groups of the 1930s, particularly the Chinese Painting Society. He was active in earlier Shanghai art societies such as Shangai Literary and Art Club (Haishang tijinguan) before becoming involved in the Bee Painting Society in 1929. He founded a group called Red Leaf Calligraphy and Painting Society in Shanghai in 1922, joined the Plain Moon Painting Society when it was founded in the old city in 1925, and later became a key figure in both the administrative and social life of the Chinese Painting Society. He further exerted substantial influence as an editor of the magazine Art and Life, which became an important outlet for dissemination of the ideas of the Chinese Painting Society. Indeed, a significant activity of the core group of artist friends was their domination of the editorial board of this mass-market pictorial.19 Devoted to improving the aesthetic quality of daily life, the magazine also publicized, through feature articles and pictures, many exhibitions, including those of the Chinese Painting Society and related groups such as Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society.  

 

 

5.7. He Tianjian (1891–1977), Conversation in the Autumn Woods, 1939, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 111 × 61 cm, Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting  

The April 1934 inaugural issue of Art and Life included a mission statement by editor Qian Shoutie, who argued for the profoundly serious role of art in an age of national crisis. In his view the magazine’s goals were to use art, with its humanistic and peaceful character, to rectify the shortcomings of science; by means of applied art, to rectify the emptiness and estrangement of the arts of the elite; and through The golden age of guohua in the 1930s

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bringing the everyday lives of the common people into art to rectify the styles of the literati.20 Accompanying this call for popular and applied art, the first issue ran a feature about the Chinese Painting Society’s exhibition, with reproductions of ink paintings by Shanghai artists Feng Chaoran, Ying Yeping, Qian Shoutie, Wang Geyi, the female artists Gu Qingyao and Lu Xiaoman, and others. A notice soliciting new members for the Chinese Painting Society was printed on the same page, along with the principles of its organization and a specification that Chinese painting lovers of both genders and all nationalities were welcome. The brothers Zhang Shanzi (1882–1940) and Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien; 1899–1983) [fig. 5.8], who served as editors for Art and Life, found popularity with young female painters, whom they entertained in the courtyard of their lodgings at the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou, where they also kept a pet tiger. Modern publishing, at both popular and professional levels, promoted various aspects of the Chinese Painting Society’s goals, including study of classical paintings and classical painting theory, elevation of the status of guohua, and promotion of the professional careers and economic status of individual guohua artists. Qian Shoutie was a mainstay of the organizational and administrative structure of the Chinese Painting Society. He also played an extremely important role in the artistic exchanges between Chinese and Japanese traditionalist painters. A charismatic figure, he developed a very close personal friendship with the Kyoto nihonga painter Hashimoto Kansetsu during the 1930s and thus facilitated connections between Japanese artists and antiquarians and his Shanghai colleagues. Hashimoto continued to visit Qian after war broke out between their two nations in 1937. The allegation of collaboration with the enemy is likely one of the reasons Qian was hounded to death during the Cultural Revolution. Zheng Wuchang (1894–1952), an artist and editor who was especially important in both the Chinese Painting Society and its precursor, the Bee Painting Society, was also known as a writer under the name Zheng Chang. Educated between 1910 and 1915 at a modern-style middle school in Hangzhou, Zheng was a classmate of Xu Zhimo and Yu Dafu, both of whom became famous poets. His art teacher, Jiang Danshu, was a graduate of the Liangjiang Normal School. After studying at a normal school in Beijing, Zheng worked from 1918 to 1922 as an elementary school principal and private family tutor in his home region. In 1922, however, he moved to Shanghai and began a ten-year career at the Zhonghua Book Company, an important educational and cultural publishing firm where his high school literature teacher had also taken a position. Between 1924, when  

 

5.8.  Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), Self Pity, 1934, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 130 × 49 cm, Palace Museum, Beijing  

 

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he assumed directorship of the art department, and 1932, when he resigned to establish his own printing business, he compiled and edited a number of important books for Zhonghua. They included one of the best histories of Chinese painting published up to that time, his Complete His‑ tory of Chinese Painting (Zhongguo huaxue quanshi, 1929), along with illustrated anthologies of Chinese, European, and world painting.21 Zheng’s twenty-five-year career as a serious painter began during his time at Zhonghua [see fig. 6.24]. In 1925 he joined the antiquarian Wind Society and in the same year, before founding the Bee Painting Society, he participated in the Friends of Winter Society, which included notable artists from all over China, such as calligrapher Yu

Youren, painters Jing Hengyi, He Xiangning, Chen Shuren, Gao Jianfu, and Huang Binhong, along with Zhang Daqian and Li Qiujun. When in 1934 the Chinese Painting Society established its journal, Guohua yuekan, it was edited by Zheng Wuchang and He Tianjian. Other literary talents, including Huang Binhong, Lu Danlin, Wang Yachen, and Xie Haiyan, also contributed to the editorial work. One of Zheng’s most significant contributions to the journal is his article, “The Responsibilities That Modern Chinese Painters Should Fulfill,” which urged his colleagues to recognize that Chinese painting had a higher purpose, both national and international, and to see its mission not in personal terms but at the higher level of cultural construction. “China is now lagging behind other countries in all ways, military, political, and economic,” he wrote. “The only thing about which we can be proud is our culture. Painting holds a very important position in our traditional culture, but since the beginning of the modern era, our people have been unsatisfied with the political and economic situation, and further doubt that our painting is as good as that of other [cultures]. . . . If one values painting in the history of human culture, then one should realize that the function of painting is not only to give people enjoyment. Modern Chinese painters should not, therefore, treat painting as just an object of personal amusement but should also carry out the mission of cultural construction and cultural preservation.” 22 Zheng Wuchang retained this sense of mission and remained active in the activities of the Chinese Painting Society until it was disbanded under the Communist government.23 After the war he was a founder of the Shanghai Art and Tea Society (Shanghai meishu chahui), a large and active group that was instrumental in the editing and publishing of the important reference book, 1947 Yearbook of Chinese Art.24 He died by suicide in 1952 during the ThreeAnti Five-Anti Campaign. The Chinese Painting Society enjoyed support from some of Shanghai’s wealthiest and most socially privileged circles, but did not limit its membership to the elite. The key factor behind the society’s significance was the artistic caliber of its membership, which included many of the nation’s best ink painters. The society brought together artists of quite different regional, social, and educational backgrounds, men and women committed in common to raising the quality of Chinese ink painting, to the pursuit of innovation, and to disseminating its best possibilities as widely as possible. The group did not limit the scope of its artistic approach but accepted colleagues of the various different schools of painting that proliferated in the 1930s. Its administrators were, in succession, Qian Shoutie, He Tianjian, and, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, Wang Yachen.25

Most artists who came to prominence in the 1930s were born before the 1911 revolution but educated as citizens of the new Republic, and many were filled with a sense of civic responsibility toward building a new nation. This goal was largely frustrated during the warlord era but reemerged after the establishment of the Nanjing government in 1928. As they wrestled during this period with the meaning of Chinese painting in the modern world, many came to realize that their art not only defined them as individuals but that their practice of guohua also defined them as Chinese. In this light, artists of the Chinese Painting Society began to argue that Chinese painters had a responsibility to the nation. The Revival of Landscape Painting

The new class of patrons that emerged in treaty port Shanghai in the nineteenth century often preferred anecdotal figure paintings or auspicious bird-and-flower paintings to landscapes. By the early twentieth century, artists who had studied in Meiji Japan similarly adopted the subjects of figures and animals that were so popular in the Japanese art world. May Fourth cultural reformers specifically identified the orthodox landscape style of the late Qing court atelier as a moribund art to be overthrown. These and other factors conspired to deprive the millennium-old art of landscape painting of its prestige in the Chinese art world and even threatened its very survival. Yet central to the efforts of the Lake Society, Chinese Painting Society, and other revivalist groups was an assumption that the landscape would remain the central genre of Chinese painting. The art historical publications of the late 1920s provided historical support for this viewpoint, that this genre of art should not be considered narrowly—as the face of Qing dynasty court painting—but instead, from the monumental landscape paintings of the Northern Song dynasty to the literati paintings of the Yuan, China’s landscape art, in all its richness and complexity, was the very foundation of China’s greatest artistic tradition. Indeed, to the degree that one accepted literati painting theory, landscape painting preserved traces of both the minds and the hands, the brilliant philosophical, moral, intellectual, and creative spirits of the great men (and occasionally women) of China’s past. In the culturally nationalistic tenor of the Nanjing decade, traditional arts were often deployed in support of the state. If Chinese painting (guohua) were identified with the nation, and with the cultural identity of the Chinese people, landscape painting might be seen as a symbol of China herself. The ethical, social, and aesthetic prestige that adhered to premodern literati painting was thus revived in this new patriotic form. Some of the most prominent landscapists to emerge in  

 

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5.10. Feng Chaoran (1882–1954), Clearing after Snow, 1925, one of a set of four hanging scrolls, ink and light color on paper, 171.9 × 37.6 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

5.9. Wu Hufan (1894–1968), Fantastic Peaks amidst Clouds, 1936, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, exhibited in the Second National Art Exhibition, 1937  

the 1920s and 1930s had direct connections with the elite Suzhou tradition of literati painting, although this was not sufficient to revive landscape painting. Wu Hufan (1894– 1968), scion of a prominent Suzhou family, was the grandson of nineteenth-century official, collector, calligrapher, and seal carver Wu Dacheng. He studied painting with Gu Linshi [see fig. 2.17] as a young man, but then developed his own style based on his explorations of antique painting traditions from his family collection. His 1936 Fantastic Peaks amidst Clouds, in the Style of Zhao Yong (ca. 1290–1360) is painted in a modified version of the courtly Tang and Song dynasty blue-green manner and demonstrates the artist’s art  

 

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historical erudition as well as stylistic innovation [fig. 5.9]. Having settled in the French concession of Shanghai, Wu Hufan was both a staunch defender of China’s traditional artistic practices and a man of the modern world. This painting is characteristic of the personal style he developed in the 1930s, which combined the exquisitely restrained and subtle brushwork of Yuan literati painting with a lush color scheme that lends the work a more immediate sensory appeal. Almost a generation older than his friend Wu Hufan, Feng Chaoran (1882–1954), who also settled on Songshan Lu in the French concession, made similar contributions to  

the survival and development of landscape painting. One such example is his Clearing after Snow, of 1925, on which he wrote of being inspired by seeing a Xu Ben painting of similar title [fig. 5.10]. Like Wu, Feng Chaoran strives in this work to create a strong composition without compromising the subtle brushwork characteristic of the literati tradition. By the 1940s these two artists had risen to the apogee of the Shanghai art market, restoring the art of landscape painting not only to its position of prestige but also to one of a more tangible value. These are only two of the many landscape painters to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, but they are among those most important to reviving this venerable form of art. Women’s Painting and Calligraphy Society

Some elite Chinese families in premodern times had permitted their daughters to study alongside their sons within the family, but it was not until the early twentieth century that it became possible for reform-minded families to educate their daughters at modern schools outside the home. Although much of the discourse about women’s education in the 1910s and 1920s focused on the importance to the nation of educating China’s future mothers, girls became interested in politics and by the 1920s the idea of the career woman also began to appear. With the active encouragement of Cai Yuanpei, some institutions of higher education such as Peking University and the Shanghai Art Academy began accepting female students in 1920. Art education followed a similar pattern. Some women in premodern times had learned to paint at home, just as their sisters had learned to read or write poetry. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for example, Ren Bonian taught his young daughter Ren Xia to paint, and she was said to have perfectly emulated his style. Most modern schools taught Western drawing and perspective, and not Chinese painting, but one of the early private girls schools in Shanghai, the East City Girls School (Chengdong nü­ xiao), which was established around the time of the Hundred Days Reform in the late Qing, taught Chinese painting as part of its regular curriculum.26 The Japaneducated founder, Yang Bomin (1874–1924), was a grandson of the famous Shanghai-school master Zhu Cheng [see fig. 1.2], from whom he had learned to paint bamboo and orchids and to love painting. Yang hired an impressive roster of instructors, men such as educator Huang Yanpei, artist Li Shutong, novelist and journalist Bao Tianxiao, and poet Gu Foying. It was not unusual in the initial period of female education for families such as the Huangs and the Gus to enroll both mothers and daughters in school at the same time. It is said that Yang established one of the earli 

est Chinese painting departments in a modern school, and a number of school graduates became well-known painters. By the mid-1920s some female artists were invited to join painting societies. The Lake Society included many women, beginning with Jin Cheng’s daughter Wang Jin Zhang (Jin Taotao), and many more exhibited in the 1929 national exhibition. The Plain Moon (Suyue) Painting Society, formed by Yang Yi in 1925 at his home near the small south gate of Shanghai’s old city, had as members many prominent male artists, such as Wang Yiting, as well as Yang Xueyao and Yang Xuejiu, daughters of the founding headmaster of East City Girls School, and Gu Fei, sister of its poetry instructor. Yang Xuejiu was one of a number of women who exhibited in the first National Art Exhibition [see fig. 5.1]. Her handsome, well-composed landscape was painted in 1923 on the occasion of a trip to Beijing with her father. The landscape bears inscriptions by both Wang Yiting, her mentor in painting, and Yang Yi, organizer of the Plain Moon art society and author of Haishang molin, the most important biographical treatise on Shanghai painters. This monumental image, with its abstract, almost ornamental, sprinkling of blunt black dots over the mountainous composition, shows strong traces of the style of her teacher Wang Yiting, but the work, as is sometimes typical of a younger painter, is more ambitious, complex, precise, and coherently planned than many of her mentor’s casual paintings of the period. The work is further enlivened by details that might claim to have been observed rather than imagined—her fine-line rendering of a watchtower, gate, and zigzagging section of the Great Wall. Not yet the symbol of China’s national identity that it has become today, the Great Wall seems to have stood out as a topographic feature of the northern landscape that was striking to the eyes of a southern visitor to the then-capital of Beijing. By the time the painting was exhibited in 1929, Yang Xuejiu’s father had died and China’s political center had relocated to Nanjing. The powerful image thus holds multiple layers of nostalgia. Yang Xuejiu was one of the female guohua painters who played an important role in the education of women artists. She inherited her father’s position as director of the East City Girls School following his premature death in 1924. One of a group of female exhibitors in the National Art Exhibition in 1929 to be featured in the Ladies Journal review of the event, she became in 1934 one of the six founders of the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society. All six organizers came from prominent artistic or cultural backgrounds, and many belonged to the Chinese Painting Society, but they did not normally move in the same social circles. The family of Yang Xuejiu, for example, had a comparatively long history of residence in the old Chinese city.  

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Li Qiujun [fig. 5.11] was from a Ningbo banking family but lived in the foreign concessions. Feng Wenfeng, a calligrapher, oil painter, and photographer as well as women’s educator, had recently moved to Shanghai from Hong Kong. Chen Xiaocui (1907–1968), a poet, translator, and painter, was the daughter of a famous popular novelist in Hangzhou. Gu Qingyao (1901–1979) was the granddaughter of scholarpainter Gu Yun, thus a member of a venerable Suzhou gentry family that collected classical painting. Gu Fei (1907– 2008) was born to a prominent family in Nanhui, Pudong, and studied painting at East City Girls School, where her brother taught for a time.27 The society they established to encourage female artists, like the earlier Bee Society and the Chinese Painting Society, brought together members from varied backgrounds who were united in their common love of Chinese painting and calligraphy. In so doing, they established new artistic and social networks that helped to develop the position of women in the art world and, like the Chinese Painting Society, promote artists and the practice of traditional painting. The Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society was founded and held its first exhibition in 1934 [fig. 5.12]; by 1937, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, it had enrolled around 150 members and garnered substantial media attention. The founders were already veterans of the new art world, and many were members of earlier traditionalist groups. Li Qiujun exhibited, as well, with Western-style painters in the Tianmahui. She and female oil painter Pan Yuliang were organizers of the Yiyuan group in 1927, centered on Shanghai Art Academy faculty. The new society was soon joined by a number of other female painters who had achieved prominence through their talent and cultural activism, including Wu Qingxia (1910–2008), from Changzhou, who was highly skilled at figure painting in the late Ming manner [fig. 5.13]; Lu Xiaoman (1903–1965), notorious for her love affair and marriage to the romantic poet Xu Zhimo; Zhou Lianxia, as famous for her writing and her social life as for her painting; Pang Zuoyu, a niece of the prominent collector Pang Yuanji; Bao Yahui; and others. Most of these women, born shortly before or after 1900, benefitted from the modern-style education that became available to women in the early twentieth century. Founder Li Qiujun attended the prestigious Wuben School for Girls and Yang Xuejiu the East City Girls School. Feng Wenfeng (also known as Flora Fong) studied abroad. Gu Fei attended first a normal school in Pudong (across the river from Shanghai proper) before enrolling at the East City Girls School. The growing belief that marshalling the talents of men and women alike was important to modernizing China  

 

 

 

 

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promised to give women, or at least urban women, unprecedented opportunities. At the same time, the nature of traditional Chinese brushwork required years of practice, and most of these ink painters supplemented their Western-style educations by studying with an older master of their traditionalist art. Yang Xuejiu learned from her father but was clearly influenced by Wang Yiting and Wu Changshi as well. Chen Xiaocui studied with Feng Chaoran. Both Li Qiujun and Chen Xiaocui had older brothers who also painted, and Li Qiujun sought tutelage from the distinguished female painter Wu Shujuan (1853–1930). Gu Fei later studied with Huang Binhong, and Lu Xiaoman with He Tianjian. This cohort of educated women thus was inspired to carry forward the mission into the next generation, developing a range of Chinese painting styles and traditions and bringing them into the education of the next generation of young men and women. Two of these female artists, Yang Xuejiu and Feng Wenfeng, directed girls schools. Many others taught painting at modern schools in Shanghai. Some, such as Gu Qingyao, even became sufficiently famous to establish private studios that recorded master-disciple relationships of a quasi-traditional kind. Like the societies that came before them, the group published an occasional journal and held annual exhibitions. The journal was edited by Gu Qingyao and Chen Xiaocui. Li Qiujun allowed her home to be used as a staging area for exhibitions, which were held at the Ningbo Native Place Society gallery. Some of the artists in the group began advertising their price lists in journals and newspapers. Like the members of the Chinese Painting Society and other traditionalist groups, the members of the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society were self-­ conscious of a cultural mission in preserving and promoting Chinese art. For them art was a form of personal expression, a demonstration of their knowledge, skill, and feeling; a marker of membership in a particular segment of society; and for some members it brought income, either through sales or through a profession as an art teacher. By virtue of its “essentially Chinese” character, in the context of China’s national emergency of the 1930s, art was displayed as a statement of patriotism and national pride. For all of these purposes, the apparatus of modern publicity, advertising, and display were brought to bear on the project of preserving a traditional form of art. By the time of the Japanese invasion in 1937, women in China’s urban centers were thoroughly integrated into the fabric of Chinese art and culture. Members of the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society continued to paint, often for the sake of friendship rather than display, throughout the war years, and the society was briefly revived before the Communist victory in  

5.12. Group portrait of selected members of the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society at the inaugural exhibition, 1934

5.11. Li Qiujun (1899–1971), Cloudy Mountain, undated (1920s), hanging scroll, ink on paper, exhibited in the First National Art Exhibition in 1929  

1949. Although it was then dissolved and many of its members subjected to substantial difficulties, in 1957 a number of the group’s most important members (including Li Qiujun, Chen Xiaocui, Pang Zuoyu, Zhou Lianxia, and Wu Qingxia) were appointed by the Shanghai municipal government to sinecures at the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting. Exhibitions Abroad

Artists within these traditionalist circles rejected the belief of many Chinese reformers that Western civilization was entirely superior to that of Asia but instead saw the potential of an alternate course. While all might agree with the need for modernization, they argued that those who sought to replace Chinese art and culture with that of the West

5.13. Wu Qingxia (1910–2008), Lohan, 1928, fan, ink and color on gold paper, private collection  

were misguided. Indeed, they viewed China’s long and rich cultural patrimony as a source of national pride and a foundation on which a new culture could and should be built. Thus, to be an artist was to accept a weighty responsibility, which included scholarly research, writing, and display of China’s classical art as well as the creation of art that would be innovative yet still fall within the realm they defined as that of traditional practice. In these ways artists could display the full range of China’s past accomplishments at the same time that they demonstrated the vigor of Chinese contemporary culture. The modern institution of the exhibition was the area in which artists sought to work out both their aesthetic ideas and their program to revive and protect China’s traditions. Such exhibitions might focus on antiquities, or conThe golden age of guohua in the 1930s

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temporary art, or might combine them in a single exhibition. Japanese foreign ministry archives record a massive display of antiquities that was organized by Wang Yiting, Pang Yuanji, and other Shanghai notables with Japanese government support in 1928.28 It was deemed sufficiently important that the emperor and empress of Japan made an appearance at the Tokyo showing. The 1929 national exhibition in Shanghai, while devoted to contemporary art, was nevertheless admired by many viewers for its displays of premodern painting, calligraphy, bronzes, and seals.29 As in their practice of art, the traditionalist artists interwove past and present in their curatorial activities. The government of Japan had recognized the value of art in its pursuit of “soft power” since the nineteenth century. By the 1930s the Nanjing government was convinced that such cultural activities were worth supporting because of their benefit to China’s international stature. Particularly after the Japanese annexation of Manchuria in the fall of 1931, the Chinese government focused unprecedented attention on artistic exchanges with Europe. Although China’s participation in international expositions had met with only modest success in the past, Chinese cultural leaders were far more cosmopolitan in the 1930s and thus far better prepared to present Chinese culture in terms that could be appreciated outside Asia. Without question the most significant international display of the Nanjing decade was the enormous exhibition of Chinese art from antiquity to 1800 held in 1935 and 1936 at Burlington House in London, an event cosponsored by the Chinese government. Extremely successful with the public and critics alike, and well documented in multiple catalog publications, the exhibit provided the foundations upon which subsequent Chinese art history developed in the English-speaking world. The idea for such a showing in London was first proposed by British collectors and scholars. After the Chinese side accepted the idea in the fall of 1934, retired officials such as Ye Gongchuo and Cai Yuanpei served on an organizational committee controlled by art-loving officials in the Republican government. On the committee, for example, sat the deputy minister of communications, Zhang Daofan, who had studied oil painting in Britain, and the French-educated deputy minister of railways, Zeng Zhongming, who was married to Fang Junbi, the first female Chinese graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. These busy Western-educated individuals delegated the curatorial decisions to specialized committees of scholars, artists, and connoisseurs. After several months of work, an initial selection of more than two thousand works was shipped to Shanghai—from the Palace Museum, the Exhibition Office of Ancient Artifacts (Guwu chen­liesuo, which  

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housed the collections of the Qing palaces in Shenyang and Rehe), the Academia Sinica (then excavating the Shang royal tombs at Anyang), the National Beiping Library, the Henan Museum, the Anhui Library, and other institutions.30 The Palace Museum alone shipped 121 crates of objects. After some negotiation the Chinese and British organizers reached an agreement on a checklist of about eight hundred masterpieces of bronzes, painting, calligraphy, ceramics, lacquers, cloisonné, enamels, embroideries, jades, folding fans, and rare woodblock printed books. The objects loaned from China were transported to London on the H.M.S. ­Suffolk, lent by the British Admiralty for the purpose. These extra­ ordinary exhibits were matched by objects from royal collections in Britain, Sweden, and Japan, as well as public and private collections throughout America, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, India, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and Turkey.31 Although specialist reviewers in both China and the West raised questions about the curatorial selections in their exhibition reviews, the show was nevertheless an extra­ ordinary success and led to a great expansion in popular and scholarly European interest in the arts and culture of China. Whatever the colonial powers of Europe might have thought of contemporary China, the public was convinced of its ancient grandeur. An exhibition that sent so many national treasures abroad was no less significant in China. The organizational committee made the decision to hold a preview exhibition in Shanghai before the objects were shipped to London. The London International Exhibition of Chinese Art Preview opened to great fanfare on April 8, 1935, in a Renaissancestyle building formerly occupied by the German Club at number 23 on the Bund. Tickets were priced at two yuan, more than twice the cost of the most expensive movie theater in the city, but were reported to have sold out every day. The closing date was extended to May 5 to accommodate the crowds of visitors. Such an exhibition of imperial master­ pieces had never taken place in China before, and despite the high ticket price, some art lovers visited it repeatedly. The Shanghai newspaper Shenbao reviewed it favorably and commented that the high ticket price was actually a bargain, when compared with the expense that would be required to visit each of the lending institutions separately. If the exhibition succeeded in making China’s artistic culture known to the outside world, its dazzling quality inspired the cultural pride of many Chinese who viewed it. Most important from an art historical perspective, the opportunity to see with their own eyes masterpieces of premodern painting long hidden in the imperial palace inspired new ways of thinking about art of the past among some of China’s own artists. Conceptually and technically, the period following

this exhibition saw a rapid qualitative improvement in the painting of many of those artists who had visited the show.32 Although artists may have had a general familiarity with old paintings from black and white reproductions, the chance to study the brushwork of the old masters firsthand stimulated new conceptual and technical insights. Treasures of China’s past were well received by international audiences, but it was significant that in the 1930s European audiences also engaged with contemporary ink painting. Liu Haisu participated in organizing the Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Painters at the Kunst­ verein Frankfurt in 1931. It showed roughly one hundred paintings including twenty-three by Liu himself. A short catalog text by W. Y. Ting (Ding Wenyuan) distinguishes between the different styles of ink painting exhibited. The majority were of the “literati school” but the “antiquating style” (which consciously holds to antique models), the “school of the middle way” (which approaches naturalism and unites Chinese and European styles), and the “Southern school” (which sought ties to masters of the early Qing dynasty) were also represented. Liu Haisu considered himself a member of the literati school, which in his definition abandoned all color, using only the tones of dilute ink for artistic expression. While we might not necessarily adopt such labels for the various trends in Chinese painting of the time, it is significant that the Chinese organizers sought to present to European audiences a pluralistic framework that would show Chinese ink painting to be every bit as rich and diverse as European oil painting. While Liu Haisu at one point saw this modern Chinese art exhibition in explicitly comparative terms, in competition with a modern Japanese painting show that opened in Dusseldorf on the same day, nevertheless, he and other writers emphasized to their Euro­ pean readers an ongoing two-way exchange between China and the West. China began absorbing European illusionism as early as the sixteenth century, they emphasized, while Europe imported not only the decorative arts and chinoiserie but also, through its engagement with East Asian prints in the nineteenth century, the very foundations of modernist painting.33 Between 1933 and 1935 alone there were at least seventeen exhibitions of twentieth-century ink painting in Europe. Two years after Liu Haisu’s show, Xu Beihong and André Dezarrois organized an exhibition of modern Chinese painting at the Jeu de Paume in Paris [fig. 5.14]. Opening in May, the exhibition included 191 modern works by such artists as Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, Huang Binhong, and Pan Tianshou. In the catalog’s preface the French writer Paul Valéry expressed sympathy and understanding of its aims, describing artists emerging from “an environment of ruins

5.14.  Xu Beihong demonstrating Chinese painting in Moscow, 1935

and a crisis of innovation.”  3 4 Xu Beihong wrote in the catalog that the exhibition demonstrates the “Renaissance of Chinese art.” A number of works from the exhibition, which subsequently toured to Milan, Moscow, and Leningrad, entered the French national collection. In its enthusiastic public reception, it achieved many of the organizers’ goals. The Chinese Contemporary Painting exhibition, held in Berlin from January 20 through March 4, 1934, was larger, with 297 modern works, and was extremely successful with both its audiences and German critics. Apparently initiated by William Cohn and Liu Haisu, the German-speaking Cai Yuanpei assisted in the effort, Ye Gongchuo facilitated the project by obtaining forty-five thousand dollars in funds from the Chinese government, and Gao Qifeng, who died before the opening, played a key organizational role. Wu Hufan was asked to select the works, which he borrowed from private collections and artists, and supplemented from his own holdings.35 The show later traveled to Hamburg, Dresden, Bonn, Amsterdam, and several other European cities with continued success.36 The Chinese government presented the State Museum of Berlin with a gift of works from the exhibition to establish a permanent installation of modern Chinese painting.37 After seeing the exhibition in The Hague in 1937, a Dutch reviewer praised the “good taste and insight” of the organizers, while another recognized “an art which draws on European elements without surrendering its own individual character.” 38 Architecture and Urban Planning

The remaking of China as a nation that was modern but that remained culturally strong on its own terms may be most evident in the public architectural and city-planning programs of the Republican period. Chinese political leaders and administrators who had studied abroad struggled with the issues involved in modernizing a traditional urban The golden age of guohua in the 1930s

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fabric. Westernizing trends promoted by such urban planners as Sun Ke (Sun Yat-sen’s American-educated son) led to demolition of Guangzhou’s eight-hundred-year-old city wall in 1920 in order to construct broad boulevards for convenient transportation. Yet an international architectural movement of the early twentieth century that was built on the beaux arts style began to emphasize the value of indigenous architectural forms. Foreign architects working in China, most notably the American Henry K. Murphy, and a host of younger Chinese colleagues successfully advocated construction of modern architecture with Chinese characteristics. On the basis of his speeches and publications in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Sun Yat-sen is often credited for modernization plans put into effect after his death. In his 1920 plan The Internationalization of China (and in his 1922 Chinese text, Jianguo fanglüe shiye jihua [Strategy to build the nation and plan for industry]), Sun Yat-sen suggested the creation of three deep-water international ports. In addition to the northern and southern harbors in Tianjin and Guangzhou, Shanghai was to be one of two possible sites for a port in the Yangzi delta region. Two years after Sun Yat-sen’s death, in June of 1927, the Republican government established the Shanghai Special Municipal Government, which reported directly to the central Nanjing government. Almost exactly two years later, in July of 1929, this government passed the Greater Shanghai Plan, inspired by Sun Yat-sen’s Strategy to Build the Nation. Although Shanghai was of great importance to the new Nationalist government both economically and politically, the Chinese government did not actually control major areas of the city, which were still separately governed as the French and the international concessions. The formerly walled Chinese city in the southern part of Shanghai, which Sun Yat-sen referred to as the “native city,” while close to the river, was too densely populated for further development. It was thus decided to build a new Shanghai city to the north of the concessions, in the Jiangwan area near the Huangpu River and its intersection with the Yangzi River. The southern and western parts of Jiangwan were connected to the existing urban areas, including the northern edge of the International Settlement and its Chinese suburbs. A site of about 1.8 square miles was cleared for the political center. The Greater Shanghai Plan included three major areas: the political, commercial, and residential. The existing old city and the concessions were considered the commercial districts, while west and south of the concessions were to be developed as residential areas. Spacious axial boulevards would radiate from the civic center, intersected by concentric rings of roads, in a dramatic beaux arts urban plan 110

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resembling those of Paris and Washington, D.C.39 The new Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) Road completely surrounded both the foreign concessions and the old city like a beltway. The new road connected the new and old parts of the city plan, but conceptually its encirclement of the foreign concessions contained their further expansion and suggested the certainty of their eventual return to Chinese sovereignty. Of greatest significance to the topic of this chapter is the complex of new civic buildings constructed in Jiangwan between 1929 and 1937. With selection of the design by Lü Yanzhi for the Nanjing mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, by the late 1920s the Nationalist government had settled on an architectural model in which the modern Chinese state might be represented by a new form of architecture. In this hybrid, or in the terminology of Henry Murphy, “adaptive architecture,” the principles of early twentieth-century Euro-American public architecture were modified to create modern Chinese architectural forms. While the roofs and ornamentation might resemble traditional Chinese architecture, such buildings were usually constructed using up-todate international techniques and fireproof materials. They adhere closely to the same conventions of beaux arts architecture that yielded the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments in Washington, D.C., and many American college campuses and public buildings constructed in the early twentieth century. Soon after the Greater Shanghai Plan was approved, the architect Dong Dayou (1899–1973) went to work on the planning committee for the new city. A graduate of Tsinghua University Architecture School in Beijing, he had studied in the United States for six years, graduating from the University of Minnesota. Along with the late Lü Yanzhi, Dong Dayou was one of the first generation of professionally trained architects in China, and he worked with Murphy on the design of a cemetery for heroes of the revolution at Linggusi, adjacent to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum.40 In 1929 he headed the Chinese Architectural Association and was named director of the architectural office of the New Shanghai City Central District Construction Committee. In October 1929 a competition was held for design of the new municipal government building. Although the jury awarded first prize to architect Zhao Chen (1898–1978) in February 1930, the authorities set aside the winning plan in favor of a final version by Dong Dayou that synthesized the strong points of the top three submissions. As finally approved, the concept of the municipal government building was in the classical Chinese palace style, or what Dong Dayou referred to as the Chinese Renaissance style. It would resemble a Chinese post-and-lintel structure with a hipped and gabled tile roof and coffered interior ceilings.  

 

5.15. Shanghai Library, designed by Dong Dayou, 1936, photo by the authors

The Greek or Roman columns of many beaux arts buildings of the period, such as the San Francisco Opera House of 1932, were replaced by perfectly cylindrical red columns in the Chinese manner; Doric or Ionian capitals were replaced with Chinese bracketing. The building was to be heavily polychromed and gilded in the palace manner. Although constructed primarily of reinforced concrete, and owing its structure to beaux arts conventions, the building’s most visible elements of roofing and ornamentation were self-consciously Chinese. Moreover, the main government building would face south, as palace buildings traditionally did. At the same time, however, the architect abandoned the encircling courtyard plan of traditional Chinese architecture and replaced it with expansive symmetrically arranged wings, presenting an extremely long and impressive façade. Perhaps most important to its modern civic function and stately appearance, a grand plaza that could accommodate a hundred thousand citizens was built to the building’s south. Construction began in June 1931 and by January of the next year was 80 percent completed. On January 28 the northern part of Shanghai became, for six months, a battle zone, as China fought a six-month war with Japan. Construction completely stopped, but fortunately damage to the site was easily repaired, and building resumed in

June 1932. The four-story government building was completed in October 1933. In front, and facing south across the plaza, rose a towering bronze image of Sun Yat-sen sculpted by Jiang Xin. High atop a stone pedestal, it was set at the apogee of a nine-step, three-tiered stone platform that was ornamented at the corners with bronze ding vessels, traditional symbols of political authority. Over the next several years other key buildings, including the Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Library, the Shanghai Municipal Stadium, the Shanghai Municipal Hospital, the National Conservatory of Music, and the Shanghai Municipal Radio Station were completed. Something of the original symmetrical plan of the civic center may still be discerned in Jiangwan, where the carefully restored government building, on the original central axis, is now part of the Physical Education University, and the somewhat remodeled museum, to its east, is now a naval hospital. Symmetrically opposite the former museum to the west, and facing it, is the former Shanghai Library. The old library, now Tongji Middle School, is the structure in the original complex that today best reflects its original appearance [fig. 5.15]. Although bearing the scars of wartime bullets and Cultural Revolution slogans, and missing windowpanes and many yellow rooftiles, it nevertheless preserves its The golden age of guohua in the 1930s

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architectural ornament and stately façade. Although a beaux arts building in its classical proportions, hierarchy of elements, arched windows and doors, and archaic ornamentation, it substitutes a Chinese tower and roof complex for the flat or domed roof of the European tradition and replaces the European ornamentation with motifs from China’s own classical past. In a reinforced concrete structure, there is of course no need for the complex wooden bracketing that would have supported a tile Chinese palace roof. Many such indigenous architectural forms are added, however, as pure ornamentation. Elaborate bracket forms are sculpted where the roof meets the façade and at the tower’s corners; likewise, imitations of wooden rafter ends are added as decoration under the eaves. Ornate tile ornamentation is applied to the ends of the central ridges, while smaller auspicious creatures, intended as references to those on palace or temple roofs, are applied to the upturned eaves. The balustrades around the tower and over the door, while similar to those in many beaux arts buildings, are modeled on the marble railings constructed in palaces and temples under Ming royal patronage. The arched portal of the old library building is ornamented with lotus scrolls, referring to Chinese Buddhist designs from a thousand years earlier. Indeed, many such “neoclassical” motifs, particularly the arched window, had entered China with Buddhism from India by the Tang dynasty (618–960) and may be seen in such brick pagodas as the Great and Small Wild Goose Pagodas in the former Tang capital in Xi’an. In the twentieth century, their revival might evoke the cosmopolitanism and power of China’s greatest imperial dynasty. It was, as well, in the ancient translation of Buddhist architectural forms into Chinese buildings that we find the earliest examples of stone and brick replicas of Chinese wooden architecture. Extending to either side of the main core of the building are two L-shaped wings that embrace a large courtyard (now used for basketball) and open at the front with arched, ornamented portals. These expansive appendages to the building echo palace galleries to be found in both Europe and China—one may find them in such French complexes as the Palace of Fontainebleau and also in such early East Asian Buddhist structures as the Byōdoin at Uji in Japan (1052) or the seventh-century paradise scenes painted on the walls of Tang dynasty caves at Dunhuang. The architects thus skillfully marshaled compositional conventions of both Occident and Orient to create a grandeur that would be felt by a visitor of any nationality, while modifying the ornamentation to leave no doubt as to the culture from which it came.41 When the library’s pair, the Shanghai Museum, was completed in 1936, it devoted its first exhibition to displays  

 

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of architectural plans and models, thus celebrating the Republican urban planning and civic engineering of which it was a part. At the same time, the exhibition highlighted significant progress in this field. No longer entirely dependent on European and American architects, these projects demonstrated the development of homegrown talent, as China’s first generation of modern architects reached maturity. The permanent display envisioned for the Shanghai Museum brought another concern of the Republican era into the new building—the preservation and exhibition of China’s cultural heritage. The Shanghai Museum’s display of antiquities was brought to fruition through the extraordinary efforts of Ye Gongchuo (1881–1968), the founder of the Chinese Painting Society, and a calligrapher and collector in his own right. Ye served as an official in the late Qing and Republican governments, contributing, despite the ups and downs of China’s many short-lived warlord governments, to the critical project of developing modern transportation and communications. Retiring from government service in 1928, Ye Gongchuo devoted the rest of his life to cultural, educational, social, and philanthropic activities, making use of his network of contacts in business and government, along with his personal reputation and persuasive skills, to promote Chinese art and culture.42 Particularly during the decade before the outbreak of the war with Japan, Ye played a key role in Shanghai cultural and art circles. In 1928 he served as an executive member of the planning committee for the First National Art Exhibition, where he established friendships with many artists and contributed essays to the exhibition’s journal.43 In 1929 he helped Cai Yuanpei organize the National Music Conservatory, played a lead role in fund-raising, and served on its board of trustees. He collaborated with Wang Yiting, Li Zuhan, Di Baoxian, Jiang Xin, Zhang Shanzi, and Wu Changshi’s son Dongmai (1885–1963) to organize a Sino-Japanese painting exhibition held in Shanghai in November 1929, and went on to found the Sino-Japanese Artists Association, which organized exchange exhibitions in China and Japan the following year. Ye participated in the planning for Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum in Nanjing and contributed his calligraphy to a pavilion built in 1932, the Yangzhiting, in which visitors might pay their respects to his late friend. In 1934 he joined the board of trustees of the Shanghai Art Academy, along with such civic leaders as Cai Yuanpei, Wang Yiting, Du Yuesheng, and the Shanghai mayor Wu Tiecheng. In the same period he helped the Bengali poet and cultural activist Rabindranath Tagore establish a College of Chinese Studies at his Visva Barati University at Santiniketan.44 In short, the range of cultural activities to which he devoted his energy,  

 

 

and the network of colleagues in the cultural world with whom he worked, was extraordinary. It was thus appropriate that in October 1933, Ye Gongchuo was appointed to take charge of establishing the Shanghai Museum and subsequently became chairman of the museum’s board of trustees. In 1936, Ye also accepted responsibility for directing the Shanghai Cultural Documents Society (Shanghai wenxian baocun hui) and planning the Shanghai Cultural Documents exhibition. The latter, which opened on June 1, 1937, as the new museum’s first major exhibition, brought together historical materials and art. The objects on display at the new Shanghai Museum came from three sources: those the museum had acquired by purchase, those acquired by donation, and those on loan from collectors. Ye Gongchuo personally recruited lenders to the show, corresponding with such collectors as Wu Hufan, Zhang Daqian, Jiang Xin, Zhang Kunyi, and Gao Qifeng. Many were his colleagues in the Chinese Painting Society. Friends Wu Hufan and Zhang Daqian not only lent their own excellent holdings but arranged for the loan of works from other prominent collections. On July 7, 1937, six weeks after the exhibition opened to the public, Japanese and Chinese troops came into conflict near Beijing in the Marco Polo Bridge incident, and it was

evident that full-scale war would soon follow. Ye Gongchuo prematurely closed the exhibition and the entire museum on July 12 and over the next ten days supervised careful packing of the exhibits and the museum’s permanent collection, which were transported to the French concession for storage in the Aurora University Museum. Three weeks later, on August 13, 1937, the government complex came under fierce attack, the municipal government building was shelled, and the victorious invaders took over the newly constructed area as part of their military base. The Chinese Renaissance style, or the Chinese beaux arts style, was a symbol of the hopes and plans of the Republican government. Even more ambitious plans for reconstruction of the city of Nanjing were made by teams of architects, both foreign and Chinese, who were hired by the new government.46 With the outbreak of war, the optimism with which the decade began was completely crushed, and these complexes, with their distinctive architecture profiles, thereafter stood as reminders of those unrealized hopes. The Republican government retreated inland and never completed the Greater Shanghai Plan. It was not until 1994 that Sun Yat-sen’s dreams for Shanghai were put into action with the development of Pudong and the internationalization of the city on Chinese terms.47

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6

Art in Wartime 1937–1949

On December 12, 1936, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) was kidnapped in Xi’an by two of his own generals. They held him hostage until Christmas Day, by which time he had agreed to abandon both his conciliatory policy toward Japanese aggression and his domestic suppression of Communists. One of his captors, Zhang Xueliang, whose father had been murdered by the Japanese in Manchuria in 1928, had refused orders to lead his army against fellow Chinese at the nearby Yan’an Communist base. Chiang was released after a meeting with Communist emissary Zhou Enlai on December 24, when it appeared that the groundwork for a United Front against further foreign incursions was laid.1 Few could imagine that when war erupted the following summer, it would last for eight years, and it would require dropping American atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Japanese occupation of China’s coastal heartland. Artists were forced to choose among several courses of action by the outbreak of the war and subsequent Japanese occupation: to seek safety in the foreign-controlled concessions of Hong Kong, Macao, or Shanghai; to flee inland to areas still under Chinese control; to join the Communist army at its bases in Shaanxi or Anhui; to join the Nationalist army; to submit to enemy occupation; or to seek refuge abroad.2 Despite communication between them, the art worlds of these various locales began to diverge, particularly once the war settled into a stalemate in 1940, after the collaborationist Chinese government of Wang Jingwei was established at Nanjing. From that point, most of China’s artists lived under one of three governments: the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in western China, the Communist-controlled territory in northern Shaanxi, or the puppet government of Wang Jingwei in the coastal 115

6.1. Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), Still Life, oil on canvas, exhibited in the Second National Art Exhibition, 1937

6.2. Li Keran (1907–1989), Mount Yulong (View of Xuzhou), oil on canvas, exhibited in the Second National Art Exhibition, 1937

 

 

region. Nevertheless, the threat of national annihilation led most artists, regardless of where they found themselves, to rethink the purposes of art and, whether temporarily or permanently, to put the national tragedy ahead of individual concerns. Thus the ambition of the urban modernist movements, the optimism of the new guohua (Chinese ink-andcolor painting) groups, and even the revolutionary fervor of the modernist printmakers were all replaced by a new public face—one in which art reflected concern for the survival of their culture and nation.  

Peaks amidst Clouds [see fig. 5.9], exemplified the successful efforts of painters and theorists to maintain and revive China’s classical painting traditions. Oil paintings reproduced in the catalog document the technical and stylistic maturity of Western-style Chinese artists. A cubist still life by the French-trained Lin Fengmian [fig. 6.1], director of the academy in Hangzhou, is a good example of modernist oil painting in tune with international trends of the day. More significant, however, might be the emergence of fresh styles as well as the appearance of a new generation of domestically trained painters in the 1930s. Li Keran (1907– 1989), whose fauvist oil landscape Mount Yunlong (View of Xuzhou) [fig. 6.2] appeared in the exhibition, had learned ink painting in his hometown of Xuzhou, Jiangsu, before enrolling at the Shanghai Art Academy in 1925. He worked briefly as an art teacher in Xuzhou and then entered the newly founded National West Lake Art School in 1929, where he studied oil painting with Lin Fengmian and André Claudot (1892–1982). In his first year at school, Li and several classmates, including his best friend Zhang Tiao (1901–1934), had organized a painting club, the Hangzhou Eighteen Society. The group exhibited its work at the YMCA in Shanghai in May 1931, with a catalog to which Lin Fengmian and Lu Xun both contributed prefaces, although Lu Xun’s was torn out by government censors. Unfortunately, the antiCommunist sweep then being carried out by the Nationalist Party caught some of the left-leaning art students in its net. Zhang was arrested, and despite Lin Fengmian’s earnest and  

The Second National Art Exhibition

Only two and a half months before the all-out Japanese invasion of China, from April 1 through April 23, 1937, the Second National Art Exhibition was held at the newly constructed Art Gallery in Nanjing. As Minister of Education Wang Shijie wrote in his catalog preface, by the time the publication would appear, many of the exhibited works had vanished in the flames of war. The catalog commemorated not only the lost works of art but implicitly also the peaceful decade in which they had been painted and the dream of a restored national unity. Although the showing was divided into nine sections—architectural plans and models, arts and crafts, books, modern ink painting and calligraphy, photography, premodern ink painting and calligraphy, sculpture, seal carvings, and Western-style painting—painting continued to dominate in both quality and quantity.3 The subtle brushwork of Wu Hufan’s 1936 guohua painting, Fantastic  

 

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initially successful efforts to protect his students, he could in the end only advise them to flee their certain arrest. Li hastily left school in the fall of 1931, with travel money provided by his teacher, and returned to Xuzhou. He taught at the Xuzhou Art School in 1937, when he exhibited this unusual landscape of his hometown, a work of appealing simplicity and tranquility. Outbreak of War

On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops in the vicinity of Beijing, claiming to have been fired upon by Chinese soldiers, launched a retaliatory attack. By the end of July, Beijing and Tianjin had fallen to Japanese occupation and all-out war was immanent. The Chinese government prepared to establish wartime bases in China’s inland provinces. Some artists then working in Beijing, like Pang Xunqin, fled with nothing but a roll of paintings, his wife, and his two children. Zhang Daqian was incarcerated by Japanese troops for a time. When freed, he taught briefly at Japanese-controlled Beiping Art Academy. It was not until May 1938 that he escaped to his native Sichuan. Many others stayed behind, living for the next eight years under Japanese occupation. The new Shanghai city center at Jiangwan was pounded by Japanese artillery on August 13, opening gaping holes in the walls and roof of the municipal government building designed by Dong Dayou. Jiang Xin’s monumental bronze image of Sun Yat-sen was toppled from its pedestal, soon to be melted down when the government center was occupied by enemy forces. Refugees from Zhabei, adjacent to the Japanese quarter of Hongkou, poured south across the Garden Bridge into the European districts. On August 23 stray bombs fell on the international concession, hitting a Nanjing Road department store and an American military installation. In October the Japanese mounted an amphibious landing and on October 31 warned all foreign nationals to evacuate the old Chinese city of Shanghai (Nanshi, the south city) in preparation for an aerial attack. Wang Yiting, whose home, the Catalpa Garden (Ziyuan), was near the center of the formerly walled Chinese city, moved temporarily to the home of his eldest son in the international concession. Hearing rumors that the Japanese intended to appoint him puppet mayor of a Japaneseoccupied Shanghai, however, Wang fled to Hong Kong. On November 9 the garden estate where he had entertained artist friends, Buddhist philanthropists, and foreign dignitaries for almost two decades was partially destroyed and the family’s possessions looted. Less than a week later, on November 14, the wellequipped campus of New China Art Academy (Xinhua yizhuan)—located across Zhaojiabang Creek, just south of  

the French concession, with its up-to-date textile studio, metal shop, and wood shop—was completely destroyed in three separate bombing raids. Ironically, the school’s president, Wang Yachen, who had studied in Tokyo and Paris, and a Japanese-trained painting professor, Zhu Qizhan, had just completed pedagogical investigations in Japan in preparation for a curricular expansion. Despite three months of fierce resistance, Shanghai fell under Japanese control in December. New China Art Academy rented six rooms in the French concession and resumed classes. Following this model, in the spring of 1938 the Suzhou Art Academy also moved to a temporary campus in the French concession. With the failure of the Nationalist government to organize an effective defense of the capital, the city was helpless when, on December 13, the Japanese military launched a ferociously brutal assault. Their revenge on the Chinese army and the city’s civilian population, which was soon known as the Rape of Nanking, continued for six weeks, long after the battle was won.4 Between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand Chinese were killed, and a third of the city’s architecture was destroyed. In all, as many as fifteen million to twenty million Chinese lost their lives during the eight-year Sino-Japanese War. Progress on most aspects of China’s development came to a halt as individuals, families, and institutions attempted to survive the desperate situations in which they found themselves. Although one of the explicit Japanese goals in invading China was to liberate Asia from Euro-American colonial domination, from 1937 until the end of 1941 they avoided further incursions into the foreign concessions, which might bring Western powers to the battlefield against them. Despite encirclement by Japanese occupying forces, and the resulting economic dislocations, these areas maintained fragile vestiges of normalcy until the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the first half of the war, therefore, the solitary island (gudao) of Shanghai’s treaty port provided a temporary refuge for many endangered people, a publication outlet for resistance propaganda, a site for benefit exhibitions, and a space in which Shanghai artists continued many activities as before. Many schools, newspapers, and publishers in the concessions continued to operate, and gudao Shanghai became a center of anti-Japanese propaganda. In the earliest days of the war, artists in the commercial publishing industry redeployed the power of their profession to assist the war effort. Teams of artists and reporters, including a group of Shanghai Art Academy alumni headed by Shen Yiqian, photographed, painted, and sketched the various battlefronts for publication in Modern Miscellany and other periodicals, while a group of academic artists led by Xu Beihong stu 

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dents Wu Zuoren and Feng Fasi traveled to record Chinese soldiers at the front in Henan. On July 28, Shanghai leaders of the worlds of art, literature, drama, film, music, and education established the National Salvation Association.5 In addition to publishing Salvation Daily, its drama team wrote and performed propaganda plays in Shanghai and throughout the region. The Resist Japan Cartoon Propaganda Team (Kangri manhua xuanchuandui) was founded in August 1937, using Shanghai as the base to publish and organize exhibitions and displays of resistance propaganda. The group, headed by Ye Qianyu, famous for his comic strip “Mr. Wang” (Wang xiansheng), included many other celebrity cartoonists, including Zhang Leping, whose comic strip “Sanmao” was even more popular.6 The group published short-lived periodicals such as Resist the Enemy Cartoons (Kangdi manhua). Equally ambitious, they organized a Resist the Enemy Cartoons exhibition and Battlefield Sketch exhibition that they took to many cities, from nearby Zhenjiang and Nanjing to Wuhan, and from Jinhua, Zhejiang, across all of China, eventually stopping in Shangyao, Changsha, Guilin, and Chongqing. The Shanghai Comics Circles National Salvation Association (Shanghai manhuajie jiuwang xiehui) was founded by cartoonist Lu Shaofei and his colleagues, including Ye Qianyu and Ding Cong, on August 14, 1937, the day after the battle for Shanghai began. Their publication, National Salvation Cartoons (Jiuwang manhua), the first cartoon magazine dedicated to resistance propaganda that attained national influence, debuted on September 20, 1937, and published eleven issues over the course of the three-month battle.7 Even before the attack on Shanghai’s Chinese city, activist artists began holding benefit exhibitions to contribute to the northern war effort. The fourth floor of the Daxin Department Store on Nanjing Road (then spelled Da Sun, now No. 1 Department Store) was a frequent venue for such events. From July 17 to July 21 three Shanghai Art Academy graduates who worked in the print industry—painter and journalist Shen Yiqian, cartoonist Zhang Wenyuan, and photojournalist Yu Chuangshuo—exhibited their work at Daxin, with all proceeds donated to benefit troops at the front. In the same galleries from October 22 to November 15, the Chinese Painting Society and the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society held an exhibition and benefit lottery to which many stars of the contemporary Chinese art world—including Wang Yiting, Wang Yachen, Chen Xiaodie, Li Qiujun, He Tianjian, Zheng Wuchang, Wu Qingxia, and Zhou Lianxia—donated their works. A raffle was held, with holders of the ten-dollar winning tickets receiving one of the exhibited paintings. The remainder of the works were auctioned, with the opening bid set at fif 

 

 

 

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teen dollars, and all proceeds going to support troops on the front. The Wuhan Period

Chiang Kai-shek’s military strategy of outlasting the Japanese occupation required relocating the capital and as much of China’s industry as could be moved to the inland provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. Thus, before Nanjing had even fallen, preparations were announced for a new capital in Chongqing. In 1938, with the Japanese occupation of his hometown, Li Keran joined the large number of patriotic writers, cartoonists, and artists who assembled at the Yangzi River city of Wuhan to create propaganda that would marshal the will of the Chinese people to resist the invaders. Under the directorship of Communist leader Zhou Enlai and Japan-educated scholar Guo Moruo, Li worked as a member of the arts propaganda division of a collaborative Nationalist and Communist group called the Third Bureau of the Political Department of the National Military Council. The arts section was supervised by the dramatist Tian Han, who had previously directed a private art and theater academy in Shanghai in collaboration with Xu Beihong.8 This military mobilization of artists, writers, and performers brought arts propaganda into the national spotlight. Core members of National Salvation Cartoons—including Ye Qianyu, Zhang Leping, Te Wei, and Hu Kao—organized themselves as the First Cartoon Propaganda Team (Manhua xuanquandui diyidui) and moved from Shanghai to Wuhan to work for the same propaganda effort after Shanghai fell in December 1937.9 In January 1938 they initiated Kangzhan manhua (War of resistance cartoons), a continuation of National Salvation Cartoons. Much of their anti-Japanese imagery is gruesome, as were the enemy massacres of Chinese civilians in the early months of the war. A comparatively moderate example of Ye’s propaganda work on a 1938 cover of Kangzhan manhua envisions heartless Japanese soldiers debating the fate of an orphaned baby [fig. 6.3]. Chiang Kai-shek had legalized the Chinese Communist Party on September 23, 1937, merging the Red Army with his own as the Eight Route Army in the north and the New Fourth Army in the south. Printmaker Liu Xian (1915– 1990), who spent 1934 to 1937 studying in Japan, joined the New Fourth Army in 1938. This exquisite small woodcut, carved to mark the first anniversary of the war, depicts the ongoing struggles of China’s military and civilian population. Reflecting both the modernist formal vocabulary of the 1930s, as well as Liu Xian’s own social concerns, this carefully crafted montage retains close links to the print and  

 

 

6.3.  Ye Qianyu (1907–1995), “Kill the child!” “Isn’t it more fun for it to starve?” Cover of War of Resistance Cartoons (Kangzhan manhua), no. 7, April 1, 1938, Hankou  

6.4. Liu Xian (1915–1990), Consolidate Our Unity, Fight the Japanese Aggressors to the End, 1938, woodcut, 11 × 12 cm, Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum, Nanjing

graphic design movements of the 1930s [fig. 6.4]. Woodblock print artists, many of whom already had a strong sense of social mission, particularly embraced this new polemical role, and a great many printmakers left their coastal homes to join the war effort inland. The United Front between the Communist and Nationalist leadership initially permitted joint efforts in producing anti-Japanese propaganda. Printmakers Li Qun, Chen Jiu, Ma Da, Lu Hongji, and Liu Jian’an organized almost one hundred artists from various parts of China into the All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association for an ambitious Anti-Japanese Art exhibition in Wuhan on June 12, 1938.10 Woodblock printmakers, who were often of leftist inclination, were rarely included in previous official exhibitions and often suffered political or legal harassment. The Wuhan group, conceived in the context of the United Front, was one of the first officially recognized Chinese woodcut groups. From this time forward, prints often appeared in the popular press.11 Flight to Inland China

When the Nationalist government retreated to Chongqing, Sichuan province, in the fall of 1937, the Ministry of Education began instructing colleges and universities to move to the interior as well. While government and mili-

 

tary officials traveled directly upriver to Chongqing, the personnel of cultural institutions and schools made their way by more circuitous routes across the south and southwest. When Wuhan fell in October 1938, artists in the Third Bureau relocated to the south, first to Changsha, then to Xiangtan, Hengshan, Hengyang, and finally, by the end of the year, to Guilin. In the spring of 1939, they finally made their way to Chongqing, where, despite suffering more than 160 Japanese bombing raids, they continued to produce work for a variety of magazines and newspapers. China’s universities had supplied the most vigorous opposition to policies of conciliation with Japan; they had also served as the location for numerous anti-Japanese demonstrations. The three most important northern universities—Peking University, Tsinghua, and Nankai—moved to Changsha in separate evacuations after the invasion began, merging to form the National Changsha Temporary University (Guoli Changsha lingshi daxue). In February of 1938, as Japanese incursions near Changsha became more frequent, they relocated to Kunming in Yunnan, and in April took the formal name Southwest United University (Xi’nan lianda). This pattern was followed by China’s art schools and universities as well. In the chaos of the retreat, however, planning and  

 

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financing were often ad hoc and insufficient. Art professors and students fled coastal cities by boat, truck, train, and foot, seeking a safe refuge. The art department of National Central University, the largest university in Republican China, moved to Sichuan in November of 1937, in the process losing most of the equipment necessary for instruction. Yet with comparatively more effective central government support, National Central University experienced a smoother relocation than many other schools. Borrowing a piece of land from Chongqing University at Shapingba, west of Chongqing, they began building a new campus. Eventually the art department was assigned space at Baixi, a newly constructed branch across the Jialing River from the main campus. Art schools in other parts of the country suffered disastrous losses in their flight inland. Although this civilian retreat was different in nature from the Communist Army’s legendary Long March, the difficulties suffered and distances traveled by China’s wartime refugees required similar courage, stamina, and resourcefulness. For some, the unpredictable and often dangerous journey, with many intermediate stops, lasted almost four years. The academies in Beijing and Hangzhou had a particularly difficult resettlement as one after another of their temporary campuses was attacked by the Japanese. At the end of July 1937, when Beijing fell to the Japanese, director Zhao Qi led a small group of professors and several dozen students on an arduous trek from Beijing to the southwestern town of Guling, in the mountains of Jiangxi province near Mount Lu, where they established their first temporary campus. Sculptor Wang Linyi and design instructor Pang Xunqin—traveling with crates of plaster casts of classical sculpture, pigments, and paper that had been newly acquired in Shanghai—journeyed to rejoin their colleagues. After Nanjing fell, the Ministry of Education ordered the school to travel by river back to Wuhan and then on to a new base at Yuanling in Hunan. At roughly the same time, in December 1937, Lin Fengmian and Lin Wenzheng led two hundred of their students in an evacuation of the campus of the National Art Academy at Hangzhou. First traveling by foot and wooden boat from Hangzhou to Zhuji, they moved next to Guixi in Jiangxi and then on to Changsha before eventually making their way to Yuanling in Hunan to join the Beiping Art Academy. Although Lin Fengmian was able to carry some of his ink paintings, and the school moved part of its library, Lin and his colleagues were forced to leave their cumbersome oil paintings behind. The Hangzhou academy employed many of the most talented members of China’s first generation of foreign-educated oil painters. After they evacuated, their entire body of work was destroyed by  

 

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enemy bombing. In 1938 the two schools were merged as the National Art Academy. Lin Fengmian, relieved of his administrative duties, returned for a time to the French concession in Shanghai, and then moved to Hong Kong and Vietnam before eventually reaching Chongqing via Hanoi and Kunming in 1939. Chongqing and the West

The damage done to the fragile modern Chinese art world by the war was severe. Beyond direct military casualties, China lost many talented artists at the apogees of their creativity during this desperately chaotic period. To mention only a few, Hangzhou oil painting professor Cai Weilian died in childbirth in Kunming in 1938. Shanghai sculptor Jiang Xin collapsed and died of exhaustion in Kunming in 1939. The art historian Teng Gu, tapped as director of the National Art Academy in 1938, died in Chonqing in 1941. French-educated Tang Yihe, professor at the Wuchang Art Academy, died along with his brother, the academy director, when an overloaded Yangzi River steamer capsized in 1944. Over the eight years of war the National Art Academy relocated its campus six times, sometimes amid great hardship. In 1938 the faculty and students moved again to Kunming, Yunnan, and in 1939 to a suburb southwest of the city near Dianchi Lake.12 Chang Shuhong (1904–1994), who had returned in 1936 from study in Paris to become chairman of the oil painting department at the Beiping Art Academy, rendered a brightly colored still life in 1939 that depicted a corner of his family’s primitive lodgings in Yunnan [fig. 6.5]. A tranquil domesticity is suggested by the colorful objects of daily life: exotic potted plants, a foreign language newspaper, and a handmade doll probably belonging to his young daughter. The ominous title, Thunder Throughout the Land, the bare brick of the walls, and the heavy shutters emphasize the fragility and transitory nature of these modest pleasures. As the universities gradually resettled in Chongqing, efforts to rebuild their facilities were constantly threatened by Japanese bombing. Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi, 1898– 1991), one of the faculty members who had moved with National Central University from Nanjing, used ink wash and touches of red pigment to capture his vivid impressions of attacks on their ostensibly safe inland haven. He writes in the inscription that he and his friend witnessed by chance the bombing of Chongqing on June 11, 1939, while visiting a friend on the southern bank of the Jialing River [fig. 6.6]. In this work he records the city as it burned. By 1941 the National Art Academy had finally reached the mountains of Sichuan, where classes were held at a place nicknamed Songlingang (Pine Forest Cliff ) at Qingmuguan,  

 

6.5.  Chang Shuhong (1904–1994), Thunder Throughout the Land, 1939, oil on canvas, 86 × 63 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

6.6. Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi; 1898–1991), Bombing of Chongqing, June 11, 1939, 1939, ink and color on paper, 82.6 × 37.4 cm, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne (Gift of Prof. Helmut Brinker)  

6.7. Tang Yihe (1905–1944), The Trumpet Call of July 7, 1940, oil on canvas, 32 × 61 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

in Bishan, to the west of Chongqing. In the course of the school’s half-dozen relocations, the students and faculty suffered periodic shortages of art supplies and even lack of food. The following year, the school moved to Panqi in Chongqing, a site near the river Huang Junbi had depicted the previous year. Finally establishing a stable campus in 1942, after five years of travel, instruction began to return to normal. Faculty and students who chose to follow the government to its inland exile had committed themselves to the dream of overcoming the enemy and returning home to

a free China. Contributing their artistic efforts for the purpose, they sought to raise morale, affect public opinion, and contribute financially to the war effort. In 1940, as Japan consolidated its control through the puppet government in Nanjing, Tang Yihe (1905–1944) spoke to a domestic audience with a realistic oil, The Trumpet Call of July 7 [fig. 6.7]. By evoking the national humiliation of Japan’s 1937 invasion, he warned China’s young people against complacency but instead asked them to contribute whatever talents and equipment they could lend to the war effort.  

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6.8.  Zhang Shuqi (1900–1957), Messengers of World Peace, 1940, ink and color on paper, 162.6 × 355.6 cm, Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York  

ally present the painting to Roosevelt and to inspire U.S. support for the Chinese struggle against Japan. His journey across North America demonstrating Chinese painting techniques and raising money for the war effort was a notable success, although in the end it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into the war on China’s side. Zhang was unable to return to China once the Pacific War began and like a number of cultural celebrities (including Pan Yuliang, Wang Jiyuan, and Wang Yachen), he eventually settled abroad. Other artists undertook fundraising in South Asia and Southeast Asia during the early years of the war. Xu Beihong (1895–1953), who had moved from Nanjing to Guilin in 1936, undertook a prolonged fundraising trip beginning in 1939 in the British colonies of Singapore and India. Works such as his Four Horses of 1940, which he subsequently inscribed as having been painted in the Himalayas, were particularly well received by Chinese collectors in the Southeast Asian diaspora. Horses, executed in ink on Chinese paper with strong Western-style foreshortening and chiaroscuro, became the subject for which he was best known. The artist frequently identified the horse with the noble and heroic spirit of his nation [fig. 6.9]. Introduced by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), who had invited him to visit India, Xu Beihong met the venerable Mohandas Gandhi on February 17, 1940. Tagore had similarly hosted Xu Beihong’s colleague Gao Jianfu at the China Institute of his Visva-Bharati University a decade earlier. During Xu’s visit to Bengal he created one of his most ambitious allegorical history paintings, The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountains [fig. 6.10]. Deploying the academic conceptions he had studied in Europe fifteen years before, Xu assembled a series of careful drawings of live models into a composition illustrating a parable of the per 

6.9.  Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Four Horses, 1940, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 110.5 × 122 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, Beijing  

In the same year, Zhang Shuqi (Chang Shu-ch’i, 1900– 1957), a guohua professor at National Central University, contributed a large bird-and-flower painting as a diplomatic gift intended to arouse American sympathy for the plight of the exiled Chinese regime and its people. His horizontal composition of soaring and descending doves, Messengers of World Peace, was designed as a gift for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chiang Kai-shek himself dedicated the painting to the American president on the occasion of his third inauguration with an inscription on the mounting [fig. 6.8]. Zhang departed Chongqing in 1941 hoping to person 

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6.10.  Xu Beihong (1895–1953), The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountains, 1940, ink and color on paper, 144 × 421 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, Beijing  

severance of the ancient Yu Gong, who endeavored to move a mountain bit by bit, confident that his descendants would continue until the job was done. Xu’s painting was a rare example of a Chinese artist attempting to deploy principles of European history painting in the guohua format. One may wonder about the significance of relying entirely on Indian figures to illustrate this Chinese tale, but its meaning in the context of the perseverance required to endure the Sino-Japanese War would have been clear to all who saw it. Xu Beihong may have wished his reputation to rest on these ambitious but awkwardly artificial historical compositions. It is, however, his preliminary studies that arouse greatest admiration, fully displaying his talents as a draftsman and his personal sensibilities. One such work, his portrait of elder statesman Li Yinquan, painted from life at Li’s residence at Hualongqiao in Chongqing, was intended to form part of a large allegorical composition, The Funeral of the Nation [fig. 6.11]. Li Yinquan was a senior member of the Nationalist Party’s founding elite. After joining the Alliance Society during his training in Japan between 1904 and 1909, he had gone on to establish an anti-Qing revolutionary government in his native Yunnan in 1911. The artistic style of this work illustrates one aspect of Xu Beihong’s art historical interests; he was a great admirer and collector of works by the nineteenth-century Shanghai master Ren Yi, whose legacy is amply evident here. Although the contrasts between carefully worked portrait faces and more simply rendered draperies are similar, the immediacy and direct emotional connection established in Xu Beihong’s portrait is something new. His portrait of Li Yinquan displays both his admiration for the character of his elderly subject and his mastery of European painting. This portrait is one of his most successful works to combine Western realism and Chinese ink.

6.11.  Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Portrait of Li Yinquan, 1943, ink and color on paper, 76 × 43 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Museum  

Remarkably, a certain degree of normalcy was established in the wartime capital during the second half of the war. Instruction at the art schools eventually settled into a regular rhythm and successfully trained the next generation of artists. A strong group—including Zhao Wuji (Zao Wou‑ki,  

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National Art Academy, class of 1941), Wu Guanzhong (National Art Academy, class of 1942), and Ha Qiongwen (National Central University, class of 1949)—studied at Chongqing schools in this period. Moreover, a great many group and solo exhibitions were held that demonstrated the diversity that had developed, particularly among guohua painters, during the years of isolation.13 The third national exhibition opened in Chongqing on Christmas day 1942, with 663 works on display. Gradually many artists from China’s coastal cities resumed their careers as teachers and painters in Sichuan. Li Keran, for example, gradually revived his youthful practice of ink painting, becoming known in these years for images of water buffalo and herdboys that possess a sweet simplicity far from the harsh realities of wartime China. The artist Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), an art history professor at National Central University, developed the distinctive personal style of guohua painting during his years in Chongqing. Originally from Nanchang in Jiangxi, Fu had studied art history in Japan, where he became particularly entranced by the paintings and eccentric life of the early Qing monk painter Shitao. Indeed, the name he took borrows one of its characters, shi, to suggest his admiration for the seventeenth-century master. In general composition Fu Baoshi’s intense contrasts of rich texture and wash against passages of reserve paper are sometimes reminiscent of the work of his idol. In his 1945 work, Rain at Dusk, Fu Baoshi concentrates on his own visual experience to depict, in somewhat romantic terms, the misty, rainy atmosphere of the Chongqing suburb, Jingangpo, where he lived [fig. 6.12]. This painting in particular demonstrates the use of what has come to be called “baoshi” texture strokes—fibrous strokes executed with a very dry, stiff brush on damp paper. Art historian James Cahill has noted that the technique was developed by Kosugi Hōan, an artist famous in Tokyo during Fu Baoshi’s student years; the Japanese master seems to have used it for only a brief period, whereas over the subsequent decades Fu Baoshi made it his own.14 If Fu Baoshi’s artistic breakthroughs came from an introspective synthesis of his intellectual concerns and daily experiences, a more physically adventurous spirit strongly affected the art of certain of his colleagues. In the summer of 1941, Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) and a party of disciples and assistants traveled across the desert to the abandoned oasis complex of ancient cave temples at Dunhuang in Gansu. Zhang and his party remained there for over two and a half years and copied 276 of the vivid Buddhist mural paintings. Rediscovery of this site—which revealed imagery, styles, and techniques of the long lost Northern Wei, Tang, and Xi Xia epochs—was one of the most significant  

 

6.12. Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), Rain at Dusk, 1945, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 103 × 59 cm, Nanjing Museum  

 

 

 

 

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art historical events of the twentieth century. At the same time, close study of its paintings by this historically minded artist significantly changed his own practice of art. In 1943 his copies were exhibited in Lanzhou and in the following year in Chengdu in Sichuan, helping to stimulate a craze for Dunhuang paintings among the exiled artists. Zhang Daqian’s figure paintings were transformed after studying the Tang and Song examples at Dunhuang, as were his flower paintings. In the late 1940s he devoted himself to the Buddhist theme of the lotus, combining the wet ink of the later Chan Buddhist tradition with the luxury and precision of the Tang and Song murals at Dunhuang [fig. 6.13]. Making the best of their exile in China’s interior, cultural institutions under the auspices of the Nationalist Ministry of Education undertook a number of archaeological, anthropological, and architectural investigations in China’s western regions during the war years. The benefits

6.13.  Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), Red Lotus, 1947, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 153 × 75 cm, Shanghai Museum  

of these projects were scholarly, cultural, and ideological but also had the practical function of providing employment for artists and scholars. Early in the war years, while living in Kunming, Pang Xunqin undertook an investigation of the costume designs of the Miao people of southwestern China on behalf of the Central Museum.15 From this time, much of Pang’s own artwork and design was inspired by the abstract beauty he perceived in the visual culture of the minority peoples. The largely formal interests of many urban modernist artists of the 1930s was discarded in wartime, as some began to focus on establishing more direct relationships between their art and their new, often exotic surroundings. The Dunhuang caves were compelling not only to classically oriented artists like Zhang Daqian but also to modernist oil painters. With sponsorship from the Ministry of Education a group of ten artists from the National Art Academy left Chongqing in 1943 for a two-year research trip to Dunhuang and the Central Asian desert. In the context of China’s isolation from the world and their own isolation from their coastal homes, these artists were inspired by a deep curiosity about the roots of China’s native artistic cul-

6.15. Ding Cong (1916–2009), Images of Today, 1944, ink and gouache on paper, 28.6 × 149.3cm, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Gift of William P. Fenn  

tures. In addition to copying the Dunhuang murals, Dong Xiwen (1914–1973), a recent graduate of the Hangzhou academy, rendered the Central Asian people he encountered on his journey in a style that combined modernism with the simplicity of ancient Buddhist murals [fig. 6.14]. Chang Shuhong [see fig. 6.5] was named director of the newly established Dunhuang Research Institute in 1944. He spent the remainder of his career at the remote and primitive desert site endeavoring to document and preserve the mural paintings. Such self-sacrifice and idealism on the part of many artists is truly remarkable. Nevertheless, the inexorable economic, social, and political disruptions of the long war eventually threatened the very fabric of Chinese society. The appalling corruption, bureaucratism, poverty, and wasteful hoarding that characterized the last years of the war were astutely satirized in 1944 by cartoonist Ding Cong (1916–2009) in his gouache painting Images of Today [fig. 6.15]. He does not spare the corpulent officials and profiteers who permit needed foodstuffs to rot rather than sell them at an unfavorable price, but only a fellow artist could have skewered his fellow painters as he did. Dressed in the foppish garb fashionable in 1920s Paris, a gangly long-haired fellow at right offers a hanging scroll for sale. The row of red ribbons on the lower mounting show that he has already accepted multiple commissions from his many wealthy patrons, people who freely spend the dubiously earned wealth of the wartime economy. The artist pretends to keep himself free of this corruption by wearing a blindfold, the better to deny knowledge of the source of his livelihood. His patrons, in turn, are happy to buy his image of a sneaky fox, rather than the themes of eagles, tigers, or horses typically used by patriotic artists as symbols of China’s enduring spirit.  

 

6.14. Dong Xiwen (1914–1973), Kazak Herdswoman, 1948, oil on canvas, 163 × 128 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

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The Isolated Island (Gudao ) of Shanghai and the Occupied Territories

In the early years of the war, the frightening uncertainty of the military situation led some artists and their wealthy patrons to leave the city of Shanghai, either for safety or to join the war effort inland. Some art societies and schools in the foreign concessions reduced or ceased their activities during the war. Yet many artists who remained in the relatively comfortable environment of Shanghai continued to paint and to exhibit. The site of many wartime benefits between 1937 and 1942, the Daxin Department Store also served as locale for regular exhibitions by art schools, art societies, small groups, and individuals. The Chinese Painting Society and the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society continued their biannual exhibitions of guohua, the latter usually held at the Ningbo Native Place Association. Five colleagues from New China Art Academy—Chen Baoyi, Zhu Qizhan, Zhou Bichu, Qian Ding, and Song Zhongyuan—held a joint oil painting exhibition, to name only one such event, at Daxin in October of 1939. Wu Hufan held several solo shows over the course of the eight-year war. Although the exuberance and optimism of the 1930s was eradicated by the devastation that surrounded the gudao, the seeming normalcy of these art-world events demonstrated that the spirits of China’s artists had not been crushed. They provided a model of what development in the Chinese art world might continue to be once the war was over. Indeed, in the comparatively quiet social conditions of wartime Shanghai, some artists devoted themselves with even greater concentration to their art. He Tianjian’s masterful Conversation in the Autumn Woods, painted in 1939 in the gudao, brought to fruition many of the aesthetic ideals  

 

of the guohua revival of the prewar period [see fig. 5.7]. The wealthy Wu Hufan continued to devote himself to research on his art collection and to his own painting. In this same period, prominent figures in the art world sought to articulate a productive role for themselves as artists in the unique oasis of safety and freedom in wartime China. A short-lived periodical from the fall of 1939, for example, Art World (Meishujie), ran a special feature with articles by a varied group of artists—Yu Jianhua, Ni Yide, Liu Haisu, Zheng Wuchang, Chen Baoyi, Guan Liang, and others—mulling the question of what should be the role of the Shanghai art world in the national crisis. Ultimately their individual answers to this question would mark the future of Chinese art. Whether upholding the national honor through excellence in traditional art or evoking patriotic sentiments through oil paintings of a more naturalistic style, almost every artist began thinking in terms of his or her contribution to the nation. Painter, illustrator, and commercial designer Chen Qiucao (1906–1988), who found it impossible to continue operating his school, the White Swan Painting Studio, after the beginning of the war, continued to paint while living quietly in the international concession. He created a powerfully narrative image, Flowers above the Trenches, in 1940. Although gloomy in its overall cast, hope of salvation is suggested by the bright blossom rising from the fields of death [fig. 6.16]. On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops poured across the bridges over Suzhou Creek to occupy the foreign concessions of Shanghai. The isolated island period came to an end.16 After the fall of the concessions, a small group from the Shanghai Art Academy fled south, under directorship of Xie Haiyan and Ni Yide. With only ten students the school settled in  

 

 

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6.16.  Chen Qiucao (1906–1988), Flowers above the Trenches, 1940, oil on canvas, 45.5 × 61 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

Yonghe, Zhejiang, in 1942, where it was briefly a division of the National Yingshi University, before it was forced farther south by the Japanese and attempted to regroup in Fujian as part of Southeastern United University. Longtime director Liu Haisu traveled to Indonesia and Singapore in 1939 and 1940 to hold benefit exhibitions but later resumed his administration of the school. The Shanghai school remained in operation throughout the war in the Japanese-controlled city of Shanghai. By contrast, the New China Art Academy rejected Japanese control and eventually closed. It had resumed instruction in rented quarters in the French concession after destruction of its campus.17 When the Japanese entered the concessions, all universities and colleges, as well as all individual faculty, were required to register with the authorities. Discovering a loophole in the registration requirement, the school reorganized as an extracurricular tutorial, changing its name to the Peiwen Painting and Music Tutorial School. In 1944, however, when the Japanese authorities cracked down further, director Wang Yachen and his colleagues refused to register and voluntarily closed the New China Art Academy. Wang Yachen and his wife, Rong Junli, took refuge in the United States. Any narrative of the wartime period is bound to be as fragmented as were the lives of those who lived through it. Artists who chose to remain in occupied territories due to poor health, financial difficulties, obligations to elderly parents, or for other reasons were confronted with requirements and requests imposed by the occupying power. Few reminiscences have been written by artists of their lives in occupied Beijing, in part because it was unthinkable to admit to dealing with the Japanese or officials of the Wang Jingwei regime after the war was over. Because of these reali128

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ties, generalizations about the situations of artists in occupied territories over the course of the eight-year war remain almost impossible to make.18 Beijing had offered little resistance to the invading army in 1937, and the occupation had thus proceeded fairly peacefully. Although the Beiping Art Academy was the first art school ordered by the national government to relocate inland after the Japanese invasion, and some professors and students began the long trek, many of the faculty remained in Beijing throughout the war and continued to teach. A great many members of the Lake Society similarly remained in the occupied city. In 1938 the Japanese authorities moved the Beijing Art Academy from the west side of Beijing to 10 East Zongbu hutong. From this time forward, many schools were duplicated and their faculties split, with one continuing in Japanese-controlled territory and the other, administered by the Nationalist government in exile, at an inland location. Huang Binhong and his younger colleague Jiang Zhaohe (1904–1986) were among the many artists who continued to teach at the Beijing Art Academy. Already very old men at the outbreak of the conflict, Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong continued to sell paintings through various agents and to trade their art for daily needs. Jiang Zhaohe’s reputation is based on a remarkable 1943 work now known as Refugees (Liumintu), a life-sized painting in ink on Chinese paper that vividly captures the suffering war had inflicted on his fellow Chinese [fig. 6.17]. One of the primary forms of wartime propaganda was the mural painting—many such works were painted on walls, but those on paper might be temporarily displayed and then moved to another location. Because of the perilous circumstances of their display and transportation, few examples of such work survive. Originally twenty-six meters in length, this highly realistic guohua painting was reportedly confiscated and partially destroyed by Japanese authorities when displayed in Shanghai in 1944. Miraculously, the section reproduced here was rediscovered in 1953. One of the most poignant ink paintings of the period, Refugees was based on two months of fieldwork among the displaced and very directly expresses the artist’s sympathy with his impoverished fellow countrymen. It has long been regarded as a patriotic masterpiece and is indeed one of the most powerful Chinese figure paintings of the epoch. The circumstances of the creation of Refugees, however, leave its relationship to patriotic currents of the day somewhat murky. The painting was originally commissioned of the financially needy artist by a high-ranking member of the puppet government of Wang Jingwei, the collaborationist regime based in Nanjing. According to Jiang Zhaohe’s published explanation at the time of its first display in  

 

6.17.  Jiang Zhaohe (1904–1986), Refugees (details), 1943, ink and color on paper, 200 × 1202 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

Beijing, its sponsor hoped that it would show Chiang Kaishek the great suffering his refusal to surrender was causing his people and thus presumably hasten the Japanese victory. It is hard to imagine that such a work would have led many viewers to blame the Chinese authorities rather than the Japanese occupiers. Japanese censors apparently agreed. Despite the absurdly neutral title, Group Portrait, under which Jiang first exhibited the work at Beijing’s Taimiao (now the Working People’s Cultural Palace) on October 29, 1943, the veracity of the people’s suffering in Jiang Zhaohe’s depiction is convincing. As it turned out, the art-loving collaborator who paid for the work died before it was first exhibited and Japanese authorities apparently did not find the nature of its financing sufficiently compelling to accept it as justification for showing it. They closed the exhibition on the first day, but not before Jiang Zhaohe had sold all fifty of the black-and-white photos he had prepared for the show. Jiang himself preferred not to talk about this painting in later years. When he did, however, he stated that the work had indeed been paid for by a traitor, but that Jiang didn’t know the patron very well or understand what his purpose in commissioning it actually was. Regardless of the

haziness of verbal explanations, the painting itself clearly tells its story of the tragic fate of China’s wartime refugees. Indeed, one can certainly understand, based on the visual qualities of the painting, why it has been retroactively interpreted as a monument of anti-Japanese resistance. It is the artist’s most powerful surviving work. Wartime Woodcuts

The highly portable and reproducible woodblock print flourished in all parts of China during the eight-year war with Japan. Previously something of an underground art, woodcuts even began to make their way into the academic curriculum. A 1943 report from the National Art Academy in the exile capital of Chongqing praised a new atmosphere in which the art of woodcuts was no longer politically perilous and described a situation in which printmaking was actively encouraged.19 Printmakers who worked in the Nationalist-controlled territory continued to explore the variety of cosmopolitan styles that had characterized their art in the 1930s. As their technical skills became more and more refined, however, and the social concerns that underlay their work continued Art in Wartime

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to grow, realism replaced the modernist approaches of their early work. By contrast, printmakers in Yan’an, the de facto capital of the Communist territory, developed, under the strict ideological control of the military base area, a unique and recognizable style associated with the new folk culture they sought to create. After the loss of Wuhan on Octo­ ber 25, 1938, artists scattered, many joining the inland retreat. The All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association officially relocated first to Chongqing and then to Guilin in the following year. A third destination for society members was the Communist base at Yan’an. Before leaving Wuhan, the group shipped some prints and blocks to Sichuan, while its members made their way inland individually. Lu Hongji held small woodcut exhibitions of resistance-themed prints all along his way west, and despite eventually discarding most of his luggage, he preserved the print collection through bombings and injury. Among others to organize exhibitions before eventually arriving in Chongqing were Duan Ganqing, Chen Yanqiao, Zhang Wang, and Wang Qi. In April 1939, on the anniversary of China’s first major victory of the war, the Woodcut Circles exhibited works by 102 artists at the Third National Resistance Art Exhibition in Chongqing. The heroic outcome of the battle at Tai’erzhuang, in the words of the historian Lloyd Eastman, “shattered the myth of Japanese invincibility.” 20 In late March 1938, Japanese forces moved to take the transportation center of Xuzhou, north of Nanjing, but Nationalist general Li Zongren lured them into a trap in the walled town of Tai’erzhuang, Jiangsu. Japanese casualties were heavy; the Chinese claimed to have killed thirty thousand. Chen Jiu’s (1916–1942) The Battle of Tai’erzhuang [fig. 6.18], dated March 21, 1939, was probably created for the exhibition celebrating the Chinese victory, which opened in Chongqing on April 6. Chen Jiu, who had been a key organizer of the All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association in Wuhan, was a graduate of New China Art Academy in Shanghai. He attended Yan’an Luyi in 1939 and died on the battlefield in 1942. In this grim, heavily shaded image, the artist depicts Chinese soldiers with bayonets at the ready, suggesting the fierce hand-to-hand combat in which the Chinese Dare-to-Die corps engaged. The distant village lies in ruins, but the ultimate defeat of the Japanese leaves their flag under the feet of the victors. A road sign at the upper right identifies the battle site. An extraordinary effort was made by printmakers to maintain contacts among their colleagues who had scattered throughout China. Nodes of activity, generally centering around one or two key individuals, developed across the country. Remarkably, given the state of war, it was possible to send prints by mail, which facilitated numerous exhibitions  

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6.18.  Chen Jiu (1916–1942), The Battle of Tai’erzhuang, 1939, woodcut, 16.1 × 11.8 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

and publications, often held in conjunction with resistance propaganda activities. Japanese bookstore owner Uchiyama Kanzō later recalled filling a mail order for a woodcut knife sent to him in Shanghai by the novelist Ding Ling, then in Yan’an. By March of 1939 the Woodcut Circles Resistance Association had reestablished contact with more than two hundred of the dispersed artists. In early 1941, however, the larger background against which the artists so enthusiastically cooperated drastically changed, as the Nationalist and Communist troops increasingly turned against one another. Huang Xinbo (1915–1980), then based in Guilin, protests the collapse of military cooperation in a dramatic print, He Hasn’t Really Gone [fig. 6.19], which laments the massacre of New Fourth Army troops by the Nationalist army.21 Huang continued to experiment with surrealist oil painting, and his dramatic prints never completely abandon a modernist vocabulary. A powerful print from late in the war, Fleeing Guilin by the North Station of 1944 [fig. 6.20], by Cai Dizhi (1918– 2008), documents the terror and desperation of refugees fleeing Japanese incursions into the southwest the previous year. Cai had been a student at the Guangzhou Municipal Art School, where Li Hua taught; when the war broke out, he dedicated himself to the resistance. In 1943 he moved from Guangdong inland to Guilin, taking a job at the Municipal Art Gallery and also teaching at the Guilin  

 

6.19. Huang Xinbo (1915– 1980), He Hasn’t Really Gone, 1941, woodcut, 14 × 18 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

Lishui, Zhejiang, which had the slogan: “Use the power of art to advocate collectivity; through collective organization expand art.” The Zhejiang group held exhibitions in many small towns in the province, operating for a time without interference from the occupying power. One could order woodcutting knives and other supplies from Zheng Yefu’s factory, and in September of 1941 he and several friends began publishing a new journal, Woodcut Art (Muke yishu), which reported on printmaking activities and exhibitions in many parts of China. Development of the Yan’an Style 6.20.  Cai Dizhi (1918–2008), Fleeing Guilin by the North Station, 1944, woodcut, 14.6 × 21 cm, Gift of Prof. and Mrs. Theodore Herman, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University  

Art School. He too joined the All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association. His highly refined print is typical of the best of those from the Nationalist-controlled areas in the 1940s. Continuing to make extremely effective use of shading and stark contrasts of black and white, this print exemplifies the social concerns that dominated prints in the Nationalist areas during the 1940s. Taking advantage of gaps in Japanese control of the eastern seaboard, in the same period Zheng Yefu operated the China Woodcut Supplies Collective Factory in

Between 1934 and 1936 the Red Army, in flight from Chiang Kai-shek’s attempt to exterminate it, had trekked from southern China to Yan’an, Shaanxi, in the Long March. With the fall of China’s coastal cities to the Japanese in 1937, this base area provided an attractive refuge for idealistic and left-leaning young artists who sought to contribute to the propaganda efforts. Hu Yichuan joined the Communist army (the Eighth Route Army) at its base in Yan’an in 1937. The concentration of talent made it possible in 1938 to establish the Lu Xun Academy of Arts and Literature, which ran short courses designed to prepare artists, writers, and dramatists for their propaganda work. Many others involved in the United Front propaganda effort of the early wartime period, such as Jiang Feng and Luo Gongliu, fled not to Chongqing but to the Communist Art in Wartime

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Eighth Route army base when Wuhan fell in 1938. Liu Xian joined the Fourth Route Army in southern Anhui. Initially accompanying his classmates in the school’s retreat from the coast, Hangzhou art academy student Yan Han (1916–), left the group to join the Communists at Yan’an in the summer of 1938. After three months of training at the Lu Xun Academy, during which he joined the Communist party, he was assigned to a small team of guerilla propagandists led by Hu Yichuan. The teenage Gu Yuan (1919–1996) soon arrived. Finally, some printmakers who went first to Chongqing, including Chen Yanqiao and Zhang Wang, moved to Yan’an in 1939. The Yan’an artists have been considered, in the standard histories of the Chinese Communist Party, to have been essential not only to the war effort but to the subsequent success of the Communist revolution. The latter role may ultimately have been more significant. Lu Xun’s protégé, Jiang Feng, became one of the leaders of the new Yan’an art after his arrival in February of 1938. He was first assigned to publish a propaganda pictorial for the Eighth Route Army but was transferred in February 1939 to the Lu Xun Academy as an instructor in the art department, thus beginning his formal career as an art educator.22 By June of 1940, Jiang Feng had been promoted to directorship of the Art Section of the academy, which administered both the art department and the art factory. Students who passed through the Lu Xun Academy were given ideological and artistic education before being sent forth to do anti-Japanese or pro-Communist propaganda work. Some, like the gifted Gu Yuan, received his fundamental technical training at the Yan’an school and became a teacher himself. One important function of the Communist artists was to produce images, often portraits, for news items in military newspapers. Inset woodblocks were generally used for such illustrations rather than the metal plates more common in a metropolitan printing house. A profound challenge for the many urban artists who joined the Communists at Yan’an, however, was to discover the most effective visual vocabulary for communicating with the largely illiterate peasantry. Although the cosmopolitan styles brought by the urban artists to the front served well for making portraits of leaders, by the end of 1939 Yan’an artists began experimenting with folk styles in order to reach a wider spectatorship. New Year’s prints (nianhua), which traditionally depicted the auspicious folk iconography associated with deities of the hearth and home, were modified by Jiang Feng, Wo Zha, Hu Yichuan, Chen Tiegeng, Luo Gongliu, and Yan Han, among others, to incorporate images of the Eighth Route Army as the people’s protectors.23 The villagers replaced such folk woodcuts as part of their annual preparations for  

 

 

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6.21.  Yan Han (b. 1916), A People’s Fighter (Cooperation Between the Army and the People), 1939–40, woodcut, 37 × 28.5 cm, Gift of Prof. and Mrs. Theodore Herman, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University  

the Chinese new year and the young artists took the holiday as an opportunity to disseminate their message to the local populace. Possibly inspired by Japanese propaganda in the same format, they became a mainstay of the Communist efforts in the north. An unsigned print by Yan Han [fig. 6.21] replaces the traditional door guardian with a Red Army soldier, his sword raised in a protective gesture. It exhorts: “The Troops and People Cooperate.” Designed to spiritually protect the double doors of a traditional gated peasant home, it is paired with another emblazoned with: “Victory in the War of Resistance.” Of significance to the Yan’an artists is the new style, in which the European styles of shading they had learned in art school were abandoned in favor of the simple outlines of Chinese folk art. To satisfy the tastes of conservative rural consumers, it was necessary that the figures be clean and their faces and bodies free of the black smudges urban sophisticates might understand as shading. Such work, which replaced religious images with propaganda, encouraged the faith of the local populace in the Communist army. The Spartan lifestyle of the Communist base at Yan’an, although extremely exotic to the young urbanites who flocked there in the early years of the war, may have been

more orderly than the chaotic poverty of their colleagues scattered over southwestern China. Yet by about 1941, as a more normal pattern was established in Chongqing, the differing styles of the Nationalist and Communist leadership led to increasingly distinctive worlds of culture and politics in the two separately governed realms. In Nationalistcontrolled territories, Communist activities were once again banned, as was open criticism of the government. Press censorship was enforced; outspoken public figures considered particularly troublesome to the regime were targeted by the secret services and sometimes “disappeared.” Among them were American-educated poet and painter Wen Yiduo, who was assassinated, and art journalist Shen Yiqian, who vanished in Chongqing not long after visiting the Communist base at Yan’an. Such suppression did nothing to diminish discontent with the corruption and profiteering of government officials or with the rapidly accelerating inflation that affected the lives of everyone. Frustration and discontent that emerged at Yan’an with the military stalemate were treated very differently, by a process of thought reform and brainwashing referred to as “rectification.” In the spring of 1942, Mao Zedong organized a massive program of investigating the activities and ideological beliefs of party members in Yan’an. For Mao, these purges were most significantly a solidification of his control over the Communist Party. The most important features of the rectification process were public condemnation and humiliation, accompanied by demands that the accused person repeatedly confess, repent, and affirm party loyalty. They were so traumatic that few people subjected to it ever again challenged Mao’s authority. Targeting his more highly educated rivals within the party, in the spring of 1942, Mao spoke in Yan’an at a conference devoted to literature and art.24 His remarks, later published as the Yan’an Talks, codified an ideology that would dominate art in Communist China for the subsequent thirty-five years. First, all art was to serve the party. Second, all art was to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Finally, in an attack on the professional art world, Mao mandated that art should emphasize not only raising standards but also popularization. According to Luo Gongliu, who attended these talks, to Mao, popularization meant that artists should leave their schools and factories and work directly for and with the masses. Art for art’s sake was to be completely left behind. From this point on, the art of Yan’an was developed as a model for a Maoist vision of culture and diverged sharply from the styles and subjects of artists in other parts of China. Prints remained dominant, but unlike the dark tones and socially critical subject matter of most young printmakers elsewhere, the Yan’an works were limited to uplifting depic-

tions of the virtues of the Communist army and administration, and were depicted in an extremely simple outline style. Folk-inspired styles associated with new nianhua became the standard in Yan’an after 1942.25 Protect Our People’s Troops of 1944 by Gu Yuan (1919–1996), who arrived in Yan’an in 1938 from his home in Guangdong, perfectly exemplified this new manner, in which each figure is rendered in outline on a blank background [fig. 6.22]. Organized in five registers, and seeming to tell a story, the print depicts the many ways the people can celebrate and assist the army. Other Yan’an prints depict local social services offered by the Communist party. Particularly after the Yan’an Talks, this hybrid outline style became the hallmark of artistic production in the Communist base area. Many of the artists at Yan’an were educated as modernists at the urban art academies in Hangzhou and Shanghai but now modified their techniques for the practical purposes to which their work was put. To create this work, Gu Yuan carved away much of the surface of the block, so as to avoid Western effects of shading and to leave the faces of the figures clean and unmarked, as in a folk print. He then hand-painted the monochromatic image.  

6.22. Gu Yuan (1919–1996), Protect Our People’s Troops, 1944, woodcut, 50 × 30 cm, Collection of the Artist’s family  

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6.23. Pan Tianshou (1898–1971), Black Chicken, 1948, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 68 × 136.5 cm, Pan Tianshou Memorial, Hangzhou  

The End of World War II and the Chinese Civil War

With the Japanese surrender to the Allies in August of 1945, the eight-year international war came to a conclusion. Institutions and families began moving back to the coast. In August of 1945 the Ministry of Education reestablished the original Hangzhou and Beijing schools, appointing Xu Beihong director of the northern school. After the school was reestablished, it accepted middle-school students into a five-year program, with majors in painting, sculpture, design, ceramics, and music. Xu retained professors like Jiang Zhaohe, whose style suited his reformist agenda, and he hired others, like Li Keran, whom he had known in Chongqing. Ink painter Pan Tianshou (1898–1971) took the position of director of the National Academy in 1945. The original campus of the Hangzhou Academy had been destroyed, but in 1946, led by Pan Tianshou, it returned to a new location in its native city. Former director Lin Fengmian accepted Pan’s invitation to resume his position as an oil painting professor. Pan was forced out of the directorship in 1947, however, and was replaced by a more fervent supporter of the Guomindang, Wang Rizhang, who led the school until the end of the civil war in 1949. It was during this period of political frustration, when Pan returned to a prolific schedule of creating art, that a breakthrough into his most distinctive and original style of painting occurred. His lifetime study of the epigraphic style of painting, as characterized  

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by the work of Wu Changshi, his interest in the early Qing individualist painter Zhu Da and his familiarity with the European modernism practiced by his colleagues in the academy merged with his own slightly pessimistic mood to produce works that might equally well be called modernist as traditionalist. Yet if concern for bold formal organization and an alienated mood suggest modern painting, Pan’s idiosyncratic execution with brush, ink, and (on occasion) hands imbues his art with the subtle astringency of the ­seventeenth-­century literati-painting aesthetic [fig. 6.23]. Indeed, work such as this fulfills the promise of literati painting about which Chen Hengque had written so passionately a quarter century earlier. With this finger painting and others like it from 1948, Pan began a two-decade period of remarkable artistic achievement. Efforts to revive the arts achieved some success in prosperous and well-developed areas. The foreign concessions of Shanghai had been returned to Chinese control after the war, an achievement long sought by its Chinese residents and the Nationalist government. The Chinese Painting Society, the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, and a number of artistic organizations resumed activity. Zheng Wuchang, who had remained in the city throughout the war, responded to the return of peace with original works of exceptional beauty and power. The monumental central peak of his 1948 Gazing at the Waterfall [fig. 6.24] may suggest the imposing strength of Northern Song dynasty painting (960–1125), the blue distant peaks evoke the manner of the seventeenth-century monk painter Shitao, and the  

6.24.  Zheng Wuchang (1894–1952), Gazing at the Waterfall, 1948, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 105 × 51 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

6.25. Li Hua (1907– 1994), Take Him In!, 1946, woodcut, 21.5 × 32.5 cm, Gift of Prof. and Mrs. Theodore Herman, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University  

6.26.  Yang Keyang (1914–2010), The Professor Sells His Books, 1947, woodcut, 21.8 × 16.2 cm, Gift of Prof. and Mrs. Theodore Herman, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University

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relaxed brushwork is reminiscent of the Ming dynasty masters of Suzhou. The foundations of erudition and originality Zheng demonstrates in 1948 might promise a bright future for Chinese painting in the newly peaceful country. The hopes of the art world to resume the interrupted development of the 1930s were, however, never fulfilled. A ceasefire between the Nationalist government and the Communists expired in June 1946, initiating a three-year civil war. Communist troops began to expand into northern areas formerly controlled by the Japanese. The government, although equipped with vastly superior military hardware and larger troop strength, suffered surprising losses. At the same time, the Nationalist administration’s takeover of Japanese businesses and property was marred by ineffectiveness and theft, leading to serious economic disruptions and loss of public confidence. The corruption and incompetence displayed after the war began to alienate the urban population that had been the Nationalist government’s key support. Most damaging, the national treasury, able to cover only one third of its expenses with income, financed the remainder by printing money. The result was a hyperinflation that made reconstruction almost impossible. The civil war reached its turning point at the end of 1948, when the underequipped Communist troops won control of Manchuria, followed by Beijing and Tianjin, and then quickly seized Jiangsu and Anhui. By early 1949 it was evident that the Communists would win the war. Printmakers, whose informal national network remained

the woodblock prints created between 1945 and 1949 tend to be far more technically refined than the work of the early thirties. As artists from the Communist and Nationalist territories came together, the contrast between the optimistic Yan’an prints, which always represented the most positive aspects of an idyllic rural life, and the dark pessimism of urban printmakers seem to foretell the results of the civil war. Li Hua, who had held several solo shows of prints and drawings during the war, had developed masterly skill. From this point his work shows no traces of his modernist experiments of the 1930s; rather, it tends to be powerfully naturalistic and readable. Yang Keyang (1914–2010), commenting on inflation in The Professor Sells His Books, depicts a broken-spirited father relinquishing the tools of his trade to feed his family, a reflection on the waste of human talent and unnecessary suffering caused by the incompetent government [fig. 6.26]. Printmakers were not the only artists to protest. The war and its aftermath left a great many Chinese disaffected with their government. Zheng Wuchang became known humorously as Cabbage Zheng for his frequent depictions of the mundane Chinese vegetable, works that were sometimes accompanied by ironic comments on the incredible cost of buying the simplest staples in an era of wildly devaluing currency. Such images, and such loss of confidence in the Nationalist authorities, set the scene for the Communists’ surprisingly quick victory in the civil war. A 1949 woodcut by Shi Lu (1919–1982), a Communist veteran of the civil war, brings a very different and perhaps, to the urban elite, more threatening sensibility to his celebration of the Communist victory. A peasant mob claims the mansion of a landlord on behalf of the masses, to whom it will belong under the new system [fig. 6.27]. The lives of all those who survived the eight-year war with Japan and suffered the dislocations of three years of civil war were forever altered by the experiences of hardship and uncertainty. Whether in exile abroad, in the Nationalist-controlled territories of western China, in occupied Shanghai or Beijing, in the Communist base at Yan’an, or in the declining cities of postwar China, a sense of duty to the fragile nation emerged as an ethical necessity. The victory of the Communists in the civil war would profoundly affect how artists pursued this ideal.  

6.27. Shi Lu (1919–1982), Down with Feudalism, 1949, woodcut, 31.2 × 22 cm, China International Exhibition Agency  

 

strong, continued to promote their art and its social concerns. Prints of the late 1940s thus seem to represent, and perhaps even lead, public opinion. A large exhibition held in Shanghai in September 1946 showed 916 woodcuts produced during the war; exhibitions were held frequently over the next few years, with both political and artistic aims. Themes common in prewar Shanghai, such as the persecution of protesters by the authorities, remained lamentably relevant [fig. 6.25]. The pervasive topic of corruption is vividly exposed in the prints of Li Hua (1907–1994), one of the leaders of the wartime and postwar print movement. China in Black and White, published in New York, with a preface by Pearl Buck, displayed for an international audience not only the best of wartime prints but also many new ones exposing deficiencies in government policies.26 For the most part,  

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7

Western-Style Art under Mao 1949–1966

Mao Zedong’s military strategy of gradually strangling China’s cities by surrounding them with his peasant armies succeeded when Beijing surrendered peacefully to the People’s Liberation Army on January 31, 1949 [fig. 7.1]. In the months leading up to this moment, underground party members in the art schools had quietly begun building support for the insurgency. Beiping Art Academy student Hou Yimin (b. 1932), for example, solicited from his professors strikingly designed handbills that praised peace and welcomed the liberating army. Although the Nationalist government was prepared to evacuate university professors to Taiwan, most art professors remained behind. The Establishment of the People’s Republic of China and Its New Art

As major cities were liberated, Communist cadres well indoctrinated in the principles of Mao Zedong’s “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art” moved in with the army and assumed control of cultural and educational institutions. In March a military group experienced in making propaganda for the Anti-Japanese War effort and for the social projects of the Communist party took control of the National Beiping Arts College. Among its leaders were printmaker Jiang Feng (1910–1982), poet Ai Qing (1910– 1996), the art theorist and sculptor Wang Zhaowen (1909–2004), and the composer Li Huanzhi (1910–2000). Based on promises made by the Communist leadership before liberation, Xu Beihong (1895–1953) was retained as director and the academy faculty remained on salary. The school would soon be renamed Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), with a calligraphic logo written by Mao Zedong himself. Academy artists would now be subject to the direction of the Communist party and, like all of China’s artists, their lives would begin a dramatic and sometimes painful transformation.  

 

 

 

 

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standards. Fourth, the contents and forms of old literature and art were to be remolded. Fifth, artists and art leaders must consider the needs of the whole nation in their art, not individual concerns. The specific ideological and stylistic mandates articulated over the duration of a two-week meeting would have great significance for future arts policies. Veteran printmaker and Communist art leader Jiang Feng (1910–1982) outlined in urgent terms the agenda for the art world: to quickly train many new art cadres, to remold folk artists and guohua artists to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and, by means of modern printing technology, to issue large quantities of art for the masses. The ultimate goal was to replace the vast market for unacceptable older types of art with mass distribution of new printed matter made to the Communist party’s specifications. Although this absolute rejection of traditional art by China’s cultural authorities was later criticized as extremist, it determined the overall direction that Chinese visual culture would take in the post-1949 period. The policies the Communist party put in place in 1949 accelerated the internationalizing trend already evident in the prewar period but guided it along a narrow path. By its centralizing strategy, which eliminated the possibility of dissent, the party mortally weakened certain forms of traditional art—particularly the classical guohua painting so successfully revived by such masters as He Tianjian, Zheng Wuchang, and Wu Hufan in the 1930s and 1940s— and replaced them with new forms, particularly academic and realist oil painting. Although the protests of traditionalists were briefly acknowledged, in actuality Chinese art and art education, like every other aspect of Chinese life, from architecture to automobiles to apparel, would gradually abandon certain premodern aesthetics, traditional techniques, and artistic forms as China sought to become a modern nation. At the 1949 meeting, Jiang Feng stated what Zhou Enlai did not: that all artists, regardless of previous political affiliation, were required to study the policies of the Communist party. He praised the accomplishments of Communist artists in the War of Liberation as models for all art workers nationwide. A concurrent exhibition of work by about three hundred artists was held in Beijing, and later shown in the prewar art centers of Shanghai and Hangzhou, to demonstrate how Communist artistic policies were put into practice. Outline and flat-color painting, a new style derived in part from northern Chinese folk art, was considered most suitable for the didactic purposes to which art would now be put. Easily readable woodblock prints were also appropriate to this new party-approved manner [see figs. 6.22 and 6.27]. Other genres in which the Communist artists worked  

7.1  Ye Qianyu (1907–1995), The Liberation of Beijing, 1959, ink and color on paper, 197 × 130 cm, new year’s picture, National Museum of China, Beijing  

 

 

By the time the Communists lowered the Nationalist flag over the presidential palace at Nanjing on April 23, 1949, the Chiang Kai-shek government had already fled to Taiwan, an island province reclaimed by China in 1945 after fifty years of Japanese rule. The People’s Liberation Army continued its unrelenting advance, marching into Shanghai on May 27, 1949, and taking Guangzhou on October 14. Even before territorial control was complete, the process of remaking China’s economy, government, society, and cultural institutions according to a new Communist framework began. The new political and social roles required for art were announced at the All-China Congress of Literary and Arts Workers held in Beiping (now Beijing) from July 2 to 19, 1949.1 Political leader Zhou Enlai presented the government plan for arts and culture. First, he stated, literary and art workers from all parts of China and all backgrounds, Communists and non-Communists alike, must work together. Second, following the principles laid out by Mao Zedong in his 1942 Yan’an Talks, artists were to serve the people, especially the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Third, popularization was to take precedence over raising of artistic 140

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included serial picture stories (lianhuanhua), wall paintings, political cartoons, pictorial magazines, and propaganda flyers. Oil painting and sculpture could also, in the postwar era, serve the national reconstruction. In short, the new arts policy required that artwork should be educational and should take its contents from life. It should serve the people, inspire their political enlightenment, and encourage the people’s enthusiasm for labor. Of particular significance was the party’s emphasis on mass publication of pictorial images. Developed with the utopian aim of making art available to everyone, the policy complemented the party’s suppression of elite forms of art that had dominated the pre-liberation Chinese art market. In practice, fine art was to be replaced by posters, comic books, and pictorial magazines, thus redistributing power, as defined by ownership of art, to the people. Between 1949 and 1952 a systematic reform of old art was attempted, leaving only three categories of art approved by the national art establishment: new year’s pictures, woodblock prints, and lianhuanhua. New year’s pictures, a peasant genre now produced to party standards for the people, was most vigorously promoted. New Nianhua (New Year’s Posters)

Between 1949 and 1952, therefore, popularization of art was the national goal, and almost all artists were enlisted in the project of designing new-style nianhua (new year’s pictures), which were reproduced as posters and magazine illustrations. Because the popular custom of buying prints every year made them an easy way to reach most of the people, revolutionary new year’s prints, usually woodblocks, had been promoted by the party during the 1940s. After 1949, with strong support from the government, the genre was able to move into a full-color format. Between 1949 and 1952 artists who specialized in all media—including oil painters, woodcut artists, traditional-style painters, cartoonists, and illustrators—were organized to create new-style new year’s pictures. In 1950 alone four hundred new year’s picture designs were published. In 1952, 570 new pictures were issued in forty million copies. Post-1949 new year’s pictures followed the old styles in many ways but incorporated new revolutionary themes. They remained popular with their consumers, who were primarily rural, until the mid1980s’ introduction of large color photocalendars. Although the new nianhua was eclipsed as the sole official style when others were added in the first five-year plan of 1953, the method by which nianhua were disseminated, high-speed publication, remained the most essential component of Chinese art world activity until the 1980s. Rejection of the privileged status of the original work of art  

 

7.2 Lin Gang (b. 1924), Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception, 1952, ink and color on silk, 77 × 105 cm, new year’s picture, Art Museum, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing

was almost total: the collectability of art was of little concern, and the mass-produced reproductions of art images became far more significant than any material remnant of the artist’s own handiwork. The prizewinning poster Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception, by a young instructor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Lin Gang (b. 1924), exemplifies both the new subject matter (praise for the accomplishments of the people) and the new style (outline and bright color) [fig. 7.2]. It was first painted in 1950 in a Western medium commonly used for commercial art, gouache on stiff drawing paper, a version that survives today only as a poster. The 1952 version reproduced here was painted on silk with the assistance of guohua painters at the academy. By so vividly bringing model worker Zhao Guilan into the palace-style architecture of China’s political center, the Zhongnanhai compound, and placing her side-by-side with Mao Zedong in a frieze-like central figure grouping, Lin Gang’s image speaks of the new leadership’s respect for the working class, and specifically for female workers. Going beyond the mandated outline and flat-color manner, Lin’s use of ornate architectural decoration and vanishing-point perspective have strong links to a local Beijing-Tianjin nianhua tradition. Another cheerful and appealing nianhua, The Liberation of Beijing [see fig. 7.1], by the technically versatile and conceptually creative Ye Qianyu, seems to push the ideological and historiographic potential of the genre to its limits. Ye Qianyu had been well known as a commercial artist, designer, and cartoonist in Shanghai before the war and easily shifted these versatile skills to new purpose. Although after 1949 Ye Qianyu became a figurative ink painter and chair of the Central Academy of Fine Arts guohua departWestern-St yle Art under Mao

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ment, much of his work in the 1950s was of a distinctly nontraditional kind, one that successfully combined folk art, cartoon art, and political propaganda to create appealing new images. Ye’s colorful picture of happy citizens celebrating amid Beijing landmarks, which was widely reproduced as a poster in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the PRC, praises the peaceful liberation of Beijing. Although the vivid cartoon figures animate this image, a stylistic source for the overall composition was the fifteenth-century Buddhist temple site of Fahaisi in the Beijing suburbs, with its mural paintings. Ye’s visit to the elaborately colored and limned Ming dynasty paintings impressed him deeply and was largely responsible for the site’s designation by the government as a protected cultural monument. Although subsequent research has shown these technically dazzling works to be products of the imperial painting atelier, the 1950s art world believed them to be painted by anonymous ancient folk artists, the kind of work ignored by China’s elitist art connoisseurs and thus appropriate stylistic models for a new art of the people. Ye Qianyu repurposed their auspicious pink and green clouds, blue and green color, fine outlines and bright color, originally painted in service to Buddhist doctrine, to create his happy scene of new China. This nian‑ hua demonstrates how art-historical references in painting might contribute to construction of the new national art, with correct forms deployed for the correct purposes. Lin Gang’s work, also fully in keeping with the goals of the new year’s picture movement, takes a step in another direction. His portraitlike depictions of the key figures—the model worker, Mao, and other government officials—suggest the interest in realism that would increasingly dominate Chinese art after 1953.  

 

Academic Realism and Construction of a New National Art

The new year’s picture movement, which was based on forms of art associated with China’s peasantry, had a specifically Maoist bent. At the same time, Stalinist art theory and criticism were published in Chinese translation to guide Chinese artists. Already in 1951 and 1952, a campaign against modernist art, condemned in Soviet terms as both bourgeois and formalist, had forced Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu [see figs. 3.9–3.10] to leave the art academy in Hangzhou and return to Shanghai. Realism was deemed the progressive style. Old European-educated faculty who remained, such as Fang Ganmin [see fig. 3.11], were thoroughly misunderstood by the students and despised as incompetent for their modernist styles. According to standards of the day, the oil portrait  

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of Mao Zedong installed high on Tiananmen was a suitable purpose for painting. As the Chinese Communist Party constructed its own history, oil painters from all over China were commissioned to create a visual iconography of key moments in its path to victory. In 1951 the Central Museum of Revolutionary History opened in the western part of the former imperial palace compound.2 Luo Gongliu (1916–2004), a Hangzhoueducated artist who was a veteran of the Yan’an Communist base, served as one of the leaders of the art project. Artists recruited for the project included many professors from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, both non-­Communists like Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, and Dong Xiwen, and Communist veterans Wang Shikuo and Hu Yichuan. Luo himself contributed several works to the museum. His Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification in Yan’an brought to vivid life a crucial moment of Mao’s leadership over the Communist Party in 1942 [fig. 7.3]. With a banner reading “Hold Truth, Revise Error” at his side, Mao is depicted as he instructs his comrades in the party how to establish and uphold ideological discipline within their ranks. Although the painting was presented as though it were a historical document, we might note that a national ideological campaign was under way at just the time Luo Gongliu painted it, in 1951 and 1952, and it may thus be read as validating the painful contemporary process. Cultural figures, particularly those with ties to the Nationalist party and who had not previously undergone the rectification campaign at Yan’an, were now investigated, shamed, and subjected to intensive thought reform. While this painting is rendered in a highly detailed and realistic manner, as encouraged under the new regime, its unvarnished academic style is one that will be characterized by subsequent Chinese artists as naïve and provincial. Using skills developed at the national art academy in the late 1930s, Luo conveys the tension and urgency of the meeting by means of the intense concentration visible on the faces and in the postures of the portraitlike characters who listen to Mao Zedong’s speech. The melodrama and painterly panache of Soviet socialist realism are not yet evident. The question of the proper style for oil painting was a highly charged one in the 1950s. On the one hand, emulation of Soviet examples would become increasingly strong as the decade passed. On the other hand, national pride dictated that China should develop its own form of oil painting. This idea resonated with European-trained artists, who might still maintain the idea that development of an original style was the core of artistic creation but would now substitute the nation for the individual. Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation [fig. 7.4] by Dong Xiwen (1914–1973)  

 

7.3 Luo Gongliu (1916–2004), Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification in Yan’an, 1951, oil on canvas, 164 × 236 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing  

7.4 Dong Xiwen (1914–1973), Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation, 1952–1953, oil on canvas, 230 × 400 cm, poster version of 1954, Collection of Yang Peiming  

 

was painted for the museum display in 1952 and 1953, before Chinese artists were familiar with Soviet methods of brushwork, color, and composition. Rather like Lin Gang’s gouache nianhua design of the same year, it uses Western pigments to suggest the bright, flat tones of the Chinese folk art aesthetic and further emphasizes motifs of Chinese palace architecture such as lanterns and ornate woodwork. Dong Xiwen, like Luo Gongliu, had attended the Hangzhou National Art Academy. Unlike his older colleague, however, he was not a veteran of the Communist army but had spent most of the wartime period in Sichuan. While Communist Party veteran Luo Gongliu painted an event significant to the party’s internal history, Dong Xiwen, who had lived in the Nationalist-controlled areas during the war, created a work of significance to the entire reunified nation. Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation depicts Mao Zedong standing atop Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace at the south of the old imperial palace) as he announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China and its new government on October 1, 1949. Mao is set off from his colleagues in a triangular space created by crossing diagonal lines of vanishing-point recession. From the lower right, following the converging lines of the silken carpet, marble parapet, iron railing, broad boulevard, and crowds of flag-waving citizens, the viewer’s eye is led toward a y­ ellow-roofed gate at the eastern end of the square and comes to rest on Mao himself. Scudding clouds in the blue sky travel in the same direction, leaving open only the halolike blue patch around Mao’s head. From the middle left, our eye runs over the faces of the six vice-chairmen of the Central People’s Government, across the old palace’s marble bridges, toward the high-flying flag of the new People’s Republic and the Qianmen Gate to the south. Over the heads of the multitudes assembled on the square circle five doves of peace. Flanking Mao, the figures in the front row proceed from the uniformed figure of General Zhu De, head of the People’s Liberation Army, at left, to Gao Gang, head of the northeastern provinces, at far right. Between them are ranged the imposing image of Liu Shaoqi, in a tidy blue Sun Yat-sen–style uniform; Madame Song Qingling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, wearing a long qipao; the elderly and slightly rumpled Li Jishen, with hat in hands; and the bearded Zhang Lan, wearing a long scholar’s robe. Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai, behind Zhu De, is prominent in the second row, and beside him is barely visible the distinctive jaw of Dong Biwu, who headed the Political and Legal Committee of the new government. To the right and behind Madame Song is Guo Moruo, head of the government’s Culture and Education Committee. Finally, behind  

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Zhou Enlai stands Lin Boqu, the secretary general of the new government. The varied appearances and dress of the new leaders emphasize the diverse range of party and nonparty centers of power they represent, all envisioned as cooperately serving the new nation. After receiving a positive appraisal from Mao Zedong and the party leadership in the fall of 1953, Dong Xiwen’s The Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation was reproduced as a poster and published in many newspapers and magazines to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. A monumental history painting in the grand European tradition, it became an icon of the new Chinese nation, and for artists, of the nation’s new art. Distinctively Chinese motifs, such as red lanterns, silk carpet, porcelain flowerpots, and palatial setting, all rendered in black outlines and bright colors, earned the work nativist praise as an example of “the Sinicization of oil painting.” One might say that the painting succeeded on all counts in realizing the aspirations of the new Chinese art as they were understood in 1952. Most Chinese who had lived through the warlord era, the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the economic collapse of the late 1940s wished for nothing more urgently than the establishment of a peaceful society and stable government. Many were extremely hopeful about China’s prospects under the newly unified government of the People’s Republic of China and quite enthusiastically sought to follow the instructions they believed would rebuild the nation. Dong Xiwen was an ardent non-Communist supporter of the new government and typical of many idealists from the cultural world. Even before the Communist victory, he designed a flyer, “The Liberation Army Is the People’s Savior,” in preparation for the People’s Liberation Army entry into Beijing, and he joined the new nianhua movement with a picture celebrating the liberation of Beijing. The fate of Dong Xiwen’s Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation illustrates the difficulties faced by even the most loyal and dedicated of artists as they sought to serve the nation amid constantly shifting standards and policies. The relatively inconspicuous dark-haired man appearing immediately to Mao Zedong’s left in the painting was Gao Gang, Mao’s longtime ally and successful economic administrator. He was appointed chairman of the State Planning Council and moved from the northeast to Beijing in 1953, just as the painting began to receive positive attention. Soon after, Gao Gang met an unhappy and rather mysterious fate, quietly accused of disloyalty in early 1954, then purged from government, and finally dead by suicide. With Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation scheduled for showing at the Second National Art Exhibition of 1955, Dong Xiwen was

7.5 Dong Xiwen (1914–1973), Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation, oil on canvas, 230 × 400 cm, revised ca. 1955 and 1967, National Museum of China, Beijing  

asked to correct the painting, to remove the offender from his official position and from history itself. A slightly easier proposition than the Stalinist practice of removing people from photographs, Dong revised the intricately balanced painting by replacing Gao Gang with a potted chrysanthemum, adding two microphones that shifted the center of balance somewhat to the right, and removing a cloud to open up the sky. A new poster was issued of the revised version and the Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation continued to enjoy its iconic status. Dong Xiwen’s construction of the visual history of new China’s birth had thus been caught up in what would be the first major internal Communist Party purge of the post-1949 era; it would not be the last. Eventually the composition’s fate would parallel that of the nation it symbolized, suffering five revisions at the hands of four artists. Two versions of the canvas survive today. One, Dong’s original, was revised a third time by the artist himself under the immense pressure of the Cultural Revolution [fig. 7.5]. Dong removed the disgraced Liu Shaoqi, moving Dong Biwu to the front row to fill his space. In 1972, while terminally ill with cancer, Dong Xiwen was ordered to rework the painting yet a fourth time, to remove Lin Boqu (1885–1960), the white-haired gentlemen at far left. He declined, and two younger artists from CAFA, Zhao Yu and Jin Shangyi, were enlisted to make an exact copy of the iconic painting with  

the required changes. Finally, after the Cultural Revolution, authorities decreed that Dong’s original iconography should be hung in the museum with Liu Shaoqi, Gao Gang, and Lin Boqu replaced. The original version no longer existed, so the 1972 copy was revised to add figures it had never previously possessed, thus creating a fifth version. The intervening rise of Soviet socialist realism is evident in the square jaw and rectangular haircut of the new Gao Gang. This copy with its restored iconographic program is the version most often published today under Dong’s name, rather than his original version [fig. 7.4], which exists only in poster reproduction. The Monument to the People’s Heroes

These few examples of oil painting illustrate the adaption of academic European modes of painting to the new ideological needs of the Chinese Communist Party and government in the period before widespread adoption of Soviet models for art and architecture. A similarly significant effort, but in architectural and sculptural form, the Monument to the People’s Heroes was erected between 1952 and 1958 to the south of Tiananmen at roughly the spot where the national flag flies in Dong Xiwen’s Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation. Constructed of granite with inset marble panels of relief sculpture, it rises on a two-tiered platform to a height of almost 125 feet [fig. 7.6]. As intended, it has become a potent symbol of patriotic martyrdom and at the same time Western-St yle Art under Mao

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7.6 Monument to the People’s Heroes (at left) in front of the Great Hall of the People, completed in 1958, granite and marble, height ca. 38 m, Tiananmen Square, Beijing

tells a carefully constructed story of the history of modern China. A resolution to undertake its construction was passed by the People’s Consultative Congress (PCC) on Septem­ber 30, 1949, and ground breaking for the monument occurred that very evening, the night before Mao Zedong ascended Tianan­men to read the proclamation that established the new state. Seventeen different work units, from the PCC to the Peoples Liberation Army, participated in the project. When the construction committee was organized in 1952, Peng Zhen (1902–1997), the mayor of Beijing, was chosen as its chairman, while the learned vice minister of culture, Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958), and the noted Americantrained architect Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) served as vice chairs. Liang, who was the son of late Qing dynasty political reformer Liang Qichao, brought his profound knowledge of the history of Chinese architecture as well as the beaux arts architectural practices he learned at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s to his design for the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Combining elements of the imperial architectures of China and Europe, it brings to mind both the traditional stele of Chinese commemorative sculpture and such Western forms as the obelisk of the Washington Monument. If we take aesthetic communication to be a visual language, what the architects of this public work, Liang Sicheng and his talented wife Lin Huiyin (1904– 1955), achieved may be described as fully bilingual. In this regard, they and the equally multicultural designer of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Lü Yanzhi, succeeded in speaking both to China and to the world. Teams of prominent historians and artists assisted with design of the historical narratives that would surround the  

 

 

 

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lower section of the monument. The art group, comprised of many sculptors who were educated in Europe, was headed by Liu Kaiqu, a French-trained artist who at that time served as the director of the art academy in Hangzhou. Eight senior sculptors from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, assisted by a team of younger assistants, worked with many of the same painters engaged with the nearby Museum of Revolutionary History to develop and execute the designs. Unlike the more narrowly defined subjects painted for the Museum of Revolutionary History, which focus mainly on the heroism and sacrifice of the Communist Party and its army, the narrative friezes installed on the Monument to the People’s Heroes cover a larger sweep of modern history and emphasize the contributions of all patriotic Chinese to the struggle against feudalism and imperialism. The story begins with the Chinese burning of opium at Humen, Guangdong, in 1839—an act of resistance to British imperialism that provoked the Opium War [fig. 7.7].3 The depredations of the Taiping Rebellion appear on the monument as a virtuous rebellion against the feudal Qing government. The south side commemorates the 1911 revolution that overturned the monarchy; the demonstrations on May 4, 1917, against the weak Chinese government’s approval of the Treaty of Versailles; and anti-­imperialist demonstrations in the foreign concessions of Shanghai on May 30, 1925. The narrative program for the Monument to the People’s Heroes was developed after the outbreak of the Korean War, when China was becoming increasingly isolated internationally. Taken as a whole, it emphasizes China’s victimization at the hands of foreign interests and thus sets a pattern for a strain of historiography that remains vital in the PRC even today. Rather than glorifying the exploits of the Red Army, the scenes were selected to emphasize a model  

7.7  Zeng Zhushao (b. 1908), Burning Opium in Humen, 1958, from Monument to the People’s Heroes, relief sculpture, marble, 200 × 495 cm

of popular patriotic sacrifice. It was only on the north side, directly opposite the Tiananmen gate itself, that the most important panels reveal the Communist liberation of China as the culmination of the national history. Project leader Liu Kaiqu executed these three panels, which illustrate the support and welcome offered to the Communists by China’s people during the civil war years of 1946 to 1949. Finally, the monument was adorned on its north side with a calligraphic inscription by Mao Zedong, “The People’s Heroes Never Die,” and on its south side by a text transcribed in the hand of Zhou Enlai that summarizes this history.4 The new government thus moved fairly quickly to establish a visual vocabulary of national symbols and a new national history. For this it relied heavily on artists and architects who had been trained abroad or in the prewar art academies of China and who understood the conventional visual definitions of the modern nation-state, as popularized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. The six-year period of construction spanned a shift from an academic mode of art imported into China in the first half of the twentieth century to a new socialist realist art learned from the USSR. The narrative relief panels on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, although constructed to commemorate the Communist liberation of China, are typical of much early art of the PRC in that they largely adopt Western European style and modes of organizing content. Nevertheless, the slightly exaggerated expressions on the faces of the figures in the panels show evidence that the artists—all of whom were educated before 1949—attempted to slightly update the images to reflect the bombastic Soviet style. This trend would accelerate with the arrival of a Russian sculptor, Nikolai N. Klindukhov (b. 1916), to teach for two years at the Central Academy of  

 

Fine Arts in 1956 and the dispatch of sculpture students to Leningrad for advanced education.5 Soviet Socialist Realism

The second phase in the development of a new art for the People’s Republic of China corresponded chronologically with the implementation of the first five-year economic plan in 1953 and brought even greater centralization to the practice and teaching of art. Most important, it saw the wholesale importation of Soviet models in art, just as it did in industry, technology, education, and virtually all other modern fields. By the end of the five-year plan in 1958, European academic modes of painting and sculpture had largely been replaced by or evolved into Soviet socialist realism, a highly idealized and artificial manner required by Stalin in the USSR following the First Congress of Writers in 1934. Chinese writers would come to distinguish between social realism, as in the art of the nineteenthcentury French painter Gustave Courbet, which depicts the contemporary reality of working people’s lives, and socialist realism, as in the works of Alexander M. Gerasimov (1881– 1963) or Vladimir Serov (1910–1968), which render an idealized (and sometimes fictional) vision of the greatness of national leaders and the people’s prosperity and happiness under Communism. Yan Han, a Yan’an veteran assigned to teach at the Cen­ tral Academy of Fine Arts, visited the USSR as early as 1950 and presumably contributed his new knowledge of Soviet public art in his suggestions and drawings for the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Jiang Feng and several colleagues, including Cai Ruohong and Wang Shikuo, visited the USSR in the spring of 1954. On October 2 of that year an exhibition of 280 works of Russian and Soviet art  

 

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opened at the newly constructed Soviet exhibition hall in Beijing. CAFA oil painting professor Ai Zhongxin praised the diversity of the works exhibited as well as the “thematic” nature (zhuti xing) of the Soviet paintings.6 In a highly symbolic act of urban planning, in 1954 and 1955 the Shanghai Municipal government also constructed a dramatic Russianstyle structure, the Sino-Soviet Friendship Center (now the Shanghai Exhibition Center) on the site of the old Hardoon Garden on Nanjing Road. When the Soviet art exhibition traveled to Shanghai in 1955, the Hangzhou academy (CAFA East China campus) organized field trips, during which students copied the paintings, memorized their themes, compositions, and brushwork, and even examined how the canvases had been prepared and stretched. For most art students of this post-1949 generation, the Soviet exhibition was their first opportunity to see an exhibition of high-quality foreign oil paintings. Russian and Soviet painting was indelibly impressed into their minds, and from this time forward it was possible for them to understand in visual terms how the Soviet theoretical texts, which were read by all Chinese artists, might actually be implemented. Thus it was training given to the younger generation of artists that had the greatest impact on the development of the new styles.7 Between 1953 and 1956 about two dozen carefully selected Chinese art students were sent to the USSR to undertake a six-year course of study at the Repin Art Academy in Saint Petersburg (then called Leningrad). Beyond artistic and academic talent, students chosen to study in the USSR were required to be politically reliable and thus most were party members who claimed a suitable class background (peasant, worker, or soldier). Although the last group of graduates did not return to China until 1962, many elements of the Soviet curriculum were adopted in Chinese art schools and departments much earlier. Indeed, the national emphasis on learning from the Soviet experience led to a generation of students fully steeped in the ideals of Maoism but infatuated with the Russian language and culture. This shift in arts policy began around 1952 as the predominant interest in popularization of art gave way to a focus on raising technical standards. A national restructuring of higher education had profound effects on art instruction. The curriculum and program of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and its sister school in Hangzhou, now renamed the CAFA East China campus, were modified to more closely resemble that of the Soviet Union’s Repin Art Institute. Independent specialities and departments were established, and the curriculum expanded to five years. At the academy in Beijing, Xu Beihong student Ai Zhongxin chaired the oil painting department, former cartoonist and 148

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designer Ye Qianyu chaired the color-and-ink department, while the printmaking department was set up by Yan Han and subsequently headed by Li Hua. In Hangzhou, Zhu Jinlou chaired the color-and-ink department, Li Binghong the oil painting department, and Zhang Xiya the printmaking department. Both campuses maintained sculpture departments, but the applied arts programs were merged in Beijing, and the Hangzhou architecture program was transferred out of the art academy to Tongji University, an engineering school in Shanghai. At the same time, a Soviet system of specialized high schools, in which an elite group of children received advanced technical training at an early age in programs affiliated with the national art academies, was adopted. The ad hoc nature of the wartime art world in Yan’an was completely replaced with the systematic teaching methods of the USSR. At the same time, the Shanghai network of private art colleges, where various styles of European art had flourished, were eliminated. The Shanghai Art Academy and the Suzhou Art Academy were merged with the art department of Shandong University and relocated to Wuxi. Liu Haisu, director of the Shanghai school, was assigned to administer it. Yan Wenliang, director of the Suzhou Art Academy, was transferred to Hangzhou to teach perspective and color theory. Although many of the Shanghai artists refused to leave the city and found work in other institutions, with the removal of the art colleges from the city, the structure of schools, publishers, and markets that made Shanghai the preliberation art center of China was systematically dismantled. Between 1952 and 1956, the CAFA East China campus alone published eighty books containing translations, analyses, or surveys of Soviet art and art theory. For the next thirty years most Chinese art students would judge teachers who admired and emulated Soviet art to be far superior to the Europe or Japan-trained elder faculty. One of the most profoundly influential programs in the move toward Soviet standards began in 1955, when the Chinese Ministry of Culture arranged to bring a teacher to China from Moscow to train young artists and art educators in Soviet academic oil painting. The portrait painter Konstantin M. Maksimov (1913–1993) arrived at the Central Academy of Fine Arts to an enthusiastic welcome on February 19, 1955. He began teaching a two-year postgraduate course to a geographically diverse group of students: artists from the six national art academies, normal colleges, the People's Liberation Army, and the Shanghai publishing industry. Graduates would then return to their home cities and institutions to disseminate the new techniques and approaches as widely as possible.

7.8  Zhan Jianjun (b. 1931), Raising a Home, 1957, oil on canvas, 140 × 348 cm, Art Museum, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing

Twenty-one students formally participated in the program. The original group consisted of sixteen young men and two young women. When a few of the original students, including one of the girls, were expelled for skipping mandatory classes in politics, their places were filled by older teachers avid to learn the latest methods. The most senior was CAFA oil painting professor Feng Fasi (1914– 2009), a 1937 graduate of Xu Beihong’s program at National Central University who had worked at the Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts in the Yan’an Communist base during the war. Yu Yunjie (1917–1992), a Xu Beihong student who worked at Shanghai People’s Art Press, joined the class in 1956. Finally, from Hangzhou came Wang Liuqiu (b. 1919), a Yan’an veteran who taught at the Hangzhou academy. In addition, Maksimov offered instruction to other faculty and professional artists in Beijing. The oil painting training class of Konstantin Maksimov had a profound effect upon the art and the careers of his students as well as on their future students. In the first year, Maksimov instructed them in the most basic fundamentals, starting with how to most effectively use a palette, to properly wash brushes, and to stretch a canvas. Perhaps most significant, the basic techniques of Western oil painting and a systematic way of teaching it were institutionalized in the Chinese art academy system and thus firmly imbedded into the mainstream of Chinese cultural practice. For students who had previously learned almost entirely by looking at reproductions, Maksimov’s instruction in how to use color was particularly influential. The luminous graduation painting Raising a Home [fig. 7.8], by Zhan Jianjun (b.  1931), depicting newly arrived settlers in the Great Northern Wilderness, as the northeastern grasslands were  

 

known, exemplifies the rich palette they learned to use. The mastery of composition, perspective, and human likeness that Xu Beihong so fervently advocated, but only imperfectly realized in his own work, was brought to fruition in this generation. Maksimov’s students describe him as a lively, sympathetic teacher who tried to free them from dogmatic preconceptions. All of the graduates became experts at socialist realist painting, but he urged upon his students a personal and sympathetic approach to their choice of subject matter— one that focused on small vignettes of ordinary life rather than grand philosophical themes. In this regard, Maksimov attempted to turn them back, at least in part, to the social realism of such Russian artists as Ilya Repin. Maksimov’s own work of the time included lyrical images of Beijing’s city wall at dusk and portraits of ordinary Chinese. Indeed, rather than the hard-line Stalinist control that Mao Zedong admired, Maksimov’s teachings may have exemplified the brief liberalization of the Khrushchev-era thaw. Although some of the students’ graduation pictures were historical in theme, none depicted political leaders, and he required that all subjects be closely tied to the student’s own experience. Underground Communist Hou Yimin depicted his Beiping dorm room in which he and fellow students illicitly printed their broadsheets, announcements, and propaganda against the nationalist government in the late 1940s. Gao Hong, a military artist and veteran of the Korean War, painted Chinese soldiers tending a Korean orphan in their barracks, as he had once done himself. His colleague He Kongde (1925–2003), in Before the Battle, depicts somber Chinese soldiers on the snowy Korean front as they emerge from underground tunnels before launching their attack  

 

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as immigrants in this desolate place [see fig. 7.8]. One of the youngest students, Chen Beixin, was permitted to paint a landscape series. Thus in the mid-1950s, as the American art world was swept by abstract expressionism, China moved in exactly the opposite direction. Maksimov’s students openly displayed their newly earned facility with oil pigment and brush technique as well as a mastery of both representation and color never before seen in Chinese oil painting. The large, blunt, squared-off brush strokes give the paintings a painterly quality absent from works of the early 1950s. Ai Zhongxin (1915–2003), chair of the CAFA oil painting department and a graduate himself of Xu Beihong’s painting program at National Central University, audited some of Maksimov’s classes and was now able to turn his talents as a landscapist to new purpose. His dramatic The Red Army Crosses the Snowy Mountains [fig. 7.10], of 1957, which is roughly contemporary with the graduation paintings of his young colleagues in the Maksimov class, seems to place less emphasis on the heroic soldiers than on the natural environment against which they fought. Now inspired by Russian prototypes, Ai Zhongxin depicts the Red Army as it crossed the Jiajing Mountains in the Tibetan area of Sichuan, one of the most perilous parts of the Long March. In contrast to the comparatively static earlier paintings by Luo Gongliu and Dong Xiwen, these works are filled with drama. Their immediacy and emotional power appealed to unsophisticated viewers and thus contributed to an acceptance of oil painting as the mainstream medium for art in China. The unfulfilled hopes of Xu Beihong for a modern Chinese art based on realism, founded in the ideas of Kang Youwei, were finally realized in this Russian-inspired art.  

7.9 He Kongde (1925–2003), Before the Battle, 1962, oil on canvas, 189 × 140 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

[fig.  7.9]. He Kongde continued to specialize in Korean War subject matter in his subsequent career. Younger artists who had less real-life experience were sent on field trips to see people and places with their own eyes. Zhan Jianjun’s summer field trip to the northeastern steppes, an area then being opened to cultivation, led to his imaginative reconstruction of the drama of the hardy Chinese settlers arriving

7.10  Ai Zhongxin (1915–2003), The Red Army Crosses the Snowy Mountains, 1957, oil on canvas, 100 × 210 cm, Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution  

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The graduation exhibition of the Maksimov oil painting training class thus marked the completion of a transformation in Chinese art. In 1949 official art was defined as the popularizing style of the new nianhua, as seen in Lin Gang’s Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception [see fig. 7.2]. By 1953 an academic realism founded in European practices of previous generations reemerged, yielding immediately readable illustrations of major events, such as Luo Gongliu’s Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification in Yan’an [see fig. 7.3]. However, with the well-publicized graduation exhibition of the Maksimov oil painting class in 1957, an event deemed important enough to warrant General Zhu De’s attendance, the new Soviet style was launched nationwide. Works by Maksimov students have been represented in almost every subsequent national exhibition, and most of them returned to influential teaching positions, where they had profound impact on the following generations of artists in their home regions. By the 1980s the directors of all six major art academies were either Soviet trained or Maksimov students. The Publishing Industry and Propaganda Posters

After establishment of the PRC government in 1949, art became part of a tremendous effort to consolidate the Communist victory and create a new socialist world. Artists studied Mao’s 1942 Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art as the unquestionable law of the art world: “Literature and art [must] become a component part of the whole revolutionary machinery, so they can act as a powerful weapon in uniting and educating the people while attacking and annihilating the enemy, and help the people achieve solidarity in their struggle against the enemy.” 8 Gaining control of the commercial publishing industry, which was based mainly in Shanghai, made it possible for the Communist Party, perhaps for the first time, to print full-color pictures in large runs. The publishing industry thereafter served as an important center of artistic activity and employment for artists. Beginning in 1952, state-run art publishing houses were set up in Shanghai (the center of China’s prewar commercial publishing), in Beijing (the nation’s political heart), and in regional centers. An important function of the new publishing houses was to print visually compelling posters in support of current political policies. Although the propagandistic nature of most single-sheet prints produced by the art publishing houses in post-1949 China has led to a descriptive label “propaganda poster” for all such objects, in practice there were several different types of posters designed and issued under different circumstances, on different schedules, and for different functions. We have already mentioned both the new year’s picture

(nianhua) and oil or ink painting reproductions (hua‑ pian). A third type of poster produced by the studios of the new publishing companies was officially called a “propaganda picture” (xuanchuanhua). Huapian, a general term that includes full-color reproductions of oil paintings or ink paintings, were available all year round and were purchased by individual schools and work units for decorative or inspirational purposes. Dong Xiwen’s Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation [see figs. 7.4 and 7.5], created for Beijing’s newly established Central Museum of Revolutionary History, was widely distributed as a huapian in 1953, as would be many subsequent commissions for the same museum. Although most huapian from the Maoist years reproduce paintings that are political in subject matter, the circumstances of their creation, marketing, and use are somewhat different from those made specifically as propaganda posters, and they are less ephemeral. The new year’s picture was more time sensitive, traditionally bought at the end of the year by individual families to decorate their homes or paste on exterior doors or gates, and replaced annually. Artists of new year’s pictures were thus busy with annual deadlines to assure that a plentiful supply would reach bookstores and other distributors well before the new year. By contrast, propaganda posters responded immediately to virtually every political movement and social program. In the words of an art editor writing in 1960: “This unique form of art, the propaganda poster, enables the policies of the party and government to open the door to the hearts of the people and inspire their utmost efforts.” 9 The designs for xuanchuanhua were painted in gouache on paper and combined the bright colors of traditional Chinese new year’s pictures with the use of light and shade, perspective, and bold but simple propaganda slogans typical of Soviet propaganda posters. In the early 1950s, before dedicated propaganda poster units were established within the state publishing industry, painting of propaganda posters largely relied on professors at select national art academies, especially those of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hangzhou. Although some of these artists had no prior experience in the commercial publishing industry, they were nevertheless enlisted on propaganda painting teams that produced large quantities of such posters. Prominent participants included the director of the newly established Central Academy of Fine Arts, Xu Beihong (1895–1953); oil painting professors Wu Zuoren (1908–1997), Li Binghong (1913–1986), Ai Zhongxin (1915–2003), Dong Xiwen (1914– 1973), and Yu Yunjie (1917–1992); revolutionary printmakers Li Hua (1907–1990) and Zhao Yannian (b. 1924); and even ink painters Li Keran (1907–1989) and Li Kuchan  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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(1898–1983). The posters of this period reflect the enthusiastic atmosphere that prevailed at the time, despite the disruptions caused by the numerous political campaigns organized to consolidate Communist rule. By 1953 the Chinese government had managed to rebuild much of the war-devastated infrastructure, bring hyperinflation under control, and orient the population to a degree of mutual cooperation not previously known. Intent on building a socialist state, it now entered the period of intensive industrialization as well as organization of agricultural cooperatives. The first Five-Year Plan was set up as a basic structure for the state-planned economy, on the model used in the Soviet Union. Thus the establishment of a formal, professional poster design team, intended as an important means of conveying party ideology, was explicitly listed in the agenda of the party. The first professional propaganda poster team in China was organized in 1954 at the East China People’s Art Publishing House in Shanghai. Its staff was expanded in 1958, as part of the centralization of industry, when it was merged with the new year’s picture team from the old Shanghai Art Print (Shanghai huapian) Press and reorganized as the New Year’s Picture and Propaganda Poster Editorial Department of the new Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. The team was primarily comprised of two complementary groups of artists—commercial artists who worked in advertising agencies and design studios before 1949 and art school graduates of the late 1940s or early 1950s. They merged the colorful and decorative calendar print (yuefenpai or cabi, rubbed charcoal and watercolor) techniques of the pre-1949 commercial art world with the highly skilled academic figure painting of the art school graduates. They were prolific: the Shanghai team published more than two thousand different poster designs, issued in more than forty million prints, between 1954 and 1966; Beijing People’s Fine Arts Publishing House published more than five hundred poster designs and printed twenty-eight million copies between 1951 and 1959; and Tianjin Fine Arts Publishing House published 267 varieties of posters in 16.8 million copies. Despite a paper shortage, the peak of propaganda poster production was during the Great Leap Forward period [fig.  7.11]. New designs were shaped in a few hours and sent directly to the printing factory, where the entire process was monitored by editors on press. Posters of particular importance could be produced in about ten hours, starting from conception and design to final printing. The poster thus became an almost instantaneous expression of party policy, reflecting the smallest changes in the thinking of the leadership almost as quickly as did official state 

 

7.11  Qian Daxin (b. 1922), Strive for Greater Harvests, Devote Them to Socialism, 1958, poster, gouache on paper, 110 × 80 cm, Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House

 

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ments. The best known of the Shanghai propaganda poster artists is Ha Qiongwen (b. 1925). His 1959 poster Long Live Chairman Mao, prepared to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, may be the most famous poster design in all of China [fig. 7.12]. It was issued in a total printing of more than 2.5 million copies. Ha Qiongwen was born in Beijing and studied oil painting in the National Central University art department, first in Chongqing and after the war in Nanjing. Upon his graduation in 1949, he joined the People’s Liberation Army and became an art teacher in the East China Military and Political Academy. When Ha Qiongwen moved to the propaganda poster department of East China People’s Art Press, he became the major figure in the studio. According to the artist’s recollection, in conceiving Long Live Chairman Mao, he first tried to paint a celebratory scene based on his memory of the happy faces he saw at the 1959 May Day parade at People’s Plaza in Shanghai, but was unsatisfied with his drafts. Finally, as Ha Qiongwen gazed out the window of his studio, he found his inspiration. The publishing house, like many new institutions established by the Communists in Shanghai, then occupied an old mansion in the French concession, and the ornamental trees that

More than ten million copies of his posters were released during his thirty-seven-year career as a propaganda poster designer. With institutionalization of the specialties of nian‑ hua, propaganda pictures, and serial picture stories within the publishing houses, and the near elimination of products of the pre-1949 mass media, the visual environment that surrounded every Chinese at home, at work, and at leisure was remade in a way that transformed both ideology and aesthetic taste. Socialist Realism in the Museum of Revolutionary History

In preparation for celebration of the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, a massive construction project was undertaken in the capital in 1958 and 1959. What were labeled the “Ten Great Buildings”—the Great Hall of the People [see fig. 7.6], the Museum of Revolutionary History, the National Museum of History, the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Military Museum, the National Agricultural Exhibition Hall, the Nationalities Cultural Palace, the Beijing Train Station, the Worker’s Stadium, the Nationalities Hotel, and the Overseas Chinese Hotel— were constructed in Beijing in a range of Soviet, European, and “adaptive” styles, many making use of such fireproof materials as stone or reinforced concrete, with exterior columns and plazas in a Western manner but courtyards and upturned tiled roofs of the Chinese tradition.10 The Great Hall of the People, the Museum of Revolutionary History, and the National Museum of History were erected directly to the east and west of the Monument to the People’s Heroes at Tiananmen Square. Other new buildings, including the Chinese National Art Gallery, were constructed soon after. These monumental structures at the heart of the capital spoke to China’s people and to any foreign visitors of China’s emergence as a modern state. Didactic content installed within would organize and codify the history of the revolution, and the works of art would encourage patriotism by creating a visual narrative of events. Thus, creating decorations and historical paintings for the Great Hall of the People, the Museum of Revolutionary History, and the Military Museum gave China’s post-1949 generation of oil painters, today referred to as the third generation, the opportunity for which they had been trained to serve. China’s leading artists were commissioned to create large paintings, decorations, and sculptures for the new buildings in three campaigns conducted between 1958 and 1965. Artists trained by Maksimov or in the USSR painted for the new museums’ historical displays in what would become the most prestigious works of the era. The works commissioned for the project also show that socialist realism was dissemi 

 

7.12 Ha Qiongwen (b. 1925), Long Live Chairman Mao, 1959, gouache on paper printed as poster, 110 × 80 cm, Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House

still bloomed in its garden had exactly the upbeat tone he sought. He thereupon painted a young woman surrounded by pink blossoms, holding her young daughter on her shoulder. Ha Qiongwen wanted to emphasize the Chinese character of the woman, so he garbed her in a black velvet qipao, or Chinese gown, ornamented with a brooch and pearl earrings. The authorities, eager to disseminate such an optimistic image in the wake of the disastrous failure of the Great Leap Forward, had Ha Qiongwen’s Long Live Chairman Mao hung in public buildings all over China— in schools, factories, and military bases. It was even reproduced in a large format and hung from the tenth story of the No. 1 Department Store on Nanjing Road in Shanghai. The same image was used five years later by the China Women’s League as the cover for the foreign editions of their journal and for that occasion switched the title of the poster to “Long Live Peace.” In a telling coincidence, Ha Qiongwen’s career as an artist exactly spanned the years when Chinese propaganda posters, as a genre, flourished. He went to work in the propaganda poster studio of East China People’s Art Press in 1955, the year after its establishment, and retired in 1992, the year the propaganda poster department was abolished.  

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7.13  Quan Shanshi (b. 1930), Unyielding Heroism, 1961, oil on canvas, 233 × 217 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing

nated beyond those artists who had direct contact with a Soviet teacher. Maksimov students such as Jin Shangyi, Zhan Jianjun, and He Kongde, along with graduates of the Repin Art Institute, including the Hangzhou oil painter Quan Shanshi (b. 1930), created heroic images that monumentalize their subjects. Typical of the socialist-realist manner are their elevated horizon lines, elaborately posed figures, and new way of painting the human form: powerful and muscular, with strong eyebrows and squared jaws. Quan Shanshi painted 154

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a typical subject in 1961, martyrdom for the Communist cause, in Unyielding Heroism [fig. 7.13]. After his study in Leningrad, Quan Shanshi’s use of color was much more vivid and powerful than that of most oil painters trained in China. Based on sketching trips he made to Hunan and Jiangxi in preparation for the project, he depicted peasant revolutionaries as they fought to establish Communist Soviets in south-­central China in the 1920s. The rising sun behind them and the high horizon line are intended to suggest the eventual victory of the Communist troops,

7.14  Cai Liang (1932–1995), The Torchlight Parade in Yan’an, 1959, oil on canvas, 164 × 375 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing  

despite the Nationalist army’s mandate to eradicate every Communist. CAFA graduate Cai Liang (1932–1995), then working in Xi’an, painted a far more cheerful victory image, The Torchlight Parade in Yan’an, in 1959. In his job assignment Cai Liang had the opportunity to study local customs in the former Communist base area in northern Shaanxi, and he creatively reconstructs the costumes and music of a celebration following the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945 [fig. 7.14]. Led by a grinning boy, a procession of soldiers and peasants, side by side, trumpet victory with torches raised high. The artist has rendered the exhilarated men and women, old and young, in a dramatic perspective that diminishes to the distant streaks of torchlight on the Yan’an hills. Silhouetted against the evening sky is the nine-story brick pagoda that became a landmark of the Communist revolution. Cai Liang had studied at CAFA from 1950 to 1955. He had undoubtedly seen the Russian exhibition when it showed in Beijing, but he did not directly study with a Soviet teacher, and his adoption of the new style may represent the dissemination of socialist realism into the broader Chinese art world. There was no shortage of Mao images when the museum display finally opened on June 29, 1961. Jin Shangyi (b. 1938), the strongest portraitist of the Maksimov class, deploys the elevated perspective and artificial light of socialist realism to represent Mao Zedong as China’s courageous revolutionary leader in his 1961 painting Mao Zedong at the December Meeting [fig. 7.15]. The work was suitable to the display by virtue of its historical context, a crucial party meeting in 1947 at the height of the civil war between the  

7.15  Jin Shangyi (b. 1938), Mao Zedong at the December Meeting, 1961, oil on canvas, 158 × 134 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing

Communists and the Nationalists. Yet supplementing this narrative of Mao’s military and ideological contributions to formation of the new nation was acknowledgment of the historical role played by Liu Shaoqi, who became new China’s second head-of-state in 1959. Following the realist style of the nineteenth-century Russian Wanderers school, Maksimov graduate Hou Yimin (b. 1930) renders an image of Liu Shaoqi as he leads a coal miner’s strike at Anyuan in Western-St yle Art under Mao

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7.16 Hou Yimin (b. 1930), Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners, 1961, oil on canvas, 162 × 333 cm (1979 version, original destroyed ca. 1968), National Museum of China, Beijing

1922. Hou Yimin’s 1961 painting Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners [fig.  7.16] further extended historical definitions of the Chinese revolution beyond the rural and military subject matter so dear to Mao by encompassing the more orthodox Marxist theme of industrial workers. The economic and technological assistance rendered by the USSR during the second five-year plan obscured a backstage diplomatic drama that developed following Stalin’s death in 1953. Particularly after Nikita Khrushchev initiated his de-Stalinization program in 1956, Mao believed the USSR had strayed from the path of orthodox Communism and into revisionism. Against Soviet advice he began implementation of the People’s Commune system and the Great Leap Forward to more rapidly achieve Communism in China. Soviet skepticism, Mao’s intransigence, and Khrushchev’s blunt and arrogant personality led to increasing SinoSoviet tension. The ideological dispute was brought to a head in the summer of 1960, when the USSR withdrew every Soviet expert in China. Overnight, praise for Soviet models became politically incorrect. Party theorists emphasized the value of national forms in art. In the oil painting Mao Zedong in Mount Jinggang, the director of the history painting project, Luo Gongliu, experimented with replacing Soviet methods and motifs with Chinese ones [fig. 7.17]. Thus, rather than the squared strokes of Russian oil painting, Luo created his vision of Mao at a turning point in the Communist fight by using striations and stippling to suggest the texture strokes and dots of Chinese ink painting technique, implicitly declaring this work to exemplify a “national style.” Another attempt 156

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in the same period to Sinicize (minzuhua) oil painting was Chairman Mao Standing with People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, by Wu Biduan (b. 1926) and Jin Shangyi. They returned to the “outline and flat color” manner of new nianhua, while still deploying the representational skills honed during their instruction by Soviet teachers [fig. 7.18]. Like a draft for a new nianhua, one of the several surviving versions of this work was actually painted in gouache on paper. Wu Biduan was a CAFA faculty member who had studied in the USSR from 1956 to 1959. The work was probably inspired in part by frieze-like Soviet compositions such as Awakening, an oil painting by A. A. Myl’nikov that was exhibited in Beijing in 1957, which depicts the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas marching together with raised fists. First published after the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, however, Wu and Jin’s painting is most important for its political theme—claims to China’s leadership of the Third World at a time of extreme international isolation. The period between 1957 and 1961 in China was cataclysmic. In the spring of 1956, Mao Zedong launched the Hundred Flowers campaign, in which all China’s citizens were required to voice their opinions for further improvement of their nation. Many people, rather naïvely taking their instructions at face value, made criticisms of specific policies or individual administrators. Mao and the party leadership responded with a vicious campaign to assert greater control over ideological discipline. The following year, the carefully recorded comments of the Hundred Flowers meetings were brought forth as evidence to target party officials who had been criticized, citizens who voiced  

7.17 Luo Gongliu (1916–2004), Mao Zedong at Mount Jinggang, 1961, oil on canvas, 150 × 220 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing  

criticism, or in some cases both. Mao suggested that perhaps 5 percent of the population were rightists. Many work units adopted 5 percent as their quota. The campaign rapidly spread to include anyone who defended a person under criticism, anyone with personal or professional enemies, and a number of unlucky souls who simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The world of oil painting was hard hit. Jiang Feng, the national administrator who had promoted oil painting’s development most fervently, was declared the number one rightist in the art world at the end of July 1957, removed from his positions, expelled from the CCP, and sent to perform hard labor. Yan Han defended Jiang Feng and was soon labeled “number two rightist” in the national art world. Representatives from the Maksimov class had spoken out to request continued institutional support for the highlevel development of oil painting. Their spokesmen—Qin Zheng, He Kongde, Wang Liuqiu, and Yan Han—were labeled rightists. Yu Yunjie from Shanghai was labeled a rightist in absentia by his Shanghai work unit. Their rightist designations were credited to the quotas of their home work units, thus saving others from condemnation. If calculated separately, more than 20 percent of the carefully selected and politically reliable members of the Maksimov class were  

7.18 Wu Biduan (b. 1926) and Jin Shangyi (b. 1938), Chairman Mao Standing with People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1961, oil on canvas, 143 × 156 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

 

labeled rightists. Their works were not published in the graduation anthology and they were not invited to participate in the history painting project. He Kongde was somewhat protected by the military, but even the most fortunate of rightists suffered indignities and would experience even Western-St yle Art under Mao

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7.19 Du Jian (b. 1933), Advancing Amid Swift Currents, 1963, oil on canvas, 220 × 332 cm, destroyed in the Cultural Revolution period

worse harm during the Cultural Revolution. Some rightists were sent for labor reform to remote prison farms, and their spouses and children were denied normal rights to schooling, employment, and housing. It is estimated that about half a million people were declared rightists. All have now been declared innocent, many of them posthumously. With his opposition either intimidated or out of the way, Mao launched several ill-fated initiatives. On the domestic front he overturned the second five-year plan in favor of his Great Leap Forward. The slogan for all endeavors was “more, faster, better, thriftier.” In industry Mao’s slogan was “Surpass Great Britain’s industrial production within fifteen years.” To fully realize Communism in agriculture, about 99 percent of China’s peasants were communized by 1959. Artists traveled to rural villages to help the peasants paint colorful murals and returned to the cities to design propaganda posters depicting abundant harvests. When bad weather led instead to crop failures, malnutrition, and even starvation, the central government continued for a time to report the glorious success of Great Leap Forward policies. Artists working on the history painting project in Beijing received supplementary food rations in those years of shortage, and indeed the project served partially as a means of mediating the extreme hardship of China’s creative elite. As a result of the withdrawal of Soviet experts, the second Russian expert’s painting class, scheduled to be conducted by A. A. Myl’nikov, was cancelled, and the students instead were trained by Luo Gongliu [see fig. 7.17]. Despite the sometimes cataclysmic political events that followed the Soviet experts’ departure from China, the styles of Russian and Soviet art, and particularly socialist realism, were already so thoroughly absorbed that they remained the mainstream, even when Soviet sources were no longer 158

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openly acknowledged [fig. 7.19]. Jiang Feng’s internationalist goal of remolding the aesthetic tastes of China’s people was largely accomplished, even if he himself was removed from the scene. As a result of the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which were a well-known secret within the upper reaches of the government, Mao was unwillingly forced to yield as government leader in the summer of 1959 and was replaced by Liu Shaoqi. Following the Three Year Natural Disaster, as the famines of the period between 1959 and 1961 were called, the hard-line political, economic, and cultural policies of the Great Leap Forward were briefly relaxed. A period of pluralism in the arts ensued, particularly in traditional arts (see chapter 8). Young socialist-realist oil painters began producing optimistic and slightly sweet work that exalted the people rather than glorifying the nation’s leaders and their history. Four Girls, painted by Wen Bao (b. 1938) in 1962, depicts happy peasant girls who have put down their farm tools to rest, a lyrical vision of the leisure after farm labor rather than its hardship [fig. 7.20]. This work is rendered with the same painterly brushwork her teachers at the CAFA might use for their history paintings. In Front of Tiananmen, by Sun Zixi (b. 1929), adopts a Sinicized style related to the outline and flat-color manner to render a diverse crowd of sightseers posing for their pictures in front of the architectural symbol of the Chinese nation [fig. 7.21]. Painted on the fifteenth anniversary of the PRC, it is political in its setting as well as in the popularizing quality of its multiethnic and occupationally diverse figures. Nevertheless, it too strays far from the “thematic” political paintings of the previous period and instead focuses on a moment of leisure enjoyed by the ordinary working men and women of new China. An extraordinary broadening of works deemed permissible for exhibition occurred in the early 1960s, after Mao temporarily retired. The exhibition held at the newly constructed Chinese National Art Gallery in Beijing to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his Yan’an Talks showed art produced between 1942 and 1962, but it included apolitical paintings by non-Communist artists from the pre-1949 era, including Dong Xiwen’s decorative Kazak Herdswoman [see fig. 6.14] and Chang Shuhong’s Thunder Throughout the Land [see fig. 6.5], along with the more overtly political works by Communist veterans. Even more telling, in December 1962 and April 1963 a solo show of the paintings of Lin Fengmian was held in Shanghai and Beijing. This was a remarkable turnabout in light of Lin’s complete marginalization after 1949 and can have had no political justification other than to moderate the extremist cultural policies of the previous period. This chapter has described the creation under the gov-

7.20 Wen Bao (b. 1938), Four Girls, 1962, oil on canvas, 110 × 202 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

7.21 Sun Zixi (b. 1929), In Front of Tiananmen, 1964, oil on canvas, 155 × 285 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

ernment of the People’s Republic of China between 1949 and 1966 of new forms of official art in the Western mediums of oil painting, sculpture, and architecture. An almost total rejection of modernism was followed by a period in which artists capable of working in the realist modes of pre-1949 European and American art academies developed historical iconographies and symbols for the new state. Following the systematic introduction of Soviet models and educational principles in the mid-1950s, however, EuroAmerican academic realism was replaced by Soviet-inspired socialist realism as China’s official style. From as early as the

Tang (618–907) dynasty, painting was considered a high art form in China. It is not surprising, perhaps, that oil painting emerged as the most prestigious form of official art during the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, it was the mainstream of Chinese art on the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966. Chapter 8 will discuss the sometimes desperate attempts of ink painters to preserve their right to create art during the same highly charged political era. Such shifting standards also had their impact on printmakers and illustrators. Western-St yle Art under Mao

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8

Ink Painting, Lianhuanhua, and Woodcuts under Mao 1949–1966

If a Westernizing impulse lay behind the ideological support for oil painting in China between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the new government had a much less straightforward view of the future of China’s indigenous form of painting, guohua. Communist arts leaders had spent their lives working to overturn the forces of conservatism that they believed prevented China’s social, economic, and cultural progress. As artists, nearly all had pursued what they believed to be the most modern, cosmopolitan, and politically progressive forms of art: oil painting and printmaking. Administrators from working-class backgrounds, like Jiang Feng, had no love for traditional Chinese painting, which he associated with conservatism and elitism. Furthermore, traditional Chinese calligraphy, because of its elaborate script forms, was considered an impediment to mass literacy. In a series of reforms in the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese writing system, upon which the art of calligraphy was founded, was systematically simplified. Mainstream arts policy of the period immediately following 1949 thus threatened to eradicate China’s highest forms of art. The official policies between 1949 and 1952 caused great difficulties for guohua artists who did not have a salaried teaching job, and even for some who did. As private property was nationalized, the art market almost disappeared. Many wealthy collectors and patrons fled abroad. Many old and middle-aged artists were unwilling or unable to abandon their own painting styles in favor of the formulaic new nianhua (new year’s posters). Furthermore, some of them had no particular interest in politics, or even worse, had enjoyed the prior patronage of Nationalist officials. By virtue of their traditionalist painting styles and ideological incompatibility with the new regime, there was little such artists could contribute. The wealthiest began liquidating their art col161

lections to cover their living expenses. It may have seemed as though the new government sought to eliminate Chinese painting and other traditional arts. Yet by 1951 the government had formalized a policy to provide livelihoods and status for leading non-­Communist cultural and intellectual figures. A system of Research Institutes for Culture and History (wenshiguan) provided stipends and jobs but removed its members from active roles in society, thus creating a living museum of the former cultural elite. Ye Gongchuo, a founding member of the Chinese Painting Society in 1931 and former Republican official, served as administrative vice-director in Beijing. Shanghai established a local branch in 1953, as did most provincial governments. The Shanghai Culture and History Institute, for example, appointed a former publisher and jinshi degree holder, Zhang Yuanji, as director. The institute employed 115 men who earned official degrees, from jinshi to xiucai, under the Qing dynasty educational system, along with many prominent figures from the Republican worlds of journalism, publishing, literature, art, history, and other kinds of scholarship. For guohua painters not yet honored by such an appointment, production cooperatives were organized in 1953 at which they decorated fans, lanterns, and window blinds on a piecework basis. Party leaders with a greater interest in Chinese history recognized, however, that the greatness of China’s ancient civilization inspired patriotism at home and respect abroad. After 1949 new museums and archaeological research institutes were established in all parts of the nation to preserve and research art and antiquities, and Marxist histories and art histories analyzing China’s past in new ways were published. As cultural nationalism reasserted itself, protection of the national heritage emerged as an explicit cultural policy of the CCP. The uniqueness of China’s traditions of painting and calligraphy came to be recognized as a value worth protecting. Cultural theorists within the party had argued since the 1930s about whether, as they put it, new wine could be put in old bottles. Party ideologist Zhou Yang continued to promote such a strategy in his speech to the Second Congress of Literary and Arts Workers in September 1953. “We request that the contents of literary and art works express the people and thoughts of the new age, and the forms express the style and vigor of the nation. . . . All writers and artists should diligently study their own national literary and artistic legacy and take continuation and development of the national heritage’s excellent tradition as their own mission.” 1 Artists like Jiang Feng and Ai Qing, following their mentor Lu Xun, were far more skeptical that old artistic forms might serve contemporary needs. These two radically different 162

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approaches to guohua reform were implemented simultaneously, creating conflict within the party arts establishment. This uncertainty created many hardships for guohua artists but also some opportunities. Between 1949 and 1966 the same system of art education that transformed oil painting produced parallel changes in the mainstream practice of Chinese painting. After 1949 the art academies in Beijing and Hangzhou merged oil painting and guohua instruction into a single painting department; during their three-year program all students studied drawing, perspective, and anatomy, working both in the studio and “in actual life,” taking numerous field trips to work alongside peasants and workers. Academic figure drawing was thus an important part of the curriculum, along with outline-and-color painting, Western watercolor painting, and oil painting. Among the three basic genres of traditional Chinese painting—landscape, bird-and-flower, and figure painting—only the latter was taught and in a modified form. Older masters of these genres, like birdand-flower painter Pan Tianshou and landscapist Huang Binhong, were removed from the classroom. Most were subjected to thought reform, which included intensive work to change their practice of painting to accommodate the new ideology. All were sent to the countryside to live and to sketch the peasants rather than the subjects in which they excelled. In 1953, just as the party’s emphasis shifted from popularization to specialization, the first generation of ink painters trained after 1949 graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Ideologically well positioned to implement new policies and free of preconceptions about the styles or nature of art, most were hired as art academy teachers. They worked hard to develop fresh forms of Chinese painting that would serve the needs of the new nation just as their classmates and colleagues sought to raise technical standards in oil painting, sculpture, and architecture by studying Soviet models. A concerted effort was made at the same time to remold guohua, both to correct its perceived ideological deficiencies and to improve its technical standards. Based on the same synthesis of Soviet and Maoist standards required in all cultural fields, it was decided that the new guohua should be figure painting and should be based on drawing from life. The result was novel—a new socialistrealist Chinese ink painting. Beijing and Hangzhou each set about this project based on the strengths of their own faculty and in the end developed slightly different styles. The Beijing style, relying on the foundations set by Xu Beihong and Jiang Zhaohe [see figs. 6.10 and 6.17], leaned more heavily on modeling threedimensional volumes and rendering the effects of illumina 

 

 

tion. In essence, this method applied Western techniques to Chinese paper and almost ignored those of China’s own tradition. The Hangzhou style was somewhat more gestural, relying more heavily on energetic outline strokes and slightly abstract washes, and retained a few techniques that may be associated with the late-nineteenth-century Shanghai school. Most important in creating a feeling of immediacy and realism, however, was the artists’ successful integration of Western perspective into their compositions. Both groups brought many of the basic principles of socialist realism into their painting. The academy in Beijing was perhaps most easily turned in this direction, because the new policies were compatible with the reformist agenda of director Xu Beihong. Himself an admirer of the realism of Ren Yi’s portraits, Xu had avoided conservative guohua painters in staffing the Beiping National Art Academy in 1946 and instead sought instructors committed to the reform of Chinese painting. One of the faculty members he hired, Jiang Zhaohe (1904–1986), had impressed him with large-scale, dramatically lit, and highly naturalistic ink paintings [see fig. 6.17]. Although Jiang’s wartime painting, especially his most famous Refugees, was dark and gloomy, his style was easily modified to reflect the optimism of the socialist-realist manner. His cheerful images of happy children, often placed with symbols of peace, were both politically appropriate and recognizably Chinese, and were selected as gifts for China’s diplomatic endeavors overseas. Jiang Zhaohe’s style served as the basis on which a new guohua figural style developed at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, one sometimes called the Beijing school. One notable socialist realist to emerge from this milieu was Li Qi (1928–2009). Born only a few years after his parents joined the Communist Party, Li was taken by them to Yan’an when he was nine, and he grew up at the center of the revolution. As a young adolescent he attended Mao’s 1942 talks on literature and art, and by all indications he was a devout follower of Mao and the party. After liberation, Li was appointed to serve as an assistant to Jiang Feng and the party administrators of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He won a Ministry of Culture prize for one of his new nianhua. His slightly later portrait, Mao Zedong Visiting the Entire Nation, was inspired by his 1959 experience of witnessing Mao visit the construction site for the Ming tombs reservoir during the Great Leap Forward. The mass adulation displayed as the workers swarmed for a view of Mao suggested the artist’s theme, in which Mao’s power is humanized with a common touch [fig. 8.1]. In placing the leader’s image against a blank background, and outlining it with black ink, Li Qi explicitly follows a tra 

 

8.1 Li Qi (1928–2009), Mao Zedong Visiting the Entire Nation, 1960, ink and color on paper, 197 × 117.5 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

ditional convention. His basic technique, however, does not come from traditional painting but from the conventions of academic drawing, Western watercolors, and Soviet socialist realism. Although influenced by Jiang Zhaohe in technique, Li Qi adopts a heroic Soviet-style perspective, with Mao elevated, as though gazing genially down on the viewer. The artist has artfully chosen to garb Mao in urban dress, giving him an air of authority but softening this impression somewhat by the loose wrinkles of the white shirt, its casually open collar, and the straw farmer’s hat Mao holds in his hand—all of which serve to establish a connection with the working people of China. Mao Zedong’s ruddy good health and cheerful expression are extremely reassuring, and this 1960 work by a true believer has become an almost sacred image of the founding father of new China. The young artists in Hangzhou developed a slightly  

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different style. Unlike the academy in Beijing, where the pre-1949 director, Xu Beihong, already stressed the necessity of academic drawing as the basis for a reformed guo‑ hua, the academy director who supervised the move back from Sichuan to Hangzhou after the war was Pan Tianshou, a bird-and-flower painter and one of the most committed advocates of traditional brushwork in guohua. He was not permitted to teach after 1949; instead, freshly graduated instructors were charged with developing a guohua practice suitable to the new era. Between 1953 and 1955 thirty-nine graduates, all well practiced in “drawing from life” and in the ideological underpinnings of the new art, were kept on as instructors. Some of the most talented, including two 1953 graduates—Zhou Changgu (1929–1986) and Fang Zengxian (b. 1931)—were assigned to the newly reestablished guohua division, where they set about drawing modern figures from life with Chinese tools. In theme, they sought an ideal translated from Soviet theory as the dianxing, or “typical.” In execution, they replaced the outline-and-flat-color manner of the new nianhua with ink lines of varying widths and richly applied ink textures. These two young painters were instrumental in developing the “Zhe style,” as the manner developed at Hangzhou (in Zhejiang province) came to be known, and which profoundly affected the subsequent practice of Chinese painting. Zhou Changgu’s Two Lambs, of 1954, represents a Tibetan herdgirl in Gannan, in southern Gansu province, leaning pensively on a simple fence [fig. 8.2]. This work is an early example of the Mao period depiction of the national minorities, a general theme that has remained very popular among artists and critics. The reasons for this are complex but are based at least partly in larger historical circumstances. The weakness of the Chinese government in the nineteenth century, and extending through the Republican period, SinoJapanese War, and Civil Wars, weakened the central government’s control over many parts of the Chinese empire, including the border regions that had been brought under Qing dynasty rule during the eighteenth century. From the earliest days of the Republic, re­establishing territorial control over the full extent of the Qing empire was an expected result of China’s reunification. In the War of Liberation the People’s Liberation Army took as its mandate the task of bringing all of that territory, its people, and its substantial natural resources back under the unified government of the new PRC. By 1954 the new government considered Buddhist Tibet and predominantly Muslim Xinjiang to have been liberated and began the process of integrating them into the Communist state. The modern nationalism that had led to overthrow of the Manchu regime in 1911 was founded, at  

 

 

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8.2  Zhou Changgu (1929–1986), Two Lambs, 1954, ink and color on paper, 79.3 × 39.3 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

least in part, on the ideals of ethnic self-determination for Han Chinese. Yet the great Chinese empires of the past, from Tang to Qing, as well as powerful states of the present, including the Soviet Union, were multiethnic. The ­twentieth-century governments of China were thus faced with resolving the contradictions between two essentially incompatible ideologies: a Han nationalism based on ethnicity and patriotic pride in a new government capable of reunifying their fractured country. Of the two, the latter was more difficult to achieve, but nurturing it became essential to any regime. Thus, during the Mao years, the party tried to educate the majority Han Chinese that their non-Han brethren, now referred to as the national minorities, were legitimately their fellow-citizens. At the same time, educational policies were introduced to teach the minorities how they might contribute to the nation as citizens of the PRC.

Scenes like Two Lambs that suggested the successful pacification of the frontiers were politically welcome. From a purely creative perspective, however, the opportunity to travel to exotic and beautiful locales rather than the usual factories and farms was a welcome adventure to artists. Regardless of the political agenda that may have provided travel funding, it was an exciting creative challenge to paint the Tibetan highlands or the Central Asian deserts, and to study the Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, or Kazaks, with their colorful costumes and striking physiognomies. The Tibetan girl at center, in her youth and innocence, embodies the nation’s dreams and hopes for the future, a potential reflected by the tiny lambs at her feet that are the explicit theme of the painting. Formally, the ground plane is so sharply tilted that the horizon line behind the figure cannot be seen, but the large flock of sheep extending behind her and beyond the picture plane create an assumed vanishing point, as in Western conventions of perspective. In a typical socialist-realist device, the large figure is elevated on the picture plane, just as are the heroic warriors of Quan Shanshi [see fig. 7.13]. Depicted as anatomically correctly as the artist found possible, the girl’s thoughtful concentration as she nibbles on a blade of grass provides the psychological interest in the story. In contrast to earlier Chinese figure paintings, particularly those depicting female figures, the Tibetan girl’s hands and bare feet are evident, accentuating the Western perspective and revealing her thoughts almost as expressively as her face. The painting’s compositional structure, which is new to Chinese figure painting, is based on a recession that describes the arc of a reversed C-shape in space, culminating with the two foreground lambs. At the same time, however, many elements of this painting come directly out of recent Chinese tradition and particularly the Shanghai school style as carried on within the pre-1949 academy in Hangzhou. Indeed, Zhou Changgu, Fang Zengxian, and their other young colleagues reluctantly acknowledged the technical facility of Pan Tianshou and the old teachers in the department, even if they looked down on them for their inability to paint anything but plants, birds, and fish. Qualities this work shares with earlier Chinese painting include the vertical format, the blank white background, the moist strokes of ink, and even the romantic sweetness of the exotic scene. Zhou Changgu’s fluid rendering of the linear drapery folds in the girl’s white garment suggest the painting of Ren Yi [see fig. 1.12], as does the layered wash with which he executed her black skirt [see fig. 1.11]. The slow and powerful lines of the fence create an epigraphic structure to the space, suggestive of the painting of Wu Changshi [see fig. 1.22].2 Choice of politically significant subject matter—in this case, the theme of con 

tented national minorities—was a core component of the new official art. While close examination of the painting, particularly when it is compared with those of Ren Bonian or Pan Tianshou, may reveal technical imperfections, Two Lambs was truly innovative in its concept and composition. The work was criticized by some party officials for its sensory charm, but it won first prize in the 1955 Moscow International Youth Show, an honor that provided international legitimacy to the new Zhe figure-painting style. Zhou Changgu’s colleague and fellow graduate of the class of 1953, Fang Zengxian (b. 1931), instead rendered more orthodox subjects from the worker-peasant-soldier canon of approved Maoist subjects. Every Grain Is Hard Work, which is formally similar to Two Lambs, depicts a frugal and hardworking peasant picking up the last grains of rice after the harvest. When exhibited in 1955, this work garnered the artist substantial favorable attention. By 1964, when he painted Telling a Red Tale, Fang had developed his compositional, perspectival, and figural skills even further, while continuing to emphasize the Zhe school ink techniques of varied and expressive outlines and deep, rich washes [fig. 8.3]. In the upper part of the composition a group of peasants, old and young, recedes sharply in an inverted U-shaped formation, a virtuoso demonstration of the artist’s mastery of Western principles of perspective. These figures comprise the attentive audience for a farm boy, depicted with his back to the viewer, who is the main character. The eye-­catching young man, his silhouette emphasized by a strong outline, uses his hoe as a stage prop to narrate and act out his revolutionary story. The overall composition, and particularly the threedimensional organization of the figures, comes from the Western academic tradition and is completely unlike anything in Chinese art of the past. The artist does not depict the heroic story itself, but instead describes the widespread enthusiasm for tales of revolutionary valor among all members of society, including the least educated. Very much a work of the post–Great Leap Forward period in its focus on the small pleasures of ordinary people and its lack of overt political subject matter, it nevertheless suggests the people’s (and the artist’s own) loyalty to the regime and its version of history. Compositionally and thematically, this is one of the most original works of the period, while at the same time upholding the principles of socialist realism. Quite significantly, in the mid-1950s the departments where Zhou Changgu, Fang Zengxian, and Jiang Zhaohe taught were not called guohua (national painting) departments, but instead were labeled by the more neutral term, color-and-ink painting (caimohua), thus removing the ideologically charged term “national” from its association with ink and Chinese paper. So named, the academic pro 

 

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8.3 Fang Zengxian (b. 1931), Telling a Red Tale, 1964, ink and color on paper, 96 × 183 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

gram to remold Chinese painting by replacing its foundational vocabulary of brushstrokes with academic drawing might more easily abandon ties to the conventions of the premodern era, especially those of landscape and bird-andflower painting, and make explicit its international aspirations. Some elements of earlier ink painting, particularly the hybrid realism of Ren Yi, were echoed in the Zhe style, but most important for all new artists were development of socialist-realist compositions and politically appropriate subject matter. The abstract beauty of brush and ink, which was such an important aspect of pre-­twentieth-century Chinese painting, became a secondary concern. Many of its most subtle techniques and skills were not passed down to subsequent generations. The new figural style initiated at the two campuses of the Central Academy of Fine Arts spread throughout China in the ensuing years and in the hands of its most talented and dedicated practitioners bloomed into an art that was truly unprecedented. The Zhe style was disseminated and further developed by the students of Fang Zengxian and Zhou Changgu. Liu Wenxi (b. 1933), who had, like oil painter Cai Liang, received his high school education at the Yucai School for gifted students in Shanghai, was a student in their first class, from 1953 to 1958. Like Cai Liang, he was assigned to work in Xi’an upon his graduation and became a specialist in depicting the people of the former Communist base area in northern Shaanxi, visiting the area more than sixty times, beginning in 1957.3 His 1962 ink-and-color paint166

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ing Four Generations shares the monumental, elevated perspective of revolutionary oil paintings of the era [fig. 8.4]. It is similar in general theme—China’s working people at leisure—to several other oil paintings of the same period, including those of Sun Zixi and Wen Bao, as well as Fang Zengxian’s Telling a Red Tale. Yet within the ideological and formal limitations of the era, Liu Wenxi strikes out on his own. Most notably, his dry brushwork, which almost seems to reflect the parched northwestern countryside, adds a powerful roughness to the composition that emphasizes the hardy spirit of perseverance with which he imbues his figures. The wizened face of the old grandfather, the weatherbeaten visage of his turbaned farmer son, the ruddy health of his tractor-driving grandson, and the tender sweetness of his little great-granddaughter tell the history of the twentieth century and the peasants’ mastery of their own destiny, from their own perspective. One of the successes of the new socialist-realist ink figure painting was the transformation of guohua from an art form for private enjoyment into public art. Indeed, the expectation that guohua should serve the same public function as oil painting was an important development of the 1950s. Of 244 paintings commissioned for the 1959 painting campaign for the Museum of Revolutionary History, 136 were guohua paintings in a new socialist-realist style. The Manchurian artist Wang Shenglie (1923–2003) was assigned a topic similar to that of Quan Shanshi’s oil painting [see fig. 7.13] for the same project. His Eight Female Martyrs [fig. 8.5] depicts  

 

 

8.4 Liu Wenxi (b. 1933), Four Generations, 1962, ink and color on paper, 118 × 98 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

8.5 Wang Shenglie (1923–2003), Eight Female Martyrs, 1959, ink and color on paper, 144 × 367 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing  

8.6  Yang Zhiguang (b. 1930), Mao Zedong at the Peasant Movement Training School, 1959, ink and color on paper, 141 × 205 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing

the heroines of the Women’s Regiment of the Anti-Japanese Amalgamated Army, who drowned in October 1938 rather than surrender to the Japanese invader. Wang Shenglie grew up in Shinkyō (now Changchun, Jilin province), the capital of Manchukuo under the Japanese colonial occupation (1932–1945). From 1941 to 1944 he studied in Tokyo with the nihonga artist Kawabata Ryūshi (1885–1966), at the Tokyo branch of the Shinkyō Art Academy, and then subsequently became an art teacher in Changchun. Upon his return to Manchuria, however, Wang joined the Communist Party and began organizing the resistance movement. He was assigned to the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang in 1949 and later became its vice-director. Wang Shenglie was trained in a polished style of Japanese art called nihonga during the Japanese occupation of his native region. Nihonga is a nativist mode of modern Japanese painting initiated in the late Meiji period (1868–1912) as a corrective to what some in the Japanese art world saw as an overreliance on Western forms of art. Although these Tokyo artists returned to the materials and highly refined techniques of early East Asian painting, they were familiar with European drawing, compositional conventions, and perspective, and their art often synthesized the two tradi 

 

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tions. In format, their paintings tend to be large and are sometimes stretched on a screenlike frame so that they may occupy the same wall space as an oil painting. Xu Beihong’s advocacy of academic figure drawing and history painting positioned his students to easily adapt themselves to the requirements of Soviet socialist realism, which had its roots in the European academic manner. Wang Shenglie’s Japanese academic training, which was also grounded in nineteenth-century realism, enabled him to achieve a similar conceptual and stylistic convergence. In addition to the highly skillful rendering of the desperate soldiers, details such as the carefully modeled and highlit boulders and the crashing waves create a dramatic, or perhaps one should say melodramatic, vision of the girls’ last moments. It is striking that the conventions for painting the sea, with the clawlike foam reaching toward shore and the overlapping linear pattern of the billows, come from the standard vocabulary of Japanese screen painting as pioneered by Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506) in the Muromachi period and followed by ink painters up to the twentieth century. These conventions find their source in Chinese court and temple painting of the Southern Song period and may be seen in religious murals of the Yuan and Ming periods as well.  

They were superbly modified by Japanese artists to serve as motifs for large screen paintings. Using Japanese innovations in a painting celebrating resistance against Japan may seem ironic, but the bold and decorative Japanese screenpainting tradition certainly provided Wang Shenglie compositional models for this public commission. Furthermore, Sesshū, who visited Ming dynasty China in 1468, was celebrated in Beijing in 1956 by a symposium marking the 450th year after his death. In this light it may have been acceptable to demonstrate mastery of this old convention. Eight Female Martyrs is almost as large as Cai Liang’s oil painting, Torchlight Parade in Yan’an [see fig. 7.14], and serves as a powerful demonstration that with sufficiently bold composition and brushwork, ink painting could serve the new regime. The Cantonese artist Yang Zhiguang (b. 1930) contributed a work to the Museum of Revolutionary History that illustrated Mao Zedong speaking to students at his 1926 training program in Guangzhou for rural cadres [fig. 8.6]. Yang Zhiguang began studying with Gao Jianfu in Guangzhou at age eighteen and was formally initiated as Gao’s disciple. After 1949 he moved briefly to Shanghai, where he continued learning guohua at the Suzhou Art Academy. In 1950, however, he enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing under Xu Beihong, Ye Qianyu, and Dong Xiwen. Yang Zhiguang graduated in the same 1953 class as Jin Shangyi and Zhan Jianjun, and from that time until his retirement taught at the South-­Central Art School in Wuhan and then, after its relocation, at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. His painting for the Museum of Revolutionary History demonstrates complex use of ink, color, wash, texture, and line learned from the Lingnan master. For purposes of the museum exhibition, however, it is less Yang’s facility in guohua techniques and more his use of Western vanishing-point perspective that gives the work its drama by adding a vivid three dimensionality to the painting's tropical lushness and excitement to its didactic theme. The Reappearance of Landscape Painting

The paintings from the history painting project examined here were painted by post-1949 art academy graduates in the new official style. Although they faced the challenge of accommodating the absorbent and unforgiving paper of Chinese painting to the large compositions that were required, in general their adoption of the conventions of socialist realism and European history painting were relatively unproblematic. Rather than modifying traditional guohua, they simply invented a new way of painting with traditional materials. However, the reappearance of the

traditional subject of landscape painting in the late 1950s is both surprising and significant. When the newly established Chinese art bureaucracy was reorganized in the fall of 1953, after the second Congress of the Federation of Literary and Arts Workers, a somewhat more conciliatory approach to Chinese painting was articulated, one that emphasized developing the national heritage. In premodern Chinese painting, the landscape generally had a philosophical meaning or function. In one of the earliest surviving landscape texts, Zong Bing (375–443) describes the spiritual benefits of looking at a landscape painting to “wander[ing] while lying down.” 4 In Northern Song painting (960–1127), landscapes serve as models of the perfect order of the universe; in Yuan and Ming literati art they also express the mind or heart of the artist. It was partly on the basis of the individualistic and introspective latter practice that landscape painting had been largely rejected as useless to new China. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American art, however, grand landscape paintings were often read through a nationalistic lens. Particularly in the United States, beginning around 1820, the awe-inspiring beauty of the natural landscape was equated with optimism for the national future and tied to the nation’s sense of Manifest Destiny. This tendency, so evident in painting, is echoed in such late-nineteenth-century patriotic songs as “America the Beautiful.” Construction of the ideology and imagery of the People’s Republic of China made effective use of similar conventions, and by 1959 we see a notable change in the interpretation of Chinese landscape painting, which came to serve as a symbol of the greatness of the nation. One of the most important criticisms of Chinese painting by those within the Communist Party who sought to remold or abolish guohua was that it was based on copying old art rather than on observation of the real world. To meet this challenge, the cultural authorities funded artists to travel in order to learn to paint the appearance and activities of the new nation. In August of 1953, for example, Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), who had worked briefly in the Nationalist government during the war but had successfully redeemed himself by completing a program of thought reform, participated in a field expedition to Anhui to paint from life at the construction site of the Foziling Dam. This engineering project, aimed at taming the Huai River, was billed as Asia’s largest dam and was a symbol of the new government’s ambition to conquer nature on behalf of the masses. From this time forth, plein air painting, previously common among practitioners of oil and water color painting, became a standard part of the project of reforming Chinese painting. As seen in the work of Zhou Changgu, travel to paint  

 

 

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the artists create an expansive and sharply tilted ground plane in the lower half of the picture that enables the viewer to see details within the courtyard, where free food is served to contented villagers. Such minute details as menus, slogan boards and propaganda banners, murals depicting giant pumpkins and ears of corn on the outside of the compound wall, loudspeakers high atop electric poles, and distant windmills, haystacks, and factories, all contribute to the purpose of the painting, illustrating the iconography of economic progress under the Great Leap Forward. The lyrical distant Jiangnan hills serve as backdrop for the action and give the work an aesthetic appeal that partially overcomes the didactic functionality of the foreground architecture and figures. While traditional Chinese landscape painting often gracefully and logically incorporates multiple viewpoints within a single composition, the movement in this work from the lower half, with its unitary Western vanishing-point perspective, to a completely different and rather disjunctive ground plane in the upper part of the picture, is unexpected. Nevertheless, because of its minute and engaging details of daily life, the painting is oddly compelling. Over the next several years the Jiangsu artists largely resolved such conspicuous contradictions between Western architectural perspective and Chinese modes of rendering distance and space. The overall composition of this work is believed to have been designed by Qian Songyan (1899–1985), a senior traditionalist landscape painter, but it was jointly executed by a team of ten collaborators, who ranged from younger specialists in figure painting to older literati-style landscapists. Fu Baoshi, the group’s director, wrote the inscription. Qian Songyan, an art teacher who had exhibited his ink paintings in the 1929 National Art Exhibition, had launched a new career with his move from Wuxi to Nanjing in 1957. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the task of remaking his own art and helping his younger colleagues develop their own technical skill. Merging nontraditional elements into the more conventional guohua he had practiced up until that point and stimulated by the opportunity to travel, he found it possible to create inspiring scenes of new China that captured the imaginations of his fellow citizens. Unfortunately, the illconceived economic policy celebrated in People’s Commune Dining Hall (Free Food for All) [see fig. 8.7] and Fields in Changshu [fig. 8.8] was followed by terrible famines euphemistically labeled the Three Years of Natural Disasters. Although shortages, many exacerbated by fatally flawed distribution policies, were obvious even in major cities, the scale of this largely human-made catastrophe, with its death toll in excess of thirty million souls, was kept secret from  

8.7  Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting, People’s Commune Dining Hall (Free Food for All), 1958, ink and color on paper, 146 × 96 cm, M K Lau Collection, Hong Kong

real places, only widely possible for artists in a time of peace and prosperity, became a major inspiration for new images and styles beginning in the early 1950s. Establishment of regional and local branches of the Chinese Artists Association further encouraged artists in regional centers to remold Chinese painting through close observation of the relationship between nature and human activity. During the Great Leap Forward of 1958, Jiangsu artists working with Fu Baoshi developed a unique regional style. Remarkably, they were also able to achieve a form of communal production. One early example of their collaboration, People’s Commune Dining Hall (Free Food for All), combines exquisitely re­­strained and subtle washes of ink and color with complicated and rather fussy details of observed human activity [fig. 8.7].5 The 1958 painting by members of the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting, which depicts a newly collectivized rural village, was particularly praised by party administrators in Beijing. Using Western principles of vanishing-point perspective, 170

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8.8  Qian Songyan (1899–1985), Fields in Changshu, 1963, ink and color on paper, 53 × 36 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

China’s public.6 Artists kept in the dark, and thus deceived, willingly provided the propaganda that hid the government’s mistakes. While Fu Baoshi had a gift for composition, of all his colleagues Qian was considered to have the best eye for choosing a view or site, and the best ear for choosing a title. His 1963 bird’s-eye view of the network of canals around Changshu, with green fields stretching from the painting’s bottom to top, is an extraordinary transformation of Chinese painting—one intended to depict in an original form the dramatic effects of new agricultural policies [fig. 8.8]. From his vantage point atop Mount Yu in Changshu, he saw the previously fragmented farm land that was now cultivated collectively as a vast geometric grid of irrigation canals and green fields. No traditional texture strokes could render this vision—land that had been so thoroughly leveled and crops that were so lush. Qian thus chose an aerial perspective that would bring out the irregular geometry of the fields, but in rendering the waterways and architectural elements found  

 

opportunity to use brushwork, perspective, and color suitable to more classical tastes. Following a traditional practice for auspicious paintings (but one far less frequently seen in this period) his title, Fields in Changshu, may also be heard as a homophonic good wish: “fields always ripe” (changshu).7 Filled with traditional elements, this work was nonetheless sufficiently new in style and theme to serve as proof that guohua could be remolded and could serve the nation. Beginning around 1953, guohua artists who showed some promise of bringing new life into landscape or bird-andflower painting were organized to sketch from nature in the nearby countryside or in remote scenic areas. The Beijing artists Li Keran and Zhang Ding, the Hangzhou painter Pan Tianshou, and the Xi’an artists Shi Lu and Zhao Wangyun are only a few of the other well-known ink painters who were treated to long sketching trips in the mid-1950s and early 1960s at government expense, and whose subsequent work was powerfully affected by their experiences drawing from nature in far-flung parts of the country. In addition to familiarizing the artists with sights and people of a larger nation, and providing them with excellent opportunities to experiment with empirically based compositions, the artists from one locale met those from another, and successful innovations rapidly spread. In 1953 as the new year’s painting movement was brought to a close, an earnest and unassuming instructor at the Cen­ tral Academy of Fine Arts, Li Keran (1907–1989), began advocating the development of a new ink landscape painting based in plein air drawing. Li, who had studied at both the Shanghai Art Academy and the West Lake National Art Academy, had exhibited a modernist oil landscape in the 1937 National Art Exhibition and during the war had dedicated substantial time to designing propaganda for the anti-Japanese resistance effort. In his wartime exile, however, he returned to the practice of ink painting. Hired by Xu Beihong to teach watercolor painting in Beijing after the Japanese surrender, Li began studying with two elder artists then in Beijing, Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong. With Qi he shared a love of rich, wet, textures of xieyi brushwork. In the landscape painting of Huang, who was then suffering from severe cataracts, he saw what were, to his healthy eyes, dramatic and intense contrasts of dark and light. Having earned praise for his 1952 nianhua, Model Workers at Beihai Park, in 1954 Li Keran set forth, along with two Beijing colleagues, Zhang Ding and Luo Ming, on a fivemonth sketching and painting trip to the Fuchun River region of Zhejiang, Mount Huang in Anhui, as well as the cities of Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi, Suzhou, Shanghai, and Shaoxing. Constantly painting and discussing their progress  

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at remolding guohua, they returned to Beijing with a large body of work and a theoretical position from which to justify their practice. In the preface to their exhibition later in the year, they adopted a moderate position in the debates about realism and Westernization. For them, successfully modifying traditional techniques to reflect current reality was their goal as guohua painters. To explain their exhibition, they wrote: Among [our] most important [problems] were how to use traditional techniques and how to develop them further. If the question was whether we simply reject traditional techniques, thus using Chinese tools and foreign techniques to do ink sketches, or whether we use completely traditional techniques, thus making conventionalized descriptions of modern scenes and things, it would be simple. But it is not so simple if we intend to develop further the excellent parts of [our] tradition, to make them suitable for reflecting recent reality, and to blend modern foreign techniques into traditional styles, so as to enrich their expressive power. The difficulty really is not whether [we] have attained theoretical clarity; it is that we must attain a concrete resolution in practice. 8 Li Keran’s paintings of the “real” Chinese landscape became more and more lyrical over the following decade. His personal breakthrough came after an exhibition of works by Rembrandt in 1956, through which he discovered what would fascinate him thereafter: the potential of light. He began to incorporate intense contrasts of dark ink and white paper into his landscape painting, thus creating works that were compositionally powerful in a Western manner but, with their complex washes and lines, texturally subtle in a Chinese way. His exploration of the optical effects of reflected light provided new ways of organizing space in Chinese painting. Work such as Spring in Jiangnan, of 1962, explored aerial landscape views of the region in which he had grown up. By 1964 the artist began applying his dramatic use of illumination to mental images, experimenting in Ten Thousand Mountains Bathed in Red [fig. 8.9] with the poetic lyrics of Mao Zedong as pictorial inspiration.9 Such themes gave artists an aesthetic license normally impossible within the socialist-realist genre. Here, as in a Song dynasty painting, a massive central peak supports a tumbling waterfall. In Li’s painting, however, it is the striking use of subtly placed axes of illumination that give the densely textured painting its power and its modern feeling. By 1955 more overt official support for revival of traditional Chinese art began to emerge in the context of a growing cultural nationalism, and the works of some traditionalist artists were shown in national exhibitions. In conjunction 172

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8.9 Li Keran (1907–1989), Ten Thousand Mountains Bathed in Red, 1964, ink and color on paper, 79.5 × 49 cm, Collection of the Artist's family, Beijing  

with the launching of the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1956, Zhou Enlai and other high officials called for a more open-minded attitude toward preserving the national heritage. Zhou approved a proposal initiated by Ye Gongchuo and Beijing bird-and-flower painter Chen Banding to establish institutes of Chinese painting in Beijing and Shanghai.10 Localities such as Nanjing and Xi’an soon followed. Fu Baoshi would head the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting and Shi Lu the Chinese Painting Research Studio of the Xi’an branch of the Chinese Artists Association. In Beijing, Qi Baishi was appointed honorary director and Ye Gongchuo director. A great many of the artists appointed to the new Beijing Institute of Chinese Painting had been members of the Lake Society during the Republican period. Preparations for the Institute for Chinese Painting in Shanghai were organized by Communist veteran Lai Shaoqi and extended beyond the city of Shanghai to encompass art-

8.10 Wu Hufan (1894–1968), Twin Pines and Layered Green, 1959, ink and color on paper, 160 × 100 cm, Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting

8.11 Wu Hufan (1894–1968), Celebrate the Success of Our Atomic Bomb Explosion, 1965, ink and color on paper, approximately 110 × 60 cm, Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting

ists in other provinces, particularly Jiangsu and Zhejiang.11 Buddhist artist Feng Zikai was appointed director, and the institute employed many key members of the Republicanera Chinese Painting Society, including Wu Hufan and He Tianjian, founders and prominent members of the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, as well as former art school administrators such as Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, Pan Tianshou, and Chen Qiucao. Wang Geyi, a disciple of Wu Changshi, along with calligrapher Shen Yinmo added to the rather diverse roster of the institute’s first fellows. While Li Keran worked to develop a new personal style of painting in the 1950s, experimenting with combining Eastern and Western modes of painting, the traditionalist Wu Hufan (1894–1968) held fast to a visual language he had perfected decades earlier. His delicate brush techniques are

the result of a lifetime of studying the works of ancient masters, particularly those of the Yuan period literati. His exquisite Twin Pines and Layered Green, of 1959, seems to show no trace of the historic political changes through which he lived but is subtly textured, tightly structured, and entirely imaginary [fig. 8.10]. In his mature years Wu’s combination of soft ink tones and deep blue and green color were particularly compelling. After resisting political pressure for fifteen years, he finally gave in around 1964, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Celebrate the Success of Our Atomic Bomb Explosion was painted in 1965 [fig. 8.11], probably based on magazine photographs of the mushroom cloud. Despite refusal of the USSR to share nuclear technology with China, the nation’s scientists were able to obtain the information they needed to construct the Chinese bomb. It is extraordi-

 

 

 

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nary to see Wu Hufan’s soft ink and gentle literati-style brush strokes used to depict such an ominous subject. Although artists who knew Wu Hufan well speculated that he would not have painted such a work without substantial pressure, the painting’s quality suggests that in the end the artist fully engaged himself with its formal problems. Among the rather diverse group of ink painters whose artistic careers were partially salvaged by appointments to the Shanghai Institute for Chinese Painting, we may find Lin Fengmian (1900–1991). Lin had long expressed his hope of developing forms of modern art that were distinctively Asian. During World War II, he gave up the practice of oil painting almost entirely and instead painted in an unorthodox mixture of ink, gouache, water color, Chinese painting color, and even, in his late years, acrylic, on square sheets of paper. Often he used a thick paper that was normally used for window panes, rather than painting paper, and applied pigment to both sides, thus creating unusual effects of depth and texture. Lin Fengmian’s surviving works from the Mao years document his participation in field trips to paint peasants and iron workers, but they are more Cubist than realist and were unsuitable from the party’s point of view [fig. 8.12]. Following the departure of his wife and daughter from China in 1956, the introverted and somewhat melancholy quality of his landscapes, birds, and figures deepened [fig.  8.13]. Autumnal scenes, his most common landscape theme, were particularly suitable to his dark effects of ink and pigment. His works, although suggestive of a universal realm rather than a specific one, nevertheless seem to have been inspired by the scenery in the Hangzhou and Shanghai areas, where Lin Fengmian lived for most of his life. The  

8.13 Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), Autumn Colors, undated, ink and color on paper, 71 × 71 cm, M. K. Lau Collection, Hong Kong  

gentle cultural nationalism to be understood in his idealistic goals for art, his landscape subject matter, and his official position as a painter at the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting were sufficient license to exhibit his work in the comparatively liberal atmosphere of late 1962 and early 1963. It is at the intersection of three policies—reviving the national tradition, remolding guohua, and encouraging local cultural developments—that two major revolutionary landscapes in ink were commissioned for the new edifices on Tiananmen Square. The first landscape reproduced here was painted for the Museum of the Chinese Revolution by Shi Lu (1919–1982), a Communist war veteran working in Xi’an [fig. 8.14]. For the Beijing history painting project he was assigned to depict Mao Zedong in 1947, when the military leader devised a plan to rescue the Communist forces from their retreat. From this rather desperate position in northern Shaanxi, Mao initiated a successful strategy of mobile warfare against the Nationalist army. Shi Lu, by choosing to depict the yellow loess plateau of northern Shaanxi, rather than a portraitlike image of Mao, conclusively redefined the meaning and appearance of the landscape in Chinese art as a symbol of the integrity and vigor of the Chinese nation. Indeed, in Shi’s painting, Mao, the landscape, and the nation are one. Shi Lu struggled mightily with the composition before reaching this powerful solution. The narrative of his history painting is conveyed by Mao himself, who stands in silhouette at the edge of the precipice, his hands folded behind his back as he contemplates his next move. Below him are his white horse and three fellow soldiers. Originally, the artist emphasized Mao’s relaxed self-confidence by a  

 

 

8.12 Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), Iron Workers, 1958, ink and color on paper, 45 × 48 cm, Shanghai Art Museum.  

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8.14 Shi Lu (1919–1982), Fighting in Northern Shaanxi, 1959, ink and color on paper, 238 × 216 cm, National Museum of China, Beijing  

walking stick on which he leaned, but one official thought the line of the knotted stick looked as though Mao were bound in chains, and Shi Lu removed it.12 Inspired as a young man by the iconoclastic writings of the seventeenth-century individualist painter Shitao (1642– 1707), as well as by the equally sharp observations of the social critic and novelist Lu Xun, he adopted the name Shi Lu when joining the Communist army. When he returned to guohua painting in the 1950s, he sought, like his idol Shitao, to develop new brushwork to depict new scenes that would be free of the traces of past masters. In one account of the development of this composition, Shi Lu described an epiphany triggered by gazing at stains on a bathroom wall. The liberation from convention suggested by these accidental dribbles are an appropriate metaphor, as the artist does indeed use bold, irregular outline strokes of his own devis 

ing, covering the surface of the paper and leading our eye back to a distant, heroic horizon. Shi Lu’s application of bright color, in contrast to the blacks and grays of his ink, along with his slightly wild landscape brushwork and huge scale, gives the painting a powerful presence when hung in its original position, high on the wall of the large gallery. That an ink landscape such as this might become a suitable subject for a historical display was a significant shift in official policy. For the grand staircase of the Great Hall of the People, across Tiananmen Square from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, Fu Baoshi (1904–1964), from Nanjing, and Guan Shanyue (1912–2000), from Guangzhou, were commissioned to illustrate a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1936 [fig.  8.15]. From early times Chinese artists had responded to poetry, both ancient and contemporary, in  

 

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8.15 Fu Baoshi (1904–1964) and Guan Shanyue (1912–2000), This Land So Rich in Beauty, 1959, ink and color on paper, 550 × 900 cm, Great Hall of the People, Beijing  

 

their paintings, just as Chinese poets exchanged lines that echoed one another’s rhyme patterns or imagery. A similarly rich dialogue between poetry and painting survived into modern times. Largely a form of private expression, it had briefly been codified in Song dynasty imperial practice, when a poem composed or transcribed by the emperor might serve as a subject for painting by one of his court painters. As an art historian, Fu Baoshi was certainly aware of this imperial practice as well as the far more extensive exchanges among individual artists and writers over the centuries. In the 1940s Fu frequently composed paintings in his distinctive style that were inspired by phrases from such classical Chinese poets of the Tang and Song periods, or by writings or paintings of the seventeenth-century artists he admired. An artist whose style was completely unsuited to socialist realism, Fu undertook a rather daring experiment after 1949. Probably through his friendship with poet, scholar, and Communist administrator Guo Moruo, who occasionally exchanged poems with Mao Zedong, Fu Baoshi obtained copies of a number of Mao’s as-yet-unpublished poems.13 In February of 1950 he began to apply the same interpretive strategies that had inspired his earlier work to the poetry of China’s new leader, creating paintings inspired by Mao Zedong’s poems. One such work was exhibited in the First National Guohua Exhibition of 1953.14 In July of 1959, Fu Baoshi was summoned to Beijing to create art for the new Great Hall in what would prove to be the most politically significant work of his career. Painted collaboratively with a senior disciple of Gao Jianfu, the Can­tonese artist Guan Shanyue, the painting This Land So Rich in Beauty (Jiangshan ruci duojiao) was based on Mao’s 176

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poem “Ode to Snow.” 15 Multiple versions of the preliminary draft for this panoramic vision survive, some presumably brushed as the artists received suggestions from the political and cultural leadership. In the end, Guan Shanyue painted the Great Wall and the distant snowy mountains, while Fu Baoshi rendered the panoramic middle distance, including the river view that leads the eye to the right, toward the glorious rising sun. Guan Shanyue’s bold mountains cross Fu Baoshi’s more restrained valleys to unify the depiction of all of China’s majestic features. One of the largest Chinese ink paintings of the era, 5.5 meters by 9 meters, it became a favorite venue for photographs of visiting dignitaries.16 This monumental, horizontal, framed picture for permanent display in a public building confirms the possibility that guohua could serve the national agenda. In general theme and composition one is reminded of the powerful images of Mount Fuji created by pro-military Japanese ink painter Yokoyama Taikan during World War II. Like the building in which it was hung [see fig. 7.6], This Land So Rich in Beauty was essentially Western in its nationalistic conception and format, if recognizably Chinese in its content and style, and fulfills much the same function as a monumental European or American oil painting of the nineteenth century. The gradual expansion of politically acceptable forms of art to encompass not only works painted in traditional guohua mediums on historical or socialist-realist themes but also romantic and even poetic landscapes was a response to forces within the art world and in the larger political environment. During the Hundred Flowers campaign many guohua painters spoke out in criticism of the hard-line cultural policies of the early PRC period. Although many of them were declared rightists, some of their complaints were

8.16 Pan Tianshou (1898–1971), Clearing after Rain, 1962, ink and color on paper, 141 × 365.5 cm, Pan Tianshou Memorial, Hangzhou  

addressed. Indeed, a purge was conducted within the party, and a number of Westernizers accused of failing to support guohua were condemned as rightists for the crime “nihilism” in the face of the national heritage. Most notably the Yan’an revolutionaries Jiang Feng and Yan Han, who had largely steered the remolding of art education, were purged and expelled from the party. Their colleague Mo Pu met the same fate in Hangzhou, whereupon the pre-1949 director of the academy, Pan Tianshou (1898–1971), was returned to the directorship. He emerged in this highly nationalistic era as one of the strongest spokesmen for the value of traditional Chinese painting. Pan Tianshou had not been permitted to teach between 1949 and 1955 but was assigned in the mid-1950s to direct an art history research institute at the academy. Urged to participate in school expeditions to draw from life, he created meticulous botanical studies. If not what hard-line administrators had in mind, this practice enabled him to expand his technical vocabulary beyond the xieyi manner that he had learned from Wu Changshi and incorporate into it some new elements rendered with greater threedimensionality in color and fine lines. In a series of works painted in the 1960s, Pan Tianshou began creating public art, monumentalizing the more intimate bird-and-flower painting genre, and proving to skeptics that even this form of Chinese painting could successfully compete with oil painting in its function of display. In the epigraphic tradition of Wu Changshi, whose early encouragement Pan had enjoyed, his 1962 Clearing after Rain [fig. 8.16] emphasizes the force of the brush almost as much as the actual scene that he depicted. Guohua were traditionally painted with the paper flat on a table. This huge painting was executed on  

the carpet of a hotel reception room, with the artist walking on the paper in his stocking feet. Pan Tianshou’s success at structuring observed details, rich tones of ink, and bold lines into a unified composition is remarkable. The loose xieyi manner of painting has rarely been employed on such a scale or with such power. Throughout this period an odd debate about whether bird-and-flower painting possessed “class characteristics” was played out on the pages of the party art journal, Meishu. Sufficient support was garnered for the proposition that every­one, particularly workers, peasants, and soldiers, appreciated bird-and-flower painting that for a time it was considered, like folk art or temple mural painting, to be an art of the people and thus politically acceptable. Pan Tianshou’s paintings of the 1960s are among the most beautiful and formally innovative of the era, but there is nothing political about their themes. They could only have emerged in a period when cultural nationalism could justify any art that glorified China’s tradition. Lianhuanhua

The emphasis on national forms in art was not limited to Chinese painting but was implemented in a variety of other mediums. Two forms of art that were at the core of the Maoist artistic agenda in 1949, lianhuanhua (serial picture stories) and woodblock prints, underwent radical transformations in response to the sometimes contending trends of socialist realism and cultural nationalism. As early as the 1930s, both genres were strongly promoted by Lu Xun for the power of their expressive language and for the potential their reproducibility provided to disseminate new ways of thinking. Both genres were adopted as revolutionary ink painting, lianhuanhua , and woodcuts under m ao

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arts in Yan’an and were further developed after 1949 under Communist direction. The term lianhuanhua encompasses a range of pictorial art forms that narrate a story, from the avant-garde woodcut illustration series of Frans Masereel that were so admired by Lu Xun to such entertainment publications as American comic books. In addition, lianhuan­ hua were produced in Republican Shanghai to illustrate the plots and characters of the latest popular dramas and movies as well as to tell stories of various kinds. As part of the popularization of art and ideology, Jiang Feng strongly promoted lianhuanhua between 1949 and 1952. He reported in 1953 that 6,490 separate titles were published in those years. One challenge was to eradicate stories that were “pornographic” and poorly illustrated and replace them with those that inculcated proper values as well as good historical and literary tales. The former were banned, and artists capable of illustrating the latter were able to make a good living after 1949. Among the new lianhuanhua considered to be a success in the early 1950s was Xiao Erhei Gets Married, a rather turgid tale with a didactic purpose: young people should not be forced by their families into arranged marriages but should freely choose their spouses. The text and the story were based on a propaganda play performed for the peasants in the Communist areas of northern China during the war; the awkward style of illustration follows the simplest of Western methods taught in how-to-draw books of the early twentieth century. Railroad Guerillas, a more entertaining and much more skillfully drawn lianhuanhua about secretly sabotaging Japanese-controlled railway lines in Shandong during World War II, began publication in 1954. The sales of this ten-volume war story exceeded four million copies in the course of more than thirty-five reprintings. The illustrations were rendered in the outline manner so suitable to inexpensive mass market publications worldwide. In a significant conceptual shift that emerged from the party’s increased emphasis on China’s native heritage, publishing houses began in about 1954 looking more intensively at premodern forms of illustration as potential sources for modern techniques and styles. Printing had, after all, been invented in China, and practiced for more than a millennium before Western publications were introduced. The beauty of traditional illustration had been remarked by Lu Xun, and enjoyed the appreciation of Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958), a scholar who served as vice-minister of culture and director of the Cultural Relics Bureau in the 1950s. Figure painting in China has made use of the ink outline since its inception more than two thousand years ago. Thus, with the development of xylography in the Tang and Song dynasties, images of figures and their settings were printed  

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in outline on a white paper background. In the late nineteenth century the editors of the Dianshizhai Pictorial made use of the capacities of Western photolithography to reproduce line illustrations and calligraphic text that suited the taste of Chinese readers [see fig. 1.13]. In the lianhuanhua workshops of Shanghai, therefore, the outline manner common to comic book and funny paper drawings around the globe was reconsidered in light of the conventions of premodern Chinese books. The new styles developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s utilized Western perspective and anatomy to create vivid and lively narratives but adopted principles of composition and brushwork from the best of seventeenth-century woodblock books, thus achieving an impressive technical finesse. He Youzhi (b. 1922) was one of the most brilliant illustrators to emerge in this period. He Youzhi joined the New Art Press of Shanghai, a forerunner of the state-owned Shanghai People’s Art Publishing House, in 1952, where he studied drawing with Yan Wenliang. As he learned to design lianhuan­hua, he emulated the work of revolutionary elders, including his studio supervisors Gu Bingxin and Zhao Hongben. Gu Bingxin was an avid collector of old books, both lianhuan­ hua and original editions of Ming and Qing illustrated dramas, and encouraged his colleagues and protégées to expand their stylistic and technical repertories by studying early illustrated books. Those of particular interest to them were the woodcut illustrations of ­seventeenth-­century painter and woodblock print designer Chen Hongshou and the nineteenth-century Ren Xiong. In the Marxist historiographical analysis of the time, both were considered to be artists who served the needs of ­working-class people by their contributions to popular literature. The text of Great Change in a Mountain Village [fig. 8.17] was based on a 1955 book of the same title by Zhou Libo that describes in rather propagandistic terms the successful communization of a rural village. He Youzhi’s art is of greater merit than the uninspiring text. To achieve a more authentic result, He Youzhi was provided funding to undertake several drawing trips to rural Hunan. There he researched local customs and topography to develop convincing characters and settings and to accurately render costume, gesture, and detail. It is evident in the effective contrasts of linear textures and white paper in the final illustration series, however, that the artist had thoroughly absorbed compositional devices from Ming and Qing prints. He adopts, and in some cases exaggerates, the sharply tilted ground plane of seventeenthcentury illustrations. Details of foliage and rock, motifs of fabric patterns, and architectural ornaments echo the aesthetics of earlier prints, and are equally striking in their composition, placement, and refined execution. Yet the pic-

8.17 He Youzhi (b. 1922), illustration for Great Change in a Mountain Village, 1962, lianhuanhua, ink on paper, 16.7 × 23.7 cm, Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House

tures are completely unlike traditional illustrations in other ways. He Youzhi observes people as an actor or film director might and thus was able to develop a cast of characters who might bring to life the printed word. Individualization of human figures, achieved through mastery of realistic figure drawing, is further accentuated through telling suggestions of the psychological states of the characters. In overall composition the point of view goes beyond standard academic perspective to emulate the diverse angles in cinematography. The five hundred individual pages are strikingly varied in point of view, a brilliant visual strategy that varies the appearance of otherwise repetitive narratives and brings poignancy to the psychological dilemmas of the characters. The shift in party guidelines for popular art encouraged the revival of “ancient costume” stories, which might just a few years earlier have been considered “feudal” for their lack of overt didactic content. Filled with miracles and martial arts, they enjoyed enormous popular appeal. One such example published at the height of the cultural liberalization of 1962 was Monkey Beats the White-Boned Demon, by Zhao Hongben (1915–2000) and Qian Xiaodai (1912– 1964) [fig.  8.18]. The story, taken from the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West, was performed nationwide as a Shaoxing-style local opera the year before. The strongly traditional pictorial style in which it is depicted is well suited to the intensifying cultural nationalism of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Whereas He Youzhi incorporated traditional elements into his essentially modern style, Zhao and Qian go the opposite route and bring the “ancient costumes” genre up-to-date. Although the Tang dynasty subject matter and Ming dynasty text of this tale would place it in a traditional 

 

8.18  Zhao Hongben (1915–2000) and Qian Xiaodai (1912– 1964), illustration for Monkey Beats the White-Boned Demon, 1960–62, lianhuanhua, ink on paper, 33.4 × 24.4 cm, Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House  

 

 

ist genre of illustration, the figures are modernized with Western conventions of anatomy and foreshortening so that the characters interact in a particularly dramatic way. As did He Youzhi, the artists of these illustrations employ contrasts of linear texture and blank paper as well as the carefully varink painting, lianhuanhua , and woodcuts under m ao

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ied outline strokes of the greatest Ming dynasty illustrations. In the Shanghai lianhuanhua, emulation of traditional techniques and compositional conventions gave the illustrations a remarkably high degree of technical finesse. At the same time, Qian and Zhao’s understanding of Western perspective, their individualization of character, and well-rendered naturalistic gestures imbue the images with a vivid threedimensionality rare in classical illustrations. The text fictionalizes the visit of the seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, now accompanied by a magic monkey and friendly pig, to the Buddha’s homeland in modern India.17 In this version, Monkey (Sun Wukong) protects Xuanzang on his pilgrimage from the court of the Tang dynasty emperor across the Central Asian deserts and mountains to the sacred realm, where he hopes to acquire precious Buddhist sutras. In the lianhuanhua, Monkey vanquishes the man-eating White-Boned Demon, a task made more difficult by the demon’s talent at transformation. She tricks the Tang monk three times by her disguises; beguiled by demon magic and unable to tell true from false, he puts himself in mortal danger. Monkey, the story’s hero, is particularly brave and discerning, in each case recognizing the demon’s ruse and wielding his magic staff to great protective effect. The golden monkey Sun Wukong may have been as popular and ubiquitous in China as Mickey Mouse was at that era in the United States. The tale was even turned by Mao into a political parable—just as the White-Boned Demon could take any form, so might anyone be an enemy of Mao and the party. The Communist Party placed great importance on the development of lianhuanhua as one of the most suitable ways of disseminating new social practices and party policies to the public. The twists and turns of cultural policy in between 1949 and 1966 did not change this priority but did cause constant turmoil in the selection of styles and story lines. Nevertheless, the financial resources and time dedicated to training and travel for the lianhuanhua artists, as well as the concentration of talent in the studios, created an environment in which the gemlike works that were produced are far more successful as art than were the government programs they promoted as policy.  

Woodblock Prints

Woodblock prints enjoyed government favor for many of the same reasons as did lianhuanhua. As an art form encouraged by Lu Xun and developed in Yan’an, it enjoyed a venerable revolutionary pedigree. In addition, many of the Communist veterans who had developed the Yan’an style of printmaking had moved into important positions in the administrative bureaucracy and particularly in the realms of 180

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publishing and propaganda. Printmaking programs staffed by such talented artist-educators as Li Hua and Gu Yuan were established at the major art academies as early as 1953. Developments in this art form were thus closely, and usually favorably, observed by the mainstream art establishment. In general, however, the regularization and stability of employment and purpose that so energized the previously struggling lianhuanhua artists seems to have drained the woodblock printmakers of the intensity that had made their pre-1949 work so compelling. With the emphasis on peace rather than struggle, a lyrical trend appeared in prints of the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly those emerging from regional centers. Local support for guohua in Jiangsu and Shaanxi yielded new schools of painting, the Nanjing and Xi’an schools, respectively. Similarly, regional arts leaders with fondness for woodblock printmaking achieved similar results in Sichuan and the region of northeastern China known as Beidahuang (the Great Northern Wilderness). Although woodblock printmaking is a venerable old Chinese art form, when artists began to make woodcuts in the twentieth century, they largely turned to European, or in some cases Japanese, models. Thus, as in the case of lian‑ huanhua, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw a process of rediscovering Chinese sources. A young Communist artist who emerged as a printmaker after moving to Sichuan was the Beijing-born Li Huanmin (b. 1930). Li Huanmin was a class behind Hou Yimin at the Beiping Art College, studying under Xu Beihong, but was expelled in 1948 after performing in a leftist play. He then joined the Communist army, where he worked with Hu Yichuan and Li Qi as the People’s Liberation Army took Tianjin. He returned to Beijing with the army after the Nationalist government left the city and continued study in a special class for art cadres at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation in 1951, he was assigned to work for New China Daily in Chongqing, Sichuan. Unlike his colleagues on the east coast, whose fieldwork took them to farms and factories, Li was assigned to work among the Tibetan peoples of the western borderlands. He learned to speak Tibetan, lived in Tibetan regions on more than thirty extended stays, and devoted the half century of his active career to depicting this subject matter. At the same time his work underwent the same transformations as all art during this period. One of his best known prints, First Steps on the Golden Road, from 1963, depicts colorfully dressed Tibetan girls leading yaks loaded with hay in an S-shaped formation [fig. 8.19]. The girl in the front appears to be singing as she waves a long stalk of grain. In its general theme of relaxation after hard work, the print is similar to Wen Bao’s depiction of peasant girls, or

8.19 Li Huanmin (b. 1930), First Steps on the Golden Road, 1963, polychromatic woodblock print, 54.3 × 40 cm, Collection of the Artist

Sun Zixi’s rendering of tourists at Tiananmen. Like Fang Zengxian’s Telling a Red Tale [see fig. 8.3], it utilizes a sharply tilted ground plane on which the figures descend to create a heroic composition. As are many other works of the Mao period, it is a “thematic” work—by virtue of its title, it carries a heavy burden of political subject matter. In this case, fourteen years after establishment of the PRC, and after a series of armed conflicts in Tibet, the artist has depicted its citizens as happy and prosperous farmers. The carving techniques, and in particular the artist’s decisions about where to carve the block away completely and where to leave thin slices of wood, serve to represent such naturalistic phenomena as strands of flying hair, and aid in creating the sense of dynamic progress that was considered so appealing by his contemporaries. Li Huanmin used opaque oil-based printing pigments, so that the bright golden sheaves of wheat serve as a brilliant backdrop for the figures and animals, who are outlined in black. Technically, this is a very Western print, even if the subject matter is of contemporary Chinese concern. A somewhat less dominant but still notable trend of the period was the revival of traditional water-based pigments, shuiyin muke, to replace the oil-based printing inks used by most modernist and Communist artists. Li Hua’s waterbased print series of 1935 [see fig. 4.17] was a rare early experiment in this technique. With the greater political emphasis in the era of Sino-Soviet tension on indigenous styles, some examples of shuiyin muke were highly praised for return-

ing Chinese printmaking to its roots in the national heritage. The local branch of the Chinese Artists Association in Sichuan, established in 1954 by Communist printmaker Li Shaoyan, strongly supported the art of woodblock printmaking. As a result, an accomplished group of Sichuanbased woodcut artists had emerged by the end of the 1950s. The final woodcut discussed here from the Mao period is an oil-based woodblock print by Chao Mei (b. 1931), then working in Heilongjiang in far northeastern China. A soldier-artist originally assigned as a farm laborer, rather like those depicted in Zhan Jianjun’s painting [see fig. 7.8], he was soon transferred to the Beidahuang Pictorial publishing house. There he and his supervisor, Zhang Zuoliang, began producing prints depicting the beauties of the northern wilds and the success of the settlers in bringing it to economic productivity. Extremely lyrical and appealing, many of them nonetheless conveyed important political messages. Chao Mei’s Black Soil Steppe of 1960, for example, depicts the work of tractor-riding settlers in opening this land near the Soviet border to agriculture [fig. 8.20]. The beauty of the natural environment invites settlers to join them on the frontier, the machines testify to the equipment provided by the state, and the vast expanse of land to future agricultural productivity. Created as it was on the eve of the great famine, it describes a promise of prosperity that would remain unfulfilled.

 

8.20  Chao Mei (b. 1931), Black Soil Steppe, 1960, polychromatic woodblock print, 36.2 × 26.4 cm, Collection of the Artist

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9

Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1976

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, formally launched by Mao Zedong on May 16, 1966, and ended by Mao’s death on September 9, 1976, had profound and permanent effects on the arts. It was extraordinarily destructive in many ways, yet over its ten-year duration consolidated Maoist artistic trends, creating a visual legacy that survived even after its political policies had been reversed. In simplest terms, we may divide the period in two, as defined by its producers. The first period, which lasted from 1966 to 1968, was that of Red Guard art, and the second period, from about 1970 to 1976, was defined by worker-peasant-soldier art. From the perspective of what was lost, this period conclusively broke the transmission of China’s traditional art of ink painting, which was endangered by the forces of Westernization in the preceding Republican period and then further attacked in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution the inherited aesthetics and intensely self-­expressive techniques of these elite traditions were, along with their practitioners, almost completely discredited. China’s art historical heritage was replaced by one engineered for the purpose—a form of socialist realism that was modified in accord with narrow definitions of Chinese folk taste yet that remained, regardless of whether executed in oil or ink, essentially Western in its conception. This systematic remaking of the nation’s visual aesthetic was accelerated as an unprecedented number of young people were recruited into the visual and performing arts, yielding an extremely large and strong cohort of Chinese artists, almost all of whom were trained in the uniform and often bombastic official style designed to represent China as a highly centralized socialist state.  

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9.1 Shen Yaoding (b. 1941), Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Proletarian Revolutionary Line, 1968, gouache on paper, 84 cm × 178 cm, Hanart TZ Gallery

The benignly named Cultural Revolution, initiated from the spheres of drama, literature, and the arts, was in reality a bitter political struggle in which the seventy-twoyear-old Mao reclaimed his dominant position in the party and on the political stage from those he considered his rivals. The most prominent colleague to support his project was Minister of Defense Lin Biao, famous for leading the Communist army in its successful sweep across China that ended the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949. By stressing ideology, in contrast to the more practical goals of officials concerned about China’s desperate economy, Lin Biao helped develop the cult of personality around Mao that was a hallmark of the Cultural Revolution. He is credited with editing the pocket-size Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, known in English as The Little Red Book, an ideological tool that functioned as a kind of Maoist catechism and would be a required possession of every Chinese. As head of the People’s Liberation Army, Lin Biao was eventually named second-in-command and written into the constitution as Mao’s chosen successor. This group portrait of Cultural Revolution leaders by a new graduate of the Central Drama Academy, Shen Yaoding (b. 1941), begins, from right, with Lin Biao, followed by Mao Zedong, Kang Sheng, Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, and finally, at left, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing [fig. 9.1]. Many historians consider the Cultural Revolution to have begun with a published attack on a well-received Peking opera first performed five years earlier. The drama, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, by Wu Han, a historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, takes as its subject the unjust demotion of a Ming dynasty official. It was sharply reinterpreted in the fall of 1965 by the Shanghai journalist Yao Wenyuan as an attack on Mao and the party. During the Cultural Revolution, praise or condemnation of works of art for their real or imagined allegorical significance reached unparalleled extremes.1 Mao’s last wife, Jiang Qing, a for184

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mer Shanghai movie actress, became the leading authority in the arts and a key figure politically. The image she cultivated is admirably depicted in this 1968 painting, her revolutionary credentials suggested by what were in effect her costume and props—a military uniform and a copy of The Little Red Book. In the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, in February 1966, Jiang Qing held a conference on military arts and literature that was dedicated to praise for Mao Zedong Thought. Besides contributing to canonization of Mao’s every word, at this time she singled out a work of sculpture to illuminate Maoist ideology. The Rent Collection Courtyard [fig. 9.2], a life-size terracotta diorama depicting the alleged brutality of a Sichuanese landlord, was to be the first of the Cultural Revolution’s canonical set of model revolutionary art works. The Rent Collection Courtyard, comprised of 114 life-size clay figures, was created in 1965 by sculptors from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and the Landlord’s Courtyard of Oppression Exhibition Hall, and is still exhibited in Dayi county, west of Chengdu, Sichuan, in the large complex where landlord Liu Wencai formerly dwelled. One of the multiple subsequent versions was exhibited in the Forbidden City in Beijing, while a fiberglass set was even sent on tour abroad in the 1980s.2 Like many of the dramas that Jiang Qing canonized and promoted, the basic theme of this work was the evildoing of the oppressing class before liberation. On May 16 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a document authored in part by Mao that criticized party leaders Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping for “having let all of the ox-demons and snakespirits out of their cages,” for “stuffing up our newspapers, broadcasts, periodicals, books, textbooks, performances, works of literature, and art, films, plays, operas, art, music, dance, and so forth,” and for refusing to accept the leadership of the proletariat. The purge of high Communist Party officials loyal to Liu and Deng began with dismissal  

9.2  Team of Sculptors, Rent Collection Courtyard (detail), clay sculptures, 1965, Dayi County, Sichuan, Rent Collection Courtyard: Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt, second edition (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), n.p.

of the army chief of staff, the mayor of Beijing, the director of the CCP Propaganda Department, and the director of the CCP Central Committee Office. Further staffing shifts were made throughout the propaganda apparatus so that major newspapers came under Mao’s direct control. At this point the movement became official, and a new Cultural Revolution Small Group was appointed under the Standing Committee of the Politburo to direct it. By early June of 1966, students nationwide were urged to join their Beijing fellows to strike in support of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Oil painter Zheng Shengtian, who was an idealistic young art teacher at the time, described the feelings he shared with many of his colleagues in the first few months of the movement: “Mao’s idea of taking a critical approach to the literature and arts of the past, and creating a new culture for the working people, sounded very appealing to me. As a young artist, I was dissatisfied with the way in which the art establishment was controlled by a few bureaucrats and old-fashioned senior artists. I believed that the Cultural Revolution would open a new phase for China and the rest of the world.” He enthusiastically burned his own paintings and writings.3 The students, some of whom began calling themselves Mao’s Red Guard, soon overthrew the administrators of their schools and universities and took over. Urged to restore the revolutionary spirit of Yan’an and rebel against bourgeois and revisionist thinking, the patriotic young people unknowingly adopted Mao’s paranoid views of his contemporaries and colleagues, transforming them into genera-

tional warfare. All of society was split in simple dualities: friend or foe, new or old, proletarian or capitalist. Quoting Mao’s slogan, “To rebel is justified,” some of them seized and humiliated their teachers. Elders were paraded around in dunce caps, forced to stand for long periods in painful positions, and driven around in open trucks for public humiliation. Their homes were invaded, art works and possessions trashed, and families traumatized. Some were seriously injured or even killed by beatings. Many, unable to bear the injustice and shame, committed suicide. Others, labeled “ox-demons and snake-spirits,” were incarcerated in makeshift jails called “ox-sheds” for extended periods of time. Yet a founding member of the Red Guard who was subsequently imprisoned himself recalls the purity of their motivation: “We were absolutely sincere in our devotion to the Communist Party, the nation and the people. We established the first group of Red Guards in China—in the world, for that matter—in good faith.” 4 The Red Guard were mandated, first, to overthrow those within the party who took the capitalist road and, second, to uproot and destroy the Four Olds—meaning old ideas, old culture, old customs, and the old habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses. On August 5, Mao himself posted a big-character poster on the door of the room where the Central Committee met, calling on the Red Guard to “bombard the headquarters” of his party opponents who exercised “bourgeois dictatorship.” 5 Mao praised the students’ revolutionary spirit and on August 18 donned an arm band reading “Red Guard” at a meeting with student  

 

 

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leaders on Tiananmen. Revolutionary destruction and class warfare accelerated after this event. In the name of destroying the Four Olds, some Red Guard set about smashing or burning old art, books, furniture, and anything they might find in the home of a “bad element,” as well as destroying historic temples originally constructed for Buddhist, Daoist, or Confucian rites. Having seized party offices, they used confidential reports and personnel files to obtain information that helped them identify targets of attacks. Premier Zhou Enlai personally intervened to save a number of specific sites and individuals from harm, but they were only a few of the many targets. Red Guard Art

Young artists, like all other Chinese, were expected to, and did, participate in this frenzy, which eventually implemented its patriotic ideals with the cold cruelty of an urban youth gang. Many art students, as in the examples presented here, contributed to the movement by spontaneous artistic efforts that formed the Cultural Revolution’s visual image— posters, billboards, broadsheets, and tabloids. Destroy the Old World; Establish the New World, by activists from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, depicts a Red Guard wearing a Yan’an-style army uniform as he smashes the Four Olds, represented by a vinyl record, Buddhist and Christian icons, a stele, Mahjong tiles, and, for good measure, a copy of Deng Tuo’s more recent text, Evening Chats at Yanshan [fig. 9.3]. As though taking the opportunity to recreate the now-idealized pure and selfless Communism of wartime Yan’an, which they themselves were too young to have experienced, Red Guard artists produced vast numbers of posters that resemble propaganda woodcuts of the old liberated zones. Vivid and direct images, with color restricted to black, white, and red, were printed under the name of one or another Red Guard group in 1967. A great many focus on destruction—whether it be destruction of the Four Olds [fig. 9.3] or war against political or spiritual enemies. Although the bold contrasts of simple color refer back to the early days of Chinese Communism, it is nevertheless evident that the styles and aesthetics developed in emulation of Soviet models remain an essential part of the Cultural Revolution aesthetic, and Cultural Revolution posters differ from the comparatively simple and naïve prints of the Yan’an period [see fig. 6.22]. Almost every twist and turn in party policy during this chaotic epoch is immortalized in poster form. In 1967 Red Guard students from the Shanghai Drama Academy, working in collaboration with “rebel” workers from the printing factory, picked a phrase from a catchy revolutionary song—“Take up a pen as a weapon”—as the theme for their  

 

 

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9.3  Destroy the Old World; Establish the New World, 1967, 110 × 80 cm, Beijing, poster, University of Westminster, London

poster [fig.  9.4].6 The fierce worker in the foreground of their image, his “revolutionary rebel” (geming zaofan) armband quite legible, lunges forward to spear tiny revisionist enemies with his giant pen. The miserable victims are identified as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, along with Politburo members Tao Zhu (1908–1969) and Tan Zhenlin (1902–1983), purged in 1967 for standing up against Mao’s excesses. Beside them is a tiny copy of Liu Shaoqi’s condemned theoretical treatise, “On the Cultivation of the Communist Party Member.” In the distance the silhouettes of revolutionary soldiers of the past, to whom the current generation owed their Communist present, raise high their guns beneath fluttering red flags.7 The major art academies, like all schools in China, soon developed competing Red Guard groups. Indeed, the Red Guard eventually split into warring camps, each believing itself to be the most revolutionary, most ideologically correct, and most loyal to Chairman Mao. Opposing Red Guard factions engaged one another in physical combat, and schools and cities became battlegrounds. In the end, children of neither group came out on top—China would be led by those who could prove that they were workers, peasants, or soldiers, either by virtue of inheritance or by conclusively turning their backs on their condemned par 

 

 

9.4 Red Brush Team, Shanghai Drama Academy, Take up a Pen as a Weapon and Concentrate Fire to Hit Liu and Deng! 1967, poster, 54 × 78 cm, Collection of Stefan Landsberger

ents. By the summer of 1967, armed battles in Shanghai, Nanjing, Changzhou, Zhengzhou, Shenyang, Chongqing, Changsha, and other major cities led to great loss of life and brought parts of China to a state of near anarchy.8 The first two years of the Cultural Revolution, dominated by the Red Guard movement, saw the appearance of seemingly limitless quantities of prints, cartoons, and posters in the so-called Red Sea, a movement in which slogans and Mao’s image were painted or pasted on every available architectural surface. The year 1967 also saw the opening in Beijing of a number of large exhibitions of Red Guard art. Prints, such as those of Central Academy of Fine Arts student Shen Yaoyi (b. 1943), a member of the Revolutionary Alliance Red Flag Red Guard faction in the capital, and brother of Shen Yaoding, served the Red Sea as nationwide models for Mao images [fig.  9.5].9 In the exhibition context, the high art forms of oil painting and ink painting also reemerged, but now with revised iconography and polished styles that would ultimately set a new standard. The oddest phenomenon of the epoch was the continued canonization of “model works” of art and theater, productions selected by Mao’s wife to suit her particular tastes and political purposes. For the visual arts, that work would be the oil painting Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, by a Red Guard art student from the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts (now Tsinghua University College of the Arts), Liu Chunhua (b. 1944) [fig. 9.6].10 The painting was created for a propaganda exhibition in October 1967 entitled Mao Zedong’s Thought Illuminates the Anyuan Worker’s Movement.11 Organized at the Museum of Revolutionary History (now part of the National Museum) by the national labor union, the exhibition had an explicitly political purpose, to discredit Liu Shaoqi, who had suc-

9.5 Shen Yaoyi (b. 1943), Advancing through the Storm in the Footsteps of Chairman Mao, 1966, woodcut, published as a poster, 55 × 80 cm

9.6 Liu Chunhua (b. 1944), Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, 1967, oil on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, China Construction Bank

ceeded Mao as head of government in 1959. As castigations in the Red Guard tabloid Art Storm some months earlier suggested, the purge of Mao’s successor meant that wellknown history paintings such as Hou Yimin’s Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners [see fig. 7.16] and Dong Xiwen’s Inaugural Ceremony for the Nation [see fig. 7.5], with prominent and positive images of Liu Shaoqi, would no longer be displayed. The exhibition redefined the visual iconography of China’s revolutionary history by replacing Liu with Mao Art of the Gre at Proletarian Cultur al Revolution

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9.7  Zheng Shengtian (b. 1938), Zhou Ruiwen (b. 1945), and Xu Junxuan (b.1934), Mao’s World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects the Situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Northern, SouthCentral, and Eastern China, 1967, poster, 61 × 84.5 cm, Collection of Wang Mingxian

as the primary figure behind the seminal 1922 labor strike. Mao was well known as a rural organizer, but this revisionist history placed him at the center of Communist actions within the industrial proletariat as well. Liu Chunhua’s painting of the young Mao visiting Anyuan provided visual support for a revision of history that would justify the elderly leader’s return to power. In the spring of 1968, Jiang Qing repeatedly praised the painting, making it into a model for Cultural Revolution art, and authorized its publication and broad distribution. Color pull-outs were inserted into China Pictorial, the People’s Art Press printed larger posters, and on July 1, 1968, People’s Daily reproduced it in color and distributed it nationwide. In an extraordinary spectacle, parades and festivals were organized to commemorate the publication of the image, with pretty girls in new blue overalls dancing in front of multiple reproductions of the picture.12 By the fall of 1968 its status as a model painting was institutionalized; it was copied by aspiring artists nationwide and reproduced on everything from Mao badges to pocket mirrors. Years later, in the 1980s, the artist estimated that nine hundred million copies had been printed during the course of the Cultural Revolution, a number greater than the entire Chinese population at that time. The painting was an important contribution to Mao’s cult, for it possesses clear cultic appeal and was often used in a quasi-religious context. Indeed, the artist claimed to have taken his inspiration from a Raphael Madonna painting, although more immediate sources might be found in contemporary Chinese oil painting in the Soviet manner. Even if the links between Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan and earlier academic art are more evident than its innovations, the 188

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work was affirmed by Cultural Revolution authorities as an icon of the new art. Features of Liu’s work that became characteristic of Cultural Revolution painting are Mao’s exaggerated eyebrows, his smooth face, and the artificially arranged clouds, which allow nature to echo Mao’s divine movements. As the historian Maurice Meisner has observed, by 1968 the cult of Mao had shifted from the iconoclasm of the Red Guard movement to the creations of icons.13 In visual imagery the radical era was characterized by emphemeral one- or two-color posters [figs.  9.3–9.5], while the subsequent trend is exemplified by the production of devotional imagery [figs 9.6–9.7], for which more sophisticated technologies of reproduction were deployed. Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan remained unsurpassed as an icon but was not entirely without challenge as a model work. In the fall of 1967 a group of artists from the Zhe­jiang Academy of Fine Arts, most notably Zheng Shengtian (b. 1938), proposed painting a eulogy to Mao that would exemplify him as a humane and benevolent leader whose moderating influence would bring peace to the land [fig. 9.7]. Following a military clash on July 20, 1967, in which radical representatives sent from Beijing were detained by the Wuhan garrison, the possibility of civil war seemed real. In response, Mao conducted a secret inspection tour of major cities, followed soon after by a new instruction that mandated a ceasefire among opposing groups. He urged an end to the violence and temporarily softened his line. In the portrait of Mao, created as a paean to his southern trip and its condemnation of bloodshed, Mao floats high, like a god, above the prosperous Yangzi River valley. Particularly welcome in the artists’ home region, the work was widely re 

 

9.8 Lin Yong (b. 1942), Great Job! Investigating the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1970, ink and color on Chinese paper, 213 × 260 cm, Collection of the Artist

produced as a poster, Mao’s World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects the Situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Northern, SouthCentral, and Eastern China, and even was recreated as a billboard at the Shanghai Railway Station. The painting exemplifies the new Cultural Revolution iconography and aesthetic: a wise and apparently divine Mao, ruddy with health and brightly lit with theatrical effects of illumination, rises high above his people and nation. The composition is entirely suffused with the red tones associated in traditional iconography with good fortune and in contemporary terms with Communism. In 1968 the provincial Red Guard leader Zhang Yongsheng took reproductions of the painting from Hangzhou to Beijing to present to Cultural Revolution leaders.14 Contrary to his expectation, Jiang Qing was extremely displeased by it, and praised Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan instead. The artists’ sincere praise for Mao’s gesture of peace was an inadvertent criticism of Jiang Qing and her extremist allies, who were the source of much of the conflict.

Although the poster was the form in which most viewers might see a work of Cultural Revolution art, formal exhibitions did permit display of politically suitable original works, primarily portraits of Mao Zedong, in the high art formats of oil painting and guohua. The devotion to Mao Zedong felt by the young Guangzhou artist Lin Yong (b. 1942) is persuasively conveyed in his monumental history painting Great Job! Investigating the Peasant Movement in Hunan of 1970. Lin, who had studied guohua with Yang Zhiguang at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, was quite successful in portraying the youthful Mao as a handsome, heroic figure, one idolized by peasants in the past, and the perfect object of admiration in the present [fig. 9.8]. Backed by a sign reading “County Peasant Association,” Lin Yong’s image of Mao confidently oversees the seizure of local governmental power by the farmers, who celebrate by exploding firecrackers and parading landlords in dunce caps. Above all wave the festive sickle-and-plow flags of the Peasant Self-Defense Brigade, a guerilla army established in 1927. In this work Lin Yong set a standard for a socialist, Art of the Gre at Proletarian Cultur al Revolution

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9.9  Zhou Shuqiao (b. 1938), Willow in Spring Wind, 1974, oil on canvas, 122 × 190 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

nontraditional form of guohua executed in ink and color on Chinese paper. Yet, although the work was highly influential among officials, viewers, and fellow artists in southern China, it too failed to garner Jiang Qing’s approval and was removed from a Beijing exhibition at her request. The artist did not comprehend the “red, bright, and shining” (hong-guang-liang) aesthetic that Jiang Qing required for all major revolutionary characters; his masterly ink wash was too evident. Worker-Peasant-Soldier Art

The rampant chaos of 1967 and 1968, which threatened the nation with civil war, led Mao to crack down against the student activism he had inspired. In 1968 and 1969 all urban high school graduates were “sent down” to labor in China’s distant hinterlands—the Siberian border in the northeast, the remote mountains of Sichuan, the Mongolian steppes, and the southwestern jungles of Yunnan—in a mass rustication that brought the Red Guard art movement to its close. This marked the ending of the first phase of Cultural Revolution art, Red Guard art, much of which was produced by art students in urban centers. In Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities professional artists who were not already in prison were sent, by 1969, to do farm work at May Seventh Cadre–schools, as labor camps in the rural suburbs were called, and they remained there until 1971. The second phase of Cultural Revolution art is that of worker-peasant-soldier art made between 1971 and 1976. Because political zeal on the part of the masses was considered more important than professional training, the creation of worker-peasant-soldier art was encouraged all over China—on farms, in factories, and in military camps. Many of its artists were amateurs who learned to draw and paint  

 

 

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entirely by making Cultural Revolution propaganda and by decorating architectural spaces for the frequent political rallies. A significant minority of those who emerged on the national scene, however, were not completely untutored peasants or workers but actually veterans of after-school art programs held at Children’s Palaces in China’s urban centers, in elite programs for gifted students, and had learned to paint and write calligraphy from professional artists. Nevertheless, once they were sent to the countryside or to urban factories, all were laborers and became peasants or workers for official purposes. Worker-peasant-soldier art most commonly took the workers, peasants, or soldiers as its subject matter and was created by artists of the worker, peasant, or soldier class. A highly idealized image of city girls being welcomed to the countryside by Guangzhou artist Zhou Shuqiao suggests the patriotic vision that led them and their families to accept their assignments to unknown rural sites far from home [fig. 9.9]. Although art periodicals had ceased publication soon after 1966, some newspapers continued to function and began to seek revolutionary paintings for reproduction on their pages. In 1969, for example, a sent-down student named Xu Chunzhong, who had learned to paint at a Shanghai Children’s Palace, obtained a commission to illustrate an important article in the Shanghai Communist Party newspaper Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao). His subject was the heroic death of Jin Xunhua, a Shanghai-born student who drowned in Heilongjiang while trying to prevent an electric pole from being swept away by flood waters. Jin, who died on August 15, 1969, and now classified as a “worker-peasant-soldier,” is here depicted as a martyr by an amateur artist of similar status. Technical skill was not sacrificed to political correctness, however, as Xu was assisted in

Wang Mantian, a shadowy figure who is believed to have studied art at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts and Literature in Yan’an.15 However, on September 13, 1971, before much progress had been made in restarting the stalled cultural apparatus, a shocking political calamity occurred: Mao’s chosen successor, Lin Biao, died in a plane crash as he and his family fled to the USSR. The split between Mao and Lin was a devastating development on the ideological front—the mastermind of the Mao loyalty cult had personally rejected it, unless, as some suspected, Mao had first rejected him. Although to this day what happened is unclear, betrayal is widely believed to be at the center of the drama. Many sent-down youth speak of that single event as completely destroying their loyalty to Mao and their faith in the Cultural Revolution. Even if retaining their idealism and patriotism, pragmatic behavior replaced self-sacrifice. For many painters this meant following the party line in exchange for art supplies and opportunities to exhibit and publish, and for the meager privilege of calling themselves artists. Mao himself suffered a physical and psychological collapse after Lin Biao’s plane was shot down, but upon his partial recovery permitted Zhou Enlai to begin a process of normalizing many party and governmental functions. U.S. president Richard Nixon was welcomed to Beijing in February 1972, and delegations of foreigners began to visit China on strictly controlled itineraries. Wang Mantian and a young academically trained oil painting instructor, Gao Jingde, began planning for a 1972 exhibition to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Mao’s Yan’an Talks. Although worker-peasant-soldier art was of primary importance, Gao sought high technical standards for this important event, in contrast to the spontaneous and disorganized artistic activity of the 1966–70 period. Most of the visual images that were reproduced as posters, calendars, or in pictorial magazines from about 1971 to 1976 were prepared in the context of the new bureaucratic structure and the series of local and national exhibitions it organized. Moreover, the close controls over official art in the late Cultural Revolution yielded an extreme and easily recognizable period style. Although the brilliant hues and focus on the traditionally auspicious color of red immediately ties Cultural Revolution icons to Chinese folk art (and thus to Maoist ideals), the strong, artificial illumination in these paintings is something new in Chinese art, and is best linked to the cinematic conventions of 1930s Hollywood— the visual world in which Jiang Qing, then known as the Shanghai film actress Lan Ping, got her start. Although her rhetoric completely rejected the capitalist economy from which it sprang, Jiang Qing’s tastes seem to have been  

9.10  Yi Zhong (pseudonym for Xu Chunzhong [b. 1948] and Chen Yifei [1946–2005]), Chairman Mao’s Red Guard: Learn from the Model of Revolutionary Youth Jin Xunhua, 1969, poster, 106 × 77 cm, Shanghai People’s Art Press  

this commission by one of the most talented of the young Shanghai professional artists, Chen Yifei, and the work was published in Liberation Daily under the pseudonym Yi Zhong [fig. 9.10]. Top Cultural Revolution administrators decided to promote Jin Xunhua as a national “model” of selfless sacrifice, and this image was repeatedly published, including as a color poster and a postage stamp. The Ministry of Culture, the Central Propaganda Department, and the Chinese Artists Association—organizations within the party and government that were responsible for art in the centralized socialist structure before the Cultural Revolution—were abolished in 1967. By about 1970 many of their functions were assumed by a Culture Group led by Jiang Qing, who became the highest authority on cultural matters, thus formalizing the nationwide imposition of her taste. Art activities became the direct responsibility of one of the ten directors of the Culture Group,  

 

 

 

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strongly molded by Shanghai commercial art of the 1930s. As remarkable or even strange as Cultural Revolution paintings might be to our eyes today, it is very much part of a continuous history of modern Chinese art. The professional artists who made many of the canonical images of the period were thoroughly trained socialist realists. Some of the so-called amateurs were rusticated urban youth with years of art practice in weekend and after-school art programs at Children’s Palaces, or even graduates of elite art middle schools. Others, like the actual farmers known as the Hu County peasant painters, were instructed by visiting professionals.16 A great number of sent-down youth artists went on to careers as professional artists and critics. Before selection of work for the national exhibition began in the spring of 1972, orders were given that many incarcerated artists, old and young, should be liberated. A small number of old professional artists who had enjoyed Zhou Enlai’s appreciation during the 1950s, including Guan Shanyue, the surviving collaborator of the 1959 painting This Land So Rich in Beauty in the Great Hall of the People [see fig. 8.15], and Qian Songyan (1899–1985), who had been active in forging the new Jiangsu style of guohua painting in the late 1950s, were asked to paint for the exhibition [fig. 9.11]. A larger number of middle-aged professionals reemerged, as did some former Red Guard painters. Yet, despite the inclusion of some professional artists, the Cultural Revolution’s emphasis on proletarian art by workers, peasants, and soldiers ensured that most of the successful submissions were by amateurs. A jury of well-known professional artists was formed to make the final selection of works in Beijing. The inherent contradiction between the often technically weak but politically correct submissions of workers, peasants, and soldiers and Gao’s mandate to seek high standards was resolved by forming “painting correction groups.” Prominent young professionals accompanied the paintings submitted by each region when they were shipped to the capital. Works by amateurs might have interesting subject matter but be poorly painted. In response to criticisms by jury members, officials, and other artists, such paintings were “corrected” by the professionals. For the oil painting section, a representative of the artist’s own region would simply repaint any problematic sections of a selected painting. If the officials still found the work inadequate, artists from other regions might provide additional correction. Some of the most highly skilled realists of the younger generation were selected for this team, including Maksimov student Jin Shangyi, from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing [see fig. 7.15]; Chen Yifei, who had studied at the  

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9.11  Qian Songyan (1899–1985), Sunrise in Yan’an after Snow, 1972, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 113 × 67.2 cm, Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum, Nanjing  

Shanghai Art College [see fig. 10.2]; Tang Xiaohe (b. 1941), a graduate of the Hubei Art Academy in Wuhan [fig. 9.12]; Sun Jingbo (b. 1945), a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Middle School then living in Kunming; Chen Yanning (b. 1945), a graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Arts [fig. 9.16]; Zhu Naizheng (b. 1935), a talented Central Academy graduate living in Qinghai; and Guang Tingbo (b. 1938), from the Lu Xun Academy of Art in Shenyang. Most of the artists were called back from labor camps or prison to participate in the exhibition. The approved style was relatively uniform, a narrowly defined academic manner that synthesized the painting standards of the art colleges and the more restrictive requirements Jiang Qing developed for the “model” theatrical works. Mandated to follow Jiang Qing’s aesthetic, and thus to depart from the conventions of Soviet art, Cultural Revolution–era painters and jurors pursued creation of images that were “red, bright, and shining.” Cool colors  

9.12 Tang Xiaohe (b. 1941), Follow Closely Our Great Leader Chairman Mao, Ride the Wind, Cleave the Waves, Fearlessly Forge Ahead, 1972, oil on canvas, 188 × 290 cm, formerly Collection of the Artist

were to be avoided; Mao’s flesh should be modeled in red and other warm tones. Conspicuous displays of brushwork should be avoided, and Mao’s face should be smooth. The entire composition should be bright, and should be illuminated in such a way as to imply that Mao himself was the primary source of light. If Mao were in the center of a group of people, all efforts should be made to illuminate surfaces that faced him. In this way, slogans such as “Chairman Mao Is the Red Sun in Our Hearts” could be made visible. Organizing the guohua section of the exhibition, which was held the following year, was more difficult. Local authorities generally believed that guohua was part of the so-called Four Olds to be eradicated by the Cultural Revolution. Yet, after Gao Jingde received explicit authorization from Wang Mantian to permit guohua painting, he was able to persuade local art circles to submit such works. As was the case with oil painting, a Painting Correction Group was assembled to assist with preparations for the exhibition. It, like the oil painting group, consisted of academically trained guohua painters from each of China’s major regions, including: from Hangzhou, Fang Zengxian, a guohua figure-painting professor at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts [see fig. 8.3]; from Xi’an, Liu Wenxi (b. 1933), a graduate of the guohua figure-

painting program at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts [see figs. 8.4 and 9.13]; from Guangzhou, Wu Qizhong, a graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Arts; from Shenyang, Xu Yong, a professor at the Lu Xun Academy of Art; and from Beijing, Zhou Sicong, a graduate of the guohua figurepainting program of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts. Faulty sections of a work painted in permanent ink on paper could not be overpainted, as they might be in an oil painting. The correctors were thus required to make new paintings based on the amateurs’ compositions. The late Zhou Sicong recalled her assignment to fix a painting by a worker in a shoe factory. The worker attempted to depict the actress of a “model” opera trying on her new ballet slippers at the factory. The theme was appealing to authorities at all levels: it flattered Jiang Qing and her Model Theatrical Works, and also documented the contribution the artist’s shoe factory was making to the Cultural Revolution. Unfortunately, the subject was difficult for an amateur to paint with any semblance of anatomical accuracy. Zhou completely repainted the work, based on the worker’s composition, and it was exhibited under the worker’s name. The emphasis on rusticated urban youth in the 1972 exhibition left the final group of paintings with compara-

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9.13 Liu Wenxi (b. 1933), New Spring in Yan’an, 1972, ink and color on Chinese paper, 243 × 178.5 cm, Chinese International Exhibition Agency, Beijing

tively few portraits of Chairman Mao. He Kongde’s portrait of Mao, The Gutian Meeting, was prominently hung in the main room of the gallery. A monumental work by the young Wuhan professional Tang Xiaohe depicted Mao on the occasion of his famous 1965 swim in the Yangzi River near Wuhan [fig. 9.12]. This work combined several characteristics considered desirable by Cultural Revolution authorities. It lauded Mao’s youthful health (whether factually accurate or not) and was so successful within the category of Mao images that it became a mandatory decoration for Chinese swimming pools. It also fell into the category of revolutionary paintings of local subjects, by taking a theme specific to the artists’ own home locale and thus demonstrating the loyalty of the people of Hubei Province, which had been the site of the Wuhan disturbance in 1967, to Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Multiplied by China’s thirty provinces and cities, such local testimonials became a major visual and propaganda statement. From 1973, portraits of Mao by guohua artists were also 194

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exhibited. Typical of the guohua of this period were works such as Liu Wenxi’s New Spring in Yan’an, painted in 1972 [fig.  9.13]. Liu Wenxi, a Xi’an artist who had been two classes ahead of Gao Jingde in art school, had developed an unmistakable style of figure painting characterized by strong outlines and bold colors. In this commission the artist emphasizes the close connections between the region of his own residence and the revolutionary heritage of Mao Zedong. The work appears to document a happy reunion between Chairman Mao and the now liberated peasants of the area around Yan’an. Themes of the wartime Communist base at Yan’an were considered part of the regional territory of the Xi’an artists, and the work thus combines two desirable subjects: the portrait of Chairman Mao and a scene based on the artist’s life experience. Trained in the ink-and-color socialist-realist figure-­ painting program that had come to dominate Chinese painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts at Hangzhou, Liu Wenxi went on to develop a personal style more closely

9.14 Shen Jiawei (b. 1948), Standing Guard for Our Great Fatherland, 1974, oil on canvas, 189 × 158 cm, private collection

related to the crisp new year’s picture aesthetic than to the self-expressive aspirations of Shanghai and Hangzhou ink painters. His guohua figures are carefully modeled with rich flesh tones and achieve a pronounced three-­dimensionality as well as the theatricality required by Jiang Qing. The garments are less heavily shaded than they might be in an oil painting but gesture and volume are well conveyed by thick black outlines. Although principles of Western perspective dominate, the background is paler and plainer than it might be in an oil painting. Liu was, in the heyday of this style, one of China’s most technically competent ­socialist-realist guohua figure painters. The next major exhibition was held in October of 1974 at the China Art Gallery, in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Jiang Qing, then involved in a power struggle with the cancer-stricken Zhou

Enlai, stepped up her personal involvement with the visual arts. She personally inspected the gallery before the opening of the exhibition, which she had not done for the 1972 exhibition, and she reportedly spent most of one night studying the display. The Politburo attended the opening, giving unprecedented political importance to the event. Official emphasis remained on paintings executed by amateurs, many of whom were rusticated urban youth facing permanent careers as peasants or factory laborers. Shen Jiawei (b. 1948), a sent-down urban youth from Zhejiang, exhibited a painting depicting the heroic activities in his new home in Heilongjiang, near the Siberian border. His story would be typical of other such young artists, if it were not for the sensational short-term success it brought him. Shen Jiawei’s painting, Standing Guard for Our Great Fatherland, reportedly won Jiang Qing’s enthusiastic approval [fig. 9.14]. Art of the Gre at Proletarian Cultur al Revolution

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Because Shen had been assigned to a military farm in The Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang), he was considered a soldier rather than a peasant. Born in 1948 in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, he was one of the four hundred thousand middle school graduates sent to farm in Heilongjiang. He was assigned to a regiment of the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps that had its headquarters in Jiamusi. His farm, with a population of ten thousand or twenty thousand demobilized soldiers, rightists, and rusticated urban youth, was located in the eastern corner of Heilongjiang, an area of border conflicts with the Soviet Union, near the Muling River. Among the many young people in Heilongjiang were some who had aspired to enter art academies before the colleges were closed. With the national leadership’s decision to sponsor art exhibitions, the authorities in Heilongjiang, like those elsewhere, began organizing painters. Hao Boyi, a young oil painter and printmaker, was assigned to find and supervise the young soldier-artists. In 1971 he began ordering a select group of young farmers to attend an art creation class in Jiamusi. Hao Boyi taught woodcuts in the local Beidahuang style [see fig. 8.20], and some of his pupils excelled at printmaking. Students who wished to work in other media experimented and taught one another. The program continued for the next five years, with artists dividing their time between artwork in Jiamusi and manual labor on their farms. Heilongjiang prints were shown in most major exhibitions of the 1970s, and many were published anonymously in Chinese Literature and other magazines for distribution abroad. Shen Jiawei entered the group in 1973 and produced his vision of a heroic border guard during the next year. The leading national art magazine of the late Cultural Revolution period, Zhejiang-based Art Materials, published an article in which Shen elaborated on his creative process.17 He wrote that the theme of his painting was suggested by a widely heard patriotic song of the period. While participating in a class for amateur artists in 1973, he was given an opportunity to visit the Ussuri River and to climb a watchtower where soldiers monitored the Sino-Soviet border. The spectacular natural scenery reinforced the importance of the soldiers’ patriotic duty. Upon his return to the military camp, Shen’s sketch of the scene was approved by local authorities, who also gave him permission to collect further material during a future visit to the site. His composition, Shen wrote, in the rhetorical manner required at the time, was guided further by principles of Chairman Mao, such as: “Our requirement is the unification of politics and art, the unification of contents and form, the unification of revolutionary political contents and the most perfect artistic form,” and “the life reflected 196

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9.15 Shi Lu (1919–1982), Mount Hua, 1972, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 147.5 × 87 cm, Collection of Cemac Ltd., Edmonton  

in artistic and literary works can be and should be loftier, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, and more ideal than ordinary actual life, thus it will be more universal.” 18 Shen also claimed the required inspiration from study of the Model Theatrical Works, which emphasized heroic characters. One soldier was made more prominent by following the suggestions of classmates to place him against an empty sky. His height was emphasized by lowering the railing and by aligning the soldier’s head and feet with the lines of architectural recession. This construction indeed exemplifies one of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary aesthetic principles: the “three prominences” (san tuchu). As discussed in Art Materials in 1973, the three prominences required that in figures artists emphasize the positive; in positive figures they emphasize the heroic; and in heroic characters they emphasize the central figure.19 What Shen did not write until many years later was his extreme

dissatisfaction with the alteration made to his painting in Beijing by the Painting Correction Group, whose representatives repainted the main characters’ faces in the “red, bright, and shining” manner. Because he was singled out for praise by Jiang Qing, Shen Jiawei’s experience was in some ways similar to that of Liu Chunhua. Rocketed to national attention on the basis of his first major painting, Shen Jiawei was an overnight celebrity—at least until two years later, when Mao died, Jiang Qing was arrested, and everything began to change. At around the time of the first visit of Henry Kissinger to China in 1971, Zhou Enlai began advocating the redecoration of hotels and train stations with traditional paintings to welcome foreign visitors to China. For purposes of both foreign exchange and international reputation, he further advocated exporting traditional-style Chinese paintings for sale. Many old guohua painters were released from their imprisonment in 1972 and allowed to paint landscapes for export. Among the many who joyfully contributed were Shi Lu (1919–1982) [fig. 9.15], Li Keran, Yan Han, and Wu Zuoren, until they were severely criticized in a 1974 Black Painting exhibition, aimed against the policies of the ailing Zhou Enlai. This art was, however briefly seen, a bright spot of diversity amid stylistic uniformity. During the last five years of the Cultural Revolution, both styles and subject matter became increasingly rigid. Creativity often was expressed by clever manipulations of allowable subject matter. Artworks were theatrical in both composition and rendering, with specific reference to the stylistic principles Jiang Qing demanded for her Model Theatrical Works. Mao remained an appropriate subject. Increasingly, however, a painting would garner greater success if it placed Mao at a plausible historical event in the artist’s own province. Workers-peasants-soldiers were the most common subject matter, and they too were best depicted from a local perspective. Finally, revolutionary women became a subject of unprecedented quantity and importance. In response to Mao’s slogan that women hold up half the sky, and Jiang Qing’s ardent espousal of feminism, young artists made a point of depicting the admirable contributions of female sent-down youth. New Doctor in the Fishing Village by Chen Yanning (b. 1945) was not only expertly painted in the new theatrical style but fulfilled many of these same thematic criteria— it depicted a female sent-down youth working in a revolutionary new profession, as a barefoot doctor, and places her in a recognizable local environment—the semitropical home province of the Cantonese artist [fig. 9.16]. Also in 1972 the slightly older fellow Cantonese, guohua painter Yang Zhiguang (b. 1930), rendered a similar concept on  

 

9.16  Chen Yanning (b. 1945), New Doctor in the Fishing Village, 1974, oil on canvas, 138.2 × 98.3 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

 

 

9.17  Yang Zhiguang (b. 1930), New Soldier of the Mine, 1972, ink and color on Chinese paper, 131 × 94 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

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9.18  Xu Kuang (b. 1938), Poems on the Grassland, 1975, woodcut, oil-based ink on Chinese paper, 70 ×103 cm, National Art Museum of China

paper as New Soldier of the Mine [fig. 9.17]. The Sichuanese woodblock printmaker Xu Kuang (b. 1938) was able to idealize the lives of girls sent-down to the Tibetan plateau with his lyrical Poems on the Grassland of 1975 [fig. 9.18]. As we see from these images, and may find on the covers of propaganda magazines of the period, the ideal female of the Cultural Revolution period was garbed in an androgynous army uniform secured by a broad leather belt. Her round face and apple-red cheeks demonstrated her healthy life of rural labor; her bobbed hair, her practicality and lack of vanity. China has undergone many catastrophes in the modern era. It is possible that the Cultural Revolution, which was more comprehensive in scope than any that preceded it— extending geographically from Tibet to the Siberian border and socially to every class of people—ranks as one of the worst. Although its spiritual and ideological legacy remain to be fully explored, some of its most durable effects on art are readily apparent. Condemnation of the Four Olds was the final blow that severed China’s lingering ties to elite traditional art. Indeed, the complete dominance of Maoist art, which had its roots in Western (including Soviet) academic, commercial, and propaganda imagery, shifted the aesthetic ground on which Chinese art would henceforth be practiced. It may be argued that China’s emergence on the global art scene in the late twentieth century was facilitated by the country’s complete casting off of the past. At the most obvious and perhaps superficial level, the ubiquity  

 

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of its propaganda images engraved them in the minds of the young, and so provided memories and motifs for postmodern appropriation by adult artists many years later. At an equally basic level, far more young people were given serious art instruction in provincial workshops, as the authorities sought to develop a cohort of worker-­peasant-­ soldier artists to implement the visual program of the Cultural Revolution. They became artists, and many have gone on to devote their lives to this calling. This intensive onthe-job training included designing posters or comic books, organizing propaganda displays, and executing huge billboards and murals. These propaganda displays were usually large, site-specific, ad hoc creations executed in a short time frame and with limited materials. It therefore may not be surprising that when artists of this generation turned their attention to installation art in the 1990s, their work was extraordinary in scale and power. Yet other factors were at play. The artists who would lead the rise of Chinese art to international recognition (Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, and Huang Yong Ping, for example) were invariably members of the sent-down youth generation—those who had most benefited by the high-­quality primary and secondary urban educational system of the 1950s and 1960s; those who were exhorted to self-sacrificing idealism in their most impressionable adolescent years; and then were sent not to college but to fend for themselves as laborers in the most difficult physical and psychological circumstances. Those who emerged from this trial by fire  

have powerful intellectual independence, strength of character, and stamina, to say nothing of mastery of a range of practical knowledge, from the most primitive survival skills of farming to building and repairing machines.20 Their resourcefulness and adaptability prepared them well for the

rapid changes they would experience as China abandoned its Cultural Revolution xenophobia and sought to become recognized as an equal among nations. The generation that followed them was thus primed for the uninhibited absorption of Western art and culture in the post-Mao era.

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10

Art after Mao 1976–1989

The Cultural Revolution ended with the death of its architect, Mao Zedong, on September 9, 1976. Bypassing men and women of greater talent or ambition, such as Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Qing, Mao named as his successor an inconspicuous follower named Hua Guofeng, whom he had promoted to a position in Beijing at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Hua loyally maintained many of Mao’s policies and personnel but also collaborated with the leader of China’s military, Marshall Ye Jianying, and head of the Secret Service, Wang Dongxin, to block any possibility of a coup by associates of Mao’s ambitious wife. Later called the Gang of Four, Cultural Revolution leaders Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen were arrested on October 6, 1976. The Cultural Revolution itself was denounced by the party central committee in 1977. By the time the quartet were put on trial in the fall of 1980, the excesses of the movement had been blamed entirely on their evil scheming. The 1976 national exhibition, scheduled for the fall, was postponed until February 18, 1977, when it opened in Beijing with the unwieldy but politically explicit title, National Art Exhibition to Ardently Celebrate Comrade Hua Guofeng’s Appointment as Central Party Chairman and Chairman of the Central Military Committee and Ardently Celebrate the Great Victory of Smashing the “Gang of Four’s” Plot to Usurp the Party and Take Power. Six months later a similar exhibition celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army. Portraits of worthy political leaders dominated both events. Art of the Hua Guofeng Interregnum

Arrest of the Gang of Four and the hope it promised for relaxation of their irrational ideological requirements was greeted with jubilation by almost all artists, as by 201

log. This kind of painting, which focused on modifying the iconography of the Cultural Revolution but not its painting styles, dominated during the years following Mao’s death. By contrast, in 1977 the Shanghai artists Chen Yifei (1946–2005) and Wei Jingshan (b. 1943) completed the most ambitious and innovative commission of the post–Cultural Revolution period, The Taking of the Presidential Palace, for the Museum of Military Affairs in Beijing [fig.  10.2]. Recommended for the commission by Maksimov student He Kongde, an influential staff artist at the military museum, the pair was asked to produce a new composition to commemorate the victory of the People’s Liberation Army over Nationalist forces in 1949. Their image, depicting Communist soldiers pulling down the Nationalist flag over the main gate to the government offices compound in Nanjing, was in both scale and quality unlike anything seen in earlier Chinese oil painting. Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan had studied with Maksimov student Yu Yunjie at the short-lived Shanghai Art School in the early 1960s (to be distinguished from the former private school of similar name abolished in 1952). They were thus well schooled in the principles of socialist realism but at the same time not immune to the residual European orientation of residents of Shanghai’s old French concession. Even during the Cultural Revolution, Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan had intuitively resisted the “red, bright, and shining” style, seeking a more naturalistic look. Rather than sketching the figures as Xu Beihong might have done, Chen Yifei directed costumed models to pose for black and white photographs, then reassembled these parts into the enormous and complicated composition he and Wei would execute with their virtuoso technique. The painting was so large that the artists invented a hinged stretcher that would permit it to be bent for transport by railroad boxcar from Shanghai to Beijing. While the theatrical gestures, lighting, and perspective of the work may have some links with Cultural Revolution painting, the pair sought to achieve a degree of verisimilitude more closely linked to classical European history painting of Eugene Delacroix or J. L. David and thus largely replaced the red hues of Cultural Revolution painting with more subtle tonalities. A technical tour de force, this work was ground breaking in its day and inspired great admiration among fellow artists still constrained by the habits developed in China over the previous decade. During the years after Lin Biao’s death, Zhou Enlai had sought cautiously, pragmatically, and somewhat indirectly to repair some of the damage the Cultural Revolution had done. In 1973 it was announced that institutions of higher learning would reopen for the benefit of workers, peas 

 

10.1  Qinwenmei (Chen Beixin [b. 1932] et al.), With You in Charge, I Am at Ease, 1977, gouache on paper reproduced as a poster, 55 × 80 cm, Collection of the Artist

China’s population as a whole. The Xi’an painting collaborative known as Qinwenmei (Shaanxi Cultural Bureau Art Creation Group), which contributed actively to the late Cultural Revolution national exhibitions, executed in gouache one of the most celebrated compositions of the Hua Guofeng era, With You in Charge, I Am at Ease, late in 1976. A history painting in the form of a double portrait, the work was designed to legitimize Hua’s rule and the removal of Jiang Qing from the center of power. Indeed, by continuing to use the accepted Cultural Revolution style, while slightly reworking its political iconography, the work is typical of the brief transitional rule of Mao’s successor. Far from the bombast of the early Cultural Revolution, the image depicts Mao Zedong, artificially glowing with health, as a kind mentor meeting with the earnest-looking Hua in a book-lined study—a setting intimately familiar to the public from propaganda photos of Mao’s meetings with world leaders. It was at one of these informal diplomatic events that Mao allegedly wrote in Hua’s notebook the words “With you in charge, I am at ease”—a phrase that became momentous when it was widely publicized in the fall of 1976 to justify the younger man’s legitimacy as Mao’s successor [fig.  10.1]. The artists—Maksimov student Chen Beixin (b.  1932), along with his colleagues Huang Naiyuan, Qin Tianjian, and Liu Wenxi—felt their task was complete once the work was published. With You in Charge appeared in magazines, as a poster, and then in January of 1977 was canonized in the official art journal Meishu. Multiple versions of the same theme by other artists soon appeared, including a crisply executed oil painting by Jin Shangyi and Peng Bin that graced the cover of the 1977 national exhibition cata 

 

 

 

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10.2  Chen Yifei (1946–2005) and Wei Jingshan (b. 1943), The Taking of the Presidential Palace, 1977, oil on canvas, 335 × 446 cm, Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, Beijing  

ants, and soldiers. In practice, this offered the possibility of educated urban youth who had been sent down to the countryside qualifying for a place at college. The system remained irregular—permission to take the admissions test was only granted to a small number of candidates by the local party officials in the villages, factories, counties, or districts to which they had been sent. The 1973 results were set aside after one applicant turned in a blank paper, claiming that revolutionary zeal was a more important qualification than book learning. In the end, four classes of workerpeasant-soldier students entered college between 1973 and 1976. In 1977 it was decided to open the college admissions examination to anyone who was younger than thirty-one and not on a political blacklist. Art schools began admitting students in the following year. The prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing admitted only fifty-five undergraduate students in 1978. At the same time, two thousand students applied for fifty-four places in the graduate program. The first class of students admitted after the Cultural Revolution was particularly accomplished. They comprised  

not only the elite of a single age group but of an entire tenyear generation. The oldest were referred to affectionately as laosanjie (old three classes), a term that includes all who were scheduled to graduate from high school or middle school in the three first years of the Cultural Revolution (1966, 1967, or 1968) and who went together to the countryside in the first wave of sent-down youth in 1968. The first class thus spanned a cohort that had graduated from high school between 1966 and 1976, and also included some autodidacts who had been sent to the countryside directly after middle school. The experiences of these students were even more diverse than their ages, but they shared a characteristic that is probably unique among any class of college students— they had spend most of the previous decade engaged in manual labor among China’s most poverty-stricken people. For them, the people—the workers, peasants, and soldiers—were not a conceptual construct but more real than any Marxist theoretician could possibly make them. Their educations had indeed, as the Yan’an Talks advocated, come from life among the masses. Although the resourcefulness, independence, toughness,  

 

 

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and creativity they developed were benefits Mao might have praised, their experiences taught them how different China’s reality was from the upbeat propaganda that proclaimed the never-ceasing progress of new China. Those who passed the art school entrance examinations brought with them not only the ideals of the new society in which they had passed their childhoods, but also vivid mental images of what they had actually seen as adolescents. The most effective critiques of Mao’s policies of the previous decade, therefore, came not from outside the official establishment, and not from those who intended to dissent, but from the former sent-down youth who began, upon their return to urban academic circles, to express their most heartfelt sympathy for Mao’s people—the workers, peasants, and soldiers—in quite individual terms.  

 

New Realism

Some particularly vivid examples of this new realism came from the brushes of students at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, located in a region that had suffered the most intense violence and loss of life during armed battles among Red Guard factions and among contending workers’ rebel groups in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Cheng Conglin (b. 1954), a member of the first post–Cultural Revolution class, painted A Snowy Day in 1968 during his second year at school [fig. 10.3]. The work was conceived, in the manner familiar to French academic artists and to socialist realists, as an artificially constructed composition intended to convey the essence of a historical or mythological narrative. In figure style it closely follows the Russian and Soviet manner then taught at the academy, somewhat resembling the compositional and emotional complexity of such earlier Chinese history paintings as Hou Yimin’s Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners [see fig. 7.16]. The theme of the work is, as Maksimov and his followers might have advised, an event so typical as to have universal significance, at the same time that it spoke to the artist’s direct personal experience. A Snowy Day, depicting the aftermath of a senseless campus battle between the Red Guard factions, constructs a vivid visual image to convey its critique of the Cultural Revolution. Sichuan was home to a great number of weapons factories, and in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution collapse of state power, weapons ranging from rifles and machine guns to tanks fell into the hands of competing Red Guard factions. This work focuses, with some sympathy, on the pathetic appearance of the defeated students as they retreat, wounded but still clutching their arms. In 1979, when this work was painted, the meaninglessness and great cost of such ideologically inspired violence was evident to every 

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one. A public cemetery in downtown Chongqing had been converted to the final resting place for Red Guard martyrs. Its crudely marked graves documented the deaths of hundreds of battling students, the youngest only fourteen. This painting thus deploys the artistic vocabulary of socialist realism, including its attention to the details of iconography, to expose not an external enemy but instead the sickness within the people and the government of socialist China. It was a particularly powerful statement because of its legibility to its audience—its style, composition, and format were as familiar as its subject matter was shocking. In any other context this painting might have been considered subversive, but it was created during a brief thaw, when condemnation of the irrationality of the Cultural Revolution was permitted as a way to speed correction of its harmful legacy. Among the spectators at the right side of the painting, a teacher with an expression of intense dismay on her face is one of the anchors of reason in the scene. The plainly dressed elderly woman, having been expelled from the classroom and relegated to menial labor by the Red Guard, leans on her broom in utter helplessness before the sight of her students at war. Cheng Conglin, who was thirteen in 1968, has depicted himself as a small bespectacled boy standing near the teacher.1 The year 1979, when this work was painted, was an extraordinary time. The December 1978 meeting of the Party Central Committee, after more than a month of preparatory discussions, rejected Hua Guofeng’s ideology of absolute loyalty to the policies of Mao Zedong. Modernization and economic policies based on successful results became the party’s primary concern. Long March veteran and economic realist Deng Xiaoping, who had been brought back into government in 1973 by Zhou Enlai only to be stripped of his positions following Zhou’s death, mounted a comeback that was based on an ideology of pragmatism and rationality and was supported by both the military and the public. In art this more empirical approach could no longer accommodate paintings like With You in Charge, I Am at Ease [see fig. 10.1], in which a dying Mao is portrayed as healthy, and an event that may never have occurred is given the vivid appearance of truth. One result of this reconsideration of the function of cultural production was the publication for the first time of exposés of the dark side of the Cultural Revolution. First appearing in fiction as so-called scar literature, a label taken from the name of a 1978 short story of this title by Lu Xinhua, artists soon began to explore the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Sympathetic exhibition jurors turned a blind eye to the long-term implications of aiming official weapons of propaganda back against the center  

10.3  Cheng Conglin (b. 1954), A Snowy Day in 1968, 1979, oil on canvas, 202 × 300 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

of power. Exhibited in Sichuan in the fall of 1979, Cheng Conglin’s work went on to win a prize in the Fifth National Art Exhibition held in Beijing in 1980 and has been canonized as a classic of so-called scar art. One of the earliest artworks of the scar genre was Why?, painted in 1978 by Gao Xiaohua (b. 1955), a classmate of Cheng Conglin at the Sichuan Academy [fig.  10.4]. This intimate and psychologically focused oil painting probes the reactions of individuals caught up in the cruel absurdity of Red Guard bloodshed. Gao depicts a lull in combat, in which four exhausted Red Guards, who occupy a section of sidewalk adjacent to a storm sewer, silently nurse their wounds. The varying directions in which they look suggest that each is lost in his or her own doubts as they await what may be a final suicidal defense of their territory. Two of the young men wear armbands identifying them with the Rebel Faction. The figure at right looks intently in the direction from which attack will come, his machine gun ready by his side. The unhappy gaze of his bandaged companion, rifle ready on his shoulder, fastens on the eyes of the viewer. Their injured female comrade lies prone on the sidewalk, covered with a red banner that reveals part of the vicious slogan “Attack with a pen but defend with a weapon,” promoted among the Red Guard by Jiang Qing in 1967. Their

10.4 Gao Xiaohua (b. 1955), Why?, 1978, oil on canvas, 108 × 136 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

fourth classmate, head down, leans listlessly against the tree at the center of their base, smoking and playing solitaire. Cheng Conglin adopts the typical elevated perspective of socialist realism; Gao Xiaohua skillfully uses an overhead viewpoint, like an omniscient narrator, to expose their tragic folly. Art after Mao

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10.5 Luo Zhongli (b. 1948), Father, 1980, oil on canvas, 227 × 154 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

Gao Xiaohua was the son of a military officer and a military doctor. As a child, he would visit his mother at work and recalls his horror at seeing her hospital filled with casualties of the Red Guard battles. In 1970 he began to work alongside his father at a military camp and later became a soldier himself, working as a staff artist and photographer before his admission to art school. This work was begun in the summer of 1978. The great accuracy with which he depicts the machine gun in the foreground suggests a familiarity with weapons that few artists of his generation would 206

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have possessed. Why? was canonized by its publication in the official journal Meishu in July 1979, at the height of the campaign to expose crimes of the Gang of Four. In the early post-Mao period, realistic techniques were the preferred means of conveying the artists’ ideas. However, many young artists working within the academies sought to leave behind the artificiality of socialist realism and replace it with something more truthful. A remarkable experiment of this sort was undertaken by Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts student Luo Zhongli (b. 1948) in 1980 [fig. 10.5]. In all

superficial ways his subject, an aged peasant depicted in a generally sympathetic tone, is in harmony with the Yan’an Talks, but in actuality Father is a sharp challenge to socialist realism. Immediately recognizable to foreign observers was that Luo had been inspired in his composition by the enormous scale and photorealism of American painter Chuck Close. Luo captures the compelling power of Close’s ambiguity, but his means of achieving it is quite different. Unlike Close’s cold postmodernism, which aimed both in its imagery and in its mechanical touch to remove all sense of personal emotion from his works, Luo’s ambiguity is of the narrative kind. His Father, with its finely detailed execution, clearly has some sort of story to tell—yet the meaning of its iconographic details and the very plot of its story are left unclear. Equally unsettling is the novelty of its combination of subject and format. A huge portrait of this sort had been limited, during the Cultural Revolution, to images of supreme leader Mao Zedong. Was Luo Zhongli suggesting that a wrinkled old peasant was as important as Mao himself? Was he the nation’s true father? Chinese Communist doctrine, based in rural revolution, might permit this understanding, but in Cultural Revolution terms this was sacrilege. While Luo Zhongli’s project was encouraged by his teachers, its potentially subversive qualities were readily recognized by the old revolutionary cadre in charge of art in Sichuan. He noted that there was nothing about this old man to distinguish him from a peasant of preliberation times. Certainly to artists of Luo’s generation, this was exactly the point: in contrast to the idealized images in the socialist-realist canon, many of the peasants they had actually seen as sent-down youth were poor, weary, and worried, and still did not know the happiness they had been promised. In a final compromise the young artist accepted his superior’s suggestion to add a ballpoint pen behind the ear of the old man, instantly transforming him into a literate beneficiary of socialist education. Soon after, the work was sent to the National Youth Exhibition in Beijing, where it won a medal. The disillusioned youth of the sent-down generation, who had worked side-by-side with the peasants, were in a position to depict the people of China’s countryside with an accuracy their elders could not imagine. Shanghai-born Chen Danqing (b. 1953), who spent five years in a village in southern Jiangxi, developed a rather different kind of subject matter toward the end of the Cultural Revolution. Selftaught as a painter, Chen had learned to draw and paint in a classical European style related to those of older friends such as Chen Yifei in Shanghai and was accepted directly into graduate study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1978. During the late Cultural Revolution, Chen Danqing lived  

10.6  Chen Danqing (b. 1953), Going to Town II, one of the Tibetan Series, 1980, oil on canvas, 78.2 × 54.5 cm, Collection of the Artist

in Tibet, where he became fascinated by the local people as subjects for art. In a series of ten small paintings from this early period Chen Danqing eschewed the artificiality of socialist realism and instead adopted a more matter of fact, almost ethnographic, approach to his subjects [fig. 10.6]. His work was highly admired in academic circles for its technical virtuousity. Like that of Luo Zhongli, Chen’s subject matter had many precedents in earlier art of the PRC. Li Huanmin’s 1963 image of pretty Tibetan women at harvest time is only one example of the celebration of the well-being of the national minorities under communism. By contrast, however, Chen Danqing’s neutrality or even ambiguity in the face of a theme with such potential for politically charged interpretation aligned his work with that of the new generation. Chen’s unsmiling figures, who possess no evident connection with modern Chinese life, were striking to Chinese viewers in the context of early post–Cultural Revolution art. Chen Danqing serves as the final example here of a talented young artist who sought to overturn the artificiality of the Cultural Revolution aesthetic and seek authenticity in new forms of realism.  

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Unofficial Art (1979 – 1981)  

The innovations of this new generation of artists revivified Chinese official art, and in particular figurative oil painting, with a new concern for politically acceptable subjects of everyday life. At the same time, however, some young artists working outside the official art establishment were prepared to push much harder against the idea of art as propaganda. The five years following the death of Lin Biao was a period in which, for most Chinese, the rigid controls over behavior and speech became unmoored from any comprehensible revolutionary purpose. Life became increasingly oppressive and bleak, particularly for the young. Spies were everywhere, hoping for some small personal benefit in exchange for reporting the suspicious deeds of their neighbors or fellow workers. In the midst of this emptiness, and despite all peril, lonely individuals began secretly congregating into small groups of artists and poets, who collectively developed a mental world very much at odds with the surrounding society. Because they operated underground, in quiet resistance to the oppression of the totalitarian regime, most of these loosely organized groups melted away during the postMao thaw in the 1980s and have been forgotten. One typical example is a group that later called themselves the No Names, a loose collection of young artists who began painting together around 1973 in the parks of Beijing. The artists came from diverse class backgrounds, different work units, and various pre-existing circles of friends. Most were middle school graduates who had been assigned to jobs as laborers in one of the various work units in Beijing. A few had learned the basics of painting from artist-parents as children. Others had demonstrated sufficient artistic talent in their factories to be sent to attend special classes for amateur artists. Many in the group attended the Black Painting Exhibition of February, 1974, eager to see what sort of creativity might be found in works that had so provoked Jiang Qing’s condemnation. Their primary study of art came, however, from banned books that were passed from hand to hand, and, perhaps most importantly, their plein air practice and mutual encouragement. Their first exhibition, a secret, unofficial, and probably illegal display of the works of about a dozen members, was held at the home of participant Zhang Wei (b. 1954) in late 1974.2 For none of them did the political status quo of the Cultural Revolution offer a happy future, and so they created an alternative world outside its boundaries. Notably, they completely rejected the Maoist doctrine that art should serve politics. Indeed, the unifying quality of their art, and its larger significance in the context of its time, was its complete avoidance of political subject matter and its pursuit of 208

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formal beauty and self-expression. Its paintings were small, painted on paper trimmed to fit in the hand-made painting boxes they carried, and usually focused on natural scenery or architectural monuments of old Beijing. Needless to say, in the Cultural Revolution context they would have been deemed a product of petty bourgeois mentality, but the group later garnered sufficient support to hold an officially approved exhibition at the Huafangzhai in Beihai Park in July of 1979. As Hua Guofeng’s power waned in early 1979, a few courageous Beijing arts administrators were willing to take the risk of encouraging the display of apolitical art. In Shanghai the official art world had not yet relaxed, but apolitical art exhibitions were organized and shown in spaces beneath the radar of the party arts administrators. Several were organized by young staff members of district workers cultural palaces.3 On March 25, 1978, the Luwan District Cultural Palace in Shanghai displayed an apolitical show of three hundred oils, watercolors, guohua, and prints, protecting itself against criticism with the title “Meishu xizuo zhan” (art studies display), which suggested that the work consisted of preliminary renderings and therefore should be judged only by technical, not ideological standards. At considerable risk, but to very positive public response, the organizers even showed works by artists whose condemnations by prior political movements had not yet been reversed. The year 1979 dawned with a wave of political rehabilitations and accompanying exhibitions of nonpolitical subject matter. At the lunar new year in February, a Beijing group of midcareer artists, which later called itself the Oil Painting Research Association, exhibited the oil landscapes and still lifes of forty oil painters, including both distinguished senior artists like Lin Gang, Jin Shangyi, Zhan Jianjun, and Wu Guanzhong, and emerging younger painters like Zhong Ming, in the New Spring Painting exhibition. Revolutionary printmaker Jiang Feng, himself a former rightist, wrote an enthusiastic preface in praise of creativity, freedom of expression, painting clubs, and the revival of the art market. Also in February 1979, a dozen artists, many from the Shanghai Drama Academy, held a Twelve-Man Painting Show at the Huangpu District Children’s Palace in Shanghai. The show was notable for its experimental and modernist styles. Old artists who had suffered so much abuse during the Cultural Revolution could perhaps be excused for relaxing their political vigilance and returning to the lyrical styles of their youths. The party establishment found it more difficult to accept, however, that young artists, born and raised in New China, might reject its culture. A few elders who still retained the idealism that had led them into the Communist Party when they were young defended creativ-

ity and freedom over party doctrine. The first No Name exhibition, which opened on July 7, 1979, was approved by Beijing Artists Association administrator and former rightist Liu Xun, who had only recently been released from jail and rehabilitated, over the vigorous opposition of his colleagues. Liu’s open-mindedness would be tested in 1979, when a newly formed group of artists and writers, the Stars (Xingxing), led by Huang Rui (b. 1952) and Ma Desheng (b.  1952), asked him to exhibit their work. Many participants in the Stars exhibition—including Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Zhong A’cheng (b. 1949), Wang Keping (b. 1949), Yan Li (b. 1954), and Li Yongcun (b. 1948)—were writers who were seriously involved with the short-lived expression of popular opinion at Democracy Wall, the publishing of underground journals, and the poetry recitals then taking place in unsupervised Beijing parks. Their commitment to art was matched by a keen sense of political mission. No longer simply apolitical landscapes and flower paintings, their work advocated individual freedom and would touch on such taboo subjects as nudity, sex, and political democracy. It would also introduce a range of heretofore banned modernist styles, including abstraction and surrealism. Their works, and the ways in which they were presented, would become provocations to party hard-liners and even seem to challenge the system itself. As the brief liberalization that accompanied Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power began to wane, and approval for an exhibition did not arrive, the politically sensitive young artists felt they could not afford to wait. On September 27, 1979, they hung their exhibition on the fence and from the trees outside the Chinese National Art Gallery. The scheduled timing was provocative—it would correspond with the October 1 celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China as well as the hanging of the final selections for the Fifth National Art Exhibition within the official gallery itself. Accompanied by handmade exhibition posters, object labels, exhibitors’ badges, and mimeographically produced exhibition tickets, the young artists hung more than 150 works by 23 artists, including woodcuts, oils, pencil drawings, guohua, and wooden sculptures, on a 40-meter-long stretch of fence and in the garden east of the gallery. A few of the works were extremely political. Wang Keping’s Silent, one of twentyeight sculptures he showed, protests the stifling of free speech that characterized public life of the time and seems to foretell the ideologically based suppression that the show itself would suffer [fig.  10.7]. Ma Desheng’s woodcut, on the other hand, depicting arms stretched to heaven above simple Beijing dwellings, suggests the unfulfilled yearning of Beijing’s ordinary citizens.  

 

 

10.7 Wang Keping (b. 1949), Silent, 1979, wood, 45 × 25 × 25 cm, Collection of the Artist

Despite its unapproved status, the exhibition began surprisingly well. On the first day Jiang Feng, now head of the Chinese Artists Association (CAA), and Yu Feng, who was deputy director of the Chinese National Art Gallery and deputy party secretary of the CAA, both visited and expressed approval; Jiang Feng agreed, moreover, to allow the artists to store the work in the Chinese National Art Gallery at night. Liu Xun sympathetically discussed the work with the artists, only suggesting that it might have looked better if they had waited until it could be hung in the gallery. These senior arts administrators, who had all suffered from artistic and personal suppression under both the Nationalists and the Communists, were doubly appreciative of the courage and ambition of the young unofficial artists and showed no concern for the personal danger they might incur by backing them. Nevertheless, by the second day the police had arrived, apparently dispatched by the Beijing Municipal Communist Party Committee. Sculptor Wang Keping, painter Huang Rui, and printmaker Ma Desheng successfully argued for the legality of their activity, and the work remained on view later in the day when faculty and students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts came to see it. By the morning of the third day, September 29, the park had been completely sealed off by police and the works confiscated. Liu Xun hustled the young artists inside Art after Mao

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ical mission—it provoked soul-searching and serious ideological controversy at the 1979 meeting of the National Congress of Literary and Art Workers. Formerly hard-line art theorist Zhou Yang, transformed into a liberal by the Cultural Revolution, supported the Stars. Screenwriter Xia Yan criticized them. Finally, with the support of the senior arts administrators, the show reopened in the official gallery at Beihai Park in November 1979, and a second Stars show was held at the National Art Gallery a year later. The 1980 second show, personally supported by Jiang Feng, made the group even more notorious because of Wang Keping’s sensational birchwood sculpture Idol [fig. 10.8]. While many officials, including even Jiang Feng himself, were sympathetic to Wang’s attack on idolatry, a direct attack on Mao himself was not yet permitted. Despite the artist’s protestations that the sculpture was not intended as a portrait of Mao Zedong, and that it was not even a good likeness, to nearly all viewers it seemed like a satirical image of the dictator in the guise of a plump Buddhist icon. Although the three leaders of the Stars—Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Wang Keping—were invited to join the official Beijing Artists Association in 1980, a cultural crackdown that began not long after their exhibition, and that would later be formalized as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign, would declare them personae non gratae. The three left China to pursue their artistic careers in France and Japan. Nevertheless, their advocacy for freedom of artistic expression had a strong impact on the Chinese art world. Indeed, the efforts of unofficial artists to demonstrate what was possible in the context of a society reopening to the outside world was a historic one. As outsiders, and with little to lose in the art world, their efforts to reject the Cultural Revolution’s impact on art and on private lives went further than official artists might dare to venture. Many in the official art world agreed with their call for freedom, and over the course of the next fifteen years, officials and official artists would push such freedoms into the open.  

 

 

10.8 Wang Keping (b. 1949), Idol, 1979, wood, 57 × 30 × 15 cm, Collection of the Artist

the National Art Gallery to avoid bloodshed.4 He agreed to arrange an indoor exhibition later in the fall. Egged on by their friends in the underground journals, however, that evening the Stars artists decided that freedom of artistic expression was a matter they could not simply drop. They posted a notice on Democracy Wall seeking an apology from the city authorities and local police for infringing upon their rights. When their demands met with no response by 9:00 a.m. on October 1, they launched their protest march. A group of about seven hundred artists and their supporters set out from Democracy Wall, on the west side of Beijing, toward Tiananmen Square. Ma De­sheng, legs crippled by polio, led the procession on crutches. Although police blocked their attempt to cross the square, they eventually arrived at the Municipal Party Committee offices, directly to the east of the square. Ma Desheng, Huang Rui, and writer friends stood atop the staircase to deliver orations. Foreign journalists and diplomats swarmed around the scene, which was published in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Wang Keping later noted with much glee that the foreign press corps neglected to report the National Day speech by Marshall Ye Jianying. This seemingly spontaneous display of art at an un­ap­­ proved outdoor exhibition succeeded in the group’s polit210

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Political Contents or Formal Beauty?

The bombastic, artificially sweet form of socialist realism that was developed as the official art of the Cultural Revolution was rejected by the official art world, along with its bloodshed and psychological trauma, but difficulties remained in determining the correct forward course. Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010), a teacher at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts (CAAC) who worked in both oils and ink, stepped into the controversy over appropriate subject matter in 1979. Wu, a 1942 graduate of the National Academy in wartime exile, studied with Lin Fengmian and Pan Tianshou before undertaking three years of further study in Paris. Despite  

10.9  Yuan Yunsheng (b. 1937), Water Splashing Festival, 1979, mural painting, acrylic on canvas, 340 × 2100 cm, former dining room, Beijing International Airport

his great hopes for new China when he returned in 1950, he found it difficult to accommodate his modernist styles to those of the new regime. His work was exhibited occasionally in the early 1960s liberalization, but it was not until the 1980s that Wu’s semiabstract modernist style of ink painting began to receive some recognition in China [fig. 10.13]. In 1979 he published the first of a series of articles in the official art journal Meishu that ignited battles within the art world over formalism and abstraction. Over several years Wu argued in print that formal beauty was the most essential element in art, and that artistic form should not be determined by externally dictated subject matter. This was a controversial ideological position that implicitly challenged Mao’s Yan’an Talks. Opposition to the theoretical primacy of socialist realism thus began to emerge as a debate about the relationship between form and content. National Day, October 1, 1979, saw the opening of a public art project at the refurbished Beijing International airport. Over the previous year the walls had been decorated with murals by faculty of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. The mural subjects were for the most part taken from Chinese folk stories or festivals, as might befit a project intended to welcome foreign visitors to China. The CAAC, originally cofounded by Pang Xunqin, was dedicated to design rather than high art or propaganda, and it pioneered various new decorative styles and media in the post-1976 period that were considered suitable to its mission in the applied arts. In practice, some of the new works very much resembled the art nouveau styles that had been popular in the 1920s and 1930s, which had been eliminated as part of the socialist-realist developments of the 1950s. Among the airport murals, the most famous, or perhaps notorious, was Water-Splashing Festival [fig. 10.9] by Yuan

Yunsheng (b. 1937), painted in a quasi-art nouveau idiom. Yuan chose to illustrate a holiday of the minority Dai people in China’s Yunnan province. For the purpose he painted in an elongated figural style that is at least partially inspired by the highly decorative works of Gustav Klimt and Amedeo Modigliani. Within a year, as China’s cultural world began to tighten, the social appropriateness of Yuan’s composition, in which young men and women frolic in the nude, was questioned. Despite a spirited defense by Jiang Feng, the offending section of the mural was soon boarded up. Nevertheless, the decorative style characterized by Yuan’s airport murals was used by muralists and sculptors in public art for the subsequent two decades. A related linear and decorative style was used by a few graduates of the CAAC similarly engaged in overthrowing socialist realism. Wang Huaiqing (b. 1944) conceived his oil Bole in allegorical terms, as a confirmation of Deng Xiaoping’s appreciation of the value of China’s intellectual class, and thus did not stray too far in content from accepted definitions of official art [fig.  10.10]. The story refers to a horse trainer recorded in histories of the Zhou dynasty who was known for his ability to recognize the excellence in a potential steed that was not apparent to anyone else. With the exoneration of China’s rightists and other political prisoners, and their return to positions of influence, Deng Xiaoping was considered to be a friend of China’s educated people, their Bole. Although this painting, offering praise to the leader, is “thematic,” it was certainly not socialist realist in style. Beyond the decorative linearity of his figure and horse, Wang emphasizes the beauty of surface by using gold foil under his black background. Even if inspired by Gustav Klimt, it was a daring innovation in Chinese oil painting of the day. Art after Mao

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10.10. Wang Huaiqing (b. 1944), Bole, 1980, oil on canvas, 200 × 154.4 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

The Guohua Revival

Although the May Fourth era attacks on traditional Chinese painting remain doctrine even today, and have profoundly affected the aesthetic outlook of many Chinese born after liberation, such attitudes were considered by most members of China’s older generation, including those Communist officials who returned to power after the Cultural Revolution, as excessively leftist. Zhou Enlai, after all, had encouraged the creation of guohua paintings as representation of the national culture. The 1980s, therefore, saw a flourishing of guohua painters of all generations. Many of the most talented and famous masters of the Republican period, including Pan Tianshou and Wu Hufan, perished during the Cultural Revolution. Li Keran (1907–1989), who survived, entered one of the most creative phases of his career. Synthesizing all of his interests—his studies of modernist oil painting with Lin Fengmian, his work in ink painting following the traditions of Huang Binhong and Qi Baishi, and his own interests in the powerful compositions of Rembrandt and other old masters, Li’s Scenery of the Li River of 1986 is imbued with the powerful effects of light for which he became famous [fig. 10.11]. The subject is a famous scenic spot in Guilin, but the work was painted in Beijing from memory and has the vivid quality of a dream image.  

10.11 Li Keran (1907–1989), Scenery of the Li River, 1986, ink and color on paper, 69 × 116 cm, Collection of Mr. Lui Kwok Man, Hong Kong  

 

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Li’s impact on the next generation may be seen in the work of Jia Youfu (b. 1942), who studied with him at the Central Academy. Jia is a native of Shaanxi who particularly excelled in depicting the drama of its harsh landscapes. The Taihang Mountain of 1984 was painted after Jia Youfu’s fourteenth visit to the spectacular mountain range on the Hebei-Shanxi border, the area where the Eighth Route Army was stationed during the Sino-Japanese War

10.12  Jia Youfu (b. 1942), The Taihang Mountain, 1984, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 200 × 170 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

[fig. 10.12]. The work is as formally beautiful as that of his teacher, but Jia Youfu declares in his inscription that his aim is not only aesthetic but also patriotic: he loves every peak, every stone, every blade of grass, but above all he loves the monumental quality of the site, which marked the nation’s struggle for survival. The Anti–Spiritual Pollution Movement and the New Wave

Despite the promising experiments that blossomed in 1979, the power and tastes of the entrenched art bureaucracy soon began to put the brakes on artistic innovation. Perhaps as a symbolic gesture to pacify the hard-liners within the party whose support he needed, Deng Xiaoping moved ahead on economic reform while supporting an ideological movement against “spiritual pollution” that took place in 1982

and 1983. Repeatedly in the 1980s, attack on the arts served as a short-term way of quieting Deng’s critics from the ideological left. Art students who did not toe the new line were expelled from school in 1982. The young critic Li Xianting, who had published a positive appraisal of the Stars exhibitions in the party art journal Meishu, was fired from his job in 1983. Many of the Stars artists left China at this time, and a few of the No Names soon followed. This policy shift did not, however, change the minds of the many reformminded artists, who, despite frustration, continued to paint while biding their time. In 1983 and 1984, Deng Xiaoping introduced a change in economic policy that would ultimately have seismic impact on society and ideology. In a redefinition of the Communist economy, most work units were informed that they would no longer be state-supported but were to become economiArt after Mao

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selection of works for the Sixth National Exhibition in 1984. Artists were particularly disappointed to see only the dead stereotypes of an earlier epoch chosen to represent China’s progress since the liberalization of 1979. By canonizing realistic techniques and politically safe or neutral subjects, this exhibition certainly did not to live up to the promise of the new era. In an irony typical of this complicated period, the Chinese Artists Association decided not to buy the major works from the Sixth National Exhibition for the National Art Gallery collection, as was previous practice. Instead of incurring this cost, they earned foreign currency by selling them to overseas buyers. The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the 1984 exhibition is evidence that the official exhibitions remained significant to artists in 1984, but their profound dissatisfaction led many to turn their backs on the establishment thereafter. Even among China’s most important artists, by the mid1980s party-sponsored national exhibitions were no longer of interest. Disillusionment with the status quo was widespread at all levels. In a speech about reform of the economic structure on October 22, 1984, Deng Xiaoping called for a generational changing of the guard—“unhesitatingly promoting young and middle-aged cadres, especially those in their thirties and forties.” He announced that in 1985 older party cadres should vacate their posts to make way for capable young people.5 Much of the rhetoric accompanying this policy linked it to negating the harmful leftism of the Cultural Revolution. Young art critics, art professors, and administrators notable for their professional talent rather than their ideological orthodoxy, and with no attachment to the status quo, were put to work in important editorial, curatorial, and instructional positions. Two months later, the party Central Committee condemned the ill effects of “leftism,” a euphemism for Mao­ ism, and urged the National Writers Congress to guarantee China’s writers freedom of expression.6 Other spokes­people advocated intellectual production that was international and adoption of Western humanistic ideals.7 In response, representatives of the official art world, including the jurors for the Sixth National Exhibition, met in the spring of 1985 at Mount Huang and repudiated the use of strict political standards in selection for the exhibition. There was consensus that pursuit of international standards should be encouraged in oil painting, but there remained substantial disagreement about what that might mean. The national congress of the Chinese Artists Association that took place in May similarly mandated a “struggle against political interference in the arts” and elevated several recent graduates, including printmaker Xu Bing, ink painter Nie Ou, and oil  

10.13 Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010), Sunrise on Mount Hua, 1983, hanging scroll, 140 × 70 cm, private collection  

cally self-sufficient. Naturally, profit soon became more important than ideology, and even the key units within the propaganda machine, publishers and broadcasters, began turning their attention to making money. At the same time, import of foreign goods accelerated. Many urban Chinese families bought the latest model microwave ovens and VCRs long before they were widespread among middle-class American families, and even before they themselves had moved into acceptable housing. This combination of cultural retrenchment, which accompanied the Anti–Spiritual Pollution campaign, economic reform, and opening to the outside world produced contradictory ways of thinking. In the art world, attempts to close the door to contemporary international culture and to domestic innovation were widely resented and were blamed for the backward-looking

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painter Luo Zhongli, to the list of directors. One new face was added to the association’s vice-chairs, the forty-six-yearold female guohua painter Zhou Sicong (1939–1995). Throughout the art world in 1985, artists and art administrators leaped through this window of opportunity as it opened. Given the mandate to encourage intellectual freedom and the development of the succeeding generation, but no specific direction, party organizations fell over one another in promoting artistic innovation by young artists. The years 1985 and 1986 were almost as exciting as 1979. Exhibitions still were party-sponsored but censorship was minimal, as the art bureaucracy sought to make up for lost time in its pursuit of novelty. In addition, the newly introduced mandate to make money led many previously highly controlled exhibition venues to begin renting out their gallery space. In late fall of 1985, the American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg was able to rent the China Art Gallery (now the National Art Museum of China) to present part of his ROCI project—paintings, installations, and mixed-media found art that he made in various countries and at home. Within a month a group in Shanxi, the Three Step Studio, attempted to exhibit an installation incorporating found objects, claiming to have been inspired by Rauschenberg. Representative groups from this era, which was later referred to as the New Wave movement or the ’85 movement, include the Pool Group in Hangzhou, whose most prominent members were Zhang Peili (b. 1957) and Geng Jianyi (b. 1962), Red Humor by Wu Shanzhuan (b. 1960), and Xiamen Dada, a group in Fujian of which Huang Yongping (b. 1954) was a key member. All of these artists studied at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, inheritor of Lin Fengmian’s National West Lake Art Academy. A liberal attitude among some of its professors, combined with a strongly independent trend among the students, led to a collective pursuit of international standards in the making of contemporary art. In 1979 the academy, in collaboration with the Zhejiang Provincial Foreign Language Bookstore and various other local publishing units, organized an “International Imported Art Book Exhibition.” 8 The entire exhibition was subsequently purchased for the school library with the explicit aim of opening eyes that had been closed for thirty years. The school’s commitment to cosmopolitanism was such that it had to sell a car and a printing press to pay for the purchase. As early as the class of 1982, which graduated in the midst of the Anti–Spiritual Pollution movement, undergraduates began avidly emulating the work they saw in foreign publications. In 1986 the school purchased the entire  

 

stock of another foreign art book exhibition in Beijing, thus making its art library one of the most up-to-date in China. Several other book exhibitions in the early 1980s were totally bought out by the Shanghai Artists Association, the Shanghai Drama Academy, and the Shanghai People’s Art Publishing House. The latter began reprinting foreign art in inexpensive loose-leaf portfolios that could be posted or easily copied by aspiring artists. Zhejiang Academy graduates from the mid-1980s, such as Geng Jianyi and Wang Guangyi, were attracted to surrealism and Dada, models that were quite evidently outside the socialist realism of their academic training. According to Gu Wenda (b. 1955), who was first a graduate student and then a faculty member at the academy, students at the academy in the late 1970s and early 1980s were drawn to Western modernist and postmodernist art even though it was condemned by their teachers; the underground trend became a self-sustaining current within the student body, passed on from one class to the next. In the mid-1980s the academy was further internationalized by the hiring of foreign artists to teach. In 1985, for example, the French abstract expressionist Zhao Wuji (Zao Wouki, b. 1921), who was a graduate of the preliberation Hangzhou academy, presented a series of lectures at the school. The American graphic designer, painter, and computer artist Roman Verostko taught in Hangzhou in the same year, introducing to his students the latest trends in American art. Perhaps even more influential, a Bulgarian textile artist named Maryn Varbanov (known in China as Wan Man; 1932–1989) had a profound impact on his students. He was an award-winning textile designer and tapestry maker in both his native country and his adopted home in France. He had studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing in the late 1950s, where he had married one of his classmates. Fluent in Chinese, and presumably possessing both an insider’s understanding of the Stalinist ideology that many young Chinese sought to overcome and an Eastern European’s familiarity with the avant-garde, he was an excellent interpreter of modern Western art to the Chinese artists he taught. Young academy instructor Gu Wenda became nationally famous (or notorious, depending on one’s viewpoint) after publication of the piece he made for the Maryn Varbanov Tapestry Research Institute, Wisdom Comes from Tranquility, of 1985 [fig.  10.14]. Gu Wenda had studied with guohua master Lu Yanshao for his graduate degree. His conceptual breakthrough, although perhaps stimulated by the modernist Western forms introduced by Varbanov, was rooted in both a Cultural Revolution frame of reference and a sensi 

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10.14 Gu Wenda (b. 1955), Wisdom Comes from Tranquility, 1985, mixed media, silk, cotton, wool, hemp, bamboo, ink, xuan paper, lacquer, weaving, traditional mounting, lacquer, splashed ink, 500 × 800 × 80 cm, at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China)

tivity to the meanings attached to calligraphy and painting. Moreover, Gu Wenda’s art, unlike virtually any that came before, succeeded in shocking his viewers at the most visceral level. His work probes not only society and politics but, by confronting audiences with their fears and revulsions, the very boundaries of what it means to be human. The formal vocabulary of his challenge to conventional thinking was, needless to say, quite different from that of the realist oil painters. In this work the four large characters that form its title—Wisdom Comes from Tranquility— are written on paper splattered with gray wash. They flank a red tapestry that is ornamented with seal-like constructions of lacquered bamboo that read “Gu,” the artist’s surname. At the bottom of each calligraphy panel is seen a stormy landscape executed in a style related to that of his teacher. Most important is the calligraphy. Gu Wenda was one of the first artists of the ’85 generation to experiment with the cultural significance of the Chinese script. Here he adopts as his theme a seemingly innocuous but formally striking pedagogical convention—the circling in red of a well-written character and crossing out one that is wrong. However, enlarging the scale of these copy-book notations and hanging them on the wall had, as the artist probably intended, a terrifying effect. When blown up in this manner, the giant X-marks resemble those made by the Red Guard during the first years of the Cultural Revolution to signify the condemned—they appeared on big character posters and on the humiliating signs that ill-fated cadres were required to wear around their necks at criticism meetings. Anyone who had personally experienced this criticism, or come home to find a parent or grandparent the target of  

 

 

 

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such a campaign, would feel horror at the sight. Even worse, such X-marks were also made over the names of criminals condemned to execution. Although such a reading might easily be denied by the artist in the face of party censors, the X-marks can, and were, read as signs of the inconceivable suffering or even deaths of the targets of the Cultural Revolution. Combined with the visual and tactile power of the striking contrasts of black, gray, and revolutionary red, and of fabric, bamboo, and xuan paper, the ambiguous suggestions of violence are shocking. Gu Wenda’s fearless approach to his work and his larger-than-life personality made him an icon of the New Wave movement. This early work also demonstrates the pursuit of formal perfection that has characterized much of his subsequent art. Wu Shanzhuan, an undergraduate student in art education at the Zhejiang Academy at the time (class of 1986), plunged into an even more intense exploration of the nonsemantic significance of Chinese characters with a series of large installations of odd scraps of commercial or philosophical text written in the standard script used for propaganda slogans during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike the solemnity of Gu Wenda’s work, Wu Shanzhuan prefers to shock with humor. Indeed, from that time until today, he has attributed his work to an organization called Red Humor International. His 1986 installation, Big Character Posters (Red Humor)—in which he covered the walls of his work unit, the Zhoushan Institute for Masses Culture (Chunzhong yishuguan), with handwritten notices—evokes the political struggles in which big character posters had played such an important and deadly role, but he ultimately diffuses and then ridicules the threat they once offered  

 

10.15 Wu Shanzhuan (b. 1960), Big Character Posters (Red Humor Series), 1986, mixed media site specific installation at the artist’s studio, Institute for Mass Culture, Zhoushan

[fig.  10.15].9 Fragments of political slogans about “class,” “movement,” and “consciousness,” exhortations to physical fitness and public sanitation, and a label reading “sea mail,” are juxtaposed with warnings about possible flooding, or announcements that the running water is shut off. On top of all is a scribbled notice of a failed rendezvous, all the more poignant for its mundanity: “Old Wang, I’ve gone home.” Interest in installation art and performance art was common to many of the New Wave movement’s artists. In May 1986, Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi, both skilled painters who had graduated from the Zhejiang Academy, organized a group called the Pool Society (Chishe) that was based on a rejection of the supremacy of easel painting and an advocacy of an organic link between painting, performance, photography, and the environment. One of the Pool Society’s most famous projects, Master Yang’s Shadow Boxing Series, of June 1, 1986, involved a midnight installation on the walls around the art academy of twelve gigantic paper cutouts of the standard moves of the meditation-exercise taijichuan. The site, near the West Lake, is the sort of place where one would find real people, mostly elderly, gathering early in the morning to perform shadow boxing exercises. Less leisurely passersby would enter the artists’ artificial world as they rode their bicycles to work. The cutout figures possess some of the ghostliness of George Segal’s life-size plaster renderings of mundane human activity. According to the artists, the point of this harmless assault on the bastion of art was its very meaninglessness. They carried this approach into their painting. The following year, Zhang Peili, who had spent many childhood hours in the hospital where his parents worked, painted a superrealist

10.16  Zhang Peili (b. 1957), X? Series, No. 4, 1987, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm, private collection

image of surgical gloves marked with meaningless numbered pointing lines [fig. 10.16].10 Geng Jianyi created a series of large grimacing heads that became icons of the New Wave movement [fig. 10.17]. The expansion of permissible subject matter in the mid- and late 1980s is immediately evident if one contrasts this painting with Luo Zhongli’s Father, which had created such a stir in 1979 because of its ambiguity [fig. 10.5]. A strict household registration system, enforced by rationing of food to local residents, remained in effect in the 1980s—a Chinese citizen was expected to live in the location to which he or she was assigned. Many graduates of the Zhejiang Academy were sent back to their hometowns rather than to major art centers upon graduation. Some, probably correctly, viewed these job assignments as punish 

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10.17 Geng Jianyi (b. 1962), The Second Situation, Nos. 1–4, (detail), 1987, oil on canvas, each 170 × 132 cm, private collection  

ment for going too far ahead of the official art world in pursuit of innovation. Huang Yongping, who graduated in 1982, at the beginning of the Anti–Spiritual Pollution movement, was assigned to work as a middle school teacher. An unintended effect of such exile, however, was the dissemination of iconoclastic ambitions throughout China. Huang Yongping launched an even more urgent attack on the art of painting than had transpired at the art school with a series of automatic paintings from the mid-1980s. He began to execute works based solely on instructions from a roulette wheel marked with signs from the Book of Changes. He then organized local colleagues to show in a group called Xiamen Dada; they burned all their works in a fiery anti-art display after their first exhibition. A subsequent exhibition, immediately closed by the authorities for violating its preapproved plan, was comprised entirely of found objects. Perhaps reaching an extreme, in 1987 Huang created a performance piece/installation entitled A History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes [fig. 10.18]. The former text was by Wang Bomin, the senior art historian at the Zhejiang Academy; the latter, a translation of a book on Western art, by Herbert Reed.11 While Huang’s pile of paper pulp would seem to castigate art history and the ambitions of those who create it, it is also a self-reflective comment on the art historical moment in which he found himself—neither in old China nor in the modern West. Of course, none of these actions were completely new in the history of world art, but the particular moment in Chinese art history in which they were carried out made them momentous. This was not only an era of rethinking the making of art, but also, with an influx of foreign books, of the theory of art as well. By this time Huang was fascinated by Dada, which he had studied in

texts by Taiwanese authors. The long-castigated principles of modernism had barely reemerged, but as early as 1986, Huang suggested in print that his group be considered postmodern.12 Of critical importance to the development of recent Chinese art was the establishment by various party organizations of new art journals intended to foster innovation and to introduce world art to China. Although such installations as the ’85 New Space, organized by the Pool Society, were completely temporary, they were canonized as young editors competed to publish photographs of the activity and to give slides to foreign writers. The new journals included the Wuhan-based magazine Art Trends, established by the provincial Federation of Literary and Arts Workers in January 1985, and the flashy weekly Fine Art News (Zhongguo meishu bao), established in June by the Arts Research Institute of the Ministry of Culture in Beijing. Equally important, the young critics hired by the party art journal Meishu determined to use their influential official platform to change both art criticism and contemporary art. From 1986 to 1989 they made a point of publish-

 

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10.18 Huang Yongping (b. 1954), A History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes, 1987, paper pulp, 31 × 20 × 20 cm, destroyed, recreated by the artist in 1993, Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

10.19  Xu Bing (b. 1955), A Mirror to Analyze the World (Book from the Sky), 1987, mixed media site specific installation, Chinese National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China), Beijing

ing work that challenged the status quo. From its establishment in 1954, Meishu had been the organ by which party arts policies had been disseminated to China’s artists and where model works and successful theories were canonized. The editorial board may have seen their new approach as an experiment, but most readers would understand that the standards for party-approved art had drastically changed. Through these publications young artists nationwide were brought together in the project of remaking Chinese art. Wang Guangyi (b. 1958) graduated from the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy in 1984 and was assigned to work in his hometown of Harbin. He and several colleagues began painting in the surrealist style and by 1986 had been recognized by Beijing critics as forming a new “Northern Art Group,” characterized by a clinical detachment that critics of the time called “rationalism.” In this regard it was considered akin to Zhang Peili’s X-series. Wang Guangyi’s surrealist transformations of iconic history paintings were typical of his work in the period. Transferred to work in the newly established Zhuhai Painting Institute in Guangdong in 1986, Wang played an important role in pushing the official establishment to accept new kinds of art. Beijing printmaker Xu Bing (b. 1955), like many other sent-down youth, had great affection and sympathy for

the rural residents among whom he had worked during the Cultural Revolution. Many of his early prints, with the same naïve charm as earlier images from Yan’an, represent the simplicity and poverty of the life they had shared. Yet while working as an instructor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he quietly led his students in a new direction. In June 1986 they mounted, as part of a print show in the school exhibition hall, one of the first examples of Chinese installation art: a gigantic tire, the tread of which they carefully printed on a long stretch of paper, stood in the middle of the gallery. Soon after, Xu Bing began work on one of his most thought-provoking series, his Book from the Sky. Over the course of the next four years he spent endless hours alone in his studio to carve a set of wooden moveable-type blocks in the Song dynasty font style. This earnest effort was dedicated to creating characters that did not exist, and once printed could neither be pronounced nor understood [fig.  10.19]. Eventually numbering more than four thousand characters, Xu Bing’s lexicon was as large as that expected of a literate Chinese adult. In October 1988 he presented his first showing of this work as A Mirror to Analyze the World, consisting of long strips of text as well as bound books, all printed in illegible characters. Many viewers were puzzled, or even frustrated, as they sought to Art after Mao

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find a word that they could read. Such extraordinary effort devoted to production of texts with no meaning stimulated great controversy and multiple interpretations. In the context of its day, it took a clear stance against the primacy of subject matter in art. The written word has enjoyed an almost sacred status from very early in Chinese history. Under Mao, and particularly in the late Cultural Revolution, proper understanding of the meaning of written words became an even more serious matter. Careful parsing of newspaper texts and political slogans, a preoccupation of many Chinese in these years, might reveal the imminent occurrence of a radical political shift. In Xu Bing’s piece, words with no meaning were an alternative to, or even attack on, those that meant something. At the same time, did use of the Song dynasty form mean something? Was this lack of meaning to be located in the relationship between modern people and their past? The profundity of this Book from the Sky, as the completed project is known, lies in the multiple levels of meaning with which it engages its viewers. It has been shown at exhibitions around the world since its first display in Beijing. A Mirror to Analyze the World was also one of the very first examples of Chinese installation art to be shown in the Chinese National Art Gallery. Xu Bing had been elected a director of the Chinese Artists Association the year before and thus may be seen as using his new platform to argue in favor of complete openness in art. This installation was a pathbreaking work for the Chinese art world as a whole. For the artist himself it initiated several directions for his art. One, also evident in the Big Wheel installation, was a deep concern for process in the making of art. The other, worked out more fully after Xu’s relocation to New York, had to do with human cognition—in particular the function of language and script in the process of individual understanding.  

New Literati Painting

As in the case of Gu Wenda, iconoclasts were not limited to artists working in the field of oil painting, where international aspirations might be expected. Young guohua painters outside the highly politicized city of Beijing adopted a similarly playful approach to their subject matter. A group of guohua artists in Nanjing began exhibiting together in the 1980s under the rubric “new literati painting.” Although their use of the term “literati painting” has mystified some art historians, who might point out that none of the artists were literati and that their styles are completely different from those of literati painters of the pre-1949 period, it may still be worthwhile understanding why they seek to explicitly identify themselves with the class of painters who were an object of ideological attack throughout most of the 220

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10.20  Xu Lei (b. 1963), Crossing Boundaries, 1986, acrylic on paper, 131 × 91 cm, private collection

PRC period. Their work generally looks to China’s imperial past for its subject matter or styles and rarely adopts the political or social subject matter of the contemporary era. However, like the painting of premodern literati artists, who learned to express themselves in the most subtle terms, alienation may take various oblique forms. The figure paintings of Wang Mengqi (b. 1947), for example, are usually set in the distant past and suggest with a gentle irony the small pleasures of the reclusive life. The work of the New Literati Painters was an almost complete rejection of both socialist realism and Mao’s Yan’an Talks. Guohua painter Xu Lei (b. 1963), then working at the Nanjing Chinese Painting Institute, threw himself into the New Wave movement and may serve as a bridge between New Literati painting and the avant-garde. In 1986 he exhibited in Nanjing a formally beautiful example of antiart. The work was a four-panel set of hanging scrolls on which were mounted not paintings but skillfully made ink rubbings of a manhole cover and the surface of the adjacent street. The scroll rollers at the bottom were painted with the red and white stripes then used in China as traffic dividers. The artist’s joke was that ink rubbings were generally used to record texts and motifs of weighty cultural importance—  

the inscriptions by famous calligraphers on stone steles, the historical events recorded on ancient bronzes, the castings of the oracles on ancient tortoise shells. Here, the dirty street on which everyone would walk, bicycle, and even spit was elevated to the subject of art. Xu Lei did not abandon painting, however, and began working in a beautifully crafted surrealist style in the same year. Possibly stimulated by the flood of translated books on philosophy and psychology, and acutely aware of his position as a Chinese citizen in a global culture, he turned his brush to the purpose of meditations on the position of the individual in time. Recognizable in his Crossing Boundaries is a figure wearing a Western hat and a full-length Chinese robe, costume typical of the Republican era, and passing through a series of arched passages that resemble the gates of the Forbidden City [fig. 10.20]. The China/Avant-Garde Exhibition

Gao Minglu (b. 1949) has recorded that more than eighty unofficial artistic groups, comprised of more than 2,250 young artists, sprang up in twenty-nine Chinese provinces, cities, and autonomous regions between 1985 and 1987. They shared a concern for the individual in the context of Chinese society, a belief in freedom of creation in art, and commitment to a radical overhaul of artistic concepts and forms. At a meeting of oil painters organized in Zhuhai in July 1986, Hangzhou academy graduate Wang Guangyi suggested that a mechanism should be found within the official art structure to bypass local artists associations in order to permit the works of avant-garde artists to be accepted into national art exhibitions. From this time it was clear that a core group of artists and critics active within the New Wave movement sought not only to escape the constraints of the official art world but to begin to replace it. Planning for a national exhibition of the new art began, with a target date of July 1987. A wave of student demonstrations broke out at the end of 1986, followed by a crackdown, and it was not until the end of 1988 that political and economic circumstances made resumption of the preparations possible. By that time a committee of editors, critics, and artists led by Gao Minglu and Li Xianting had succeeded in raising sufficient funds from public work units and private entrepreneurs to rent the National Art Gallery. China/Avant-Garde (Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan) opened on February 5, 1989, at the Chinese National Art Gallery, the most prestigious site for official art exhibitions, almost thirty years after the building, one of the Ten Great Buildings of 1959, was completed [fig. 10.21]. In all, 293 works by 186 artists were installed. Art history student Hou Hanru (b.  1963), who was fluent in French, coined

a catchy English name that was not a literal translation of the more prosaic Chinese exhibition title (Chinese Modern Art Exhibition), thus retroactively renaming the entire New Wave movement. The most important artists of the epoch lent their best work. Gu Wenda, who had moved to North America the previous year, provided calligraphic work. Xu Bing lent his Book from the Sky; Geng Jianyi exhibited four panels of Second Situation; Huang Yongping showed both his roulette wheel and his washing-machine piece. After some controversy during the preview, the open-minded USSR-trained art historian Shao Dazhen (b. 1934), a powerful authority on the ideology of art, is said to have blocked censoring one of the edgiest submissions, an image of Mao over which a grid had been painted. Despite having gone through all the official paperwork and procedures, by nature this new avant-garde remained prone to spontaneity. Some of the curators were said to have been complicit in the naughtiness of their exhibitors. Artists who had not been invited to participate nevertheless turned up. A work made of gigantic balloons was hung to resemble male genitals. Performance pieces that the curators and gallery administrators had not approved were carried out by other artists. One flung condoms from the top of the staircase. Wu Shanzhuan, always in search of the irony of the mundane, now targeted not politics but commerce. He set up a small stand at which he hawked live shrimp that he had carried by train from the fishing port where he lived; he was particularly delighted when the aged gallery director, Liu Kaiqu, a fellow seafood-loving native of the Yangzi River delta, purchased some for new year’s dinner without acknowledging he was participating in an art performance.13 Shanghai Drama Academy instructor Li Shan, whose pop-art installation was decorated with Warholesque images

10.21 Opening of China/Avant-Garde (Chinese Modern Art Exhibition), February 5, 1989, Chinese National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China), Beijing

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10.22 Gu Xiong (b. 1953), Fence, 1988, oil on canvas, 102 × 406 cm, Collection of the Artist

of Ronald Reagan, brought forth a Thermos of hot water and began washing his feet in the Reagan foot basin. The Sichuanese artist Zhang Nian (b. 1964), a recent graduate of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, sat henlike on a large nest, eggs scattered around him, and began his performance, “Brooding,” wearing a placard around his neck: “[Theoretical] discussion is prohibited during the incubation period, to avoid disturbing the next generation.” 14 Gu Xiong (b. 1953) came to the exhibition hall in costume, converting his painting installation, Fence, a multipanel mural-scale oil painting that resembled an enlarged stretch of chain-link fencing, into a performance [fig. 10.22]. The artist wore a white jumpsuit painted with the same pattern, which made him look like some sort of convict but

10.23  Xiao Lu (b. 1958) firing a gun at her installation, Dialogue, February 5, 1989, Chinese National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China), Beijing

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also permitted him to stand in front of or on top of his painting in a perfect camouflage. He had painted at center a break in the fence, suggesting the possibility of escape from the bonds that constrained China’s artists, as well as the inevitable injuries they might suffer in wriggling through the ragged gap. Lu Shengzhong (b. 1952), who had received his MFA degree in folk art from the Central Aca­demy of Fine Arts in 1987, displayed Chichu, a large installation that was constructed of papercuts. With cut-out footprints proceeding from the floor and up the wall, it resembled a diagram from a mysterious Daoist ritual text but appears to trace an uncertain psychological and physical journey. The classical Chinese term used for the title refers to taking tiny, hesitant steps in the face of an obstacle. The most notorious aspect of the exhibition occurred three hours after the opening, when one of the artists, Xiao Lu (b. 1958), fired a gun into her installation, converting it into a performance piece [fig.  10.23]. This action, in a gallery filled with spectators, did not have prior approval, and the show was immediately closed by the police. The foreign media enthusiastically reported the suppression of the artistic event. Vigorous negotiations by the curatorial team succeeded in reopening the gallery, although it was temporarily closed for a second time after a bomb threat was phoned in. Xiao Lu and her coconspirator were arrested— he immediately and she after turning herself in—but with return of the “borrowed” gun and the intervention of various Beijing officials, they were released. From the perspective of the international art world to whom this event hoped to speak, the exhibition may have seemed somewhat lacking curatorial structure, and its galleries more like a happening than an art exhibition. Nevertheless, it was a successful retrospective of the alternatives that had been developed to  

 

the mainstream of official art and demonstrated the nature of the New Wave art movement and the state of mind of its artists. A few foreign gallery owners recognized the historic nature of the event and purchased works from the price list offered by the curatorial committee. The majority of works stayed in China, initially in the hands of the entrepreneur who had helped fund the event. Only two months after the close of China/Avant-Garde, former party secretary Hu Yaobang suddenly died of a stroke. Hu had been one of Deng Xiaoping’s close allies in the liberalization and rationalization of personnel practices—in 1978 and 1979 he had carried out the rehabilitation of rightists and people condemned by the Cultural Revolu­tion. He had devised the plan by which educated young people would later move into positions of responsibility within the administration. Hu had risen alongside Deng to the highest position in the nation, general secretary of the Communist Party, and formed part of an administrative troika consisting of Deng, as head of the military committee, and Zhao Ziyang, as premier. Hu Yaobang was considered to be the most liberal of the three and was beloved of the intellectual class. In 1986 he was removed from his post, blamed for student demonstrations in favor of democratic reform and against government corruption. It was widely rumored in the early months of 1989 that he would soon return to office, and his death was a crushing disappointment. With a public outpouring very similar to the spontaneous demonstration in memory of Zhou Enlai in 1976, Beijing citizens covered the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square with wreaths and flowers. The Central Academy of Fine Arts supplied a portrait. Not wishing to repeat the Gang of Four’s brutal suppression of communal mourning, when high pressure hoses had been used to heartlessly destroy the wreaths to Zhou Enlai and mourners had been arrested, the public was permitted to express their sorrow for Hu Yaobang. However, the demonstrations that broke out after his death did not subside but began to demand the same things sought by those of 1986. For six weeks Tiananmen Square was filled by protestors and hunger strikers. Eventually almost everyone in the cultural world who was physically capable of marching joined the demonstrations. Some elderly artists, like Li Keran, instead donated paintings to be sold as a benefit for the movement against corruption and for democracy. Despite warnings from the government to stop, the citizenry became more and more enthusiastic. After declaration of martial law on May 19, tanks moved into the city from the suburbs, but no one in the city could conceive that the People’s Liberation Army would ever harm the people. CAFA’s sculpture department created a monumental  

10.24 Statue of the Goddess of Democracy, at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, May 1989, photo by Toshio Sakai/AFP/ Getty Images

Goddess of Democracy from Styrofoam and plaster, wheeling her onto the square directly opposite the Tiananmen portrait of Mao Zedong [fig. 10.24]. The eighty-five-yearold Deng Xiaoping, given alarmist reports of civic rebellion by conservative advisers, made the fateful decision on the evening of June 3, 1989, to move troops against the demonstrators. By dawn on June 4, gunfire had emptied the square and filled nearby hospitals with casualties. The Goddess of Democracy had been crushed under the treads of tanks. Hundreds of people died in the crackdown, which is now known as the Tiananmen Massacre.

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11

Alternative Chinas Hong Kong and Taiwan

Two island territories, the British colony of Hong Kong and the Nationalist-controlled island of Taiwan, both remained outside the control of the People’s Republic of China during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1949 both territories saw waves of refugees from China’s new Communist government, bringing serious challenges to their societies and infrastructures but also stimulating culture and art. During the thirty years when relations with China were cut off or restricted, between 1949 and 1979, art in these two regions developed largely independently of that on the mainland. When China reopened, therefore, the first place many mainland artists turned was to these two alternative versions of Chinese culture. Taiwan and Hong Kong are different in many fundamental ways, from spoken dialect to colonial history. Nevertheless, they shared a common historical characteristic: lengthy and thorough subjugation to colonial rule and between 1949 and 1979 a common cultural orientation to Western Europe and the United States. It was their position in relationship to the West (that is, the nonCommunist world) rather than the East (the Communist bloc) that brought their art worlds into alignment with one another by the 1970s and made possible the significant role they played in the modernization of mainland China’s art world in the 1980s. Hong Kong, located southeast of Guangzhou in the Pearl River delta, was taken from China by Britain in 1841 and became a British crown colony. Expanding from the island of Hong Kong, Britain acquired the Kowloon peninsula, on the opposite side of the deep water harbor, in 1860. Finally, in 1898 an additional annex, known as the New Territories, was leased from China for ninety-nine years. The UK thus governed Hong Kong continuously for more than 150 years, its control only broken for four years during the Japanese occupation of World War II. When the New Territories lease expired 225

11.1  Attributed to Youqua (active 1840–1880s), Whampoa, ca. 1850, oil on canvas, 78.3 × 144.3 cm, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem  

in 1997, all parts of the colony were returned to China on the condition that the rights and freedoms of its people be maintained for a period of fifty years, or until 2047. The art of nineteenth-century Hong Kong is essentially that of Guangdong, the Chinese province to which it had previously belonged. Hong Kong art in the Qing dynasty had particularly strong ties to that of Guangzhou (Canton), a port that began serving British trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Macau, administered by Portugal since the late sixteenth century. In these ports there developed a good market for “export paintings”—realistic images in oil or watercolor of local life and scenery that were marketed primarily as souvenirs. Lam Qua (Guan Qiaochang; 1802–ca. 1860), for example, was well-known among ­nineteenth-­century New Englanders in the China trade for his portraits.1 The third generation in a familial lineage of painters, he ran a workshop with several dozen assistants and apprentices.2 He is believed to have opened a studio in Hong Kong in 1846. Youqua (active 1840s–1880s), who ran the Yeehing Art Shop in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, marketed landscapes, flower paintings, and harbor views, such as this image of the the port at Huangpu (Whampoa) in Guangzhou [fig. 11.1]. Photography was introduced to China almost as soon as it was invented, and workshop painters began using photos as a tool to expedite their work. Within a few  

 

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decades photography was widespread, with Queens Road in Hong Kong alone boasting more than twenty photo studios by the 1870s. By the end of the nineteenth century, photography had made the hand-painted souvenirs obsolete.3 In the late nineteenth century, Hong Kong began to take on the role of safe harbor for Chinese dissidents and revolutionaries. It attracted reformers who criticized the Qing regime, and was a site where the Chinese mass media could operate relatively freely, publishing political cartoons directed against the Qing government (if not against the crown). Notable examples were those by He Jianshi (1877– 1915), who collaborated with Gao Jianfu (1879–1951), Gao Qifeng (1889–1933), and Pan Dawei (1881–1929) to publish Current Affairs Pictorial (Shishi huabao) and later established Everyman’s Pictorial (Pinmin huabao). After the 1911 revolution most of the refugees exiled in Hong Kong returned to China but were soon replaced by a stream of new exiles traveling in the opposite direction—Qing dynasty loyalists who fled to the colony. These former officials brought mainstream late Qing art with them. Among them was Feng Shihan (1875–1950), a translator who had been trained at the Beiyang Academy in Tianjin. Feng excelled particularly in seal script calligraphy and in bamboo painting, arts that he taught his precocious daughter Feng Wenfeng (Flora Fong; 1900–1961). Young Flora studied oil painting, photography,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

sculpture, and music in Italy, and by the age of fifteen was quite well known in art and educational circles. In 1919 she established the Xiangjiang Girls Calligraphy and Painting School, which was the only art school in Hong Kong until the mid-1920s. She went on to become a founding member of the Chinese Women’s Painting and Calligraphy Association in 1934 in Shanghai, often exhibiting calligraphy in archaic styles.4 Hong Kong Art of the 1920s and 1930s

Artists were attracted by the prosperity of Hong Kong in the 1920s, and between 1925 and 1937 more than a dozen privately run art schools and studios, large and small, were established in Hong Kong by Chinese who had studied in modern schools in China or abroad.5 One of the most influential was Laiching (Lijin) Art Academy, established by Bao Shaoyou (1892–1985), a Cantonese who was born and educated primarily in Japan, where he learned the lyrical ink painting style of his teacher at the Kyoto Art School, Kikuchi Hobun (1862–1918). Yamamoto Shunkyo and Takeuchi Seihō, who so profoundly influenced Gao Qifeng, were also on the faculty in those years. Bao was sufficiently skilled in Japanese painting to win an award in 1916 at the official Bunten exhibition. In 1927, at the invitation of Gao Jianfu, he returned to China to teach, but in 1928 he opened his own art school in Hong Kong. Over the next decade he achieved impressive results: of the fifty-seven works representing Hong Kong in the Second National Art Exhibition of 1937, forty-eight were by Bao Shaoyou and his students. His work, in a modified Japanese style, is typical of the Lingnan school at its most lyrical [fig. 11.2]. The debates on how to reform Chinese art that dominated the larger Chinese art world in the mid-1920s also swept into Hong Kong. In 1926 the Hong Kong branch of the Guangdong Association for the Study of Chinese Paintings was founded by Pan Dawei, Deng Erya (1884– 1954), and Wong Po-yeh (Huang Banruo; 1901–1968).6 In 1927 the Calligraphy, Painting, and Literature Society, with which Gao Qifeng, who lived in nearby Guangzhou, would be involved, was established. These organizations represented the two opposing viewpoints in the guohua world of 1920s Guangdong—one advocating a mainstream traditional Chinese painting and the other the more Westernized style of the Lingnan school. In social and artistic practice, if not in discursive position, however, many artists were active in both groups. Guohua in Hong Kong during the first half of the twentieth century should be seen as a part of the larger sphere of Cantonese painting that centered on Guangzhou.  

 

 

 

 

11.2  Bao Shaoyou (1892–1985), Two Deer in Snow, 1957, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

A number of Western-style Chinese artists from the mainland and from overseas were also attracted to Hong Kong during the late 1920s and 1930s. Their work as a whole seems to bear traces of the British colonial world in which they lived—with emphasis on watercolor painting and fairly realistic figurative oils—in contrast to the slightly more continental styles practiced in Shanghai. In 1932 the pioneering commercial artist in Shanghai, Xu Yongqing, whose style had been fashionable in Shanghai in the 1910s, moved to Hong Kong to open a studio to teach watercolors and drawing. One might speculate that his conservative style was more welcome in Hong Kong than in Shanghai, where modernist trends in design had become fashionable by this time. In this period Cantonese oil painters who returned from English-speaking countries abroad to settle in Hong Kong  

 

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227

11.3 Li Tiefu (1869–1952), Martyrdom, 1946, oil on canvas, 100 × 177 cm, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts  

11.4  Yu Ben (1905–1995), The Unemployed, 1941, oil on canvas, 50.5 × 61 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing  

also worked in the academic style typical of early twentieth-century North American and British painting. Li Tiefu (Lee Y. Tien; 1869–1952), a skilled portraitist who had passed most of his life in Canada and the United States, lived in Kowloon from 1932 until the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in 1941 [fig. 11.3].7 In art he was a follower of William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent and an admirer of the brushwork of Velasquez. In politics he was a strong supporter of Sun Yat-sen and even served as executive secretary of the New York branch of the revolutionary Alliance Society from 1909 to 1911. Li Tiefu was therefore welcomed back to China by the PRC government at the end of his life. Three very active Western-style painters in the 1930s were Li Bing (1903–1994), Yu Ben (Yee Bon; 1905–1995), and Luis Chan (Chen Fushan; 1905–1995). Li Bing and Yu Ben were Guangdong born but grew up in Canada, where they stud 

 

 

 

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ied art together in Winnipeg before enrolling at the Ontario Art Academy in Toronto in 1927. Li moved to Hong Kong first, in 1930, and in 1931 he, Luis Chan, and others organized the Qinghua Art Club, the first of many such groups in which they would involve themselves. Yu Ben studied for four years in Toronto with J. W. Beatty, a Canadian impressionist, mastering an academic style with some flavor of the Canadian Group of Seven. Upon his move to Hong Kong in 1935, Yu Ben established a studio with Li Bing [fig. 11.4]. He would return to Guangzhou in 1956, while Li Bing left for Canada.8 Art in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion did not have a particularly distinctive character. It would be decades before the most original of this generation of Hong Kong artists, Luis Chan, would develop his own quite striking personal style. Perhaps also the most deeply rooted in Hong Kong, Chan, who moved to Hong Kong from Panama as a small child, never lived anywhere else. He was self-taught, learning to paint by taking a correspondence course on British watercolor painting while employed in a law firm in Hong Kong. He soon became known as a skilled watercolorist and during the 1930s helped establish a number of art societies. By 1960 he was even recognized in Britain, the colonial center of power, for what was by that time a conservative style. In the 1970s, however, he developed an entirely idiosyncratic mode of surrealist painting in which imagery from his subconscious—scenery, figures, fish, TV shows, sailboats, advertisements, Hong Kong landmarks— floated together in startling ways. Building from smears of pigment, often daubed on Chinese paper, his vision poured forth in brilliantly exuberant color. His paintings are so personal, and so located in his own physical and aesthetic environment, that his art has been universally hailed as one that may represent qualities unique to Hong Kong [fig. 11.5].  

 

11.5 Luis Chan (Chen Fushan; 1905–1995), Untitled, 1980, ink and acrylic on paper, 136 × 209 cm, Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong  

The War Years, 1937 – 1945  

The Hong Kong art world underwent dramatic changes following the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, when refugees from cities all over southern China fled to Hong Kong. From 1937 to 1941, when Hong Kong was taken by Japan, the population of Hong Kong soared from 460,000 to 1.4 million. A first wave began in 1937 and lasted until the end of 1941. As Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Guangzhou successively fell to the Japanese in 1937 and 1938, artists either relocated to the colony or used Hong Kong as a temporary stop on their journey. The refugee artists brought with them the major trends in the Chinese art world of the day. Those from the Shanghai-based modern mass media, usually liberal or left-leaning artists, engaged in social and political advocacy. A second group, already well-established in Hong Kong, was comprised of Lingnan school artists who advocated new guohua. A third might be loosely termed traditionalist painters. All shared the wartime goal of using art to save the nation. They established art societies and publications, organized benefit exhibitions, and in these years created and showed many artworks on anti-Japanese resistance themes. Hong Kong was thus both a refuge and a center of the cultural display of Chinese resistance against Japan. One particularly interesting figure to settle his family in Hong Kong in 1938 was Deng Fen (1892–1963), who is usually categorized with the traditionalists but in fact had ties that crossed geographic and aesthetic boundaries. From a prominent Cantonese family, Deng exhibited his work with  

the Tianmahui (Heavenly Horse Society) in 1920s Shanghai. He knew Gao Jianfu, and through him seems to have met many members of the Shanghai art world, including Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien; 1899–1983), Xu Beihong, Jiang Xin, Wang Jiyuan, and Pan Yuliang.9 In 1933 he became a professor at the Guangzhou Municipal Art School, but by the following year he was also involved with art activities in Hong Kong. Deng Fen was also famous for his contributions to Cantonese opera, including a 1926 composition called Illusion of the Red Chamber (Mengjue honglou). He is notable for his unique visions of ghosts and spirits, especially his powerfully theatrical renderings of the demon-queller Zhong Kui [fig. 11.6]. His guohua seems to deploy a modern metropolitan visual mode to distill images from classical and popular Cantonese culture. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Deng Fen established a price list and began selling his paintings at the well-known art shop Jiuhuatang in Hong Kong. The leftist artists mainly worked in the formats of cartoons, comics, and woodcuts. The Hong Kong branch of the All-China Cartoonists Association was particularly active, as was the Hong Kong branch of the All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association. The former organized a large benefit cartoon exhibition from May 7 to 10, 1939, in Hong Kong, which included more than a hundred artworks by thirty artists. Because Britain still maintained diplomatic relations with Japan, the artists could not use an overtly anti-Japanese exhibition title, but their sentiments were clear. Among the exhibitors were some of China’s best  

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11.6 Deng Fen (1892–1963), Zhong Kui Snatches Little Demons, 1926, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 123.5 × 58 cm, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

cartoonists and commercial artists, including Ye Qianyu, Zhang Guangyu, Zhang Zhengyu, Lu Shaofei, Ding Cong, Huang Miaozi, Yu Feng, Hu Kao, Te Wei, Chen Yan­ qiao, Lu Zhiyang, and Li Binghong. The organizers noted an attendance that exceeded thirty thousand viewers over the brief four-day event, with prominent visitors including Edgar Snow and Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Song Qingling. Similarly, the Hong Kong branch of the All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association, organized by Tang Yingwei, held a memorial exhibition in May 1940 to commemorate Lu Xun, with an anthology and a subsequent traveling exhibition. The more traditionally oriented Chinese painting groups also responded to the crisis. In February of 1940, 230

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Ye Gongchuo, then a refugee in Hong Kong, and Huang Banruo organized a show to promote China’s cultural heritage. More than two thousand works from 150 private collectors of Guangdong antiquities were assembled at the Fung Ping Shan Library at Hong Kong University.10 Over nine days it attracted more than two hundred thousand viewers. The influx of refugees was reversed again after the Japanese occupied Hong Kong at the end of 1941. Many artists continued their exile by journeying to Nationalist-controlled inland areas, including Chongqing, or to Yan’an in the Communist-controlled northwest. Other artists returned to their homes in Shanghai or other cities and towns that were nominally controlled by the puppet government of Wang Jingwei after 1940. Regardless of where they lived, all suffered hardship. A much smaller number fled overseas. The renewed outbreak of the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists in 1946 brought a new wave of migration to Hong Kong and Macao, the only colonial territories not absorbed into China after the Japanese surrender. A number of non-Communist progressives who were accustomed to working in the mass media of semicolonial Shanghai, where they had freedom to express their opinions about Chinese society and politics, resented or even feared the press censorship of the increasingly rightwing Nationalist regime. Surrealist painter and printmaker Huang Xinbo [see fig. 6.19] and other modernist colleagues, such as Zhang Guangyu and Liao Bingxiong, established the Yan Ken (Human; renjian) Painting Society in Hong Kong in March of 1947.11 These years were Huang Xinbo’s most prolific as an oil painter. A steady stream of colleagues from the mainland, including some who were underground Communists, joined them in Hong Kong over the following year to implement a range of publication and exhibition activities, including new art supplements for the newspapers Dagongbao (Ta Kung Pao), Sing Tao Daily, and Wenhuibao (Wen Wei Po), as well as books of contemporary art and cartoons and reproductions of the work of foreign artists. The society broke up after many of the artists left in 1949 or 1950 to take up positions in China. Huang Xinbo was unable to continue the surrealist pursuits of his Hong Kong years under the new government. Art of the 1950s and 1960s

The primary direction of migration, however, was into Hong Kong from China, swelling the population by about 750,000 new residents of all economic levels. Wealthy families, many of whom had built their fortunes in the former treaty port of Shanghai, began moving their assets out of China to settle in Hong Kong. Some Nationalist government officials in flight from the Communists permanently

had developed in China in the 1930s. In Shanghai she had taught painting and history at Xizhen Women’s Middle School and in 1934 helped organize the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Association [fig. 11.7]. She brought to Hong Kong a painting style rooted in that of the Suzhou literati tradition. Gu Qingyao was joined in Hong Kong by another core member of the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Association, Hou Biyi. Most advanced art education was conducted privately in 1950s Hong Kong, but when the colony’s first formal art major was established at New Asia College in 1958, Gu Qingyao was appointed an instructor. In the absence of more formal structures for artistic activity, many new art clubs and groups were established in the 1950s. Some, like the Free China Calligraphy and Painting Association, established in 1955, brought together ink painters who shared anti-Communist political beliefs. The Bingshen Art Club, founded in 1956 by Chao Shao-an (Zhao Shao’ang; 1905–1998), Yang Shanshen, Bao Shaoyou, Li Yanshan, Huang Banruo and others, also organized exhibitions and catalogs largely devoted to Cantonese painting. The Chinese Art Club (Xianggang zhongguo meishuhui), established in 1956, was perhaps most influential of the groups within the evolving colonial society. It was neutral politically, at least in relationship to China, but was originally conceived as an alternative to the Hong Kong Art Club, which showed only oils and watercolors, mainly by British colonial artists. The cultural agenda of the Chinese Art Club received support from the colonial authorities, and the British Council began financing their annual exhibition and journal. In 1956 the British Council further collaborated with the Chinese Art Club to send a traveling exhibition of Chinese painting to various cities in Southeast Asia.12 By 1958 it was formally registered with the Hong Kong government, had two hundred members, and also became part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival—an event established by the British Council in 1955. Among artists active in organizing Hong Kong art societies were Chao Shao-an and Lui Shou-kwan (Lü Shoukun; 1919–1975), both of whom worked in the Lingnan style (although Lui would soon make a radical change). Chao studied with Gao Qifeng in Guangzhou and in 1925 established his own design studio, the Lingnan Printing House (Lingnan zhibansuo). In 1927 he assumed a teaching post at Foshan Municipal Art School, where Bao Shaoyou also briefly taught, but in 1930 opened his private studio, the Lingnan Academy (Lingnan huayuan) in Guangzhou. He held solo shows in 1934 in Nanjing, Tianjin, and Beijing, and was appointed chair of the Chinese painting department at Guangzhou Municipal Art School in 1937. The war  

11.7 Gu Qingyao (1896–1978), Travelling in Snow, undated, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, exhibited in the First National Art Exhibition, 1929  

 

resettled in the colony, while others took temporary refuge before moving to Taiwan or to another country. Many residents of nearby areas of Guangdong who did not support the new government also moved to Hong Kong. Thus, for the first ten or fifteen years after establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Hong Kong art world saw both the influx of fellow Cantonese artists, whose work was generally in tune with their own, and new arrivals who brought with them trends from the art worlds of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beijing. The guohua painter Gu Qingyao (Koo Tsin-yaw; 1896– 1978), who moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1950, was a good representative of the traditionalist art world that  

 

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modernists. Chao himself frequently collaborated with artists of different schools and artistic backgrounds. The enduring appeal of this manner of painting in Hong Kong ensured its survival into the late twentieth century. With growing prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, the Lingnan school, by that time in its third generation, continued to flourish. With the international decline of colonialism following World War II, the British empire also began to wane. To maintain control of Hong Kong under these circumstances, Britain required a thoughtful policy toward the Chinese subjects of the colony. By the latter half of the 1950s, the British government in Hong Kong had begun to cultivate among its residents a form of civic pride—the idea that Hong Kong was a special place and that they therefore enjoyed a unique Hong Kong identity. Over the course of the 1960s many came to accept this cultural status. Hong Kong identity had several ramifications—it served to invest those who felt it with a greater stake in the colony’s success—and it divorced Hong Kong Chinese from an attachment to Communist China. Directly supporting the growth of a Hong Kong cultural consciousness in the late 1950s and 1960s were new educational and cultural institutions, with their promotion of local culture and art. Then, from March to October 1967, a Communist-inspired campaign of leftist riots and terrifying violence further alienated the Hong Kong public from the Chinese regime. The Red Guard’s desecration of graves, temples, and family records on the mainland, along with the Cultural Revolution’s more general attacks on art, music, and traditional culture, further severed Hong Kong’s ties to present-day China. The conjunction of these two factors, Britain’s encouragement of a positive feeling for Hong Kong and China’s actions to inspire fear, brought Hong Kong into a special cultural space. The development of a distinctive modern Hong Kong art may be, at least in part, associated with the establishment of an academic program in fine arts at New Asia College in the late 1950s and the introduction of art into higher education. Although a private Hong Kong Art Academy and other schools and studios had appeared earlier in the decade, this program, which would become the Fine Arts Department at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 1963, was one of the most influential long-term educational developments. Among its other strengths, such as study of classical Chinese art, it was significant in its first two decades as a locus for development of a new abstract form of ink painting that became particularly identified with Hong Kong culture. New Asia College itself was established on October 10, 1949, by the historian Qian Mu and other mainland immigrants. In January 1957, Ding Yanyong (1902–1978)  

 

 

11.8  Chao Shao-an (Zhao Shao’ang; 1905–1998), Banana Tree, 1969, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 184.8 × 87.1 cm, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Collection of Master Chao Shao-an  

broke out almost immediately, whereupon he moved to Hong Kong. With Hong Kong’s occupation, Chao Shao-an fled to Macao, then eventually went to Chongqing to teach at the relocated National Central University and National Art Academy. He reopened his Lingnan Academy in Hong Kong after the war, in 1948. Chao himself was a faithful transmitter of the Lingnan school, his bird-and-flower painting inheriting the manner of Gao Jianfu’s teacher, Ju Lian, and his puddled pigment (zhuangshui and zhuangfen) the methods of the Gao brothers, but he was well traveled and not provincial in outlook [fig. 11.8]. Although most of his students also worked in the Lingnan style, some became 232

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and Chen Shiwen (1907–1984) were hired to establish an art program at the school, with an explicit mandate to balance technical training with education aimed at philosophical and aesthetic cultivation.13 The program taught both guohua and Western painting and by 1959 had become a full four-year major, with design added. The first four teachers were the Japan-educated Ding and French-educated Chen, teaching oil painting, as well as the Suzhou-born guohua painter Wang Jiqian (C. C. Wang; 1907–2003) and the seal carver Zeng Kerui. In the first years of the program, it organized an exhibition of Masterpieces of Ancient Chinese Painting and a solo show of the contemporary abstract oil painter Zao Wou-ki (Zhao Wuji; b. 1921), then living in Paris, which foreshadowed the significant role its art gallery would later play. Ding Yanyong, who was born near Guangzhou, had substantial experience as an art administrator by the time he joined New Asia College. Japan-trained, having studied at the Kawabata Painting Academy and then, from 1921 to 1925, at the prestigious Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he was also well informed about art education. Ding’s own approach to art had been strongly affected by viewing an exhibition of modern French painting when a student in Tokyo. His early oils, which were exhibited in Tokyo in 1924, were often Fauvist, with bright-colored, slightly exaggerated shapes and free brushwork.14 After teaching in Shanghai for several years, in 1928 Ding Yanyong moved to Guangzhou to set up the Guangzhou Municipal Art Museum and teach Western painting at Guangzhou Municipal Art School. During this period he began to collect Chinese paintings, especially those of Zhu Da, Shitao, and Jin Nong, the effects of which are visible in his own later work. In 1932 he returned to Shanghai to teach at New China Art College, and during the war he taught at the National Art Academy in Chongqing. In 1945 Ding—along with Guan Liang, Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, Fang Ganmin, Pang Xunqin, Ni Yide, and Li Zhongsheng (Li Chun-chen; 1912–1984)—exhibited oil paintings in the Chinese Modern Painting Exhibition (Zhongguo xiandai huihua zhan) organized by Zao Wouki in Chongqing. The merging of tradition and modernism in his work was paralleled by his social activities. After the war he organized the Nine Person Art Society in Shanghai, which included modernist oil painters and traditionalist ink painters: Chen Shiwen, Guan Liang, Ni Yide, Zhou Bichu, Tang Yun, Zhu Qizhan, Qian Ding, and Song Zhong. Ding returned to the south in 1946 to become director of Guangdong Provincial Art School. On October 14, 1949, he moved to Hong Kong, where he supported himself as a middle school teacher and by giving private lessons. He  

 

11.9 Ding Yanyong (1902–1978), Magpies, Plum Blossoms, and Rock, 1967, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 139 × 70 cm, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

 

 

 

formed another small art club with ink painters Lui Shoukwan and Chao Shao-an, the Seven Man Art Club, in 1957. At New Asia College, from 1957 to 1978, Ding taught watercolors, oil painting, and Chinese bird-and-flower painting, as well as Chinese art history and theory. His own later work was inspired by Zhu Da, a loose, free, and somewhat abstract ink painting, with exaggerated and distorted forms, that had absorbed some Fauvist principles [fig. 11.9]. Ding achieved his own synthesis of modernism and the literati tradition. C. C. Wang (Wang Chi-ch’ien; Wang Jiqian), another of the four initial instructors, was from a very different background, one more similar to that of Gu Qingyao. Scion of an elite Suzhou family, he began studying painting with Gu Alternative Chinas

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11.10  C. C. Wang (Wang Jiqian; 1907–2003), Landscape No. 305, 1974, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 90.1 × 61 cm, Collection of the Artist’s family  

Linshi [see fig.  2.17] in 1924, learning both practice and, from Gu’s excellent collection, connoisseurship. He enrolled at Suzhou University (Dongwu daxue) to study law in 1932 and in the same year began studying painting and connoisseurship with Wu Hufan. This provided Wang the opportunity to serve in 1935 on the selection committee for the great London exhibition. In 1949 he moved from Shanghai to New York, where he resided for the rest of his life. He is often considered a Chinese American artist, but his contributions to the so-called New Ink Art in Hong Kong were significant. Although Wang went back to New York after initiating the ink painting curriculum at New Asia College in 1957, he returned to teach for two years more, from 1962 through 1964, when as chair of the fine arts department he oversaw the merger into Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1974 he taught in the department once again and had four solo shows in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. Although trained under Gu Linshi and Wu Hufan in the most delicate of literati landscape styles, Wang dramatically changed his work during the period of his involvement with New Asia College. By the mid-1960s the CUHK fine arts department was the center of a new ink painting trend, and Wang himself was working in a manner very much inspired by abstract expressionism. Making use of the possibilities 234

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of fortunate accident, Wang began substituting rough ink dabs made with crumpled paper for the refined outlines and washes of traditional landscape painting. Rather as he might correct the inadequate efforts of a painting student, he responded visually and kinesthetically to these blotches, adding his elegant texture strokes and washes until a coherent landscape emerged from the fragmentary patterns [fig. 11.10].15 Many sources of information on modernism were available in the late 1950s, but few were as direct as those brought to the New Asia program from Paris in 1958 by Zao Wou-ki (Zhao Wuji). A graduate of the National Art Academy during its wartime exile in Chongqing, Zao had moved to Paris in 1948. He quite quickly established a successful exhibition record in Europe and America, showing in the French submission to the third Sao Paolo Biennial in 1955. Fascinated by spiritual and philosophical implications in the work of Swiss artist Paul Klee, by 1958 Zao had adopted an abstract style. He was invited to exhibit more than twenty of his new paintings at New Asia College in the spring of 1958. Zao’s lectures were widely published and his passionate engagement with abstraction inspired young artists in Hong Kong [fig. 11.11]. Interest in postwar forms of modernism had already begun to grow by this time. In 1956 a magazine called New Wave Arts and Literature (Wenyi xinchao) was established to introduce modernist culture and art, and the following year the Hong Kong Artists Association, with Lui Shoukwan as a member, was formed with the same goal. In 1958 the Modern Literature and Arts Association was organized by Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie), Wai-lim Yip (Ye Weilian), and Li Yinghao to bring aspiring modernist writers and artists together. Some of its members had recently graduated from schools abroad. Sculptors Chiang Yee (Zhang Yi) and Van Lau (Wen Lou; b. 1933) were trained at Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Vietnam-born Van Lau would go on to explore a purely abstract form of sculpture after study in the United States but later turned to a combination of modernism and Chinese subject matter unique to the Hong Kong– Taiwan cultural milieu of the period [fig. 11.12]. A main goal of the group as a whole was to promote an Eastern form of modernist art and literature in Hong Kong. They published two magazines, Xin sichao (New trends) in 1959 and Hao wang jiao (Cape of Good Hope) in 1963 and organized three Hong Kong International Art salons in 1960, 1962, and 1964. They showed modernist artworks from Hong Kong, along with those from Europe, the United States, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan. The connections between modernist movements developing in Taiwan and Hong Kong were particularly important to both art worlds in this period.  

11.11  Zao Wou-ki (Zhao Wuji; b. 1921), En Memorie de May, 1972, oil on canvas, 200 × 525 cm, Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

11.12 Van Lau (Wen Lou; b. 1933), Bamboo in the Wind, 1986, stainless steel, 400 × 200 × 100 cm, Hangzhou Municipal Government

Several developments within the cultural administration affected art in the early 1960s. In 1962, to promote Hong Kong art, a gallery was established in the newly constructed Hong Kong City Hall with an opening show, “Hong Kong Art Today.” Establishment of such an authoritative venue made it possible to effect a change in art’s direction. The gallery’s first director, John Warner, emphasized experimentation and creativity, including new uses of media, as criteria for selection of works. Modernism now had both a venue and an increasingly mainstream position. Among those exhibited in the early years were Lui Shou-kwan, pioneer of New Ink Painting, and modernist sculptor Van Lau. After moving to Hong Kong in 1948, Lui Shou-kwan supported himself as an inspector for the ferry company. He showed at the City Hall gallery in 1964 and began teaching art for the extension division of CUHK in 1966. One of the leading figures in the Hong Kong modern ink movement, he undertook a critical analysis of Western modernism and tra-

11.13 Lui Shou-kwan (Lü Shoukun; 1919– 1975), Zen Painting, undated, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 121 × 65 cm, Collection of Yiqingzhai, Hong Kong  

ditional Chinese painting, joining many modernist societies, while simultaneously exploring the traditionalist style of Huang Banruo. In his stylistic evolution, Lui first exhibited semiabstract paintings, followed by works that were almost completely abstract. His innovations were sufficiently well received that in 1963 the Modern Literature and Art Society published a monograph about Lui Shou-kwan. His selfexpressive quest involved pulling modernist elements into ink painting [fig. 11.13], a point of departure for many of his students. Alternative Chinas

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11.15 Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong; b. 1932), Eclipse, 1971, set of eleven panels, 120 × 519 cm, ink and color on paper, private collection, courtesy of the artist

11.14 Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie; b. 1936), Cloudy Harmony, 1978, ink on paper, 136 × 67 cm, Hong Kong Museum of Art

The increasingly abstract New Ink Art, which combined up-to-date Western abstract expressionism with traditional Asian materials, was warmly welcomed in the new City Hall Art Gallery as it had been in the university program. Although abstract ink art was not initially claimed by its artists to be a sign of Hong Kong culture, and indeed was more often discussed by them in reference to Asian philosophy or an Eastern (dongfang) aesthetic, the curators and critics who determined its position in the artistic canon eventually discussed it in terms of Hong Kong identity. This art, neither British nor Chinese, was promoted in a way that suggested an independent culture that was, of practical necessity, beyond the nation-state. In the era of New Ink’s ascendency, 236

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contemporary art in traditional forms was largely left out of the institutional mainstream, continuing to develop primarily in the studios and in private tutorials that competed with formal academic institutions. A second seminal figure in New Ink Art, the younger Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie; b. 1936), approached it from the opposite direction, coming to an “ink aesthetic” from a position more deeply rooted in modern literature and contemporary Western-style art and design. Attracted to modernism, he began studying with Lui Shou-kwan in 1957, and in 1958, the year of Zao Wou-ki’s lectures at New Asia College, he was instrumental in establishing the modernist Chinese Literature and Art Society. Wong also initiated the sequence of modernist salons the group held, beginning in 1960. From 1961 to 1965 he studied design and abstract painting in the United States, returning to run the design program offered by CUHK extension in 1966, and then to assume a curatorial position in 1967 at the new City Hall Art Gallery. Unlike the more gestural work of Lui Shoukwan, with its references to calligraphic spontaneity, Wong’s work suggests through its textural denseness the philosophical profundity associated with the monumental landscapes of the Song dynasty. In this geometrically conceived work of the 1970s, Wong simultaneously interrogates the philosophical foundations of Chinese landscape painting and Western modernism [fig. 11.14]. The third major figure in the development of New Ink Art was Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong; b. 1932), who moved from Taiwan to Hong Kong in 1971 to teach in the Fine Arts Department of CUHK. He served as chair from 1972

to 1976, promoted the teaching of modern painting in the extension division, and in 1977, with his students, established the Hong Kong Modern Ink Painting Association. During his twenty-one-year teaching career at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Liu was a strong voice for New Ink Art in the colony. After the opening of China, his art and theories had a strong impact in the People’s Republic of China as well. Liu was an early adherent of modernism. In 1956, not long after his graduation from Taiwan Normal University, he and like-minded young artists founded the Fifth Moon Painting Society (Wuyue huahui; a reference to the Salon de mai) to encourage modernist art in Taiwan. Allegedly because of its enthusiasm for onetime Communist Pablo Picasso, the Fifth Moon Painting Society came under suspicion of Communist leanings, a deadly serious matter in martial-law Taiwan. Unable to exhibit in Taiwan, members of the group found success in their submissions to international exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Paris Youth Exhibition, thus moving directly out of the studio into the international sphere. In the early 1960s, soon after Liu first saw the great Song dynasty landscape paintings in the National Palace Museum collection, he abandoned canvas in favor of paper, ink, and collage, aiming to create a modern ink painting. From this point his modernist challenge to tradition took aim at his native artistic heritage. Like Lui Shou-kwan and Wucius Wong, Liu Kuo-sung stirred controversy by writing extensively about his artistic theories. One important aspect of his early career was his adoption of the term “ink paint-

ing” (shuimohua) instead of “national painting” (guohua) to label his art. He was, throughout most of his career, quite conscious of his position vis-à-vis international art, and as something of a wanderer, he avoided the parochial terminology of nation. Liu’s role as a pioneer of an internationally oriented modern Asian painting has been celebrated in mainland China since 1980 [fig. 11.15]. In 1981 he was invited to exhibit at the newly established Chinese Painting Research Institute in Beijing and two years later to hold his first mainland solo show at the National Art Museum of China. In an era in China when artists were vigorously seeking alternatives to the highly politicized art of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Kuo-sung’s art and artistic ideals, which he presented in a lecture series at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1983, were particularly welcome. He has continued to travel, speak, and exhibit in China, reinforcing the legacy of those early contacts. The roots of the Experimental Ink Painting movement in mainland China should be traced to the New Ink Art of 1970s and 1980s Hong Kong and Taiwan, and particularly to the art and theory of Liu Kuo-sung. There remain far more alternatives to the romanticism of the Lingnan school or the abstraction of the New Ink Art than space permits here, but it should be noted that a few contemporary artists are proving that new things can be done within the traditionalist vocabulary. One of Gu Qingyao’s most illustrious students is Harold Wong (Huang Zhongfang; b. 1943), also Shanghai-born, who moved with his family to Hong Kong at the age of five and began studying privately with Gu Qingyao in 1956. Both teacher and Alternative Chinas

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Postmodernism

In the 1970s Hong Kong became one of the most important cities of Asia, and indeed of the capitalist world—one that took pride in its prosperity, sense of order, rationality, practicality, peace, and freedom. The rise of New Ink Art as a sign of Hong Kong’s identity was thus supported by economic and civic developments. This sense of security, and even superiority, was shattered, however, when negotiations between Britain and China about the future of Hong Kong began in 1979. In 1981 revisions to the British passport regulations made most Hong Kongers ineligible for immigration to the United Kingdom. Then, in 1984, the government of Margaret Thatcher announced that the entire colony would be returned to China when the lease on the New Territories expired in 1997. This decision created for Hong Kong residents a particular postcolonial situation—Hong Kongers would be handed back to a country that in 1984 clearly lacked the legal protections, rational economic framework, and personal freedom to which they were accustomed. The fragility of the Hong Kong identity, which was based most fundamentally on the assumption of Hong Kong’s stability, was revealed. Although an outward migration began immediately, the most dramatic expression of local concern about the hand­ over took place five years later, following the June 4, 1989, massacre in Beijing. The terror the Cultural Revolution riots had inspired was revived in the minds of the people of Hong Kong, who entered an unprecedented period of political and civic activism. Direct elections for the Legislative Council were phased in beginning in 1991. In 1995 the Hong Kong Arts Development Council was established, making public funding available for experimental or innovative forms of art. As relations between China and Hong Kong became more closely interlinked in the lead-up to 1997, Hong Kong’s now endangered local character became a matter of widespread anxiety. The public response to Tsang Tsou Choi (Zeng Zaocai; 1921–2007) in the 1990s is telling. An eccentric graffiti artist who called himself “King of Kowloon,” in the 1990s Tsang covered public property with writing in which he reclaimed from Britain his expropriated patrimony.17 Although more naïve than postmodern, Tsang and his activities were celebrated as though they were performance art or public art, in large part because they so acutely reflected universal concerns of the time [fig. 11.17]. Elevated to the status of local hero by art critics and the media, his quixotic obsession with the injustices of the past spoke to fears for the future in a way that few elite artists could. Events that were entirely external—decisions made in  

 

11.16 Huang Zhongfang (Harold Wong; b. 1943), Layered Clouds and Folded Peaks, 2000, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 365.8 × 123.8 cm, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art

pupil came from collectors’ lineages—Wong is the son of collector Huang Baoxi (Wong Pao Hsie) and Gu the granddaughter of famous painter and collector Gu Yun. Both were powerfully affected by their exposure to masterpieces of early Chinese painting, and each developed an eye for classical styles while living in a modern metropolitan setting: Gu in Republican-era Shanghai and Wong in postwar Hong Kong. European educated, Wong did not pursue a conventional career, but ran a gallery in Hong Kong between 1977 and 1990 that specialized in fine classical Chinese paintings. Since then he has devoted himself to his own painting.16 His commitment to experimenting within the traditional bounds of guohua are almost unique in contemporary painting [fig. 11.16].  

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11.17 Tsang Tsou Choi (Zeng Zaocai; 1921-2007), A Calligraphic Inscription by the “King of Kowloon,” ink graffiti, undated, exhibited January 2008, Telford Plaza, Kowloon

11.18 Tsang Tak Ping (Zeng Deping; b. 1959), Hello! Hong Kong— Part 3, 1996, temporary site specific mixed-media installation, Hong Kong

Beijing or London, Washington, D.C., or Moscow—produced a major change in the mentality of Hong Kong’s citizenry. For artists, these changes paralleled world art trends, particularly the shift in the artistic mainstream from modernism to postmodernism. The younger generation of Hong Kong–born artists brought back from their studies overseas an engagement with new media and new artistic concerns and also an orientation that was often explicitly social and political. Such an activist orientation led to the establishment of Para/Site in 1996 as the first artist-run exhibition space in Hong Kong devoted to installation and performance art, along with publication, conferences, and other activities. Among the artists who founded Para/Site were Tsang Tak Ping (Zeng Deping; b. 1959), a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic, and Phoebe Ching Ying Man (Wen Jingying; b. 1969). Their first exhibition of site-specific works, in a rented space in an old commercial neighborhood, reflected both upon the local neighborhood and upon Hong Kong’s moment in history. Tsang’s work, Hello! Hong Kong—Part 3, which used bamboo and galvanized steel to partially construct a temporary stage for performance of Cantonese opera, spoke directly to the local

Cantonese culture and its relationship to Hong Kong’s colonial and nautical past. Along with a faintly audible sound track of a melancholy aria, photographs preserved in glass bottles, a papier-mâché boat, and other objects connected materially to Hong Kong’s past and present culture filled the space. Transparencies of the construction of Hong Kong’s waterfront were projected onto the fragile boat [fig. 11.18], along with images of peeling walls and old advertisements.18 Nostalgia for fast-disappearing traditional performance arts and crafts may not be unique to Hong Kong, but in 1996 Hong Kong’s position in relationship to its past and future was. The resonances of this work thus were particularly meaningful in its time and space. Phoebe Man violates taboos of public display in her Beautiful Flowers of 1996. Seeming to be a sea of sculptured blossoms, further inspection of the installation found the petals to be sanitary napkins and the center to be eggshells painted red [fig. 11.19]. Although this work, by its references to menstruation and reproduction, is less specific to its locale, the motif of red eggshells refers to the hundred-day celebration of a baby’s birth in southern Chinese custom and is thus a culturally specific reference. The p ­ erformance

 

 

 

 

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11.19 Phoebe Ching Ying Man (Wen Jingying; b. 1969), Beautiful Flowers (detail), 1996, installation with sanitary napkins, colored eggshells, and chair with light bulb, dimensions variable, Collection of the Artist

11.20 Ho Siu-kee (He Zhaoji; b. 1964), Walking on Two Balls, 1995, installation with video, flip book, and two wooden balls, Collection of the Artist

11.21 Wilson Ka-ho Shieh (Shi Jiahao; b. 1970), Victoria City, 2006, ink and watercolor on silk, 71 × 95 cm, private collection, Hong Kong

art of Ho Siu-kee (He Zhaoji; b. 1964) focused on the body from a significantly different perspective. In his 1995 video he presents himself attempting to walk on two large sculptured balls [fig. 11.20]. His work challenges the way the body has learned to move and to see by temporarily disabling it. In its temporal context, however, it was also interpreted by many viewers in an allegorical way. For many of these artists in the uncertain period immediately before and after the retrocession, exhibition of postmodern art that explored local concerns, and was conceived in Western installation and performance modes, was a way of distancing themselves from a Chinese identity they could not yet comprehend or accept. Beginning in 2001, also with funding from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong—now known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC—began organizing its own submission to the Venice Biennale. In 2005, for example, Chan Yukkeung (Chen Yuqiang; b. 1959), then a curator-critic-artist associated with Para/Site, represented Hong Kong with the installation Empty City, Inverted, Suspended. The struggle with artistic and cultural identity has remained a powerful theme in postretrocession Hong Kong, particularly as a younger generation of native Hong Kong artists emerge. Wilson Ka-ho Shieh (Shi Jiahao, b. 1970), for example, created paintings of Victoria City, the old name for downtown Hong Kong. His work personifies the city’s major architectural landmarks, which were constructed by companies of different nationalities in different periods and styles, as ethnically varied women wear garments that cleverly refer to their architectural motifs [fig.  11.21]. The images are fully comprehensible only to those with intimate familiarity with Hong Kong as a place and also knowledgeable about the history of its urban development. To take only one example, I. M. Pei’s Bank of China building, commissioned by the government of the People’s Republic of China, was completed in 1989. Hsieh has played with its triangular motifs and elegant lines in his graceful female figure, but signifies her ethnicity by the triangle of her coolie hat. The language of exoticism is applied equally to all those who erected iconic architectural monuments in the former colony.  

 

Colonial and Postcolonial Art of Taiwan

The island of Taiwan, located seventy-five miles off the coast of Fujian province, was ceded to Japan in 1895 following the Qing dynasty’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. Taiwan thus had a distinctive colonial history: unlike the colonial parts of Asia that fell under the control of European powers, it was subjugated by another Asian nation. This did not ameliorate Taiwan’s colonial experience; on the contrary,

the Japanese colonial administration was prone to applying racist distinctions to the Chinese and aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan in the same way that white colonizers might denigrate nonwhite subject peoples. Following a number of fierce rebellions against the Japanese military in the first decade or two after 1895, however, by 1920 the island had been brought under civilian control. Given the assumption of racial and cultural superiority, Japan energetically endeavored to bring modern civilization, as it existed in the homeland, to its new territory. Art was one of its symbols. The Chinese residents of Taiwan had migrated primarily from Fujian and other coastal areas of southern China. Their art and literature, at the time they were annexed by Japan, was a reflection of styles popular in Fujian and to a lesser degree in coastal Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu. As the colonizing power launched a long-term program to completely replace Chinese culture with that of its own, this preexisting Chinese art was systematically left out. Indeed, when the Japanese began instituting a modern educational system in Taiwan, it was entirely based on their own educational, cultural, and linguistic norms.19 Chinese culture was relegated to the position of an exotic, primitive motif. The Japanese written language replaced Chinese, and young Taiwanese took Japanese names. Taiwan would be made modern and Japanese at the same time. As early as 1911, Taiwanese students began enrolling in Taipei’s Japanese School (Kokugo gakkō), an institution set up for the primary purpose of educating the children of Japanese colonists in the island’s capital. One of the earliest Chinese artists to graduate was sculptor Huang Tushui (1895–1930), who studied in the teacher training program from 1911 to 1915 and then at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He exhibited his academic sculptures repeatedly in Tokyo’s Imperial Art Exhibition beginning with the Second Teiten in 1920. Other important Taiwanese educated in this school were oil painters Chen Cheng-po (Chen Chengbo; 1895–1947) [see fig. 4.4], who graduated in 1917; Kuo Po-chuan (Guo Bochuan) in 1921; Liao Chi-chun (Liao Jichun; 1902–1976) in 1922; and Li Shih-chiao (Li Shiqiao) in 1929. A great many Japanese teachers were dispatched to Taiwan to run the Japanese school system, and Japanese artists soon began exhibiting their work in Taiwan. These Western-style (yōga) and Japanese-style (nihonga) painters would determine the direction of Taiwanese art. The first tour of duty in Taiwan for watercolorist Ichikawa Kinichirō (1871–1945) began in 1907, with his dispatch to the new colony as an army translator. By 1909 he had begun teaching art at the Japanese School in Taipei and eventually became one of the longest-serving art teachers during Taiwan’s colonial period (1909–16 and 1924–32). He was reasonably well  

 

 

 

 

 

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11.22 Kuo Hsueh-hu (Guo Xuehu; 1908–2012), At the Side of Yuanshan, 1928, ink and color on silk, 94.3 × 175 cm, selected for the Second Taiwan Painting Exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

connected in the Tokyo art world, having exhibited in both the Meiji Art Society exhibitions and in the official Bunten. Some of Ishikawa’s students thus went on to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and successful careers as oil painters. Graduates of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts who taught in Taiwan, such as nihonga painter Gōhara Kotō (1887–1965) and oil painter Shiotsuki Tōho (1885–1954; 1921–1945 in Taiwan), played a similarly important role in mentoring young artists and determining the direction of Taiwan’s art. In early twentieth-century Japan, official exhibitions, particularly the Bunten (the Ministry of Education Fine Arts exhibition) and the Teiten (the Imperial Fine Arts exhibition), were the primary venues in which an artist might establish a reputation.20 With Taiwan’s stabilization a need was seen to establish a parallel system for the benefit of colonials on the island. Thus for a decade, between 1927 and 1936, an annual Taiwan Fine Arts exhibition (Taiwan bijutsu tenrankai, or Taiten) was held every October to demonstrate the progress made in developing Taiwan’s colonial culture. One of the most significant features of the first allisland exhibition, which codified the acceptable forms of art for the colonized Taiwanese, was its complete exclusion of Chinese painting. The exhibition structure was set up with two categories for painting, Oriental-style painting (tōyōga) and Western-style painting (seiyōga).21 “Oriental-style painting” was almost identical to what would be called “nihonga” (Japanese painting) if exhibited in Tokyo. The purpose of the name change was apparently conciliatory—to open the exhibition to the local Chinese population—but in practice the jury admitted only Taiwanese who had worked in the Japanese style. It also suggested that Japan’s destiny was to lead the other, “backward” peoples of Asia.22 Of the forty works of tōyōga exhibited in the first Taiwan  

 

 

 

 

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exhibition, thirty-seven were by Japanese painters and only three by young Taiwanese. Of these, Kuo Hsueh-hu (Guo Xuehu, 1908–2012) [fig.  11.22], Lin Yushan (1907–2004), and the female painter Chen Chin (Chen Jin; 1907–1998) were all born and educated in the colonial period and therefore might represent the new Taiwanese colonial subject. At the time of the exhibition, 1927, Lin Yushan was already studying at the Kawabata Art School in Tokyo. The year before, Chen Chin had enrolled at the Tokyo Women’s Art School, the first Taiwanese girl to be admitted. She painted figures extremely beautifully in a nihonga style typical of Tokyo School of Fine Arts graduates. Nihonga, while not limited to a simple, easily definable manner, was usually painted with great precision on silk with water-based pigments. What made it distinctively modern, while at the same time Japanese, was its highly selective synthesis of certain representational conventions of Western and Asian painting. A two-panel folding screen Chen Chin exhibited in the 1934 Teiten is typical. The figures are large in scale, even monumental, as they might be in a nineteenth-century European portrait, and are rendered with anatomical accuracy and faithful attention to observed details of attributes (such as musical instruments) and ornamentation (including jewelry, draped fabric, and inlaid mother-of-pearl). Vanishing-point perspective is suggested in the angled ends of the lacquered bench, but the flesh of the female figures, rendered in outline and evenly toned pigment, is intentionally flat, creating a striking contrast between costume and body. Moreover, the figures are set against a blank background, an East Asian pictorial convention often seen in nihonga. A striking touch in this synthesis of the modern and traditional, Chinese and Japanese, is the contrast between the red high heels of one  

 

 

11.23  Chen Chin (Chen Jin; 1907–1998), Instrumental Ensemble, 1934, folding screen, color on silk, 200 × 177 cm, selected for the Fifteenth Teiten, Japan, Collection of the Artist’s family.  

stylish musician and the Chinese slippers of her companion. Thus, the work is completely Japanese in style and format, only referring to the artist’s own heritage in details of costume and furniture [fig. 11.23]. Both landscape painter Kuo Hsueh-hu and figure painter Chen Chin were promoted in the colonial art world by nihonga painter Gōhara Kotō, who worked in Taiwan from 1919 to 1936. Japanese colonists and local Taiwanese alike were encouraged by Tokyo critics to develop a distinctively Taiwanese way of painting, but selection criteria for the official exhibitions limited this distinctiveness to subject matter and not style. In a lecture delivered in Taipei in 1925, the director of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Masaki Naohiko, spoke eloquently on the virtues of “exotic tastes,” which he associated with the cultured citizens of a superior race.23 Critical enthusiasm for exoticism in art (similar to European Orientalism, but here focused entirely within the Orient) led to a focus on local color.24 Painting subjects that conveyed the local color of the island, particularly its scenery and folk customs, became a distinctive feature of Taiwanese colorand-ink painting during this period [see fig. 11.22, shown in the 1928 Taiten]. At the same time that exhibition jurors praised this local flavor, the standards of nihonga prevailed in style and technique. Local color was prized in Western-style painting as well. Ichikawa, who served as a juror for the oil painting section during the first five Taiten, himself claimed to have cap-

tured the local color of Taiwan in his watercolors. A number of Taiwanese oil painters were recognized in the First Taiten. They included Liao Chi-chun, Chen Cheng-po, and Yang Shanlang, all three of whom were then studying in Japan; local color was also much in evidence in their work [fig.  11.24]. Chen Cheng-po was the first Taiwanese oil painter to show in the Imperial Exhibition, in 1926. In

11.24  Chen Cheng-po (Chen Chengbo; 1895–1947), Spring at the West Lake, 1934, oil on canvas, 45.5 × 53 cm, selected for the Fifteenth Teiten, Japan, Collection of Lin Liangming  

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1928 Liao Chi-chun exhibited in the Teiten in Japan an oil painting depicting his home in Tainan [fig.  11.25], while Chen Chih-chi (Chen Zhiqi; 1906–1932) showed Taiwan Landscape, in the same show. Some Taiwanese oil painters, like their peers in China and Japan, went on from Tokyo for further study in Paris. One such artist was Yang Sanlang (1907–1995) [fig. 11.26], who exhibited in the 1932 Salon d’automne before returning to Taiwan in 1934. On November 4, 1934, shortly before the close of the Eighth Taiten, he, Liao Chi-chun, Chen Cheng-po, Yan Shuilong, Tateishi Tetsuomi (1905–1980; a Taiwan-born Japanese), and several other artists who had studied abroad organized the Taiyang Art Association. The group was named for its sponsor, a coal-mining firm called the Taiyang Limited Company in Jilong. The goals of the group—to permit progressive artists to freely exhibit their work and to promote a Chinese cultural spirit—received strong support in intellectual circles. Public perception of an oppositional agenda for the Taiyang Art Association, and perhaps even anticolonial intent, were sufficiently strong that Liao Chi-chun felt obliged to publish an article denying them. It is possible that their desire for an alternative exhibition venue was caused by the Taiten’s decision to return, after several years when Taiwanese had served on the jury, to an all-Japanese selection panel for 1935. In any case, they organized ten exhibitions—one every May—between 1934 and 1944. The exhibitions toured to central and southern Taiwan, and although they were dominated by oil painting, they also included Chinese-style ink paintings, watercolors, and oils as well as Japanese-style paintings, prints, and sculptures. The Taiten was not held in 1937, the year the SinoJapanese War began and Taiwan reverted from civilian to military rule, but six more annual exhibitions, now called the Futen (Taiwan Sōtokufu bijutsu tenrankai, or Taiwan Government–General Art Exhibition), were held during the war years, from 1938 to 1943. Beginning in 1937, after launching the war with China, Japan extended its colonial efforts with a campaign to make Taiwanese into loyal “imperial subjects” (kōmin). Japanese-language study now became mandatory and Chinese-language magazines were prohibited. Until Japan’s defeat in 1945, Taiwanese who adopted Japanese names, lived in the Japanese manner, and spoke Japanese at home were given preferential treatment in employment and education.25 Ties to ancestral Chinese cultural traditions were seriously weakened by the time the war ended. Taiwan was reclaimed by the Nationalist Chinese government as a province of the Republic of China in October 1945. In very general ways Taiwan’s retrocession paralleled that  

 

 

 

 

11.25 Liao Chi-chun (Liao Jichun; 1902–1976), A Courtyard with Banana Trees, 1928, oil on canvas, 129.2 95.8 cm, selected for the Ninth Teiten, Japan, Taipei Fine Arts Museum  

 

 

11.26  Yang Sanlang (1907–1995), Old Alley in Paris, 1934, oil on canvas, 61 × 80 cm, private collection  

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11.27 Li Meishu (1902–1983), Evening, 1948, oil on canvas, 194 × 130 cm, selected for the Fifth Taiwan Provincial Art Exhibition, Collection of the Artist’s family  

of Hong Kong, half a century later: both were handed back to a Chinese homeland with which few of its residents was personally familiar. The retrocession of Taiwan, however, at the end of an exhausting war, proved to be more sudden, less well-organized, and far more traumatic to its residents. The public use of the Japanese language was banned in 1946, to be replaced immediately with Mandarin Chinese, the northern Chinese language that few Taiwanese knew how to speak. Although the radical speed of the de-­Japanization had the practical effect of silencing many members of Taiwan’s educated elite, many still attempted to contribute to civic institutions. Yang Sanlang took the initiative to suggest to the new government that an annual art exhibition be held, and in late October 1946 the First Taiwan Provincial exhibition opened, with himself and Kuo Hsueh-hu as organizers. Now called the Shengzhan (Provincial exhibition), this annual event continued to occupy a central role in the Taiwanese art world for many decades [fig. 11.27]. Despite the social dislocation that would ensue with the victory of the Communists in 1949, the art world enjoyed a measure of stability. The retrocession was poorly administered, and on February 28, 1947, resentment against the mainland Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek exploded in Taipei, spreading

to islandwide demonstrations and riots. Nationalist troops were deployed from the mainland in March. It is not known how many died in the ensuing bloodshed, but it may have been more than twenty thousand. Among those who lost their lives were the artist Chen Cheng-po, who was shot after attempting to negotiate between unhappy locals and the Nationalist authorities. No acknowledgment was made that the massacre, known as that of 2/28 (for February 28), had even occurred until 1993, leaving an ugly scar in Taiwanese society that is still sometimes revealed even today. As in Hong Kong, Taiwan saw a flood of refugees arrive from mainland China after the Communist victory. Initially believing that this exile would be temporary, when the government of the Republic of China began its retreat from the Communists on the mainland in 1948, it implemented martial law. Restrictions on political speech and activity would remain in effect for thirty-eight years, long after hopes for reconquering the mainland had died, effectively maintaining the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek in the name of anti-Communism. Significantly, however, the government in exile retained the diplomatic recognition of most nations of the Western world and its seat at the United Nations; in the discourse of the Cold War, it was “Free China.” Closely allied to the United States, the Chiang Kaishek government added a strident anti-Communism to the anti-Japanese discourse of the wartime years and enforced its fears by a censorship that restrained the cultural scene. The most important artistic and cultural trend promoted by the authorities in the period between 1949 and the mid1980s was aimed to identify the Nationalist government with the preservation and restoration of China’s classical culture. This cultural nationalism had its roots in the 1930s, and many of its doctrines were similar to those proposed by the Chinese Painting Society and other traditionalist painting groups. It had many beneficial results in encouraging study of classical literature, history, and art history, but for the practice of art this elevation of traditionalism from the realm of private aspiration to political dogma had a deadening effect. Its most conspicuous manifestation in art was the adoption of traditionalist Chinese painting as a de facto cultural symbol of the Nationalist government. By 1950 the Japanese-trained painters who exhibited in the provincial exhibition came under increasingly strong attack from mainlanders who had taken over the positions of cultural authority in education and government. The scholarly Puru (P’u Hsin-yü; 1896–1963), from Beijing, and Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi; 1889–1991), a Cantonese who had taught at National Central University, stated their criticisms more gently, but Liu Haisu’s nephew Liu Shi (1910–1997) deployed his prestige as a Shanghai  

 

 

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materials. Those who attacked it did so on the basis of style, those who attempted to defend it did so on the basis of subject matter, its local color. The Nationalist authorities provided some assistance for officials and professors to evacuate the mainland, but it was only a small minority of artists who chose to flee. Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi), who had been recommended by Zhang Shuqi (Chang Shu-ch’i) as private painting tutor to Soong Mei-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was one of them. Of Cantonese origin, he had previously taught at the Guangzhou Municipal Art School, National Central University in Nanjing, and the National Art Academy in Chongqing [see fig. 6.6]. His painting style possessed many of the general characteristics of Lingnan school painting—a syncretic blend of Chinese brushwork with Western effects of light and shade and a romantic sense of drama. He devoted himself to landscape paintings that were assumed to represent real places, but as they grew less and less specific over time, they were received as icons of the Chinese homeland to which all mainlanders sought to return. Huang Junbi became chair of the Art Department at Taiwan Provincial Normal College when he moved to Taiwan in 1949, a school that in 1967 was renamed National Taiwan Normal University. Up until his retirement in 1971, Huang taught several generations of students at Taiwan’s best art program and executed commissions for a variety of high-level private and institutional patrons [fig. 11.28]. His blunt brushwork and generalized landscape imagery was extremely influential among graduates of Taiwan Normal. In contrast, Puru, the second major figure among the distinguished mainland immigrants, was influential for the precision and discipline of his brushwork [fig. 11.29]. A cousin of the last Qing emperor, Puru (also known as P’u Hsin‑yü or Pu Xinyu) was traditionally educated in calligraphy and classical literature, especially poetry, but then studied at a modern school in Beijing and in Berlin after World War I. It is not known with whom he studied painting, but his royal heritage certainly provided access both to instruction and to opportunities to study high-quality early paintings, and his primary inspiration was the comparatively fine and naturalistic painting of the Tang and Song dynasties. In these early years, Puru joined the Xuannan huashe, a group of art-­loving Beijing luminaries, including Chen Hengque, Yao Hua, Shen Yinmo, and Liang Qichao, who met at the home of Yu Shaosong south of the Xuanwu Gate in Beijing. In 1924, Puru met the young Zhang Daqian, a traditionalist artist with whom his name would later be linked, in Beijing, and in 1926 he held his first solo exhibition in Beijing’s Central Park. Puru’s work was included in the contemporary Chinese painting exhibition in Berlin in 1933. He taught at  

11.28 Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi; 1898–1991), Landscape, 1947, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

Art Academy professor to stridently denigrate Japanese art and all Taiwanese who painted in the Japanese style. The issue of whether what was formerly called tōyōga could be considered Chinese painting provided a constant source of debate that surrounded the provincial exhibition; for a time two categories of guohua were exhibited, the second of them essentially tōyōga. In the 1980s the latter was renamed jiaocaihua (glue-and-pigment painting) in reference to its 246

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in the central part of the island, in the vocabulary of classical painting. In a truly remarkable saga, more than sixteen thousand crates of precious art treasures were removed from the Palace Museum in Beijing for safekeeping before the SinoJapanese War. Eighty of them were sent to the London exhibition in 1935–1936 and returned. They were kept first in Nanjing, but after the war broke out they were shipped in various stages on a perilous journey inland to Chongqing. Then, having survived the eight-year war with Japan intact, the collection was believed to be endangered by the civil war. In 1948, as part of the Nationalist government’s decision to withdraw to Taiwan, it planned to move the imperial treasures once again. In the end, only about 20 percent of the collection was actually shipped to Taiwan, with the remainder safely returned to Beijing’s Palace Museum, but what was taken included some of the greatest works of art, including masterpieces of Chinese painting. For a decade the curators cared for them in two warehouses of the Taiwan Sugar Company in central Taiwan, with a small exhibition hall only built in Taizhong with U.S. funding in 1957. In 1961 and 1962 a major exhibition of works from the Palace Collection was sent on a tour of major museums in the United States.26 This beautifully selected exhibition not only stimulated interest in the field, but its accompanying scholarly projects, most notably photographing the entire collection for teaching purposes, made it feasible for the first time in the United States to study and teach Chinese art history with stylistic and visual analysis as sophisticated as that practiced in the more fully developed fields of European art history. Another significant result of the exhibition’s success was a matching grant to the Republic of China’s government by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to construct a museum for the collection. From this time it was evident that return to the mainland would not happen soon, and the authorities in Taiwan set about defining Taiwan’s new ideological position. Because the Republic of China claimed to represent the true China, research and dissemination of knowledge about these classics of premodern Chinese art were an important project, as was promotion of high-quality contemporary painting in the traditionalist mode. Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien; 1899–1983), one of the most technically skilled and versatile of the traditional painters to leave the mainland, conducted a twenty-five-year flirtation with the Nationalist government before finally making the decision to settle on the island in 1976. By the time he did, he had become a local cultural icon. After 1949, Chang visited Taiwan, settled briefly in Hong Kong, and then finally, in 1953, established a long-term residence in  

11.29 Puru (P’u Hsin-yü; 1896–1963), Mountains in Autumn Splender, 1961, ink on paper, 187 × 95 cm, Collection of Michael Yun-wen Shih, Tainan  

the Beijing Art Academy and after the war briefly also at the National Art Academy in Hangzhou. Puru was thus a well-established traditionalist artist before his migration to Taiwan in 1949. He joined Huang Junbi at the Provincial Normal College as well as continuing his private teaching. He worked in both the gongbi (outline) style for figures and birds-and-flowers and a delicately textured landscape mode inspired by Song painting. In 1958 and again in 1962 he taught for a time at the New Asia College in Hong Kong. Among his students in Taiwan was Chiang Chao-shen (Jiang Zhaoshen; 1925–1997), who mastered the refined landscape techniques of his teacher but then supplemented this background with study of the National Palace Museum collection, where he worked as a curator and deputy-director. The most important innovation of Anhui-born Chiang Chao-shen was to render the actual landscape of Taiwan, particularly the dramatic peaks  

 

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ings at the newly constructed National Palace Museum in 1969. In 1971 Zhang Daqian exhibited his new mode of inkand-color painting at Hong Kong’s City Hall Art Gallery and Museum. By this time he had developed a spontaneous style of painting that seems to have been equally inspired by his creative reading of Tang dynasty art texts (a description of a master of splashed ink, in particular) and his encounters with abstract expressionist painting. It was certainly appreciated by audiences familiar with contemporary Western art for its spontaneity and abstraction. Despite the resemblance between some of his works of the late 1960s and action painting, Zhang maintained throughout his life that his technique was Chinese, and he never used it in a purely abstract manner. In this painting of his final years, blue and green pigment is used to suggest a mythical paradise, the Peach-Blossom Spring, where human discord was unknown [fig. 11.30]. In addition to ink painters, Taiwan’s art world was stimulated by the arrival of oil painters with new ideas. Li Zhongsheng (Li Chun-chen; 1912–1984), a veteran of the 1930s modern art movement in both Shanghai and Guangzhou, arrived in Taipei in 1949. A prolific writer, he carried his enthusiasm for modernism from his early career as a member of the Storm Society and the Independent Artists Association in the early 1930s on into many articles published in Taiwan. In his private studio in the early 1950s, he quickly attracted a group of aspiring young artists, whose minds he filled with calls for freedom, originality, and creativity [fig. 11.31]. This activity laid the groundwork for a modernist revolt against cultural orthodoxy in the mid-1950s. The year 1957 saw the establishment of two modernist painting socie­ ties, the Fifth Moon Painting Society (Wuyue huahui) and the Eastern Painting Society (Dongfang; Ton Fan).27 The Fifth Moon Painting Society was established by graduates of the Provincial Normal College, including Liu Kuosung [fig.  11.32] and Chuang Che (Zhuang Zhe; b. 1934) [fig.11.33], with the encouragement of their teacher, Liao Chi-chun [see fig.  11.25]. The group, supported in their efforts by novelists, musicians, and poets, argued vigorously in print, in debate, and with their own works of art that the only form of art that could be considered modern was abstract. Their polemics were all the more controversial because of the effective discourse with which they articulated their aesthetic theories, and their challenge to both the conservatism of the Provincial Exhibition and the dominance of Japanese-style painting. Unlike mainland Chinese artists in the 1950s, the iconoclasts in Taiwan were free to write and to speak about art, but they still had no exhibi 

11.30  Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien; 1899–1983), PeachBlossom Spring, 1983, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 209.1 × 92.4 cm, Collection of Cemac, Ltd.  

Brazil. From 1968 to 1976 he lived in Northern California, but he exhibited all over the world and was exposed to developing trends in modern painting of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956 he held an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris for which Chang Yu (Sanyu) designed the catalog, and through his connections in Paris had the opportunity to visit Picasso. In 1959 the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China awarded Zhang Daqian a gold medal for cultural achievement, one of many recognitions he would enjoy. He exhibited in Taiwan in 1962 and 1967, was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1968, and showed his Dunhuang paint248

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11.31 Li Zhongsheng (Li Chun-chen; 1912–1984), Work No. 533, 1958, oil on canvas, 51 × 36 cm, Collection of the Li Chungsheng Modern Painting Foundation  

11.32 Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong; b. 1932), Toward the Hazy Unknown, 1963, ink and color with collage, 95 × 58 cm, Courtesy of the Artist

11.33  Chuang Che (Zhuang Zhe; b. 1934), Landscape, 1966, ink on paper, 110 × 140 cm, Collection of Rita and Bernard Gallin, Ann Arbor

tion venue and garnered no institutional support for their artistic activities. As a result, they looked abroad for validation, successfully submitting their works to the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Paris Youth Biennial. The Eastern Painting Society was comprised of many of Li Zhongsheng’s young students and included a mixture of teachers and young soldiers. Hsia Yang (Xia Yang; b. 1932)

[fig. 11.34] and Wu Hao (b. 1931) were air force bunkmates who studied at Li Zhongsheng’s Andong Street Studio and then went on to form a club dedicated to bringing modernism to the East. In 1960 these two groups were among seventeen nonmainstream painting organizations that were brought together under the umbrella of the newly established Chinese Modern Art Center. In March of 1960 they held Alternative Chinas

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in Taiwan, a key support for the abstract movement, the cultural magazine and gallery of the same name, Wenxing (Literary star), closed under political pressure. Many young Taiwanese modernists left for the West, thinning the avantgarde ranks. Liu Kuo-sung departed for the United States in 1964; Chuang Che in 1966. The abstract expressionists reached the height of their achievements in the 1960s and 1970s, breaking down the boundaries between Asian art and Western art, and creating means of expression that were at once modern and Chinese. The following decades would see changes on the international front that would gradually leave this art behind. Hsia Yang, for example, took up postmodernism after his journey to New York, where he was successful as a photorealist painter, and pop elements made their way into the painting of several abstract ink painters. The 1970s and 1980s were a time of increasing prosperity in Taiwan but also a period during which the Taiwanese art world and society suffered a number of shocks. First, in 1972, the People’s Republic of China was recognized as the legitimate government of China and took Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations. Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 and was formally succeeded in 1978 by his Soviet-educated son, Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo; 1910–1988). The United States formally dropped diplomatic relations with the Republic of China at the end of 1978. Chiang Ching-kuo, who served as president until his death in 1988, initiated major economic developments, gradually relaxed controls on political speech and organizations, and in 1987 lifted martial law. As it became clear that Taiwan was internationally isolated, the Taiwanese cultural world responded with a profound rethinking of its identity and local culture. The Chiang family brought its domination of the island to an end when Chiang Ching-kuo named a Taiwan-born politician, Lee Teng-hui (Li Denghui), as his successor. The 1970s and 1980s are thus characterized as the era of a developing “native consciousness.” The primary cultural ideology until the early 1970s was that of Taiwan as the last bastion of China’s traditional civilization, an orientation that foregrounded mainland-born artists such as Puru [see fig. 5.3], Huang Junbi [see fig. 6.6], and Zhang Daqian [see figs. 5.8 and 6.13]. Even the modernist movements of the 1950s to the 1970s were dominated by mainlanders who, although young enough to establish firm roots in Taiwan, still tended to think of their work in terms of a broader Chinese culture. The 1970s and 1980s saw the art world turn instead to roots in the native soil of Taiwan. For the first time, art historians and curators conducted systematic art historical studies of Taiwanese artists who worked in the colonial period.29 When these early twentieth-century artworks, oil paintings and tōyōga alike,  

11.34 Hsia Yang (Xia Yang; b. 1932), Hanging, 1960, oil on canvas, 138 × 70 cm, Collection of the Dimension Endowment of Art, Taipei

the first modernist art exhibition at the National History Museum, but unfortunately a malicious accusation that the woodblock prints of Eastern Painting Society member Qin Song (1932–2007) exhibited Communist leanings brought an end to this promising venue. The debate the young artists had stirred up about art was taken far beyond their intended realm when, in 1961 the philosopher Hsu Fu-kuan (Xu Fuguan; 1904–1982) published an article that not only castigated modernism but also maintained that it would clear the path for Communism. Liu Kuo-sung, an enthusiastic debater, quickly went to press with a rebuttal in which he pointed out that abstract art was banned in the Communist world. Indeed, his confidence echoes from his title, “Why Should We Take Modern Art and Give It to the Enemy?” 28 In 1964 pop artist Robert Rauschenberg won the grand prize at the Venice Biennale. The following year  

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11.35  Ju Ming (Zhu Ming; b. 1938), Taiji series—single whip, 1986, bronze, 470 × 171 × 255 cm, Ju Ming Museum

began appearing in museum exhibitions and on the market, their novelty and compelling history attracted a virtual frenzy among students and collectors. At the same time, a search for authenticity in contemporary Taiwanese art led to the discovery of artists of Taiwanese heritage whose work could easily be distinguished from that of mainlander artists. The nativist movement in 1970s and 1980s Taiwan thus had multiple strands—a rejection of the culture of the post1945 mainland immigrants, and at the same time, after diplomatic rejection by the United States, a turning away from American cultural influence in favor of a nostalgic engagement with that of Japan. The lifting of martial law also made possible the open expression of political sentiments. How the Taiwanese identity might best be understood in art remains a matter of debate, but at its most fundamental it involves reassertion of cultural authority by native Taiwanese and reclaiming previously suppressed histories. The self-taught sculptor Ju Ming (Zhu Ming; b. 1938) burst on the scene in 1976, just as these issues began to emerge. Born in the central Taiwan county of Miaoli in 1938, his distinctive work was immediately recognized for its authenticity in his first solo show at the National Museum of History. From a poor rural family in Dongxiao, his only education in art was as a carpenter’s apprentice. He ran a successful crafts studio in his hometown, teaching himself sculpture on the side, until in 1968 he sought private instruction from a distinguished academic sculptor, Yang Yuyu, who had recently returned from a fellowship in Italy.30 Under Yang’s informal guidance, Ju not only took up the practice of taijiquan  

(shadow-boxing), but began representing its slow but forceful movements in his sculpture. Ju’s vivid work represents the human figure with a charming simplicity and at the same time preserves in bronze the rough marks of the artist’s tools on hacked and sawed wood [fig. 11.35]. In some ways it echoes the modernist experiments of the New Ink Art, and his appearance on the art scene was well received in Japan and in Hong Kong. A 1985 work from the Taiji series was even installed at the center of Hong Kong’s newly constructed Exchange Square, a thought-provoking ornament to the Hong Kong stock market. However, with his rustic roots Ju is justifiably considered a fruit of Taiwan’s own soil, and he has now become one of Taiwan’s best-known international artists. Major institutional transformations began in the 1980s Taiwanese art world. In 1983 the new Taipei Fine Arts Museum opened in the northern part of the city, for the first time providing a dedicated place for the exhibition of contemporary art. In the late 1980s a new generation of artists began to return from abroad, bringing another fundamental conceptual change. Nurtured in the era of Taiwan consciousness, and then educated in the multimedia concepts of new art abroad, their work often engaged with postmodern issues of society and politics, including particularly those rooted in their local situation. In 1984 a group of artists trained abroad, led by Tsong Pu (Zhuang Pu; b. 1947), held what is believed to have been the first installation exhibition in Taiwan. Two years later, in 1986, Jun T. Lai (Lai Chunchun; b. 1953) founded a studio that she called SOCA Alternative Chinas

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11.36  Chen Hui-Chiao (b. 1964), You’re the Rose, I’m the Needle, 1993, installation of roses and needles at IT Park, Taipei, 425 × 800 cm.

11.37 Tsong Pu (Zhuang Pu; b. 1947), There is a Name, There is a Reason, 2000, performance, chalk on wall, at University of Buffalo Art Gallery

Studio (Society of Contemporary Art) in Taipei. Her first exhibition, “Environment, Installation, Video,” introduced these new forms to the local public. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum held its first exhibition of such new art, a show titled “Experimental Art: Performance and Space” in 1987. The installation artist Tsong Pu, who returned from MFA studies in Spain in 1981, was a key figure in pushing installation art into the mainstream. In 1988 he and a group of colleagues established IT Park, a well-designed artist-run studio and exhibition space in the center of Taipei. Chen Hui-Chiao (b. 1964), who first emerged in the 1987 “Experimental Art” exhibition, has been a key figure in developing IT Park’s artistic vision. Her own delicate yet shocking installation, You’re the Rose, I’m the Needle, of 1993, consisted of a thousand red rose buds that she repeatedly pierced with steel needles [fig. 11.36]. Incorporating objects and imagery that speak to a female sensuality, by her intense concentration on sharply contrasting materials and trans252

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gressive juxtapositions, Chen Hui-Chiao enveloped audiences in her own personal vision and even her subconscious fears and desires. An IT Park colleague, the German-educated Wu Mali (b. 1957), broke political taboos with her 1997 video lament on the 2/28 massacre.31 At the same time that grievances might now be aired, the ethnic split between the old Taiwanese and the new immigrants was beginning to blur. Tsong Pu, although born in Shanghai to a mainland family, is of the first generation to know no other home and no other native culture than that of Taiwan. A performance/installation testifies to his ongoing societal concerns—by copying thousands of names randomly picked from the Taipei telephone directory onto a bright green wall, he celebrated the popular passions Taiwan’s first openly contested presidential election inspired [fig. 11.37]. The personal, local, and universal are not easily distinguished in the art of the post–martial law generation. Ink  

11.39 Wu Tien-chang (Wu Tianzhang; b. 1956), A Dream of a Spring Night, 1995, oil and mixed media on canvas, 220 × 180 cm, Collection of the Artist

11.38  Yu Peng (b. 1955), Landscape of Desire—2, 1999, ink on paper, 232 × 53 cm, Collection of the Artist  

painter Yu Peng (b. 1955) represents a new generation of artists in this medium who have no interest in the imaginary images of a distant Chinese homeland. Instead, his fragmented landscapes are populated by naïvely rendered figures, often naked or engaged in private activities, which may represent the anomy of contemporary urban society [fig. 11.38]. Nostalgia for Taiwan’s past remains a common theme, but artists such as Wu Tien-chang (Wu Tianzhang; b. 1956) and Chen Chieh-jen (Chen Jieren; b. 1960) scrutinize it with an eye to vulgarity, violation, and violence. Both use manipulated photographic images as their expressive vehicle. Wu Tien-chang’s imaginary image of a chastely dressed colonial-era schoolgirl is tricked out with a tacky border of plastic flowers [fig. 11.39]. This disturbing contradiction is emphasized by further examination of the girl in the photo, who wears dark sunglasses and appears to fondle her own breast. Chen Chieh-jen’s photographic obsession is the violence perpetrated by human beings on one another. Basing his work on photographs of wartime slaughter, he inserts his own image into a composition that thereby loses its temporal indexicality, creating a horror that is both personal and timeless [fig. 11.40]. Alternative Chinas

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11.40  Chen Chieh-jen (Chen Jieren; b. 1960), Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph, photograph (video still), 2002, super 16 mm transferred to DVD, black and white, sound in selected portions, 21 minutes, 4 seconds, 3-channel video installation, photo by Dubby Tu, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

11.41 Lee Mingwei (Li Mingwei; b. 1964), The Dining Project, 1998 to present, performance, multi-media, commissioned by Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Collection of the Artist

Lee Mingwei (b. 1964) reflects on the history of contemporary art in a gentler fashion, with a series in which he makes a daily videotape of someone he has invited to dinner. He prints fragmentary transcripts of the dinner table conversation over still photographs [fig.  11.41]. By turning a clinical eye on the most basic and domestic human interactions, he exposes them in generically impersonal terms. Unlike director Woody Allen’s early films, however, in which the American dinner table is used as a symbol of social disfunctionality, Lee Mingwei valorizes, with 254

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mild irony, the inevitable intimacy and common memories created by a shared Asian meal. By contrast, Michael Lin (Lin Minghong, b.  1964) takes his own memories to the world, with a series of gaudy site-specific installations based on childhood memories of his grandmother’s quilt covers [fig. 11.42]. Bringing the kitsch of popular Taiwanese design to the world of art is perhaps the most conspicuous statement yet of an uninhibited Taiwanese identity. Although the nature of the colonial experiences in Taiwan and Hong Kong were different in many specifics, by 1990

11.42 Michael Lin (Lin Minghong; b. 1964), Georgia Street Plaza, 23.01–02.05.10, 2010, painted on metal, 1,158 × 1,646 cm, at Vancouver Art Gallery, Collection of the Artist

they shared certain general characteristics. Both societies had been very dramatically changed by their colonial experiences. At the same time, their practical separation from China, particularly between 1949 and the 1980s, had produced a cultural and psychological separation as well. A few artists with strong emotional, personal, or family ties on the mainland, such as Liu Kuo-sung and C. C. Wang, began frequent vis-

its to the People’s Republic of China. In general, however, by 1990 artists in Hong Kong and Taiwan inhabited an art world that was cut off culturally, psychologically, and, to some extent, ethnically from that of the mainland. It would only be with China’s reopening in 1993 that certain internationally oriented artists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China would begin to share the common space of global art.

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12

No U-Turn Chinese Art after 1989

The June 4, 1989, massacre at Tiananmen Square was a turning point in the political life of China and had an equally profound impact on the country’s art and artists. Immediately subjected to strong political pressure, the Chinese art world entered a strangely quiet period. The art historian Francesca dal Lago has described it as a period of “sobering up” after “nearly a decade of cultural intoxication.” 1 Hard-line party theorists enforced this inward turn by targeting the New Wave, and its culmination in the February 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition, as part of the ideological deviancy that had led to the demonstrations. The logo designed by Nanjing artist Yang Zhilin (b. 1956) for the 1989 exhibition, a No U-Turn sign, was prescient [see fig. 10.21]. Few members of the cultural world, despite threats and cajoling, could be persuaded to support a return to leftist cultural policy. Officials who were ordered to investigate participants in the demonstration reported that they had failed to find any evidence. No one, for example, seems to have noticed who constructed the very large Goddess of Democracy on the very small campus of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. This searing experience marked the end of official art. In the period immediately after June 4, many Chinese artists avoided participation in official art exhibitions. Many others left China. Those who remained in China withdrew into their own private realms, where they continued to produce art, with no thought for public display, publication, or collective discussion. Between 1989 and 1992 the entire society was under such severe political pressure that art went underground and, in its isolated setting, found certain kinds of freedom. Ironically, because of widespread noncooperation with the government’s attempted cultural crackdown, artists operated in a realm of social isolation that might be characterized as low pressure. They could not exhibit, but they continued to work for themselves and for the approval of trusted friends. During 257

12.1  Xu Bing (b. 1955) and his team making rubbings at the Great Wall, 1990

this “low-pressure” period, however, art continued to expand along the lines of the late 1980s New Wave, so that the 1990s brought photography, video, performance, and installation art into common use, breaking the boundaries between media that were still reflected in the official exhibitions. Postmodern Reflections

Xu Bing (b. 1955) was criticized for his Book from the Sky, its meaninglessness seen as evidence that he had completely lost his way, “like ghosts pounding the wall.” In response, in the fall of 1990, he embarked on a twenty-four-day performance that would eventually become the installation Ghosts Pounding the Wall. Xu Bing and his students, wearing bright yellow uniforms on which they had stenciled texts from Book from the Sky, worked high atop bamboo scaffolding to make ink rubbings of a one-kilometer stretch of the Great Wall [fig. 12.1]. As they rhythmically beat their tightly packed ink-soaked wads onto the paper-covered stone surfaces, the sounds of their muffled pounding resonated across the isolated valley in a truly ghostly way. In a gesture one might relate to the work of Christo, Xu Bing took control of a monument by covering it. This was not just any monument. The Great Wall, as one of the most recognizable tourist destinations in China, was one of the symbols the government began promoting as it tried to create a new nationalism that might compensate for the post– June 4 popular disillusionment. The ink rubbing was most often used to capture the fine details of ancient carvings, duplicating canonical texts, imperial edicts, and calligraphic masterpieces for preservation and study. Conspicuously violating the conventional cultural purpose of this technology by recording instead the rough-hewn surface of a military  

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fortification was an act of cultural iconoclasm. By means of this process, Xu Bing deconstructs the Great Wall, reclaims it for the laborers who built it, and then, making it his own, he departed for North America with the carefully numbered sections in his luggage. Over the subsequent year, Xu painstakingly reconstructed the Wall’s imprint, mounted it as huge scrolls, and installed it in his first American solo show, held at the Elvehjem Museum (now called the Chazen Museum of Art) at the University of Wisconsin. Ghosts Pounding the Wall hung from the third story skylight, across the atrium, to the ground floor of the museum. Making his feelings of that time explicit, Xu pinned the scrolls to the floor with a large mound of dirt that resembled a rustic Chinese grave [fig. 12.2]. Immediately following the massacre, many young faculty at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, like Xu Bing, threw themselves into making works that they did not exhibit— an older printmaker produced a series of abstract images that look disturbingly like bullet holes; an installation artist made an obsessive series of papercuts depicting tiny red ghosts; an oil painter depicted boys in the school shower room washing blood off their legs. The sculptor Sui Jianguo (b. 1956), who spent those years wrapping granite boulders with networks of rusted rebar [fig. 12.3], has been quoted as describing how he invested his feelings in his work:  

At that time I was quite depressed but also unusually sensitive. From early morning I started to silently carve stone. A whole day flew by, and before I raised my head the sun had already set. I worked like this for twenty days; the stone material in my hand began to gain shape. I think that it was actually a process of exchange: gradually and silently my experiences

12.2  Xu Bing (b. 1955), Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1990–91, mixed media installation, 3,200 × 1,500 cm, at Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison  

entered stone, while in the same process stone became part of myself.2

12.3 Sui Jianguo (b. 1956), Structure series, 1992–1994, steel, stone, dimensions variable, Collection of the Artist

A publication blackout, which remains effective in China today, was imposed on writing or publicly speaking of the events of June 4. Young oil painting faculty, trained by socialist-realist professors in their representational techniques but too young to have any memory of the ideals of high socialism, began their careers in this oppressive atmosphere and devoted their art not to the nation or the people but to very personal reflections on themselves and their times, most often in the form of technically polished depictions of their ennui. Indeed, one of the dominant trends of the 1990s was the abandonment of “important subject matter” and a turn to the concerns of everyday life. Liu Xiao­dong (b. 1963), then teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Middle School, depicted the various activities that young men of the period, his friends, devised to waste time: drinking, eating, or bathing. Rarely do his characters actually seem to have any fun. The work of Yu Hong (b. 1966) from this time has a dreamlike quality, often depicting stylishly dressed young women, some recognizable as self-­ portraits, floating inexplicably in the air [fig. 12.4]. Even sharper trends appeared outside Beijing. Wang Guangyi (b. 1955), then teaching in Wuhan, began a series of postmodern reflections on politics and commerce, his No U-Turn

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12.4  Yu Hong (b. 1966), Height of Adolescence, 1993, oil on canvas, 150 × 130 cm, The Uli Sigg Collection.

Great Castigation series [fig.  12.5]. Possibly inspired by a similarly ironic movement, Sots Art, which emerged in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as by the works of his idol, Andy Warhol, Wang combined standard images from Red Guard posters with the international commercial logos characteristic of China’s post-1979 economic opening. Like the Grid Mao he exhibited at the Avant-Garde exhibition, Wang adopts an intentionally ambiguous or even duplicitous interpretive stance. To leftists, particularly in this period of retrenchment, it read as a politically satisfactory critique of capitalism and China’s commodification; to others, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it suggests the opposite, the inevitable victory of capitalism over leftist ideology. In a strategic play with the official prioritization of subject matter over form, Wang created ambiguous meaning that could not be condemned, thus making his brazen adoption of Cultural Revolution forms difficult to ban. Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan had created in their earlier works a powerful ambience of the Cultural Revolution to stimulate social, psychological, and philosophical observations. Their strategy of simultaneously evoking and negating terror was 260

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12.5 Wang Guangyi (b. 1955), Great Criticism–Coca Cola, 1900–1993, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm, private collection, USA  

 

12.6 Li Shan (b. 1944), Rouge Series—The Young Mao Zedong, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 × 200 cm, Collection of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong  

intricately tied to political ideology, but its specific elements might be explained away in the face of those who might voice political criticism. Wang’s manipulation of the iconography of the Red Guard was more overt but his meaning truly more ambiguous. Two Shanghai artists became pioneers of what was soon labeled Political Pop. Li Shan (b. 1944), a professor at the Shanghai Drama Academy, had devoted the 1980s to serious explorations in the still taboo format of abstract expressionist oil painting. In 1989 he joined the young artists at the Avant-Garde exhibition with a Warholesque installation/­ performance for which he painted portraits of Ronald Reagan on consumer goods such as wash basins. After June 4, Li responded to, or became part of, a complicated popular phenomenon soon known as “Mao Fever.” Stimulated by loss of faith in the Deng Xiaoping government, images of Mao began to resurface in a nostalgic national craze. Taxi drivers hung portraits of Mao on their mirrors, ostensibly to protect themselves against car accidents. For most members of the cultural world, who certainly did not seek a return to the leftism of the Cultural Revolution, evoking Mao was a statement of discontent with corruption, inequality, and bureaucratic stagnation. Like most artists of his generation, Li Shan had painted so many images of Chairman Mao in his youth that he could do so entirely from memory. In the early 1990s Li launched a provocative postmodern series, “Rouge Mao,” which took the conventions of the propagandist, and the idolatry they inspired, to an extreme [fig. 12.6]. He based his paintings

on the photo of a haggard Mao Zedong taken in 1936, at the end of the Long March, by Edgar Snow. This image had been republished countless times over the decades, becoming ever prettier and younger over time as it was retouched by the publishers’ art designers. Li Shan’s version takes this a step further, explicitly confusing the emotions of political fervor with those of sexual desire. In his “Mao Goes Pop” series, Li’s colleague Yu Youhan (b.  1943) embarked on a similar task in a rather different way, focusing on the everso-recognizable contours of standard propaganda images. He empties the Mao image of meaning by rendering it as nothing more than a happy decoration, submerged in the bright colors of folk art and fabric design [fig. 12.7].3 Li and Yu, both of whom taught painting to future stage designers, were devastatingly effective in their manipulation of color and imagery. In Political Pop of the 1990s the entire propaganda edifice was called into question by its former participants. Zhang Hongtu (b. 1947), who was then a student at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, admits to having been briefly carried away in 1966 with the exhilaration of painting for the revolution but suffered profound disillusionment when the Cultural Revolution turned violent. In that interlude of idealism he contributed colossal images on the billboards around Tiananmen Square, a strategic site for propaganda over which his Red Guard colleagues had gained control. Zhang spent the 1980s eradicating ideology from his art, first by studying and copying Buddhist mural paintings and ancient archaeological forms, and then, after No U-Turn

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12.8  Zhang Hongtu (b. 1947), Pingpong Mao, 1995, mixed-media installation, performance, 75 × 150 × 270 cm, private collection, New York

12.7  Yu Youhan (b. 1943), Mao Talking with the Peasants in Shaoshan, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 167 × 118 cm, Collection of the Artist

12.9 Wang Jingsong (b. 1963), Taking a Picture in front of Tiananmen Square, 1992, oil on canvas, 125 × 185 cm, Collection of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong

moving to New York, by throwing himself into gestural abstraction. However, after the profound shock of the June 4, 1989, massacre, which seemed to foreshadow a return to the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s image returned to haunt Zhang, and he spent most of the 1990s exploring the ghostly presence in his psyche. He shared his obsession with his audience in several interactive pieces. In Pingpong Mao, which brings together visual, kinesthetic, and metaphorical power, viewers are invited to play China’s most ubiquitous sport on a table in the gallery [fig. 12.8]. A silhouette of Mao Zedong’s head has been cut out of the table’s surface on either side of the net and thus becomes the most formidable obstacle for the player on each side as she seeks to gain the next point. To avoid losing the ball completely, players are forced by Mao (or, rather, the gaping absence of Mao) to hit their strokes up the sidelines rather than engage in a normal volley; positioned so close to the edge, they 262

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are always in peril of going out of bounds. Such imagery, which speaks for an entire generation, and perhaps even an entire society, burst from the hearts and memories of artists who had experienced the Cultural Revolution in the post– June 4 period, which many feared was the beginning of a new era of totalitarianism. The younger generation of painters confronted the social and political changes of the early 1990s in a somewhat more individual or personal way. Wang Jingsong (b. 1963), a 1987 graduate of the Zhejiang Academy who works in Beijing, explicitly differentiated his generation from those it succeeded with his parody of Sun Zixi’s In Front of Tiananmen [see fig.  7.21]. The contrast with his source, an icon of Chinese oil painting that was created the year after his own birth, is both amusing and perceptive [fig. 12.9]. Deploying the iconographic habits of socialist realism, Wang replaces the tidily arranged model citizens of the Maoist past—its work 

12.10 Fang Lijun (b. 1963), Series II, No. 2, 1992, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm, Ludwig Museum, Cologne

ers, peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, and minority people—so carefully differentiated by class and ethnicity, with more casually posed postsocialist citizens of the 1990s. By their messy informality, Wang suggests a desacrilizing of their visits to Tiananmen Square, with tourism replacing pilgrimage; by their new costumes, especially neckties and leather jackets, he documents the significant social changes then under way. Fang Lijun (b. 1963), whose years as a student in the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, 1985 to 1989, exactly spanned the New Wave movement, was both disillusioned and unemployed after June 4. He found cheap rustic lodgings in what was then a Beijing suburb near the Yuanmingyuan and was soon followed by other similarly disaffected young artists. Spending their days painting and partying, they formed a community that came to be called the Painters Village. Fang Lijun was the most notable exemplar of a trend that emerged there, which the first curators to exhibit it, Li Xianting and Johnson Chang (Chang Tsong-zung), dubbed “cynical realism.” Taking the themes of boredom and apathy to new extremes, Fang’s Series II, No. 2 of 1992 [fig. 12.10] is a large image of a hooligan (liumang) in the midst of a giant yawn. The identical  

figures repeated behind the yawning youth further suggest an absence of meaningful social mooring and sense of selfworth. Although not technically a self-portrait, the resemblance between the painted image and the shaven-headed appearance of the artist at the time he painted it has been noted by many observers. Artists of this group claim to be completely uninterested in politics, as their apathetic posture might suggest, but the social condition in which they found themselves in those years was a direct result of political events. Ejected from the elite art academies into a directionless society that seemed to offer no meaning and no future, Fang Lijun turned his superb training to evoking just this mood.4 The combination of international boycotts of China in 1989, internal investigations of the ideological reliability of Chinese with foreign contacts, and an internal shutdown of international trade and cultural exchanges left China’s economy and cultural life stagnant. Moreover, leftists within the Communist Party, who had never been sympathetic to Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, saw the debacle of 1989 as proof of his policy failure. In 1992 the eighty-seven-yearold leader embarked on a series of inspection tours of southNo U-Turn

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ern China intended to justify his reform program. Praising development in the Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, he relaunched international trade and opened new zones of economic development, most notably in Pudong, across the Huangpu River from Shanghai. The year 1993 thus brought China’s self-imposed isolation to an end. By the time of Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997, inter­ national boycotts had also been forgotten. The exodus of internationally oriented young artists to foreign countries after June 4 was welcomed by a sympathetic international community, which prepared the ground for the best of them to emerge on the international art scene after 1989. Several international exhibitions opened in 1993. China’s New Art Post-1989, which originated in Hong Kong, traveled to Australia and North America, and China Avantgarde! organized in Berlin. Both projects were notable for the quality of their full-color catalogs and their writings by Western and Chinese scholars that aimed to put the various art movements of the day in historical and contemporary perspective. The former exhibition, curated by Chang Tsung-zong in Hong Kong and Li Xianting in Beijing, was particularly significant for its comprehensive coverage of the most innovative artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as for its conceptual structure, which began with major sections on political pop and cynical realism. The selection of works in the two shows was important both for the kind of Chinese art to which they chose to expose Western audiences and the window they provided into Western curatorial and scholarly thinking for young artists still in China. Moreover, the shows were significant in stimulating the international market for works of political pop and cynical realism, as well as bringing installation artists associated with the 1980s avant-garde to Western attention. Thirteen artists from the Hong Kong show—Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Xu Bing, Liu Wei, Fang Lijun, Yu Hong, Feng Mengbo, Li Shan, Yu Youhan, Wang Ziwei, Sun Liang, and Song Haidong—went on to show at the 1993 Venice Biennale. The following year, Li Shan, Yu Youhan, Wang Guangyi, Liu Wei, Fang Lijun, and Zhang Xiaogang participated in the Twenty-Second International Sao Paulo Biennial. Meanwhile, artists who had moved abroad after June 4 began to exhibit in increasingly prestigious venues. Artists in China worked quietly and inconspicuously until 1993, when Deng Xiaoping ended China’s post–June 4 international isolation and relaunched, with increased vigor, his economic reforms. The Chinese economy entered a period of extremely rapid development that began to dramatically change the entire society. Although the ruling authorities did not undertake any overt political reforms, in the art and cultural worlds an unspoken policy of political  

 

 

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relaxation—or, perhaps, a period of no policy at all—provided an environment in which certain freedoms appeared. At the same time, economic decentralization liberated artists from their previous dependence on state-run work units for income, studio space, housing, and even art supplies, and thus gave them new kinds of personal and creative freedom. For the first time since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, it was possible for artists to ignore what the official art establishment might say about their art. Simultaneously, increasing exchange between China and the outside world gave Chinese artists new opportunities to engage with the international art world and even the opportunity to travel abroad. In 1993, Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), a 1982 graduate of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts who was also a veteran of the ’85 movement, began work on a new series, Bloodlines [fig. 12.11]. More reserved than the works of the Beijing cynical realists or the Shanghai political pop artists, his work touches on the psychic damage left by China’s recent history. The paintings in the series each resemble a black-andwhite family photograph of Cultural Revolution vintage that has been enlarged, tinted with color, and marked with red lines to faintly connect parents and children. Similarity in physiognomy between parent and child are evident, but no hint of their emotional bond may be seen in this highly conventionalized photo-studio composition. Indeed, the strict adherence to the visual conventions of the Cultural Revolution make clear the success of the sitters in stripping their visible forms of any traces of themselves. The parents are dressed in Mao suits, the androgynous formal garb of the era, with nothing to mark their individuality except perhaps the pens in their pockets, signifiers of their status as members of the intelligentsia.5 The breasts of the male figures are ornamented with the requisite Mao buttons, the father’s reproducing the same Edgar Snow photo on which Li Shan’s young Mao Zedong [see fig. 12.6] is based. Like Xu Lei and others who emerged in the mid-1980s, Zhang was fascinated by surrealism and Western philosophies of the subconscious. A mysterious, oddly shaped patch of illumination mars the face of each figure. Zhang’s work explores the painful legacy of a period when the concept of private life was systematically destroyed by home invasions and family separations, measuring, in the words of Chang Tsong-zung, “the tensions between the forces of public life and individual privacy. . . . In recapitulating the collective experience of violated privacy, Zhang has created convincing images of the suppressed psyche of China’s recent past.” 6 Indeed, the faces of Zhang Xiaogang’s solemn and conventionally posed figures become masks behind which they hide themselves.  

 

12.11  Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), The Big Family, 1994, oil on canvas, 150 × 180 cm, Collection of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong

Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964), who graduated from art school in Wuhan in 1991, moved to Beijing in 1993 to become an independent artist. Expressionistic works he did in his student years depicted hospitals and butcher shops, which he showed in the section of the China’s New Art exhibition entitled Fetishism and Sado-Masochism. Yet, after moving to the capital, his experience of adjustment to the new environment yielded a much cooler, more restrained series, in which the facial features of each of his urbane figures is obscured by a mask [fig. 12.12]. No longer inhibited by the oppressive political forces suggested in Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings, Zeng’s suggest the uncertain identity of the individual in a rapidly changing society. The quickly expanding consumer culture in 1990s China made the series that Wang Guangyi had begun in about 1990, Great Castigation, even more relevant [see fig. 12.5]. Responding to the sudden modernization of urban life, Beijing artist Feng Mengbo (b. 1966) adopted the form of a newly introduced commodity, Nintendo, to create an even more perfectly targeted parody. In his oil painting Taxi! Taxi! the iconic image of Mao Zedong becomes a pixilated video game character whose raised arm, formerly used to

12.12  Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964), Mask Series, 1994, oil on canvas, 180 × 198 cm, private collection

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12.13 Feng Mengbo (b. 1966), Taxi! Taxi!, 1994, oil on canvas, 98 × 348 cm, The Uli Sigg Collection

bestow political blessings, now hails a cab [fig. 12.13]. As living standards rose in 1990s China, the taxi began to replace the bicycle as the most ubiquitous form of individual transportation. In a continuing fascination with electronic games, Feng has gone on to produce actual video-game versions of Taxi. Zhou Tiehai (b. 1966) brilliantly comments on several contemporary social themes. Acutely aware of the essential role of the media in establishing the new order, he plays with the digital and print organs of news, celebrity, and propaganda. In a series of fake magazine covers, he took the image of himself, a nobody, and converted it into a popular press icon by injecting his picture into every imaginable media context. In Press Conference III, he aims his mockery at the international economic ambitions so urgently propagated by China’s central government, placing his own image in the simulated television press conference of a global economic summit [fig. 12.14]. He announces presciently that, in essence, all that now matters in art, as in international relations, is economic competition. If commodification was one conspicuous phenomenon beginning to develop in the art world of the 1990s, the competition to which Zhou Tiehai refers resulted in a new art world that was pluralistic in medium as well as in theme. To borrow his metaphor, just as the binary American-Russian struggle was made obsolete by the end of the Cold War, so the confrontation between ink painting and oil painting was overwhelmed in the 1990s by the influx of different mediums. Installation art, which had emerged in the late 1980s, came to maturity in the 1990s, particularly as artists moved abroad. They rose to the challenge of site-­specific commissions, and their work, now more professionally installed than had been possible in the frequently dingy and dilapidated exhibition venues of 1980s China, became formally more satisfying. Upon his move to North America in 1987, Gu Wenda (b. 1955) turned his attention to the human body as the core

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of his art. Unlike most body art, however, Gu’s work was not directly about his own body. Challenging taboos about sanitation and privacy, he began to produce installations made with human waste. The first quite controversial works had to do with menstruation and child-bearing. In the mid1990s he shifted to a gender-neutral raw material when he began a series of works made from hair clippings collected at barber shops and salons. Combining the physical leavings of anonymous individuals from the neighborhoods, cities, and nations in which he has exhibited, he forms huge translucent tapestries arranged in multihued patterns of legible and illegible scripts [fig. 12.15]. His work thus preserves a certain essence of humanity, as he physically merges the bodily matter of the individual people into a macro­cosmic whole—the genetic matter of many races and nationalities woven into a single tissue of fabric. Gu Wenda’s raw materials evoke disgust or repulsion in many spectators, a visceral response to the idea of touching the waste of strangers. Yet through the experience of viewing his formally beautiful installations, aesthetic pleasure quickly overwhelms such thoughts. What finally emerges are the intellectual problems set by his use of multiple different scripts, both readable and not, as motifs. Operating on multiple levels—aesthetic, intellectual, and instinctive— Gu’s work has been successfully shown to viewers in venues from South Africa to San Francisco to Shanghai. The example reproduced here was displayed in New York and San Francisco in a significant 1998 retrospective of Chinese avant-garde art, Inside Out. Many of the Chinese installation artists working abroad in the 1990s, like Gu Wenda, found themselves engaging directly or indirectly with issues related to their own experiences as immigrants striving to establish themselves in a global art world. In 1989, Huang Yongping (b. 1954) became one of the first postmodernists to join the post–June 4 exodus when he was invited to participate in Magiciens de la Terre, an exhibition in Paris that strove for truly global  

 

 

 

12.14  Zhou Tiehai (b. 1966), Press Conference III, 1996, gouache on paper, 285 × 390 cm, The Uli Sigg Collection

12.15 Gu Wenda (b. 1955), United Nations—New York, 1998, site-specific installation, hair and mixed media, Asia Society Gallery, New York  

12.16 Huang Yongping (b. 1954), Human Snake Plan, 1993, mixed-media, site-specific installation, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus

coverage of international art. Like many artists who emigrated in this period, Huang left behind the pure Dada of the 1980s and became more reflective of cultural and social issues. In a site-specific installation Huang developed for the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1993, he fabricated a striking conical work to suit the acute angles in the building designed by Peter Eisenman. Huang’s Human Snake Plan refers to the lucrative enterprise of smuggling illegal aliens from the coast of Fujian, Huang’s native province, to the West [fig. 12.16]. The potential immigrants, dazzled by the lure of America, risk their lives at sea and take on such a burden of debt that, in the event their landing in North America succeeds, they and their families in China remain hostages to organized crime, the “snake-heads,” for years. The installation took the form of a human-scale trap, some seventy feet long, constructed of three huge iron rings, cables, and hundreds of yards of netting. At its far end glows a golden, electrified map of the United States—the bait in the trap. At the entrance to the gallery, piles of rusty oil drums and old tires evoke the wharves of Fujian, while old clothing strung out like laundry humanizes the work, suggesting the confinement of the long and perilous journey. The immediate reference made by this work was to the  

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Golden Venture tragedy of June 1993, in which a ship holding 286 mainly Fujianese illegal immigrants ran aground off the coast of Queens, New York, and ten people died when jumping overboard. Yet Huang claimed his inspiration to be a formal one—the netlike pattern proceeding from the map of China on his Chinese national registration card. Seeing that unadorned outline as a giant hole into which anything might be sucked, he went on to transform the contour of the United States into a gigantic lure. Xu Bing, with his profound interest in language, was most immediately engaged by the linguistic switch his move to the United States required. In 1991 he molded a set of large ceramic blocks that resemble lead type, each carved in relief with a letter from the Roman alphabet that he has transliterated into Chinese characters. The first, A, is written as “ai” (sadness); B, “bi” (land on the other shore); W, “dabu-liu” (arrive-cloth-six). He explores the complexity of linguistic transference by means of its apparent randomness and even nonsensicality. For the Wexner Center in 1993, Xu created a beautifully printed but almost unreadable set of English texts, Post-Testament, of systematically scrambled English phrases, and then installed the leather-bound volumes along with the string-bound fascicles of the Book from  

12.17  Xu Bing (b. 1955), Square Word Calligraphy, 1994–96, installation, mixed-media, ink, texts, brushes, and classroom furniture, various venues  

the Sky as Cultural Negotiation. By 1997 he had invented a new and somewhat puzzling English script comprised of deconstructed Chinese characters. New English Calligraphy, also called Square Word Calligraphy, requires brushing an English word with the standard strokes of Chinese calligraphy to achieve a single squared “character.” Challenging the cognitive functions of human minds molded by education, the script is extremely difficult to understand for bilingual readers, whose brains automatically try to read the characters as Chinese, but relatively easy for English-speakers illiterate in Chinese to decipher. When exhibited, the installation usually took the form of a classroom for New English Calligraphy, equipped with a blackboard, charts of how to hold the brush, and even an instructional video in which Beijing-based British art critic, Karen Smith, intones the lesson in a prim caricature of a proper schoolteacher [fig. 12.17]. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to participate by sitting at desks laid out with specially printed model books (imitating the rubbings of calligraphic masterpieces), red-square copybooks (resembling those used by Chinese children when they study calligraphy), ink, and writing brushes. Xu Bing actively sought to engage viewers in the process and would often take the role of teacher at the exhibition opening. As “students” write this unfamiliar script, at a certain moment it becomes perfectly legible and they realize that they are actually brushing English words masquerading as Chinese characters. Every viewer of this work, regardless of linguistic or cultural background, is thus confronted with both familiarity and strangeness. The artist challenges the viewer’s mental complacency by bringing unconscious cognitive processes

to the fore. At the same time, the idea of language as a site of cultural misunderstanding remains central. In the more recent Book from the Ground, Xu Bing uses another new translingual script to tell stories and send messages in simple logolike pictures. Working with software designers, he has managed to mechanize the process of writing in both these fonts, and in a slight parody of the Maoist slogan, has made them available to serve the people. Despite the scholarly air of his work, perhaps the result of growing up on the campus of Peking University, he remains a dedicated populist, and for him the boundaries of art are expansive. Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), who participated in the notorious Stars exhibitions in 1979 and 1980, spent the 1980s in New York. Something of an enfant terrible, he seems to have carried on the revolutionary mission of his poet father, Ai Qing, an avid participant in Communist agitation in 1930s Shanghai who was sentenced to jail along with Jiang Feng and other printmakers. Ai Weiwei has emerged since his return to China in 1993 as a designer but also as an outspoken public intellectual, sometimes engaging in dangerously direct criticism of the shortcomings of government administrators. Much of Ai Weiwei’s artwork has a deconstructionist bent. In this example, from a classical furniture series, he has cut up attractive Ming-style tables and rebuilt them so that they lose their utilitarian function [fig. 12.18]. All that remains are the lovely material and the elegant ornamentation. Is this a critique of the awkward mistakes that occur in the process of remaking China? Or of the uselessness of tradition in the modern era? Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957), in contrast to Ai Weiwei, is a

12.18  Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Table with Two Legs on the Wall, 1997, wooden table of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 91 × 118 × 122 cm, Collection of the Artist

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12.19  Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957), Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, 1998, mixed media installation, wooden boat, canvas sail, arrows, metal, rope, Chinese flag, and electric fan boat. Boat: 152.4 × 720 × 320 cm, arrows: 62 cm long each. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Glenn D. Lowry

rather mild-mannered person, but his art, which sometimes involves massive explosions, is even more aggressively iconoclastic. He graduated from the Shanghai Drama Academy in 1985, where he mastered the demands of effectively controlling the space of the stage. This school, led by a very liberal administrator, Kong Boji, and staffed by teachers like Li Shan, who were pushing the boundaries of allowable art, was one of the most open-minded institutions for art in China at the time. Over the course of almost a decade in Japan between 1986 and 1995, Cai emerged as a provocative performance artist who used the pyrotechnic effects of gunpowder particularly effectively. In 1995 he emigrated to New York, where the remarkable nature of his artistic vision was quickly recognized. His first several New York pieces dealt with the subject of the East-West divide, but in a far less gentle way than did artists like Xu Bing or Gu Wenda. Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows is based on a traditional Chinese story of the late Eastern Han period (25–220 CE) in which Liu Bei (161–223 CE), assisted by his brilliant military strategist Zhuge Liang (181–234 CE), fights to retake the Han dynasty throne [fig. 12.19]. Scheming his way out of certain defeat, Zhuge Liang pushed a straw boat out into the fog. His strategy was successful. Enemy troops led by Cao Cao (155–220 CE) were fooled, assaulting the dummy  

 

 

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with arrows that were then retrieved and launched back against them by Liu Bei’s archers. For his extraordinary installation, Cai suspended an old Chinese fishing boat to which he attached countless protruding arrows. An unobtrusive Chinese flag mounted at the stern flaps in the breeze of a small electric fan. The work clearly refers to the way China sought to win its rightful international position after a century of foreign domination—by turning Western technology to its own purposes. A Chinese artist who worked in the global art world might find himself in the same position. The China/Avant-Garde show of February 1989 represented the emergence of the new wave into the official art establishment, but the ideological clampdown that followed June 4, 1989, reopened a divide between official and unofficial art. There were no longer public exhibition spaces open to these young artists and, as in the early 1980s, most of them worked at home, in small apartments or courtyard houses. They were, thanks to the New Wave or the ’85 movement, aware that they were not alone but were part of a widespread network. Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi were particularly active themselves and encouraged young artists as well. Some began mail-art projects in which they publicized concepts for installations that they could not exhibit to sympathetic critics and colleagues. Others, in cit 

ies such as Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing, created their installations at home or in temporary spaces and then invited their audiences to private one-day viewings. In 1994 the Big-Tailed Elephant group in Guangzhou (Chen Shaoxiong [b. 1962], Liang Juhui [b. 1959], Lin Yilin [b. 1964], and Xu Tan [b. 1957]) installed their work in an empty house for the No Room exhibition. Xu Bing showed his 1994 performance Case Study of Transference in Beijing with only the briefest prior notice to those invited. On a hot summer day in 1995, Beijing artist Song Dong (b. 1966) invited colleagues, critics, and a handful of Western curators to his lodgings, which were located in a dilapidated Beijing courtyard-style house. Opposite the gate into his courtyard was a high gray wall that presented a forbiddingly blank and silent face to the neighborhood. For his installation Song Dong mounted bags of ice at regular intervals along this looming barrier. His guests, if they chose, could spend the day with the artist and his wife talking about art and watching the ice melt. The wall, it turned out, surrounded the guarded compound where dismissed leader Hua Guofeng (1921–2008) then lived. Although many examples of this “apartment art” dealt with personal issues, Song Dong’s work also sizzled with a political charge. Another notable phenomenon to appear in the context of apartment art around 1994 was a new kind of installation art made by women—work that often speaks of their frustration and emotional distress in the face of difficult social pressures. Autobiographical references to the body, to reproduction, and to typically female personal experiences distinguish this work from that of their male counterparts. Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963) is one of the most sensitive. Born in Beijing, and a 1989 graduate of Capital Normal University, she worked as a teacher in the mid-1990s and lived with her husband, Song Dong, in a small section of a simple Beijing courtyard house. In Suitcase, of 1995, Yin fixes in concrete her own well-worn and outdated garment— a thin, hand-sewn tunic under which a padded jacket or sweater would have been worn, as though in a trousseau [fig. 12.20]. On the interior of the trunk are old photos. Her most private and profound early memories are thus sealed in the visible remains of this brightly colored girl’s garment. Yin Xiuzhen’s work often refers to the lives of women in village and traditional China. In this piece the trunk suggests the preparations of a bride as she readies for the most significant change of her life. In premodern China a woman, once married, was never permitted to move back to her natal village. Packing her trunk was often a painful process of permanently leaving behind her childhood and family to become the person— the obedient wife and filial daughter-in-law—that her new  

 

 

 

 

12.20  Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963), Suitcase, 1995, installation, wooden box, concrete, the artist’s personal garments, 38 × 67 × 44 cm, Collection of the Artist

family expected. The garment thus may suggest a personal transition, closing the door of childhood, of a former identity, and the setting aside of its memories. This was, at the same time, a passage with features shared by other Chinese women and, in a more general sense, a universal experience shared by women everywhere. When viewed again so many years after its creation, the piece also speaks to social change—this formless garment, which modestly obscures the shape of the female body within, has been almost universally abandoned in favor of more form-fitting inter­ national styles, the signifiers of new attitudes about women. Yin’s work is thus highly personal, a larger social commentary, and an encapsulation of a universal human experience. Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961) returned in 1995 from the United States to an art world still operating primarily in the private sphere. Bringing a more sharply focused feminist sensibility to her art, she began a two-year project on the theme of women’s work. In Bound and Unbound, she filled the gallery with household implements that she had completely and tidily covered in plain white string. She concentrates female frustration in the face of the endless domestic burdens of weaving, washing, cooking, sewing, and cleaning by her own obsessive wrapping [fig. 12.21]. Drawing a sharp focus to this unceasingly repetitive labor is a video in which it is all undone: a close-up shot of a pair of tra 

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12.21 Lin Tian-miao (b. 1961), Bound and Unbound, 1995–97, installation with video projection and household objects wrapped in thread, Hong Kong Museum of Art  

ditional Chinese scissors, with a soundtrack in which the scissors incessantly snip the string, as though necessitating a return to yet another round of wrapping. Shi Hui (b. 1955), who had studied tapestry-making with Marvyn Varbanov at the Zhejiang Academy, knots delicate installations from twisted cotton, hemp, and paper [fig. 12.22]. Her process of repetitive labor and her evocations of the tradition of female handicrafts bring a similar feminine sensibility to her work,

12.22 Shi Hui (b. 1955), Nets, 1994–1995, threads, paper pulp, xuan paper, wood, lights, 90 × 90 × 15 cm × 24, Collection of the Artist

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which, although abstract in imagery, suggests organic forms and the processes of reproduction and life. Beijing’s East Village

The mid-1990s saw a concentration of young artists who lacked Beijing residence permits settle in the capital in rudimentary low-rent peasant housing, including one site they self-consciously styled the East Village. Many of its residents, like others outside the official mainstream, explored conceptual art in complete rejection of the genres of art and concepts practiced in the art academies. The 1990s thus saw the expansion of unofficial art into a wide range of other media, which included photography, video, performance, and installation art. Gifted Fujianese photographer Rong Rong (b. 1967) and performance artists Zhang Huan (b. 1965) and Ma Liuming (b. 1969) were active members of the East Village artist’s community. All three were academically trained artists, but their time at the East Village was devoted to challenging the aesthetic and social boundaries of the established art world. Rong Rong documented the activities and art of East Village artists, along with capturing startling images of the changing life of the capital in two series, Wedding Gowns and Ruins. In the performance piece To Add One Meter to An Unknown Mountain, naked East Village artists identified themselves by name, weighed

12.23  Zhang Huan (b. 1965), To Add One Meter to An Unknown Mountain, performance at Miaofeng Mountain, Beijing, May 22, 1995

themselves, and then piled their bare bodies one atop the other to a height of about a meter [fig. 12.23]. Exploring the limits of the self, some of the East Village artists conducted masochistic performances with their own bodies. In a solo performance by Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, the artist covered himself in honey and sat for an hour in the fly-­ ridden East Village public lavatory. Performance art could also be quite political in the mid1990s and might even be performed, under cover of darkness, in the most public of places. Song Dong’s Breathing, in which he repeatedly exhaled on a patch of the wintry pavement of Tiananmen Square until he had covered it with ice, challenges the aura of this symbolic political space [fig. 12.24]. The word for “to exhale,” tuqi, may also be used figuratively as “to express opinions.” The June 4 massacre was then, and remains today, prohibited as a topic of public discourse. For witnesses of the student movement the square was haunted with disappointment and tragic memories. The meaningless results of Song Dong’s comically earnest efforts evoke a certain hopelessness. Similarly, the plight of impoverished migrant laborers who were building the new infrastructure of 1990s China has been a constant theme in art of the 1990s and new millennium. Zhu Fadong (b. 1962), in an absurdist engagement with this social problem, used his own body to personify the countless unemployed or underemployed workers who streamed to China’s big cities in the mid-1990s in search of work. Carrying a briefcase and wearing a blue Mao suit, he

12.24 Song Dong (b. 1966), Breathing, 1996, color photograph, two parts, 120 × 180 cm each, The Uli Sigg Collection

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walked the streets of Beijing for two weeks with a notice attached to his back: “This person is for sale, price negotiable.” The artist staged his videotaped performance This Person Is for Sale soon after he himself moved to Beijing from Kunming in 1994. The physical pace of urban development in China during the 1990s proceeded with a speed that was more than many inhabitants could psychologically bear. After decades of political struggle and economic stagnation, the general state of Chinese housing in the 1990s was dire, and most people were eager to move out of cramped and dilapidated quarters into new apartments. The speed of urban deconstruction was astonishing, however, and almost everyone had the experience of finding neighborhoods they had known all their lives suddenly converted into totally unfamiliar landscapes. Overnight whole sections of cities were razed, streets relocated, and all landmarks obliterated. People were suddenly strangers in their own urban environment. Artists confronted the rebuilding of China’s cities from a variety of points of view, ranging from the emotional confusion of individuals to the social effects of mass relocation. Siting his performance in front of a high-rise that was under construction, in 1995, Lin Yilin, for example, built a cinderblock wall in the middle of a busy Guangzhou Street. A number of Beijing artists also intervened artistically in the devastating urban destruction they witnessed but could not prevent. Between 1995 and 1998, Zhang Dali (b. 1963) spray-painted more than two thousand caricatures of himself on walls all over Beijing. His project resonated with the profound distress and nostalgia that many Beijing residents felt for the old courtyard houses that gave the city its character, and a sense of powerlessness in the face of the profound spatial and aesthetic changes imposed on the people by city bureaucrats. Zhang’s graffiti would often appear after workmen had, seemingly randomly, marked the word chai (demolish) on a building’s wall. One of his most formally striking photographs places a corner of the yellow-tiled Forbidden City in the hole in a partially demolished wall [fig. 12.25]. He wrote of his series: “I firmly believe people are the products of their environment, and changes in the environment actively alter the nature of the people.” 7 A significant development in artistic practice in the 1990s was the appearance of photography and video as independent art forms. They had been used in the 1980s to document performances, and the boundaries between these three arts are not always clear, but in the 1990s more artists were recognized for work intended to be experienced only as a photograph or film. Zhang Peili (b. 1957), for example, began to move away from painting during the cultural hiatus of the post–Tiananmen massacre period. One of his  

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12.25  Zhang Dali (b. 1963), Dialogue, 1998, photograph, Collection of the Artist

12.26  Zhang Peili (b. 1957), Water: Standard Pronunciation, Ci Hai (Sea of Words), 1992, video, Collection of the Artist

most brilliantly absurd political works of the time is his 1992 video Water, in which he comments on the common culture of China’s state-run media [fig.  12.26]. For this production he hired Xing Zhibin, the well-known newscaster who was seen by the Chinese public as the face and voice of the authorities: they knew her as the person who read

12.27  Yang Fudong (b. 1964), City Lights, 2000, photographs (video stills), Collection of the Artist

the latest party proclamations on the evening news.8 Zhang Peili employed this announcer, posed and dressed just as she appeared on CCTV, to read a long entry, “Water,” from the authoritative Chinese dictionary, in Cihai (Sea of Words). Particularly in the context of the leftist domination of the media that followed June 4, the sight of this mouthpiece of the party on the screen initially raised ominous expectations in the minds of its Chinese viewers. When she unexpectedly filled their ears with words that were completely without meaning, however, they were convulsed with laughter. This is a brilliant piece in which the artist confronts government censorship by conveying his meaning in a literally meaningless form. Many videos and photographs of the mid-1990s ex­­ ploited the absurdities in urban life that resulted from the uneven pace of development to comment on current social issues. Video artist Yang Fudong (b. 1964) devoted a number of ironic projects to the new urban class that appeared in the 1990s: smartly dressed white-collar office workers, whom he portrays as disoriented characters in a brand-new “postsocialist” space [fig. 12.27]. City Lights of 2000 makes superb psychological use of odd contrasts in setting—the solidly constructed architectural edifices of 1920s and 1930s capitalist Shanghai, the run-down traces of Maoist neglect, and the surprising suddenness of new apartment and office towers of the late 1990s. At the same time, superficial similarities between present and past are invoked by his references to the look of Shanghai and Hollywood films of the 1930s. Performance artist Zhao Bandi (b. 1966) plays himself as a character in a series of humorous photographs in which he and his stuffed panda, Panda Kitty (Xiong Maomi), exchange edifying remarks, bilingually, on current social

12.28  Zhao Bandi (b. 1966), Zhao Bandi and Panda Kitty, 1999, photograph, dimensions variable, Collection of the Artist

themes [fig.  12.28]. Taking the form of a public service poster, Zhao Bandi and Xiong Maomi help one another productively consider many distressing problems; unemployment, violence, drugs, smoking, product counterfeiting, and AIDS, as well issues of civic morality and public safety. When work of this avant-garde artist is shown in an art gallery, these photographs may be read as ironic parodies of the mass media, rather like the work of Zhou Tiehai. The Zhao Bandi character earnestly protects his panda from the perils of modern society, and Maomi reciprocates, even saving Zhao Bandi from suicide. The public relations value of the Chinese panda, a national zoological treasure, makes Maomi a precious stand-in for the Chinese everyman but, rather like a ventriloquist, Zhao Bandi uses his toy panda to make childlike observations an adult could not straight­forwardly utter. This series is gentle rather than cynical in its humor, and rather like Jeff Koons’s Big Puppy, is found lovable by the public despite its ironic intentions. Zhao Bandi and Panda Kitty is so cute and its simple dialogue so disarming that the Shanghai Municipal government allowed its photographs to be mounted on advertising panels at the Shanghai Airport, where with cynicism not immediately evident, they successfully masqueraded as public service posters. In the 1990s new media began to succeed in its struggle to gain recognition in the Chinese art world and internaNo U-Turn

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12.29 Wang Dongling (b. 1945), Qian Kun, ink on paper, 69 × 69 cm, Collection of the Artist

tionally. Seeing the abandonment of traditional mediums as an opportunity to attain new expressive possibilities, ink artists also experimented outside conventional formats, subjects, and styles. Particularly inspired by such overseas artists as Zhao Wuji (Zao Wou-ki) and Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong), who lectured in China in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as by Gu Wenda’s work of the 1980s, ink artists sought to create a modernist revolution in China’s indigenous artistic medium. Ink art had played a role, even if comparatively small, in the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition. By the 1990s, encouraged by critic Pi Daojian, a group of abstract ink artists were grouped together as pioneers of “experimental ink art.” By 1998 they had achieved some recognition both domestically and abroad and were featured in the Second Shanghai Biennale in 1998, in A Century in Crisis, a major exhibition of modern Chinese art held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao, Spain, in 1998, and in Inside Out in New York and San Francisco.9 The calligrapher Wang Dongling (b. 1945), strongly influenced by Japanese modernism, seeks to imbue his work with the power of gesture, scale, and design [fig. 12.29]. Zhang Yu (b. 1959) is less interested in the purely formal properties of ink and more in the expressive capabilities of his illusionism [fig. 12.30]. He describes his goal as to stimulate the subconscious and create an alternative spiritual world, a contrast to the rapidly changing environment in which his viewers actually live, with its disturbing problems of pollution, corruption, terrorism, epidemics, and war. Zhang’s ink pursues the image of cosmic truth. Other artists, in search of cultural identity in the global artistic context, adopt the materials of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy to represent the purity and sensitivity of the indigenous ink aesthetic. Some expand beyond the two-dimensional format of the calligraphy and painting tradition into new media. Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969), intensely engaged in the materiality of his project, applies a deconstructionist approach to the idea of calligraphy in a work that was at once a performance piece, a video, and a work of art on paper [fig.  12.31]. Assignment No. 1: Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” a Thousand Times began with a calligraphic exercise—copying a famous text believed to represent the hand of the patriarch of Chinese calligraphy, Wang Xizhi. Qi Zhijie reused the same paper over and over, eventually transforming this venerable calligraphic model into an illegible sea of black ink. Artists of the 1990s in China turned for subject matter to a range of social and political issues, from the individual to the social, economic, political, and cultural. Painful examinations of the raw human body, images of China’s unfortunate  

12.30  Zhang Yu (b. 1959), Light of Spirit Series (No. 49): The Floating Sphere, 1996, ink on paper, 178 × 96 cm, Collection of the Artist

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12.31  Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969), Assignment No. 1: Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” a Thousand Times, 1990–95, video and photograph, ink, calligraphic text on rice paper, Collection of Hanart, TZ Gallery, Hong Kong  

“superfluous people,” manipulation of the icons of socialist realism and of Maoism, exploration of common cultural memories, ironic analyses of consumer culture, troubling reflection on urban reconstruction, and occasional engagements with the burden of Chinese tradition emerge among the many themes of Chinese art today.10 The formal and technical experiments of the 1980s, which brought installation art, video art, and performance art, among other new expressive means, into their vocabulary led to a reconfiguration of the mental world of artists and curators. In the 1990s categorization by medium, such as oil, ink, or woodcut, was challenged, and by the new millennium, official exhibitions, such as the Shanghai Biennale, began to reflect this change. New media were officially accepted as part of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, and from this time on, exhibitions have incorporated both new media and new concepts. The conceptual developments of the 1990s broke through into a more mature understanding of postmodernism on the part of both the artists and the new generation of curators and arts administrators in China. At the same time, the extraordinary changes in China’s physical, social, and economic environment provide constant subject matter for artistic commentary and representation. The intention signaled by a “No U-Turn” sign hung outside the 1989 China/Avant-Garde show was finally realized, many years later, as a result of the persistent hard work of artists during the past two decades, beginning with those in the underground between 1989 and 1992. Propaganda and formalism have both been left behind, and postmodern approaches are part of the mainstream. Social commentary has emerged as a constant element of China’s contemporary art. As the then-young artists and curators of the 1980s had hoped, China has joined the international art world. At the end of the millennium, as they so boldly proclaimed in 1989, there was no turning back.

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13

The New Millennium, and the Chinese Century?

A mantra appearing in Chinese publications beginning the mid-1990s, long before the Western financial press took up the chant, was that the twenty-first century will belong to China. This was a popular concept behind which Chinese of all backgrounds and political orientations could unite, one that might wipe away memories of national shame in the semicolonial nineteenth century and tragedy in the strife-torn twentieth. For art, and perhaps for Chinese culture more generally, the 2000 Shanghai Biennale fulfilled the historical potential of the moment and launched the Chinese art world into an international orbit. Held from November 6, 2000, to January 6, 2001, at the newly renovated Shanghai Art Museum, the 2000 Shanghai Biennale chose as its title the punning Haishang/ Shanghai, which in the original Chinese suggests both the city’s history and future as an international trading center. The Shanghai Cultural Bureau and municipal government made the unprecedented decision to enlist two foreign curators to join two Shanghai curators in implementing a fully international event. One of the two was a notable choice, the very active Paris-based curator Hou Hanru, who as a member of the 1989 China/Avant-Garde curatorial team had coined its English title. He had emigrated to France in 1990 and in 1999 was selected to curate the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale. To represent France in 1999, Hou Hanru chose Huang Yongping (b. 1954), who had become a French citizen: he was represented as well by a powerful work in the 2000 biennial [fig. 13.1]. Hou Hanru and the Shanghai Art Museum curators Zhang Qing and Li Xu were joined by the Tokyo-based Toshio Shimizu, thus establishing conditions for a global selection of works. Depending on how one defines their nationality, about thirty-five artists from China (including Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997) showed their works alongside thirty-two others from Europe, North America, Australia, and other parts of Asia. 279

13.1 Huang Yongping (b. 1954), Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, 2000, installation, sand, concrete, at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale , 350 × 607 × 438 cm, Collection of Guan Yi, Beijing

Perhaps even more significant than the international roster of participants was that the event demonstrated official Chinese support for contemporary art selected in accordance with global standards. The Shanghai Biennale thus established a clear alternative to the official exhibitions that had been held in Beijing, Shanghai, and all over China at regular intervals since 1949. Those exhibitions were strictly defined by medium: oil painting, guohua (traditional Chinese) painting, sculpture, or woodblock prints, in a fossilized system that was in some ways more conceptually conservative than the organizationally immature 1929 National Art Exhibition. The Shanghai Biennale sought to show the most up-to-date in installation art, video art, and other new media, along with more conventional formats, thus thoroughly breaking down the academic boundaries that still restricted the contemporary Chinese art world. Although critics pointed out a few instances in which foreign artists were not able to fully realize their conceptions, in general reviewers were exhilarated with the promise this exhibition offered for the future. Official sponsorship for the biennial by the city government, which in a previous era had been in charge of implementing state controls on art, was not entirely without its own agenda. Most evident in the curatorial selection for this biennial was a complete rejection of both socialist realism and the old-fashioned realist oil painting that had replaced it in China’s official mainstream. Now thinking more of 280

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economic development than of ideology, administrators in the mayor’s office realized that art could convey a positive image of Shanghai’s openness and cosmopolitan attitudes— and of its potential to become Asia’s next global city. This intersection in Shanghai of the global and the local, the official and the unofficial, had other significant and long-lasting effects. Dozens of privately organized satellite exhibitions accompanied the biennial, including a particularly provocative one organized by iconoclastic veterans of the Beijing avant-garde, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. Local authorities, treating these as free-market commercial activities, did not interfere until public health inspectors insisted that a work of art involving rotting meat be removed for sanitary reasons. This laissez-faire attitude reinforced Shanghai’s image abroad as a center of cultural and economic opportunity. At the same time, the positive critical response, both inside China and internationally, had a great impact on official attitudes toward such international events and to previously marginalized art forms such as installation, video, and photography. The Shanghai Biennale marked an epochal institutional change in the art world of the People’s Republic of China.  

The Emergence of Chinese Art in International Biennials of the 1990s

The structural changes in China’s art world in the new millennium were founded on developments both domestically

and internationally during the 1990s. The end of the Cold War had brought a sudden expansion to the geographic sphere of interest of Western institutions of contemporary art. Although a few curators had sought to bridge the gap between China and the West in the 1980s, it was not until the 1990s, possibly affected by the widespread international sympathy for China’s citizens following the June  4, 1989, massacre, that they had some success in bringing Chinese artists to international attention.1 Further stimulated by scholarly trends such as postmodernism and postcolonialism, in the 1990s Western curators sought to correct the virtual exclusion of artists from the developing world that had characterized the Western discourse on modern art since World War II. This trend was most notable in Europe, but by the end of the decade the American art world had followed. Two institutions in New York, the Guggenheim and the Asia Society, commissioned exhibitions of modern Chinese art that opened in 1998.2 The Museum of Modern Art expanded its sphere of interest to include China over the course of the decade, between 2000 and 2010.3 Development of this trend was facilitated by the internationally oriented Chinese critics and curators who poured out of China after 1989 and were well situated to interpret contemporary Chinese art for Western audiences. Among those based in Europe were Beijing-educated art historians Fei Dawei and Hou Hanru. In 1987 the Pompidou Center in Paris enlisted Fei Dawei to help with Magicians of the

13.2  Yang Jiechang (b. 1956), 100 Layers of Ink: Voyage in Mexico, 1990, ink on xuan paper and gauze, 300 × 190 cm, Collection of the Artist

Earth, an enormously ambitious show of art from all over the globe.4 An enthusiast of the ’85 New Wave movement, he introduced Yang Jiechang (b. 1956) [fig.  13.2], Huang Yongping, and Gu Dexin to represent China. As it happened, the exhibition opened in the spring of 1989, leaving Fei and the Chinese artists stranded in Paris after June 4. The following year, Fei went on to curate what may have been the first show of the Chinese avant-garde in the West, a selection of installations by Huang Yongping, Chen Zhen (b. 1955) [fig.  13.3], Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957), Gu Wenda, Yang Jiechang, and Yan Peiming exhibited in Paris, represented here by slightly later works.5 In 1991, Fei Dawei curated a project in Fukuoka for which were commissioned site-specific installations by Huang Yongping, Gu Wenda, Yang Jiechang, Cai Guoqiang, and a three-man group called the New Analysts (Xin kedu xiaozu).6 Hou Hanru, who arrived in Paris in 1990, began his formal curatorial career in 1994, and through his subsequent interpretive writing and curating has gone on to very effectively situate contemporary Chinese art in the international context.7 In North America, Zheng Shengtian and Gao Minglu have played an important role, along with Wu Hung, who emigrated to the United States a decade earlier. In the 1990s, by attracting critical attention outside China to Chinese art, they laid the groundwork for what happened inside China after 2000. Chinese avant-garde artists, for whom domestic exhibition opportunities remained almost nonexistent, became increasingly interested in international exhibitions in the

13.3  Chen Zhen (1955–2000), Jue Chang—Fifty Strokes Each, 1998, installation with chairs and bed frames converted into drums

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13.4  Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957), Venice Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999, performance, installation, sixty tons of clay, wire and wooden armatures (108 life-sized sculptures realized on site by Long Xuli and nine guest artisan sculptors),at the Forty-Eighth Venice Biennale, Deposito Polveri, Arsenale

1990s. The whimsical Wu Shanzhuan, to take only one example, injected himself into the Ninth Documenta in 1992 on his own terms. Then studying in Germany, he traveled to Kassel, where he engaged in two months of manual labor as part of his series, “Tourist Information.” The performance was documented at the end by a certificate declaring him a “Labor[er] of Kassel,” which he “validated” by stamping it with his Red Humor International seal and by obtaining signatures from Jan Hoet, Documenta’s curator, and a number of artists who participated in the official exhibition.8 The following year, 1993, Francesca dal Lago, a young Venetian Sinologist who had worked at the Italian embassy in Beijing, helped obtain formal invitations for about a dozen Chinese avant-garde painters to show with the emerging artists at the Forty-Fifth Venice Biennale. The New Wave artists and the critics who supported them, all of whom were so thoroughly frustrated at home, were exhilarated by the possibility of breaking into the international art scene in this way. For the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial, Chang 282

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Tsung-zong, the curator of China’s New Art Post-89, organized half a dozen painters (including Zhang Xiaogang, Yu Youhan, Wang Guangyi, Liu Wei, Li Shan, Fang Lijun), along with Deng Xiaoping’s artist-daughter, Deng Lin, as participants. The Forty-Sixth Venice Biennale of 1995, on the theme of Identity and Alterity, showed Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Wei, and Yan Peiming. The newly established Gwangju (Kwangju) Biennial in Korea (in 1995) and the Fukuoka Triennial in Japan (in 1999) also included a number of such internationally oriented Chinese artists. The culmination of this trend may have come in 1999, when curator Harald Szeeman selected so many Chinese artists (more than twenty) for the Forty-Eighth Venice Biennale that few critics could ignore their emergence. Cai Guoqiang’s work, Rent Collection Courtyard in Venice, was an extended performance in which an old socialist-realist sculptor partially reconstructed the 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard [fig. 13.4; also see fig. 9.2], an assemblage he had helped create decades earlier. Cai Guoqiang was awarded the Golden Lion award

13.5 Weng Fen (b. 1961), Sitting on the Wall-Guangzhou (2), 2002, photograph, 122.5 × 176.5 cm, The Uli Sigg Collection

for his piece. With the 1999 Venice Biennale it was evident that the new art movement in China, with little support at home, had established itself as the mainstream of Chinese art abroad. China’s Biennial Decade: 2000 – 2010  

A biennial boom welcomed the new millennium in China, as it did in other developing parts of Asia. A significant change in China’s official position on art was initiated in the context of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale. The Shanghai Biennale continued to function as a truly international exhibition for the duration of the decade, with international curators from Japan, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as artists from all over the world. The 2002 theme, Urban Creation, provoked artists and architects to respond to the city in both conceptual and physical terms [figs.  13.5, 13.6, and 13.7]. The show included, for the first time, interactive Internet work. Techniques of the Visible, in 2004, featured striking new uses of photography, projection, digital media, film, video, installations, performances, and other forms new to China. The year 2006 brought contemporary design to Shanghai in a biennial titled Hyperdesign. The last of this decade, Translocal Motion, the 2008 biennial, focused on the city, rapid change, and dislocated people. For some critics

13.6  Zhang Jianjun (b. 1955), Ink Garden, 2002, installation, ink and mixed media, 240 cm high, at the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, Collection of the Artist

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13.7  Yang Zhenzhong (b. 1968), Let’s Puff! 2002, video installation, Collection of Shangart Gallery, Shanghai

13.8  Xu Bing (b. 1955), Tree, Stone, and Stream, 2008, ink on paper, 60 × 370 cm, Collection of the Artist

the Shanghai Biennale now comprises one stop on an Asian biennial circuit, followed by the Gwangju Biennial and the Taipei Biennial, all of which take place in the same year. Many other Chinese cities sought to make their mark in the Chinese art world during this decade of biennials. Two, in particular, provided exhibition platforms that further opened up the Chinese art world to international art forms and concepts still outside China’s official mainstream. Important for its position in the newly prosperous inland province of Sichuan, Chengdu initiated its biennial in 2001 with funding entirely from an art-loving local businessman and the vague approval of municipal authorities. Over the course of its four exhibitions, it has displayed a wide range of artistic approaches practiced primarily by Chinese and overseas Chinese artists.9 Perhaps unique in this decade, in 2007 the show focused on ink art, with international curators attempting to bring this indigenous form of expression and its varied aesthetic qualities into a contemporary arena [fig.  13.8]. The First Guangzhou Triennial, of 2002, set the stage for its future developments with a retrospective titled Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990–2000 [fig. 13.9]. The successive events, Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization, in 2005, and Farewell to Post-colonialism, in 2008, explored interactions between center and local and provocatively challenged rote references to postcolonial theory. This  

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13.9 Wang Jianwei (b. 1958), Production, 1996, video, Collection of the Artist.

13.10 He Jiaying (b. 1958), A Break in the Dance, 2011, ink and color on paper, 195 × 115 cm, Collection of the Artist

venue, in one of China’s earliest treaty ports, and in such close proximity to Hong Kong and Macao, is a particularly suitable one for sensitive explorations of issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, diasporic cultural positioning, and alternative modernities. In 2003 cultural authorities in Beijing established the Beijing Biennial to avert the possibility that China’s mainstream academic art might become as marginalized at home as it was abroad. Adopting a rather different approach to internationalization, the Chinese curators for the Beijing Biennial initially focused on the historic fraternal diplomatic partners of the PRC in the former Eastern Bloc, and particularly countries in the Third World. Participating

countries were greatly expanded in successive biennials, but a basically conservative aesthetic approach—one that might be characterized as “academic,” “official,” or “mainstream”—has characterized its selection and awards. In particular, painting and sculpture were dominant throughout the decade [fig.  13.10]. In 2005 the Chinese Ministry of Culture established an official Chinese pavilion at Venice. The 2005 and 2007 exhibitions were curated by overseas Chinese Cai Guoqiang and Hou Hanru, but subsequent showings have turned to curators based in China. The participation of Chinese artists in international biennials and multinational thematic exhibitions has expanded the nature of their work in a variety of ways. One of the  

 

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13.11 Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963), Three Gorges: Displaced Population (two of four panels), 2003, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm each, Collection of the Artist

ticipated. Those with international inclinations were able to witness firsthand the response to their works and also, for the first time, to see the art of their foreign colleagues with their own eyes. Chinese artists and critics of the 1980s had sought to understand the international art world by looking at magazines and books, but by the mid-1990s they began to have the advantage of eyewitness accounts. This was particularly important for artists who worked in new media. The prevalence of thematic exhibitions that were designed by individual curators as a forum for creative intellectual and artistic interaction was liberating for Chinese artists in the 1990s. Participation in such shows challenged them to respond to new creative visions with work that would have universal relevance. As we have seen, artists increasingly began to turn their attention to social issues, phenomena such as migration [fig.  13.11], urban redevelopment, social dislocation [fig.  13.12], poverty, environmental pollution [fig. 13.13], and public health. In the new millennium some Chinese artists transformed postcolonial approaches—in particular those probing the interactions of center and periphery, hegemonic powers and subaltern groups, or the conflicts between global and local that were prevalent in international exhibitions—to suit China’s particular situation [fig. 13.14]. For the more socially critical artists the center came to represent China’s own central government, and the colonized periphery her own local regions. The international, the national, the local, and the individual might be layered in complex conceptual formulations [figs. 13.15, 13.16, and 13.17].  

13.12  Cui Xiuwen (b. 1970), Ladies, 2000, two stills from video, 6 minutes 20 seconds, Collection of the Artist

 

most fundamental conditions for the internationalization of art was the Chinese government’s decision to give its private citizens freedom to travel abroad without penalty at home. Now artists were free to come and go on short visits, and many attended the overseas exhibitions in which they par286

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13.13  Yang Shaobing (b. 1963), X—Blind Spot, 2008, still from video, 11 minutes 22 seconds, Collection of the Artist  

13.14  Zhan Wang (b. 1955), Urban Landscape, 2005, installation, Anderson Gallery, University at Buffalo, Collection of the Artist

13.15  Zhong Biao (b. 1968), For the Future, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 440 × 723 cm, Collection of the Artist

13.16  Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963), Making Cities, 2005, mixed-media installation at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Collection of the Artist

In the 1990s Chinese art was introduced to audiences abroad through its participation in biennials and thematic exhibitions outside China. In China’s biennial decade, the 2000s, exhibitions on an international model were institutionalized as part of the internal workings of the Chinese art world and attracted foreign artists, critics, and curators to make a journey in the opposite direction—from the West to China.  

The Suzhou Museum

13.17 Hai Bo (b. 1962), Them No. 5, 2000, photograph, 160 × 180 cm each, Collection of the Artist

Since the mid-1990s, thousands of new buildings, some of them colossal in scale and many of them designed by foreign firms, have been constructed in cities all over China. The ambitious commissions have turned China’s cities into an experimental field for innovative new designs by architects of many countries working in a variety of different idioms. One of the most distinctive is the Suzhou Museum, designed by the Chinese American architect I. M. Pei (b. 1917), whose family lived in Suzhou for several generations and who spent summers in his grandfather’s Suzhou garden estate as a child. Unlike the palace-style adaptive architecture that dominated public buildings of the Republican period and that remains popular for new buildings today, Pei chose the more intimate and elegant proportions of a Suzhou residential garden as his inspiration for the new museum [fig. 13.18].

13.18 Suzhou Museum, designed by I. M. Pei (b. 1917), completed in 2006, Suzhou

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289

Appropriate to the site, which is adjacent to a famous Ming garden, the Zhuozhengyuan (Humble Administrator’s Garden), the building is relatively low, and its airy galleries are stretched across the grounds in a fashion that suggests the courtyards and corridors of a traditional domestic compound. Combining the clean lines and geometric shapes of modernist architecture—as well as its glass, steel, and stone—with the gray and white tonalities, unpainted wood, artfully arranged windows and vegetation, flowing watercourses, outdoor walkways, and sculptural rockeries of the most elegant Suzhou architecture, Pei’s design brings out the modern tendencies in Ming architecture to create a clean, quiet, yet intensely humane setting. The visitor may amble from one wing of the museum to the other by crossing a stone walkway above an artificial pond. From the garden, as from the main lobby, one gazes at a carefully placed rockery that creates a mountain landscape against the plain garden wall. Surrounded, as any Suzhou garden would be, by a high white wall, the new museum, which opened in 2006, is peacefully set off from the surrounding city, recreating the feeling of the refined gardens and courtyards where much of the art on display would have originally been enjoyed by the collectors for whom it was made.  

 

13.19 Wang Yidong (b. 1963), Bees Buzzing, 2000, oil on canvas, 150 × 100, Collection of the Artist

The Market

In the new millennium, implementation of market-­oriented economic reforms created additional zones of freedom that Chinese artists had not enjoyed for many decades. One of great significance was the right to sell their works through private channels. The new trade in art was initiated in the 1990s by overseas Chinese, who enjoyed a special position of trust among foreign nationals, and was facilitated by the appearance of new galleries and art dealers in greater China—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—that bought contemporary Chinese art of various styles for sale abroad. Artists whose works were popular with these dealers and their collectors were able to make a good living completely independent of the Chinese state. Intentionally or not, by granting this economic freedom, the state largely relinquished its ability to control art. It should be stressed that the fruits of the new commercial market were enjoyed primarily by artists in the mainstream, particularly guohua painters and realist oil painters [fig. 13.19], but that the market also provided necessary conditions for the survival of the avant-garde [fig.  13.20]. With independent sources of income, artists were free from many material restraints that had kept them tied to the system. Yet for all artists, whether former socialist-realists or abstract ink painters, moving their art simultaneously into an inter­national context and a commercial one required rethinking basic artistic aims.  

13.20 Sui Jianguo (b. 1956), Legacy Mantle, 1997, painted fiberglass, 139.7 × 109.2 cm, Collection of the Artist

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The new millennium saw an unprecented development— the proliferation in China’s cities, especially Shanghai and Beijing, of modern art galleries. Like the appearance of domestic biennials after 2000, high-quality local galleries gave China’s artists new opportunities without leaving the country’s borders. Before 1949, and even in imperial times, China had a lively art market, but it never adopted a modern commercial gallery system of the Parisian or New York variety. The 1930s did see the appearance of high-quality exhibitions for sale in Shanghai department stores, a marketing model that was prevalent in Tokyo and Osaka at the time, but this was abandoned in China after 1949. In the early decades of the PRC, traditional art shops, such as Rongbaozhai in Beijing or Duoyunxuan in Shanghai, handled what little art was still sold to private individuals. After the Cultural Revolution, art shops resumed active sales of guohua. In addition, for a time in the 1980s art by wellknown contemporary artists could be purchased by foreign visitors using special nonconvertible currency at small shops in hotels or art schools. A small number of alternative venues opened in the 1990s, some with official backing. In 1992 the progressive chairman of the Beijing Artists Association, Liu Xun (1923–2007), masterminded the opening of a highly visible commercial gallery for contemporary Chinese art as part of a new hotel project (now the Holiday Inn Crown Plaza) built on land that was previously the artists association offices.10 With windows on a bustling commercial street halfway between the Chinese National Art Gallery and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, near the People’s Art Theater, it enjoyed a location with promise to become a node in a new arts district. The gallery’s septuagenarian founder threw himself into the previously banned practice of abstract expressionism, and the gallery attempted to push open both the market and the nature of art. Although its essentially modernist aims would be superseded before they were fully attained, the official enterprise was important as a statement of support for two distinctly un-Maoist ideas: an aesthetic, nonpolitical purpose for art, and a free market. Both ideas considered the well-being of the individual rather than the collectivity. Artists disaffected from the mainstream began creatively taking advantage of the transitional state of China’s legal system after 1992 to mount installations, performances, and happening-like events in various nontraditional public venues. Unofficial publishing was an equally enticing possibility for the enterprising writer. Although quite a few such efforts were closed down or censored, artists often manipulated such confrontations with nameless authorities, as well as loopholes in enforcement of ideological controls, for their  

 

own purposes.11 Although economic policy was constantly under revision, the authorities did not establish a clear cultural policy in the 1990s, leaving it to the artists to challenge existing norms and see what happened. By the 2000s censorship of art was so much less frequent and varied so greatly from city to city that it acquired an entirely random quality. Nevertheless, although it became increasingly challenging for those who actively sought the drama of seeing their exhibition closed by the police, the survival of its threat still inspires self-censorship or the kind of creative ambiguity with which Chinese artists in imperial days were so proficient. Of particular significance in the first half of the decade was the emergence of foreign-owned galleries that initially sold mainly to other foreigners. The first of them were very modest, and were often located within the confines of internationally owned or managed hotels. Australian Brian Wallace ran the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing’s China World Hotel throughout the 1990s, but in 1999 he reestablished it in a dramatic site atop the old city gate at Dongzhimen. Lorenz Helbling, who studied history, Chinese, and art history in Zurich and Shanghai, opened Shangart at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai in 1996. In 1999, Helbling was able to establish a small independent gallery in Shanghai’s Fuxing Park, in the former French concession, where he continued to sell primarily to foreign collectors. Despite the unassuming appearance of his gallery, it established a high degree of professionalism in its catalogs, documentation, and publicity, becoming important in the eventual emergence of some Chinese artists in Europe, particularly at Documenta, and in bringing Chinese artists to the attention of international collectors at Art Basel and other international art fairs. In 1997 a Chinese American lawyer, Handel Lee, opened the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing in the basement of a beautifully renovated imperial structure, a former ice house bordering the moat east of the Forbidden City. In 2004 he went on to found Shanghai Art Gallery in the elegantly restored Three on the Bund building in Shanghai, and in 2008 he opened a third gallery in the Legation Quarter, site of the nineteenth-century American embassy in Beijing. By about 1997 a few galleries owned by individual Chinese also appeared in Shanghai and Beijing, usually run by artists who had returned from Japan or the West. Since 2000, however, artists have enjoyed an even greater range of domestic venues in which their art may be displayed and marketed to the public. Urban arts districts now serve as locations of display, sale, research, education, and artistic production. The two most important to have developed over the course of the past decade are the 798 Art District at Dashanzi in Beijing and 50 Moganshan Road, The New Mi llennium, and the Chinese Century ?

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13.21 Shen Yuan (b. 1959), A Morning of the World, 2000, installation, wood, tiles, mixed media, 900 × 800 × 120 cm, at the Kunsthalle de Berne, Switzerland

near the Suzhou River in Shanghai. Like Soho or Chelsea in New York, both districts began by attracting artists’ studios and commercial art galleries to their large spaces with cheap rental prices. The 798 Art District, founded in the capital in 2001, is unquestionably the best known area and has led to a proliferation of small so-called “798s” in cities all over China. The huge complex was originally built in the mid1950s, on plans developed in East Berlin, as a military factory for advanced electronics. The Bauhaus-style structure is ideal for art, and even before the factory was completely vacated some art studios and galleries had begun to move in. One of the earliest commercial galleries, Yukihito Tabata’s Tokyo/Beijing Art Projects, which opened in a large, vaulted space in 2002, was assisted in its Beijing design by Huang Rui, the former Stars artist who returned from Japan in 2000. A foreign-owned art bookstore and publisher, Timezone 8, provides support for both artists and overseas collectors. Following the artists, a host of other foreign-owned galleries also opened at 798, culminating in 2007 with the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, which owned such ambitious works as Shen Yuan’s A Morning of the World [fig. 13.21], and New York’s Pace Gallery in 2008. A majority of the hundreds of galleries are Chinese-owned. A market survey conducted by the Central Academy of Fine Arts concluded that patrons for art in Beijing’s rapidly increasing galleries were almost 292

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entirely foreign up until about 2005 but began to change thereafter, and by 2008 the patrons were primarily domestic. The Dashanzi area, now much tidier than in its early stage as an art district, has attracted offices for photographers, designers, and advertising agencies. It is also developing an entertainment culture, with bars, boutiques, and restaurants. The 50 Moganshan Art District in Shanghai plays a similar role. At the end of the 1990s, many state-run factories along the Suzhou River in Shanghai were relocated, leaving huge abandoned tracts of real estate behind. As early as 1997, Taiwanese architect Deng Kunyan (Teng K’un-yen) renovated an empty warehouse near the Suzhou River into a modernist studio and living space. When factories moved out, artists moved in, converting dozens of old warehouses, some of which were used to display satellite exhibitions during the 2000 biennial. Recognizing this development, by 2002 a huge former textile factory at 50 Moganshan Road in the former British section of Shanghai was declared the center of an arts district, and more and more artists, designers, photographers, and architects set up studios inside. Shangart expanded at Moganshan, occupying a prominent central location, but was only one of an increasing number of galleries to concentrate in the area. In the new millennium artists have many more options for selling their work, both domestically and abroad, as do both Chinese and for-

eign collectors for acquiring it. The gallery system, however, and the artists’ relationship to it, has remained immature, possibly because many traditional patterns of economic interaction have resurfaced. One of the factors that has led to a business model somewhat different from that of the Western art world has been the reluctance of many artists to establish an exclusive relationship with a single gallery. This lack of control has made it more difficult for galleries to set appropriate prices. The auction market, in a way unique to the Chinese environment, has partially fulfilled this role. The most sensational development of the new millennium, primarily because of the large sums of money involved and the very public nature of the sales, has been the successful expansion of auction houses into the contemporary art market. When Sotheby’s held its first auction of contemporary Chinese oil paintings in New York in 2006, a painting by Zhang Xiaogang sold for three times the published estimate, reaching almost a million dollars. The following year, one of his works brought $3.8 million and by one report, in 2008 auction sales of his work amounted to more than $44 million.12 Breaking all records for contemporary Chinese art, in 2008 a Zeng Fanzhi painting sold for $9.7 million at Christie’s in Hong Kong. Because auction houses, at least by Western convention, primarily serve a secondary market by bringing works owned by private or institutional collections into open public bidding, such profits often did not go to the artist. However, as early as this first Sotheby’s auction, some artists began consigning work directly to the auction houses. Needless to say, high auction prices also raised the prices for their own future sales. China had established its own domestic auctions following the economy’s reopening in the early 1990s. The Shanghai art shop Duoyunxuan, for example, also opened an auction house in 1992 and by the end of the decade sold its most valuable stock only in public bidding. In 1993 a new auction house in Beijing, China Guardian (Jiade), was founded as a domestic alternative for the sale of Chinese antiquities. By the new millennium, Beijing auction houses had begun to realize higher prices for Chinese art than did their counterparts abroad, and premodern paintings and objects previously in foreign collections began to flow back into the Chinese market. Auction houses multiplied in cities and towns all over China, bringing work at all levels of quality and value out of private collections and artists studios into public view. The big auctions also began to attract some foreign bidders, and in the mid-2000s sales by Chinese auction houses of modern and contemporary Chinese art began to rise. It was only with the high-priced results of the Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions of 2006 and 2007, however, that China’s

domestic market began to sizzle. Even after the 2008 international banking crisis, the 2009 domestic art auctions in China (premodern and modern) are estimated to have brought in more than 21 billion Chinese yuan ($3 billion U.S.). In the spring of 2010, Chinese auctions accounted for 25 percent of art sales at auction worldwide. Through the auction process some painters saw the market value of their work increase more than a hundredfold in only a few years. The extraordinary behavior of the market immediately before the world financial crisis of 2008 had both positive and negative effects on the Chinese art world. With frequent favorable attention in the world financial press, contemporary Chinese art conclusively broke out of the limited circles of Asian art collectors or Chinese studies specialists who had been its primary enthusiasts. International collectors of Western contemporary art, and the institutions to which they offered their support, now began to engage with contemporary Chinese art to an unprecedented degree. Moreover, unlike the 1990s, in which a few Chinese artists who had come out of China were seen in international venues, in the 2000s the international art world came to China, firmly establishing China’s presence on the world stage. At the same time, the market frenzy produced a frantic atmosphere that many artists found distracting. Sudden fame and wealth always present perils, but particularly challenging in this case was to maintain a healthy creative perspective after being labeled a good “brand” by the international business community. Furthermore, allegations of the heavy involvement of short-term speculators, as opposed to serious collectors, and even talk of market manipulation, caused some observers concern about the health of the market. Perhaps as a result, some younger artists, observing the rapidity with which their elders became rich, focused too intently on instant financial success. Growing Chinese economic, diplomatic, and cultural self-confidence have reconfigured the Chinese art world. During the preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, hundreds of new museums and exhibition centers were built all over China. Artists and curators now have boundless opportunities for creative display of art. Art schools have built new state-of-the art campuses and have dramatically increased their enrollments. In 2009 the Ministry of Culture co-opted former iconoclasts, many of whom are now art market stars, by appointing twenty-one honorary fellows to the Contemporary Art Academy of China, newly established to further institutionalize the avant-garde. In 2010, for the first time since 2000, the Shanghai Biennale was organized only by domestic curators. The sector of the Chinese art world that has come to The New Mi llennium, and the Chinese Century ?

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13.22 Li Jin (b. 1958), Delicious (detail), 2006, ink and color on paper, 38 × 82.5 cm, Collection of the Artist

13.23 Li Huayi (b. 1948), Dragon amidst Mountain Ridge, 2006–2009, six-panel screen with hanging scroll in front, ink and color on paper, each panel: 185.5 × 93 cm, hanging scroll: 205.3 × 109.5 cm, Collection of Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang

13.24 Pan Gongkai (b. 1947), Snow Melt, 2010, ink painting printed on canvas, with animation projected, 300 × 2,000 cm, the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum

world attention in the context of China’s rising economic stature has been internationally oriented art. A significant segment of the Chinese art scene, its ink artists, despite their unflagging popularity at home, has largely escaped notice overseas [fig. 13.22]. Although at domestic auction, if one includes firms in small cities, guohua brings overall sales figures as large as those for oil painting, with a few conspicuous examples [fig. 13.23], it remains of little interest to observers outside. The most interesting guohua artists follow neither a completely traditional path nor emulate the avantgarde, but engage with contemporary conceptual, aesthetic, and social issues from their own perspective. Ink painter Pan Gongkai (b. 1947), resisting critical condemnations that guohua has marginalized itself by a backward-looking narrative, creates colossal installations from his sensitively brushed ink lotuses. In recent work he digitally projected Chinese characters that fell like snow on his monochromatic mural painting of lotus stems and blossoms. Pan’s elegant ink painting, even more astringent than the work of his father, Pan Tianshou, exemplifies the epigraphic flavor and abstract power of literati painting in a way few other contemporary painters can match [fig. 13.24]. Yet, reaching further, in his projects combining his mastery of traditional technique with new media and technological concepts, he seeks to renew the expressive potential of literati painting. Shanghai-based Wang Tiande (b.  1960) adopts a more deconstructive approach to Chinese painting in a series of pseudo-landscapes in which he carefully burns away the forms of mountains, trees, and characters with incense sticks [fig. 13.25]. By this means he creates the impression of a landscape painting by the absence of painted image within charred outlines. He then loosely mounts the translucent paper, with its blackened quasi-outlines, over a simple, rather routine ink-painted landscape, which renders the underlayer hazy and creates surprisingly harmonious juxtapositions of form, texture, and hue. Perhaps most important, Wang’s work demonstrates the ambiguity of the contemporary artist’s relationship to painting conventions of the past: his obsession with the landscape composition while he laboriously destroys it. The iconoclastic Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957), who has lived abroad for a quarter century, now constantly returns to concerns that have dominated Chinese thought and aesthetic theory for more than a millennium, particularly such philo­ sophical questions as the relationship between humankind and nature or between nature and the cosmos. Recent works from an extensive series in which Cai produces delicate abstract images by igniting gunpowder on a paper ground have begun to suggest landscapes, vegetation, and

13.25 Wang Tiande (b. 1960), Digital_No.08_HL06, 2007, ink and burn marks on paper, 177 × 39.5 cm, Collection of the Artist

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295

13.26  Cai Guoqiang (b. 1957), A Certain Lunar Eclipse: Project for Humankind No. 2, 1991, gunpowder and ink on paper, mounted on wood as sevenpanel screen, 200 × 595 cm, private collection, Hong Kong

other natural forms. The artist himself compares his pale and restrained compositions to literati painting but leaves it to the viewer to consider the significance of an aesthetic parallel that is created by replacing ink with explosive powder [fig. 13.26]. It is much too early to speculate whether the present epoch will in the end be China’s century on the world stage, or how its art may choose (or not) to engage with this nationalistic aspiration. What we can say, looking back, is that many of the hopes and dreams of China’s modern

296

The New Millennium, and the Chinese Century ?

reformers have been realized. Artists, art museums, art publications, and art education of an international caliber may now be found within China’s own borders. In the new millennium the pluralistic art world Cai Yuanpei envisioned almost a century earlier has begun to emerge, with artists working in all media and in a range of styles. Perhaps most important for the revolutionaries who led Chinese culture out of its imperial past, modern Chinese art has diversified and matured, joining, as they so ardently sought to do, the international mainstream.

Glossary and List of Characters

Ai Qing Ai Weiwei Ai Zhongxin Anhui Anji Anyuan

艾青 艾未未 艾中信 安徽 安吉 安源

Bai Sha baihua baiwen Bao Shaoyou Bao Tianxiao Bao Yahui Beidahuang Beidou Beihai Beijing Beiping yizhuan Beiyang Beiyang huabao bingshen bogu Bujing chuanxi suo

白砂　 白話 白文 包少游 包天笑 鮑亞暉 北大荒 北斗 北海 北京 北平藝專 北洋 北洋畫報 丙申 博古 布景傳習所

bunjinga Bunkyudō Bunten Byōdoin

文人畫 文求堂 文展 平等院

cabi Cai Dizhi Cai Guoqiang Cai Liang Cai Ruohong Cai Weilian Cai Yuanpei Cai Zhaochu caimohua Cao Bai Cao Cao Chan, Luis (Chen Fushan) Chan Yuk Keung (Chen Yuqiang) Chang Dai-chien (see Zhang Daqian) Chang Hao (Zhang Hao)

擦筆 蔡迪支 蔡國強 蔡亮 蔡若虹 蔡威廉 蔡元培 蔡照初 彩墨畫 曹白 曹操 陳福善 陳育強

張灝

297

Chang Shu-chi (see Zhang Shuqi) Chang Shuhong Chang Tsong-zung (Zhang Songren) Chang Yu (Sanyu) Changming Changshu Chao Mei Chao Shao-an (Zhao Shao’ang) Chen Baoyi Chen Beixin Chen Boda Chen Cheng-po (Chen Chengbo) Chen Chieh-jen (Chen Jieren) Chen Chih-chi (Chen Zhiqi) Chen Chin (Chen Jin) Chen Danqing Chen Duxiu Chen Guoliang (Chen Xiaojiang) Chen Hengque (Chen Shizeng) Chen Hongshou Chen Hui-Chiao (Chen Huiqiao) Chen Jiu Chen Qiucao Chen Sanli Chen Shaomei Chen Shaoxiong Chen Shiwen Chen Shuren Chen Tiegeng Chen Xiaocui Chen Yanning Chen Yanqiao Chen Yifei Chen Yiming Chen Zhen Chen Zhifo Chenguang meishuhui Cheng Conglin Cheng Sui Chengdong nüxiao Chichu Chishe Chiang Chao-shen (Jiang Zhaoshen)

298

常書鴻 張頌仁 常玉 昌明 常熟 晁楣 趙少昂 陳抱一 諶北新 陳伯達 陳澄波 陳界仁 陳植棋 陳進 陳丹青 陳獨秀 陳國亮（陳曉江） 陳衡恪 （陳師曾） 陳洪綬 陳慧嶠 陳九 陳秋草 陳三立 陳少梅 陳劭雄 陳士文 陳樹人 陳鐵耕 陳小翠 陳衍寧 陳煙橋 陳逸飛 陳宜明 陳箴 陳之佛 晨光美術會 程叢林 程邃 城東女校 彳亍 池社 江兆申

Glossary and Li st of Char acters

Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo) Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) Chuang Che (Zhuang Zhe) Chuanqi Chunshui caotang Chunshui huayuan Cihai Cixi Conghua Cui Xiuwen Cui Yingying

蔣經國

Dagongbao (Ta Kung Pao) Dashanzi Daxueyuan Dayi Dangdai mingjia huahai Deyuelou Deng Erya Deng Fen Deng Shi Deng Xiaoping Di Baoxian (Di Chuqing, Di Pingzi) Dianchi Dianshizhai Dianshizhai huabao dianxing Ding Cong Ding Song Ding Wenwei Ding Wenyuan Ding Yanyong Dingyi Dong Biwu Dong Dayou Dong Qichang Dong Xiwen dongfang Dongfang zazhi Dongwu daxue Dou Yujun dougong Du Jian Du Wenlan Du Xueou Du Yuesheng

大公報 大山子 大學院 大邑 當代名家畫海 得月樓 鄧爾雅 鄧芬 鄧實 鄧小平 狄葆賢 (狄楚青, 狄平子) 滇池 點石齋 點石齋畫報 典型 丁聰 丁悚 丁文蔚 丁文元 丁衍庸 鼎裔 董必武 董大猷 董其昌 董希文 東方 東方雜誌 東吳大學 竇禹鈞 斗拱 杜健 杜文瀾 杜雪鷗 杜月笙

蔣介石 莊喆 傳奇 春睡草堂 春睡畫院 辭海 慈禧 從化 崔岫聞 崔鶯鶯

Duan Ganqing Duan Pingyou Dunhuang Duoyunxuan

段幹青 段平佑 敦煌 朵雲軒

Fahaisi Fan Tingzuo Fang Ganmin Fang Junbi Fang Lijun Fang Rending Fang Ruo Fang Xuehu Fang Zengxian Fei Dawei Feiyingge huabao Feng Boyi Feng Chaoran Feng Fasi Feng Gangbai Feng Mengbo Feng Shan Feng Shihan Feng Wenfeng Feng Zhongtie Feng Zikai Foshan Foziling Fu Baoshi Fu Lei Fuchun Fujishima Takeji Funü zazhi Futen Fuzhou

法海寺 范廷佐 方幹民 方君壁 方勵君 方人定 方若 方雪鵠 方增先 費大為 飛影閣畫報 馮博一 馮超然 馮法祀 馮鋼百 馮夢波 鳳山 馮師韓 馮文鳳 豐中鐵 豐子愷 佛山 佛子嶺 傅抱石 傅雷 富春 藤島武二 婦女雜誌 府展 福州

Gao Changhong Gao Gang Gao Hong Gao Jianfu Gao Jingde Gao Minglu Gao Qifeng Gao Xiaohua Gao Yong Ge Gongzhen Geng Jianyi Gōhara Kotō gongbi

高長虹 高崗 高虹 高劍父 高敬德 高名潞 高其峰 高小華 高邕 戈公振 耿建羿 鄉原古統 工筆

Goutu Gu Bingxin Gu Dexin Gu Fei Gu Kaizhi Gu Linshi Gu Qingyao (Koo Tsin Yaw) Gu Wenda Gu Xiong Gu Yuan gudao Gugong zhoukan Guhuan jinyushe Gutian Guwu chenliesuo Guxiangshi Guan Liang Guan Shanyue Guan Zilan Guang Tingbo Guangxu Guangzhou (Canton) gui Guo Morou guocui Guocui xuebao guohua Guohua yuekan Guohuajia jiying lianhe Guoli Hangzhou yishu zhuanke xuexiao Guomindang guoxue Guoxue congshu

構圖 顧炳鑫 顧德新 顧飛 顧愷之 顧麟士 顧青瑤 谷文達 顧雄 古元 孤島 故宮週刊 古懽今雨社 古田 古物陳列所 古香室 關良 關山月 關紫蘭 廣廷渤 光緒 廣州 鬹 郭沫若 國粹 國粹學報 國畫 國畫月刊 國畫家亟應聯合 國立杭州藝術專科學校

Ha Qiongwen Ha Shaofu Hai Bo Hai Rui Haishang molin Haishang tijinguan shuhuahui Haishang/Shanghai Hakubakai Hanjian Hankou Hao Boyi Haowangjiao Hashimoto Kansetsu He Baitao

哈琼文 哈少甫 海波 海瑞 海上墨林 海上題襟館書畫會 海上／上海 白馬會 漢奸 漢口 郝伯義 好望角 橋本關雪 何白濤

國民黨 國學 國學叢書

Glossary and List of Char acters

299

He Jiaying He Jianshi He Kongde He Sui He Tianjian He Xiangning He Youzhi Hengshan Hengyang Ho Siu-kee (He Zhaoji) Hong Kong Hong Xiuquan hong-guang-liang Hongkou Hongniang Hou Biyi Hou Hanru Hou Yimin Hsia Yang (Xia Yang) Hu Kao Hu Peiheng Hu Yaobang Hu Yichuan Hu Yuan (Hu Gongshou) Humen Hushe Hua Guofeng Hua Junwu Hua Shan Huafa yanjiuhui Huafangzhai huagao huajihua Hualongqiao huapian Huaxue yuekan Huang Binhong Huang Jie Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi) Huang Langping Huang Miaozi Huang Naiyuan Huang Rui Huang Shanding Huang Tushui Huang Xinbo Huang Yanpei

300

何家英 何劍士 何孔德 何燧 賀天健 何香凝 賀友直 衡山 衡陽 何兆基 香港 洪秀全 紅光亮 虹口 紅娘 侯碧漪 侯瀚如 侯逸民 夏陽 胡考 胡佩衡 胡耀邦 胡一川 胡遠（胡公壽） 虎門 湖社 華國鋒 華君武 華山 畫法研究會 畫舫齋 畫稿 滑稽畫 華龍橋 畫片 畫學月刊 黃賓虹 黃節 黃君璧 黃浪萍 黃苗子 黃乃源 黃銳 黃山定 黃土水 黃新波 黃炎培

Glossary and Li st of Char acters

Huang Yongping Huang Zhongfang (Harold Wong) Huangpu Huishi qianshuo

黃永砯 黃仲方

Ichikawa Kinichirō Itagaki Takao

石川欽一郎 板垣孝雄

Jilong Jinan Jia Youfu Jiade Jiajin Jiaxing Jianguo fanglüe shiye jihua Jiang Baoling Jiang Biwei Jiang Danshu Jiang Feng Jiang Huaisu Jiang Qing Jiang Tingxi Jiang Xin (Jiang Xiaojian) Jiang Zhaohe Jiangnan Jiangsu Jiangwan Jiangxi jiaocaihua Jiefang ribao Jimbōchō Jin Cheng Jin Fengsun Jin Nong Jin Shangyi Jingangpo Jin Xunhua Jinling jinshi jinshi jinyu Jing Hengyi Jiuhuatang Jiuwang ribao Ju Ming (Zhu Ming) Ju Lian juren

基隆 濟南 賈又福 嘉德 夾金 嘉興 建國方略實業計劃 蔣寶齡 蔣碧薇 姜丹書 江豐 姜懷素 江青 蔣廷錫 江新 (江小鶼) 蔣兆和 江南 江蘇 江灣 江西 膠彩畫 解放日報 神保町 金城 金逢孫 金農 靳尚誼 金剛坡 金訓華 金陵 進士 金石 金魚 經亨頤 九華堂 救亡日報 朱銘 居廉 舉人

黃浦 繪事淺說

jue Juelanshe

爵 決瀾社

Kaiguo dadian Kaiming Kang Sheng Kang Youwei Kangxi Kangzhan Kawabata Ryūshi Kawai Senrō Kikuchi Hōbun Kokugakai Kokugo gakkō kōmin Kong Boji Kosugi Hōan Kuaiji Kuncan Kunming kunqu Kuo Hsueh-hu (Guo Xuehu) Kuo Po-chuan (Guo Bochuan) Kuriyagawa Hakuson Kuroda Seiki Kusakabe Meikaku

開國大典 開明 康生 康有為 康熙 抗戰 川端龍子 河井仙郎 菊池芳文 國畫會 國語學校 皇民 孔伯基 小杉放庵 會稽 髨殘 昆明 崑曲 郭雪湖 郭伯川 廚川 白村 黑田清輝 日下部鳴鶴

Lai Chusheng Lai Chunchun (Jun T. Lai) Lai Shaoqi Laiching (Lijin) Lan Ping Lang Jingshan Lang Shining (Guiseppe Castiglione) Lao She laosanjie Lee Mingwei (Li Mingwei) Lee Teng-hui (Li Denghui) Lei Guiyuan Li Bin Li Bing Li Binghong Li Chaoshi Li Dongping Li Honggang Li Hua Li Huayi

來楚生 賴純純 賴少其 勵精 藍苹 郎靜山 郎世寧 老舍 老三屆 李明維 李登輝 雷圭元 李斌 李秉 黎冰鴻 李超士 李東平 李紅鋼 李樺 李華弌

Li Huanmin Li Huanzhi Li Jishen Li Jin Li Jinfa Li Jing Li Keran Li Kuchan Li Meishu Li Puyuan Li Qi Li Qiujun Li Qun Li Ruiqing Li Shan Li Shaoyan Li Shih-chiao (Li Shiqiao) Li Shutong (Hongyi fashi) Li Tiefu (Lee Y. Tien) Li Weizhuang Li Xianting Li Xiushi Li Xu Li Yanshan Li Yishi Li Yinquan Li Yinghao Li Yongcun Li Zhongsheng (Li Chun-chen) Li Zongren Li Zuhan Lishui lianhuanhua lianhuanhuabao Liang Baibo Liang Juhui Liang Qichao Liang Sicheng Liang Xihong Liangjiang shifan xuetang Liangyou (Young companion) Liao Bingxiong Liao Chi-chun (Liao Jichun) Liexian jiupai Lin Biao Lin Fengmian Lin Gang Lin Huiyin

李煥民 李煥之 李濟深 李津 李金發 李靖 李可染 李苦禪 李梅樹 李樸園 李琦 李秋君 力群 李瑞清 李山 李少言 李世樵 李叔同（弘一法師） 李鐵夫 李薇庄 栗憲庭 李秀實 李旭 李研山 李毅士 李印泉 李英豪 李永存 李仲生 李宗仁 李祖韓 麗水 連環畫 連環畫報 梁白波 梁鉅輝 梁啓超 梁思成 梁錫鴻 兩江師範學堂 良友 廖冰兄 廖繼春 列仙酒牌 林彪 林風眠 林崗 林徽因

Glossary and List of Char acters

301

Lin Minghong (Michael Lin) Lin Tianmiao Lin Wenzheng Lin Yilin Lin Yong Lin Yushan Ling Hongxun Linggusi Lingnan Lingnan huayuan Lingnan zhibansuo lingzhi Liu Bei Liu Chunhua Liu Dezhai Liu Haisu Liu Jipiao Liu Jian’an Liu Kaiqü Liu Kunyi Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong) Liu Lun Liu Shaoqi Liu Wei Liu Wencai Liu Wenxi Liu Xian Liu Xiaodong Liu Xun Liu Yulian Liu Zhiping Liu Zijian Liulichang Lu Bodu Lu Danfeng Lu Danlin Lu Hongji Lu Meiniang Lu Shaofei Lu Xiaoman Lu Xinhua Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren) Lu Zhiyang Luwan Lü Cheng Lü Fengzi Lü Qingzhong Lü Shengzhong Lü Sibai

302

林明弘 林天苗 林文錚 林一林 林墉 林玉山 淩鴻勛 靈谷寺 嶺南 嶺南畫院 嶺南製版所 靈芝 劉備 劉春華 劉德齋 劉海粟 劉既漂 劉建安 劉開渠 劉坤一 劉國松 劉崙 劉少奇 劉偉 劉文采 劉文西 劉峴 劉小東 劉迅 劉宇廉 劉質平 劉子建 琉璃廠 陸伯都 盧丹楓 陸丹林 盧鴻基 盧眉孃 魯少飛 陸小曼 盧新華 魯迅（周樹人） 陸志癢 盧灣 呂瀓 呂鳳子 呂卿仲 呂勝中 呂斯百

Glossary and Li st of Char acters

Lü Yanzhi Lui Shou-kwan (Lü Shoukun) Luo Gongliu Luo Qingzhen Luo Zhongli

呂彥直 呂壽琨 羅工柳 羅清楨 羅中立

Ma Da Ma Desheng Ma Liuming Man Ching Ying (Phoebe Man, Wen Jingying) manhua Manyunge Mao Dun Mao Zedong Masaki Naohiko Mei Qing meishu Meishu congshu Meishu shenghuo Meishu xizuo zhan Meishu zazhi Meixian meiyu Meizhan Mengjue honglou Mifeng huashe Miao Zi Miaoli Minzuhua Mo Pu Moganshan Muban hua Muke jicheng Muke yishu Muling muke yanjiuhui Muromachi

馬達 馬德升 馬六明 文晶瑩

Nagao Uzan Nakamura Fusetsu Nanguo yishu xueyuan Nanhui Nanking (Nanjing) Nanyang Nanyang gongxue Ni Yide Ni Zan Nihon Bijutsuin nihonga

長尾雨杉 中村不折 南國藝術學院 南匯 南京 南洋 南洋公學 倪貽德 倪瓚 日本美術院 日本畫

漫畫 縵雲閣 茅盾 毛澤東 正木直彦 梅清 美術 美術叢書 美術生活 美術習作展 美術雜誌 梅縣 美育 美展 夢覺紅樓 蜜蜂畫社 繆梓 苗栗 民族化 莫樸 莫干山 木版畫 木刻紀程 木刻藝術 木鈴木刻研究會 室町

Nikakai nianhua Nie Ou Ningbo

二科會 年畫 聶鷗 寧波

Oga Seiun Omura Seigai Ouyang Yuqian

小鹿青雲 大村西厓 歐陽玉倩

Pan Boyin Pan Dawei Pan Gongkai Pan Jiajun Pan Sitong Pan Tianshou Pan Yuliang pantu Panxi Panyu Pang Xunqin Pang Yuanji Pang Zuoyu Pei, I. M. (Bei Yuming) Peiwenzhai shuhuapu Peng Bin Peng Zhen Pi Daojian Pinghuashe Pingjin Pingmin huabao Pu Hua Pudong Puru (P’u Hsin-yü; Pu Xinyu) Puyi

潘伯寅 潘達微 潘公凱 潘家俊 潘思同 潘天壽（天綬） 潘玉良 叛徒 磐溪 番禺 龐薰琹 龐元濟 龐左玉 貝聿銘 佩文齋書畫譜 彭彬 彭真 皮道堅 萍花社 平津 平民畫報 蒲華 浦東 溥濡（溥心畬） 溥儀

Qi Baishi qilin qipao Qian Daxin Qian Ding Qian Hui’an Qian Juntao Qian Mu Qian Shoutie Qian Songyan Qian Xiaodai Qianbi lianxi huatie Qianlong Qianmen

齊白石 麒麟 旗袍 錢大盺 錢鼎 錢慧安 錢君匋 錢穆 錢瘦鐵 錢松喦 錢笑呆 鉛筆練習畫帖 乾隆 前門

qianzhuang qin Qin Song Qin Tianjin Qin Wenmei Qin Zheng Qing Qiu Ti (Qiu Bizhen) Qiu Zhijie Quan Shanshi

錢莊 琴 秦松 秦天健 秦文美 秦征 清 丘堤（丘碧珍） 邱志傑 全山石

Rehe Ren Xiong (Ren Weichang) Ren Xun Ren Yi (Ren Bonian) Rimpa Rong Junli Rong Rong Rongbaozhai Rou Shi

熱河 任熊（任渭長） 任薰 任頤（任伯年） 琳派 榮君立 榮榮 榮寶齋 柔石

Saitō Kazō san tuchu Sanjiang shifan chuanxisuo Satomi Katsuzō seiyōga Sesshū Tōyō Shaanxi shanjianzhuang Shanyin Shang Shengbo Shanghai Shanghai huabao Shanghai manhua Shanghai meishu zhuanke xuexiao Shanghai tuhua meishuyuan Shanghai wenxian baocun hui Shanghai yishu daxue Shanghai Zhongguo shuhua baocunhui Shao Dazhen Shao Xunmei Shaoxing shehui meiyu Shexian Shen Bochen Shen Jiawei Shen Yaoding

斎藤佳三 三突出 三江師範傳習所 里見勝蔵 西洋畫 雪舟等揚 陝西 扇箋庄 山陰 商笙伯 上海 上海畫報 上海漫畫 上海美術專科學校 上海圖畫美術院 上海文獻保存會 上海藝術大學 上海中國書畫保存會 邵大箴 邵洵美 紹興 社會美育 歙縣 沈伯塵 沈家蔚 沈堯定

Glossary and List of Char acters

303

Shen Yaoyi Shen Yiqian Shen Yinmo Shen Yuan Shenbao Shenzhou Shenzhou guoguangji Sheng Xuanhuai Shengzhan Shi Hui Shi Lu Shidai Shimizu Toshio Shina kaiga shi Shishi huabao Shitao Shieh Ka Ho (Shi Jiahao, Wilson Shieh) Shinkyo Shiotsuki Tōho shuimohui Shun’yokai Sing Tao (Xingdao) Song Bingheng Song Dong Song Haidong Song Meiling (Soong May-ling) Song Qingling Song Zhong Song Zhongyuan Songlingang Songshan Lu songshu Su Wonong Su Wu Suyue Suzhou suan Suanhanwei suanpan Sui Jianguo Sun Chuanfang Sun Fuxi Sun Jingbo Sun Ke Sun Liang Sun Runyu Sun Wukong

304

沈堯伊 沈逸千 沈尹默 沈遠 申報 神州 神州國光集 盛宣懷 省展 施慧 石魯 時代 清水敏夫 支那繪畫史 時事畫報 石濤 石家豪 新京 鹽月桃甫 水墨會 春陽會 星島 宋秉恒 宋東 宋 海東 宋美齡 宋慶齡 宋鍾 宋鍾沅 松林崗 嵩山路 松鼠 蘇臥農 蘇武 素月 蘇州 算 酸寒尉 算盤 隋建國 孫傳芳 孫福熙 孫景波 孫科 孫良 孫潤宇 孫悟空

Glossary and Li st of Char acters

Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) Sun Zixi

孫逸仙 （孫中山） 孫滋溪

Tabata Yukito Tai’erzhuang taijiquan Taimeng huahui Taimiao Taipingyang bao Taiwan bijutsu tenrankai (Taiten) Taiwan sōtokufu bijutsu tenrankai Taiyang Taiyuan taiping Takeuchi Seihō Tanaka Raisho Tang Xiaohe Tang Yihe Tang Yijing Tang Yingwei Tang Yun Tao Yuanqing Taohuawu Tateishi Tetsuomi Te Wei Teiten Teng Gu Tian Han Tian Heng Tiananmen Tianmahui tianzhen Tokyodō tōyōga Tongmenghui Tongwenguan Tongxiao Tsang Tak Ping (Zeng Deping, Kith Tsang Tak Ping) Tsang Tsou Choi (Zeng Zaocai) Tsinghua (Qinghua) Tsong Pu (Zhuang Pu) tuhua tuqi Tushanwan

高畑幸人 台兒庄 太極拳 苔蒙畫會 太廟 太平洋報 台灣美術展覽會 (台展) 台灣總督府美術展覽會 台陽 太原 太平 竹內栖鳳 田中賴璋 唐小禾 唐一禾 唐義精 唐英偉 唐雲 陶元慶 桃花塢 立石鐵臣 特偉 帝展 滕固 田漢 田衡 天安門 天馬會 天真 東京堂 東洋畫 同盟會 同文館 通霄 曾德平 曾灶財 清華 莊普 圖畫 吐氣 土山灣

Uchiyama Kakichi Uchiyama Kanzo

內山嘉吉 內山完造

Van Lau (Wen Lou)

文樓

Wada Eisaku Wan Laiming Wan Man (Maryn Varbanov) Wang Caibai Wang Chuantao Wang Daizhi Wang Donglin Wang Dongxin Wang Geyi Wang Guangyi Wang Hongwen Wang Huaiqing Wang Jiqian (C. C. Wang) Wang Jiyuan Wang Jian Wang Jianwei Wang Jin Zhang (Jin Taotao) Wang Jingsong Wang Jingwei Wang Keping Wang Li Wang Liuqiu Wang Mantian Wang Mengqi Wang Qi Wang Rizhang Wang Shenglie Wang Shijie Wang Shikuo Wang Shimin Wang Tiande Wang Xizhi Wang Yachen Wang Yidong Wang Yongquan Wang Yuanqi Wang Yuezhi Wang Zhaowen Wang Zhen (Wang Yiting) Wang Ziwei Weida de lianai Wei Jingshan Wei Zhi

和田英作 萬籟鳴 萬曼 汪采白 王傳燾 王代之 王冬齡 汪東興 王個簃 王廣義 王洪文 王懷慶 王季遷 王濟遠 王鑒 汪建偉 王金章 （金陶陶） 王勁松 汪精衛 王克平 王禮 王流秋 王曼恬 王孟奇 王琦 汪日章 王盛烈 王世傑 王式廓 王士敏 王天德 王羲之 汪亞塵 王沂東 王永泉 王原祁 王悅之 王朝聞 王震 （王一亭） 王子偉 偉大的戀愛 魏景山 韋陟

Weihaiwei Wen Bao Wen Tao Wen Yiduo Wen Zhengming Wenhuibao (Wen Wei Po) Weng Fen Weng Rulan wenrenhua Wenrenhua de jiazhi　 Wenshiguan Wenxing Wenxue Wenyi xinchao Wo Zha Wong Pao Hsie (Huang Baoxi) Wong Po-yeh (Huang Banruo) Wong Wucius (Wang Wuxie) Wu Wu Biduan Wu Changshi (Wu Junqing) Wu Dacheng Wu Dayu Wu Daiqiu Wu Dongmai Wuduoyun Wu Fading Wu Fan Wu Fuzhi Wu Guanzhong Wu Han Wu Hao Wu Hufan Wu Hung (Wu Hong) Wu Jiayou (Wu Youru) Wu Mali Wu Mengfei Wu Qizhong Wu Qingxia Wu Shanzhuan Wu Shiguang Wu Shujuan (Wu Xingfen) Wu Tiecheng Wu Tien-chang (Wu Tianzhang) Wu Zhongxiong Wu Zonglin Wu Zuoren

威海衛 溫葆 溫濤 聞一多 文徵明 文匯報 翁奮 翁汝蘭 文人畫 文人畫的價值 文史館 文星 文學 文藝新潮 沃渣 黄寶熙 黃般若 王無邪 吳 伍必端 吳昌碩 （吳俊卿） 吳大澂 吳大羽 吳待秋 吳東邁 五朵雲 吳法定 吳凡 吳茀之 吳冠中 吳晗 吳昊 吳湖帆 巫宏 吳嘉猷 （吳友如） 吳瑪琍 吳夢非 伍啟中 吳青霞 吳山專 烏始光 吳淑娟 (吳杏芬) 吳鐵城 吳天章 吳仲熊 吳宗麟 吳作人

Glossary and List of Char acters

305

306

Wuben Wuchang Wusong Wuxi Wuxing Wuyue huahui

務本 武昌 吳淞 無錫 吳興 五月畫會

Xia Jiankang Xia Peng Xiamen (Amoy) Xian Xinghai Xiandai meishu Xiandai zhongguo huaji Xianggang zhongguo meishuhui Xiangjiang Xiangtan Xiao Junxian Xiao Lu Xiao Sun Xiaopenglai Xiaoshan Xie Gongzhan Xie Haiyan Xie Zhiguang xiesheng xieshi xieyi Xihongtang Xiling Xishan xiyanghua Xin guohua Xin kedu xiaozu Xin meishu Xin puyu tang Xin sichao xinhai Xinhua yizhuan Xinjiang Xinxing banhua yundong Xing Zhibin Xingxing xiong maomi Xiongnu xiucai Xu Beihong Xu Ben Xu Bing

夏劍康 夏朋 廈門 洗星海 現代美術 現代中國畫集 香港中國美術會 香江 湘潭 蕭俊賢 蕭魯 蕭遜 小蓬萊 蕭山 謝公展 謝海燕 謝之光 寫生 寫實 寫意 戲鴻堂 西泠 西山 西洋畫 新國畫 新刻度小組 新美術 新普育堂 新思潮 辛亥 新華藝專 新疆 新興版畫運動 邢質斌 星星 熊貓咪 匈奴 秀才 徐悲鴻 徐賁 徐冰

Glossary and Li st of Char acters

Xu Chunzhong Xu Fuguan Xu Guangqi Xu Junxuan Xu Kuang Xu Lei Xu Qinwen Xu Tan Xu Yong Xu Yongqing Xu Zhimo Xugu (Zhu Huairen) Xujiahui (Ziccawei) xuan xuanchuanhua Xuannan huashe Xuanwu Xuanzang

徐純中 徐復觀 徐光啓 徐君萱 徐匡 徐累 許欽文 徐坦 許勇 徐詠青 徐志摩 虛谷 （朱懷仁） 徐家匯 宣 宣傳畫 宣南畫社 宣武 玄奘

Yamamoto Baigai Yamamoto Shunkyo Yan Fu Yan Han Yan Ken (Renjian) Yan Li Yan Peiming Yan Shuilong Yan Wenliang Yan’an Yanzi Yang Baoyi Yang Bomin Yang Borun Yang Fudong Yang Jiecang Yang Keyang Yang Qiuren Yang Sanlang Yang Shanshen Yang Shaobin Yang Taiyang Yang Xian Yang Xingxing (Yang Liuqiao) Yang Xueyao Yang Xuejiu Yang Yinfang Yang Yingfeng Yang Zhenzhong Yang Zhiguang

山本梅涯 山本春舉 嚴復 彥涵 人間 嚴力 嚴培明 顏水龍 顏文樑 延安 燕子 楊葆益 楊伯民 楊伯潤 楊福東 楊詰蒼 楊可揚 楊秋人 楊三郎 楊善深 楊少斌 陽太陽 楊峴 楊惺惺（楊柳橋） 楊雪瑤 楊雪玖 楊蔭芳 楊英風 楊振中 楊之光

Yang Zhilin Yangjing Yangliuqing Yangzhiting Yangzhou Yangzi Yao Hua Yao Mangfu Yao Wenyuan Yao Xie Yasui Sotarō Ye Gongchuo Ye Jianying Ye Luo Ye Qianyu Yi Zhong Yifeng Yiguang Yishu gongkai zhuyi Yishu shifan xuexiao Yishu xunkan Yixing Yiyuan Yin Xiuzhen Ying Yeping Yinghuan Yip Wai-lim (Ye Weilian) yōga Youzheng Yu Ben Yu Changgong Yu Dafu Yu Fei’an Yu Feng Yu Hong Yu Jifan Yu Jianhua Yu Naida Yu Peng Yu Shaosong Yu Youhan Yu Youren Yu Yue Yu Yunjie Yushan Yuyuan shuhua shanhui Yuan Yuan Hao Yuan Shikai

楊志林 洋涇 楊柳青 仰止亭 揚州 揚子 姚華 姚茫父 姚文元 姚燮 安井曾太郎 葉恭綽 葉劍英 葉洛 葉淺予 逸中 藝風 藝觀 藝術公開主義 藝術師範學校 藝術旬刊 宜興 藝苑 尹秀珍 應野平 瀛寰 葉維廉 洋畫 有正 余本 余長工 郁達夫 于非盦 郁風 喻紅 俞寄凡 俞劍華 俞乃大 于彭 余紹宋 余友涵 于右任 俞樾 俞雲階 虞山 豫園書畫善會 元 袁浩 袁世凱

Yuan Yunsheng Yuanhe Yuanling Yuanmingyuan yuefenpai Yun Shouping

袁運生 元和 沅陵 圓明園 月份牌 惲壽平

Zao Wouki (Zhao Wuji) Zeng Fanzhi Zeng Fengji Zeng Guofan Zeng Kezhuan (Zeng Lüchuan) Zeng Ming Zeng Xi Zeng Yi Zeng Zhiliang Zeng Zhongming Zeng Zhushao Zhabei Zhapu Zhan Jianjun Zhan Wang Zhang Chenbo Zhang Chongren Zhang Chunqiao Zhang Dali Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien, Zhang Yuan) Zhang Daofan Zhang Ding Zhang Guangyu Zhang Hongtu Zhang Huan Zhang Jianjun Zhang Kunyi Zhang Lan Zhang Leping Zhang Nian Zhang Peili Zhang Qing Zhang Shanzi Zhang Shuqi (Chang Shu-chi) Zhang Tiao Zhang Wang Zhang Wei Zhang Xichen Zhang Xiaogang

趙無極 曾梵志 曾鳳寄 曾國藩 曾克耑（曾履川） 曾鳴 曾熙 曾奕 曾志良 曾仲鳴 曾竹韶 閘北 乍浦 詹建俊 展望 張辰伯 張充仁 張春橋 張大力 張大千 （張爰） 張道藩 張仃 張光宇 張宏圖 張洹 張健君 張坤儀 張瀾 張樂平 張念 張培力 張晴 張善孖 張書旂 張眺 張望 張偉 章錫琛 張曉剛

Glossary and List of Char acters

307

Zhang Xiong Zhang Xuan Zhang Xueliang Zhang Yangxi Zhang Yi (Cheung Yee) Zhang Yongsheng Zhang Yu Zhang Yuguang Zhang Zhengyu Zhang Zhidong Zhang Zixiang kutu huagao Zhang Zuoliang Zhang Zuolin Zhao Bandi Zhao Guilan Zhao Hongben Zhao Shen Zhao Shou Zhao Wangyun Zhao Yannian Zhao Zhiqian Zhao Ziyang Zhe Zhejiang zhezhong Zhendan Zheng Chang (Zheng Wuchang) Zheng Shengtian Zheng Yefu Zheng Yi Zheng Zhenduo Zhong A’cheng Zhong Biao Zhong Huizhu Zhong Kui Zhong Ming Zhongguo huaxue quanshi Zhongguo jinshi shuhua yiguan xuehui Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan

308

張熊 張弦 張學良 張漾兮 張義 張永生 張羽 張聿光 張正宇 張之洞 張子祥課徒畫稿 張作良 張作霖 趙半狄 趙桂蘭 趙宏本 趙深 趙獸 張望雲 趙延年 趙之謙 趙紫陽 浙 浙江 折衷 震旦 鄭昶（鄭午昌） 鄭勝天 鄭野夫 鄭義 鄭振鐸 鍾阿城 鍾飆 鍾惠珠 鍾馗 鍾鳴 中國畫學全史 中國金石書畫藝觀學會 中國現代藝術展

Glossary and Li st of Char acters

Zhonghua quanguo meishujie kangdi xiehui Zhonghua xueyishe Zhonghua yishu daxue (Zhonghua yida) Zhongnanhai Zhong-Ri meishu xiehui Zhong-Ri meishu tongzhihui Zhongshan Ling Zhou Zhou Bichu Zhou Changgu Zhou Duo Zhou Enlai Zhou Libo Zhou Lianxia Zhou Ruiwen Zhou Shuqiao Zhou Sicong Zhou Tiehai Zhou Xian Zhou Xiang Zhou Zhengtai Zhou Zimian Zhoushan Zhu Cheng Zhu Da (Bada Shanren) Zhu De Zhu Fadong Zhu Jintang Zhu Naizheng Zhu Qizhan Zhu Xiong Zhu Yuanzhang Zhuge Liang Zhuhai Zhuji zhuti xing zhuangfen zhuangshui Zong Bing

中華全國美術界抗敵 協會 中華學藝社 中華藝術大學 (中華藝大） 中南海 中日美術協會 中日美術同志會 中山陵 周 周碧初 周昌谷 周多 周恩來 周立波 周練霞 周瑞文 周樹橋 周思聰 周鐵海 周閑 周湘 周真太 周子冕 舟山 朱偁 朱耷 （八大山人） 朱德 朱發東 朱錦堂 朱乃正 朱屺嶦 朱熊 朱元璋 諸葛亮 珠海 諸暨 主題性 撞粉 撞水 宗炳

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

1839 1839–42:  

The Opium War between Britain and China is fought.

1841

Hong Kong is taken from China and becomes a British Crown colony.

1842

The Treaty of Nanjing establishes the treaty port system and grants Britain an indemnity; the beginning of the so-called Unequal Treaties. The British concession is established in Shanghai.

1843

The French concession is established in Shanghai.

1850 1850–64:

The Taiping Rebellion decimates the Yangzi River valley and is not completely quelled until 1871.  

1854

The expedition of Admiral Matthew Perry forces Japan to open trade.

1856 1856–60:  

The Second Opium War (between Britain, France, and China) is

fought. 1860

The Old Summer Palace, including the European-style Yuanming Yuan, burns and is looted by British and French troops. Ten additional treaty ports and permission for foreigners to travel freely in China is granted in the treaty to end the war. The British colony of Hong Kong is expanded by the addition of Kowloon, and China is required to pay an indemnity to the victorious powers.

1862

Diplomatic relations between China and Japan resume.

1864

Tushanwan orphanage is established.

309

1867

The Tushanwan Atelier, the art training and production center of Jesuit missionaries at the Xujiahui (Ziccawei) orphanage, is established in Shanghai.

1868

Meiji Reformation (Japan).

1872

The Chinese language newspaper Shenbao (Shunbao) is established in Shanghai.

1884

Dianshizhai Pictorial begins publication.

1894 1894–  

1895

1911

September: The Shanghai Tijin Hall Calligraphy and Painting Club (Haishang tijin guan shuhuahui) is established in Shanghai. October 10: The Xinhai Revolution led by Sun Yatsen topples the Qing dynasty.

95: The Sino-Japanese War is fought.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki, in which China ceded Taiwan to Japan, takes place. Taiwan remains a ­colony for fifty years.

1912

January 1: The Republic of China is established. Spring: Li Shutong begins teaching at Chengdong Girls School in Shanghai.

The Hundred Days Reform is initiated. 1898

Britain acquires a ninety-nine-year lease to the New Territories adjacent to Kowloon.

June 5: Zhenxiang huabao (True record), edited by Gao Jianfu, is inaugurated in Shanghai (publishes seventeen issues).

1900

The Boxer Rebellion in northern China is suppressed by an alliance of eight foreign powers. The concluding treaty (in 1901) levies a large fine on the Qing dynasty government.

Fall: Li Shutong moves to Hangzhou and establishes an art major at Zhejiang Higher Normal School.

1902

The Sanjiang (later called Liangjiang) Normal School is established in Nanjing.

1904

The Xiling Seal Society is established in Hangzhou.

The Antiquities Exhibition Center (Guwu chen­ liesuo) is established in Beijing.

February 23: Guocui xuebao’s inaugural issue is edited by Deng Shi.

The Shanghai Art Academy is founded; it opens for classes in 1913 with Wu Shiguang as director.

1905

The Imperial Civil Service Examination System is abolished.

Cai Yuanpei is named first minister of education.

1906

Gao Jianfu departs for study in Japan. His brother, Gao Qifeng, joins him in 1907.

Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng establish the Spring Slumber Studio (Chunshui caotang) in Guangzhou.

Strife between rival warlords begins. 1913

The Liangjiang Normal School initiates painting and handicrafts classes. 1907

The Tushanwan Atelier publishes Primer on Painting (Huishi qianshuo) and Manual of Pencil Drawing (Qianbi xihua tie).

1908

The bimonthly Shenzhou guoguangji begins publication, which continues until 1912.

1909

1910

310

March: Li Shutong graduates from the Oil Painting Department of Tokyo School of Fine Arts; he returns to China to teach at Beiyang Higher Industrial School and Zhili Model Industrial School.

Zhejiang Higher Normal School begins use of plaster casts in drawing class. The Oriental Painting Society (Dongfang huahui), to promote Western-style painting, is established in Shanghai by seven Shanghai Art School teachers— Wu Shiguang, Yu Jifan, Liu Haisu, Wang Yachen, Chen Baoyi, Shen Bochen, and Ding Song; it is disbanded in 1916, when key members leave for Japan.  

1914

The Yu Garden Calligraphy and Painting Charitable Society is established, in Shanghai; continues until 1937.

Zhang Yuguang becomes the director of the Shanghai Art Academy.

1915

A work-study program to send Chinese students to France is formalized.

Chen Hengque (Chen Shizeng) graduates from Tokyo Higher Normal School.

1916

Chen Baoyi (1893–1945) leaves the Shanghai Art Academy faculty to study at Tokyo School of Fine Arts; he graduates in oil painting in 1921.

April: The Shanghai Painting and Calligraphy Research Society is established.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

 

1917

Cai Yuanpei, now president of Peking (Beijing) University, publishes “Replace Religion with ­Aesthetic Education.”

1924

Jiang Xin graduates from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and begins teaching at the Shanghai Art Academy. 1918

March: Liao Jichun and Chen Chengbo (Chen Cheng-po) enroll in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

February: The Painting Methods Research Society (Huafa yanjiu hui) is founded at Peking University.

May 21: The Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Chi‑ nese Art opens in Strasbourg, organized by students in Europe, including Lin Fengmian, Lin Wenzheng, and Wu Dayu.

April 15: The Beijing Art Academy is established by the Ministry of Education. Li Shutong resigns all academic posts and adopts the Buddhist name Hongyi, becoming a monk at Hupao Temple in Hangzhou. 1919

March 17: Xu Beihong departs Shanghai and arrives in Paris in May. He enters École des Beaux-Arts in 1921.

The Seven Star Art Forum is established in Taipei, with support of Ishikawa Kenichiro, one of the earliest Western art societies in Taiwan. 1925

March 12: Sun Yat-sen dies in Beijing. October 10: The Palace Museum is established in Beijing.

October 23: The Heavenly Horse Painting Society (Tianmahui), in Shanghai, holds its first exhibition at Jiangsu Provincial Education Association.

1920

January 1: The White Swan Painting Society (later the White Swan Painting Research Center) is established in Shanghai to teach amateur painters by Chen Qiucao and others. It closes during the SinoJapanese War in the late 1930s.

November: Lin Fengmian (returned from Paris) is appointed the director of the Beijing Art Academy.

July: Liu Haisu becomes the director of the Shanghai Art Academy.

The Taiwan Watercolor Society is founded in Taipei.

The Shanghai Art Academy accepts eleven female students and becomes coeducational.

Chen Baoyi and Ding Yanyong establish the China College of Arts (Zhonghua yishu daxue) in Shanghai.

The Society for Research on Chinese Painting (Zhongguo huaxue yanjiu hui) is established in ­Beijing by Jin Cheng, Zhou Zhaoxiang, He Lūzhi, and Chen Hengque.

1925–26: The nude painting controversy occurs at the Shanghai Art Academy.

Pan Yuliang embarks for study in Italy.

ZZZ

1926

Lin Fengmian arrives in France. Lin enters art school in Dijon and in September 1920 begins study in Paris with Fernand Cormon. 1921

The Aurora Art Club (Chenguang meishuhui) is established in Shanghai by Chen Baoyi.

1922

April 26: Guangzhou Municipal Art School is established by Hu Gentian, a graduate of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and Feng Gangbai, who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.

With help from Wang Yiting, the Sino-Japanese Art Society (Zhong-Ri meishu xiehui) is founded.

February: Xu Beihong returns to China and has a lecture tour to Shanghai in March. February: Lin Fengmian returns to China to become the director of the Beijing Art School. May 26: Life drawing with nude models is banned in five provinces, as well as in Shanghai, by the warlord Sun Chuanfang in response to the Shanghai Art Academy’s nude painting controversy. December: The New China Art Academy (Xinhua yishu zhuanke xuexiao) splits from the Shanghai Art Academy.

September: The Suzhou Art Academy is established by Yan Wenliang. The Society to Preserve Painting and ­Calligraphy (Zhongguo shuhua baocunhui) is founded in Shanghai.

QQQ

The Shanghai Tijin Hall Calligraphy and Painting Club closes. 1927

January 15: The Lake Society (Hu She) splits from the Society for Research on Chinese Painting, in Beijing. Spring: Xu Beihong assumes the position as Art Department head at Shanghai University of the

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

311

Arts; in January 1928, Xu moves to South China (Nanguo) Arts Academy in Shanghai. May 11: The Beijing Art Exposition, organized by Lin Fengmian to promote Aesthetic Education, opens with more than three thousand works.

1928–32: Yan Wenliang, the director of the Suzhou Art School, studies in France.  

1929

March: Li Shizhao and Li Meishu leave Taiwan for Tokyo to study.

June: The Northern Expedition to reunite China largely ends warlord strife, and the capital of China is moved to Nanjing.

April 10–30: The Ministry of Education’s First National Art Exhibition is held in Shanghai and stimulates debate about styles of modern Chinese oil painting.  

June: Cai Yuanpei is appointed the director of the University Council, in Nanjing, and establishes the Art Education Committee. In July, Lin Fengmian resigns as director of the Beijing Art Academy to become head of Art Education Committee of the University Council. On November 27 the committee approves the establishment of the national art academy and begins planning for a national exhibition.

May 24–26: An exhibition of the Art Movement Society (Yishu yundong she) is organized by Lin Fengmian at the French School in Shanghai, with 106 works.  

The Bee Painting Society (Mifeng huahui) is established. Xu Beihong becomes the professor in charge of the Western painting division at National Central University. Recruits Pan Yuliang as an oil painting professor.

September 1: The Red Sun Western Painting Society is established in Taiwan by Liao Jichun, Chen Chengbo, Yan Suilong, and others. Fall: Ni Yide travels to Tokyo to study at the Kawabata Painting School with Fujishima Takeji. Fall: The Shanghai Manhua (Cartoon) Society is established by twelve prominent artists, including Ding Song, Huang Wennong, Ye Qianyu, Wang Dunqing, and Zhang Zhenyu, and headed by Zhang Guangyu.

Chen Chengbo graduates from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and becomes oil painting chair at New China Art School in Shanghai. 1930

October 4–5: An exhibition of Foreign Woodcuts is held in Shanghai, organized by Lu Xun, with ­seventy works.  

The first annual Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiwan bijutsu tenrankai, or Taiten) is held, continuing through 1936.

October 10: The Yiyuan Painting Research Institute is established in Shanghai by Zhang Chenbo, Wang Jiyuan, Zhu Qizhan, and Jiang Xin. An exhibition is held in September 1929. November 15–December 29: Xu Beihong serves as the director of the newly established College of the Arts at Peking University.  

312

October: Pang Xunqin returns from five years in France to organize the Deux Mondes (Taimeng) Painting Society.

March 26: The National West Lake Art Academy (later the National Hangzhou Art Academy) is established with Lin Fengmian as director. August: The Art Movement Society is founded at the academy by Lin Fengmian and others.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

January 2: The first exhibition of the West Lake Eighteen Art Society is held at Ningbo Native Place Society in Shanghai. July: The League of Left-wing Artists is established.

National Central University in Nanjing establishes Fine Arts and Art Education majors, directed by Xu Beihong.

1928

January 22: The West Lake Eighteen Art Society is established at Hangzhou Art Academy.

The Sino-Japanese Art Colleagues Association (Zhong-Ri yishu tongzhihui) is founded by Wang Yiting. 1931

June 11–14: The Eighteen Art Society’s 1931 exhibition is held at Mainichi Shimbunsha in Shanghai, with 180 works.  

August 17–27: The Woodcut Training Class is conducted by Uchiyama Kakichi and Lu Xun in Shanghai.  

Dedication of the Mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, designed by Lü Yanzhi, is held in Nanjing.

September 18: Japan invades Manchuria; China loses three northeastern provinces.

1935

September 23: The Storm Society (Juelanshe) is established in Shanghai. 1932

 

 

October 1: Shanghai Art Academy faculty found the Muse (Moshe) Society. The first exhibition is held in November. October 9–16: The first exhibition of the Storm Society is held.

1936

1937

An exhibition at Academia Sinica of works prepared for the Chicago World Fair is held.

November 13: The Hangzhou Art Academy retreats inland. August 13: New Shanghai city center at Jiangwan is pounded by Japanese artillery.

January 20–March 4: The Chinese Contemporary Painting exhibition is held in Berlin, with ­catalog essay written by Liu Haisu, and subsequently tours Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

November 14: The New China Art Academy (Xinhua yizhuan) campus is bombed.

 

June 19: The Modern Creative Print Society is established in Guangzhou by Li Hua and ­others. The group’s journal (eighteen issues) begins in December. November 12: The Taiyang Art Association is founded in Taipei. 1934–36: The Long March: the Communist army retreats from Jiangxi to northern Shaanxi.  

The Chinese Independent Art Association is founded in Tokyo; the association reorganizes and holds an exhibition in Guangzhou in 1935.

 

Late summer: The Beiping Art Academy retreats inland.

 

April 29: The Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society (Zhongguo nūzi shuhuahui) is founded in Shanghai; the first exhibition opens on June 2 at Ningbo Native Place Association.

April 1–23: The Second National Art Exhibition is held in Nanjing. July 7: Marco Polo Bridge incident; the eight-year Sino-Japanese War begins.

January 1: The Yifeng Society is established in Hang­zhou by Xu Beihong, Wang Yachen, and Sun Fuxi. January 1933–September 1934: An exhibition of Chinese painting organized by Xu Beihong tours Europe, including Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, Moscow, and Leningrad.

1934

July 5: The National Traveling Woodcut Exhibition opens in Guangzhou, organized by the Modern Creative Print Society; shows October 2–8 at the YMCA in Shanghai. Lu Xun visits the exhibition on October 8.  

 

1933

 

November 28–March 7, 1936: The International Exhibition of Chinese Art is held at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London, with loans from Chinese government and private collections; the exhibit shows in Nanjing on June 1, 1936.

January 28–March: War between Japan and China in Shanghai. June 25: The Chinese Painting Society is established in Shanghai.

April 8–May 5: At the former German Club on the Bund, the Shanghai group has a preparatory showing for the London exhibition.

December 13: The Japanese military begins a six-week assault on Nanjing known as the Rape of Nanking. 1938

April 1: The Third Bureau in the Political Department of the National Government’s Military Committee in Hankou (modern Wuhan) is established; directed by Guo Moruo, it includes an Arts Division responsible for propaganda and employs many artists. March: The Beijing Art Academy and the Hangzhou Art Academy merge by the Ministry of Education, now called the National Art Academy. April 10: Lu Xun Art Academy in Yan’an, headquarters of the Communist-controlled territory, is established; the first exhibition of woodcuts, cartoons, and propaganda posters is held. In July the academy adds a literature department and changes its name to Lu Xun Academy of Arts and Literature. June 6: The All-China Arts Circles Resistance ­Association (Zhonghua quanguo meishujie kangdi

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

313

xiehui) is established in Wuhan by the Third Bureau; it organizes the National Resistance Artworks Exhibition.

August 6 and 9: Atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. August 15: Japan surrenders to the Allied forces.

October 25: Wuhan falls to the Japanese; the Military Committee and Third Bureau retreat inland.

September 15: The Shanghai Art Academy resumes operation.

November: Lu Xun Art Academy students and faculty organize the Woodcut Work Team to take propaganda to rural communities; they begin creating new-style new year’s prints.

October: Faculty and students return from Sichuan to the Beijing Art Academy; Xu Beihong is appointed director. October 10: The Shanghai Painters Association (Shanghai huaren xiehui) is established, with Wang Yichang as director.

The first annual Taiwan Government-General Art Exhibition (Taiwan Sōtokufu bijutsu tenrankai; or Futen) is held. 1939

May: The Third National Resistance Woodcut Exhibition is held in Chongqing.

1940

January: The National Woodcut Ten-Year Exhibition is organized by the National Woodcut Resistance Association, in Guilin.

1941

1942

October: Taiwan is returned to Chinese control. The Art Department of the National Central University is moved back to Nanjing; the majors of oil painting, ink painting, and music are reestablished. 1946

Summer: Zhang Daqian and a party of disciples and assistants began a two-and-a-half-year ­project to copy the ancient cave temple murals at Dunhuang in Gansu.

March 25: The Shanghai Art Club is established. The Hangzhou Art Academy is returned to its home campus, with Pan Tianshou as director.

December 8: The Japanese seize foreign concessions of Shanghai, and the “Isolated Island” period ends.

June: Human (Yan Ken) Painting Society is established in Hong Kong.

January 3: The China Woodcut Research Society is established at the China–USSR Cultural Center in Chongqing. The First Double Ten National Woodcut Exhibition opens on October 10.

September 18: The Eight Years of Wartime Woodcuts exhibition opens in Shanghai. October: Yan’an Lu Xun Literature and Arts Academy moves northeast, and the name is changed to Northeast Lu Xun Literature and Arts Academy.

The Yan’an Rectification Campaign (Yan’an Zhengfeng) to eliminate dissidence begins. May 2, 16, and 23: Mao Zedong delivers talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and the Arts (known as the Yan’an Talks). December 25–January 10: The third national exhibition is held in Chongqing.  

1943

January 16–20: The exhibition of copies of Dunhuang murals by the Northwest Art and Cultural Relics Survey Team, including Zhang Daqian and others, in Chongqing is held.

1944

May 19: The exhibition of the Dunhuang copies by Zhang Daqian is held.

 

The Dunhuang Research Institute is established. 1945

314

January: The Suzhou Art Academy resumes classes in Suzhou, with Yan Wenliang as director.

January 18: An exhibition of modern painting opens in Chongqing (Xiandai huihua lianhe zhanlan).

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

October: The first Taiwan Provincial Exhibition (Shengzhan) after retrocession to China is held. Fall: Gao Jianfu reopens Chunshui huayuan. 1947

February 28: Nationalist Chinese military forces in Taiwan quell demonstrations against the poorly administered retrocession by massacring civilians. October: Guangdong Provincial Art Academy is established in Guangzhou, with Gao Jianfu as director. More than 169 exhibitions are held in Shanghai; the preparatory committee for Shanghai Art Gallery is established. Wang Rizhang becomes director of National Hangzhou Art Academy.

1948

October 10: The 1947 Yearbook of Chinese Art is published, the most comprehensive survey of the modern art scene in Shanghai and elsewhere.

October 10: The New Asia College is established in Hong Kong by mainland immigrants. In January 1957 an art program is added. The college is later reorganized as Chinese University of Hong Kong.

December: Communist art administrators Jiang Feng, Wang Zhaowen, Wang Shikuo, and Hu Yi­­chuan begin planning for a new academy in Beijing based on the old Beijing National Art Academy. The Nationalist Chinese government retreats to Taiwan. A portion of the Palace Museum (the former imperial) collection is removed to Taiwan. 1949

October 14: Guangzhou surrenders. 1949–52: Communist administrators organize a nationwide movement to produce new-style new year’s pictures.  

1950

January 31: Beijing surrenders to Communist troops.

April 1: Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) is created by merging the Beijing Art Academy and North China University’s Third Division; Xu Beihong is named director.

March: The Communist administrative team— Jiang Feng, Ai Qing, Wang Zhaowen, and Li Huanzhi—take over Beijing Art Academy. Xu Beihong retains title of director.  

 

June 25: The Korean War begins.

April 23: Nanjing surrenders.

November 7: The National Hangzhou College of Arts is renamed the East China Campus of CAFA.

May 25: Shanghai surrenders. May 27: Chen Qiucao, Qian Juntao, Pang ­Xunqin, Zhang Xiya, and Wang Manhua paint a huge portrait of Mao Zedong, which they hang over the main entrance of Great World Entertainment ­Center in Shanghai.

January 8: The Shanghai Cartoonists League is established.

1951

March 1: The National Exhibition of New-style New Year’s Pictures is held in Beijing.

June 6: The Shanghai Art Workers Association is established.

September: Jiang Feng is appointed vice-director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing. Wu Zuoren is provost, Wang Zhaowen vice-provost. Hu Yichuan and Luo Gongliu are in charge of cadre training programs.

July 2–19: The All-China Congress of Literary and Arts Workers is held in Beijing.

The wenshiguan system is established to support unemployed elderly intellectuals.

 

July 2–16: The first National Art Exhibition, held at Beijing Art Academy, promotes revolutionary art.  

July 19: The China Federation of Literary and Arts Circles (FLAC) is established. July 21: The All-China Art Workers Association is established. Xu Beihong is named chairman, Jiang Feng and Ye Qianyu vice-chairmen. September 25: The French-educated sculptor Liu Kaiqu becomes director of the National Art Academy in Hangzhou, with Jiang Feng as party secretary and vice-director, Ni Yide as vice-director, and Pang Xunqin as oil painting chair. October 1: Mao Zedong formally announces the establishment of the People’s Republic of China from atop the former imperial palace’s Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen), overlooking Tiananmen Square.

1952

January: “Three-anti” and “five-anti” campaigns against corruption are launched nationwide. The restructuring of higher education begins. June: Northeast Lu Xun Literature and Art Academy’s art department becomes independent, is renamed the Northeast Academy of Fine Arts, and moves to a new campus in Shenyang. Formally established in June 1953, Yang Jiao is the director. In 1958 it is renamed Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. June: The painting and applied art departments of Chengdu Academy of Arts merged with the art department of Southwest Peoples Art Academy to form the Southwest Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 it is renamed the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. August 1: Construction begins on the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. Liu Kaiqu is in charge of the art team that designs the relief sculpture.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

315

August 16: East China People’s Fine Arts Publishing House is established in Shanghai. Later it is renamed Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. October: Applied Arts Department at East China CAFA in Hangzhou moves to the Beijing ­campus, and professors Pang Xunqin and Lei Guiyuan are transferred to Beijing. The move is formalized in March 1953, and they begin planning for the establishment of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. November: Mo Pu is appointed the first vice-­ director of East China CAFA; Yan Wenliang is ­second vice-director.

A production cooperative is established for unemployed guohua painters. 1953–62: Chinese students study at Repin Art Academy in Leningrad.  

1954

A propaganda poster team is set up at the East China People’s Art Publishing House (later renamed the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House). October 10: Xu Beihong Memorial Museum opens in Beijing. 1955

December: The art department of National Central University moves to Nanjing Normal College. December 8: The Shanghai Art Academy and Suzhou Art Academy merge with Shandong University Fine Arts Department to form East China Academy of Arts in Wuxi, with Liu Haisu as director. No art schools remain in Shanghai. 1953

The first Five-Year Plan begins.

February 19: Konstantin M. Maksimov arrives from the USSR to conduct a two-year course in advanced oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. March 27: The Second National Art Exhibition is held at the Soviet Exhibition Hall, in Beijing. July 1: The National Conference on Drawing Education is held in Beijing by the Ministry of Culture.

1956

July 27: Cease-fire ends the Korean War.

May 2: Mao Zedong announces the Hundred ­Flowers Campaign. June 1: The State Council decides to establish Chinese Painting Institutes in Shanghai and Beijing.

September: The Central Academy of Fine Arts establishes an affiliated middle school on the Soviet model, under director Ding Jingwen.

September 10: The Shanghai Chinese Painting ­Institute is established.

September 16: The First National Guohua Exhibition opens in Beihai Park.

September 10: The Second National Guohua ­Exhibition opens in Beijing.

September 23: The Second Congress of Literary and Arts Workers is held.

November 1: The Central Academy of Arts and Crafts is established, with Deng Yunhao as director, and Pang Xunqin and Lei Guiyuan vice-directors.

September 25: The All-China Art Workers Association National Committee meeting opens.

December 21, 1956–January 5, 1957: The exhibition Russian Paintings of the Eighteenth through Twenti‑ eth Centuries opens at the China–USSR Friendship Center in Shanghai. Chinese artists copy the paintings, and visiting Soviet artists lecture. Opens on November 5 at its second venue, the Beijing Exhibition Hall.  

October 4: The All-China Art Workers Association is renamed the Chinese Artists Association (CAA). Nonagenarian Qi Baishi is named chairman; Jiang Feng, Liu Kaiqu, Ye Qianyu, Wu Zuoren, Cai Ruohong are vice-directors; Hua Junwu becomes secretary general. November 1: The Palace Museum, Beijing, opens its painting gallery (Huihuaguan) with an exhibition of more than five hundred paintings from early dynasties. December 12: Jiang Feng is appointed acting director of CAFA following the death of Xu Beihong.

316

January 15: Meishu, the journal of the CAA, is inaugurated in Beijing.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

 

1957

January: The art program is established at New Asia College, Hong Kong. May 14: The Beijing Chinese Painting Institute is formally established, with Ye Gongchuo as director and Chen Banding, Yu Fei’an, and Xu Yansun vicedirectors. Nanjing and Xi’an institutes soon follow.

May 24: A graduation exhibition opens for students in the Oil Painting Training Program taught by Konstantin Maksimov.

sand members and effectively silencing truthful reporting of the coming catastrophe. December 5: Pan Tianshou is appointed director of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA).

June 8: Mao Zedong launches the Anti-Rightist campaign to condemn dissidents within and outside the Communist Party. Liu Haisu was labeled a rightist in June; Jiang Feng was condemned as head of a Counter-revolutionary Group in July; fortyfour CAFA faculty and students are condemned. Two modernist painting societies, the Fifth Moon Painting Society and the Eastern Painting Society (Dongfang; Ton Fan), are established in Taiwan. 1958

December 23: Ten Years of Propaganda Posters exhibition opens in Beijing’s Sun Yat-sen Park. 1959–61: The three-year famine emerges as a result of the Great Leap Forward, and approximately fifty million people die. 1960

March 1: East China Art Academy moves from Wuxi to Nanjing and the name changes to Nanjing Art Academy.

June 17: The National Art Exhibition opens in Beijing. July 16: The Chinese break with the USSR is made public.

Spring: Mao Zedong launches the Great Leap Forward, a radical economic centralization of the country.

July 30: The Second National Congress of the Chinese Artists Association meets; He Xiangning is named chairwoman, with Cai Ruohong, Liu Kaiqu, Ye Qianyu, Wu Zuoren, Pan Tianshou, and Fu Baoshi vice-chairs.

June: The East China campus of CAFA, Hangzhou, is renamed Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. August 11: The Museum of the Chinese R ­ evolution opens, in Beijing. Construction continues on the “Ten Great Buildings” in Beijing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the PRC, including the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese National Art Gallery, the National Museum of History, and the ­Beijing Train Station.

1959

March 16: The Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute is established in Nanjing, with Fu Baoshi as director and Qian Songyan vice-director.

September: The twelve-person Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute work team, including Fu Baoshi, Qian Songyan, Ya Ming, and Song Wenzhi, begin their twenty-three-thousand-kilometer longdistance sketching journey.

December 12: The Hong Kong Modern Literature and Art Association is founded.

September: The Shanghai Art Technical School is established.

March 10: The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts is established, based on the South China Art Academy; Hu Yichuan is the director.

October: Romanian artist Eugen Popa begins teaching a two-year oil painting training course at ZAFA. November 12: The Beidahuang (Great Northern Wasteland) art exhibition opens in Beijing.

April 17: Liu Shaoqi is elected chairman of the ­People’s Republic of China. July 2–August 16: An expanded meeting of the Politburo (July 2–August 1) and the Eighth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee (August 2–16) convenes at Lushan, in Jiangxi, to examine problems stemming from the Great Leap Forward but is turned by Mao into a critique of “right opportunism.” Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai and other key officials were condemned as an anti-party clique and dismissed. The Chinese Communist Party then launches an “anti-right opportunism campaign” within the party, condemning more than ten thou-

The Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts is established, based on the Xi’an Art Technical School.

 

 

1961

 

June 2: The Chinese Artists Association conference on the creation of revolutionary history paintings is held. December 19: An exhibition of Chinese Revolution‑ ary Woodcuts, 1931–1949 opens in Beijing.  

1962

May: The Chinese National Art Gallery opens, with Liu Kaiqu as inaugural director. May 23: The Third National Art Exhibition opens in Beijing, at the Chinese National Art Gallery.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

317

Hong Kong City Hall art gallery opens; the inaugural exhibition is Hong Kong Art Today.

Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and most top administrators in government, party, military, education, and culture are purged.

Chinese military conflict with India begins. 1963

July 28: A graduation exhibition is held for CAFA students in the sculpture and oil painting training class.

1967

March–October: Pro–Cultural Revolution demonstrations and riots occur in Hong Kong.  

December 25: National awards for lianhuanhua are presented for the first time (1949–63). September 26: The Fourth National Art Exhibition, actually a succession of exhibitions from ­different regions shown in Beijing, begins, held through March 1965.

1965

October: The Shanghai Art Technical School is changed to the Shanghai Art School.

1968

December 24, 1965–March 6, 1966: The Rent Collec‑ tion Courtyard sculptural group exhibits at the Chinese National Art Gallery in Beijing.  

The Beijing Chinese Painting Institute hires oil painters, printmakers, and sculptors; the name is changed to the Beijing Painting Institute.

August 25: The Central Committee of the ­Chinese Communist Party orders, at Mao’s behest, that workers’ propaganda teams be sent to assume leadership of all universities, schools, educational, and cultural units throughout the country.

November 12: The National Palace Museum opens in Wai-shuang-hsi, Taipei, to house the imperial collection and other treasures moved from Beijing and Nanjing in 1948–49.

October 13: Liu Shaoqi is expelled from the Communist Party and removed from all leadership posts at the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in Beijing.

May 16: The enlarged meeting of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee passes the “May 16 Circular” approving the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

1968–76: The eight-year Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement—which sent more than sixteen million urban ­graduates from middle school, high school, and colleges to the countryside to receive so-called reeducation—begins.

 

May 28: The Central Cultural Revolution Group officially establishes with Jiang Qing as deputy director. August 1: The Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Chinese Communist Party Central Committee meeting, dominated by Mao Zedong, issues the sixteenpoint directive for the Cultural Revolution.

318

January 1: The Red Sun exhibition organized by thirty-four revolutionary rebel organizations is held in Shanghai. July 1: Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan is published in People’s Daily and PLA Daily.

The Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Creation Studio is established.

1966

 

October 1: Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line exhibition is held by the Red Guard at the Chinese National Art Gallery; Mao Zedong’s Thought Illuminates the Anyuan Workers Movement is held at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing.

 

1964

January 8: Rebel groups take over the city of Shanghai.

 

 

 

1969

March 2: The Sino-Soviet military clash at Zhenbao (Damanski) island in the Ussuri River occurs. April 1: The Ninth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party meets in Beijing. Lin Biao is officially named as Mao’s successor.

The Red Guard art movement begins and continues until roughly 1968.

September 27: All staff members of the CAA are sent to labor in the countryside at the “May 7th Cadre School.”

August 18: Mao meets and praises the Red Guard at Tiananmen.

November 12: Former PRC chairman Liu Shaoqi is tortured to death in Henan, at age seventy-one.

August 23: The CAFA Red Guard holds a Black Painting Exhibition and attacks Luo Gongliu, Ye Qianyu, and Huang Yongyu.

All major art institutions are taken over by workersoldier propaganda teams.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

1970

May: Faculty, staff, and students of the CAFA are sent to labor in Cixian, Hebei. This year artists, ­editors, and staff of Shanghai arts units are also sent down to the countryside.

1971

May 24: Most Shanghai publishers merge into the Shanghai People’s Publishing House, which holds a training class for “worker, peasant, soldier art creation,” enrolling thirty-three artists in courses on making lianhuanhua and propaganda posters. September 13: Mao’s designated successor Lin Biao and his family are killed in a plane crash in Mongolia, allegedly trying to flee China.

1974

February 15: The Black Painting Exhibition is held in Beijing; in March similar Black Painting Exhibitions are organized in Shanghai, Xi’an, and elsewhere. October 1: The National Art Exhibition in Celebra‑ tion of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the PRC is held in Beijing; the exhibit subsequently travels to Shanghai. 1975

October 25: The PRC is admitted to the United Nations, replacing the Republic of China (Taiwan).

1972

The First Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition is organized by the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It has been held continuously to the present, showing Hong Kong art. 1976

January 8: Zhou Enlai dies.

February 28: U.S. president Richard Nixon concludes his visit to China.

March 25: Official art journal Meishu resumes publication after a ten-year hiatus.

April 23–July 23: A national art exhibition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Mao’s Yan’an Talks is held in Beijing.

April 5: Spontaneous commemoration of Zhou Enlai and demonstration against Cultural Revolution leaders occurs at Tiananmen Square. The Tiananmen Incident is declared counterrevolutionary, and Deng Xiaoping is dismissed from all positions. Hua Guofeng is appointed prime minister and party vice-chairman.

 

May 12: An exhibition to celebrate Mao’s Yan’an Talks opens at Shanghai Art Exhibition Hall. 1973

May 23: In conjunction with Model Theatrical Works Performance in Beijing, a traveling exhibition of worker and peasant paintings is held. Yishujia (Artist) magazine is established in Taipei.

1971 –73: Zhou Enlai rehabilitates some artists condemned by the Cultural Revolution; he encourages landscapes and birds-and-flowers suitable for interior decoration and foreign sale Lion Art (Xiongshi meishu) is established in Taiwan.

January: The campaign to “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” is launched, aimed in part at Zhou Enlai.

March 10: Deng Xiaoping returns to administrative work to assist a cancer-stricken Zhou Enlai.

July 28: The Tangshan earthquake hits Tianjin and Beijing.

August 11: The Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting and the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio merge as the Shanghai Painting Institute, with Lü Meng as director and Wu Dayu, Tang Yun, and Wang Geyi vice-directors.

September 9: Mao Zedong dies. October 6: The Gang of Four (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan) is arrested.

October 1: A national lianhuanhua and guohua exhibition is held, Huxian Peasant Painting exhibition, in Beijing, which subsequently travels to Shanghai. November: Central May Seventh University of Arts is established in Beijing with Jiang Qing as president. “Worker-peasant-soldier” students are recruited by recommendation; CAFA faculty and students return from the countryside. Universities and other educational units recruit 150,000 “worker-peasant-soldier” students by recommendation.

November 23, 1976–January 12, 1977: The exhibit to Ardently Celebrate Comrade Hua Guofeng’s Appoint‑ ment as Central Party Chairman and Smashing the “Gang of Four’s” Plot to Usurp the Party and Take Power is shown at the Shanghai Art Gallery.  

1977

February 7: Hua Guofeng promulgates the “Two Whatevers” policy, affirming the correctness of all Mao’s policies. February 18–April 17: The National Art ­Exhibition Ardently Celebrate Comrade Hua Guofeng’s Appoint‑  

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

319

begins. Convictions of Jiang Feng and Liu Xun are overturned.

ment as Central Party Chairman and Chairman of the Central Military Committee and Ardently Cele­ brate the Great Victory of Smashing the “Gang of Four’s” Plot to Usurp the Party and Take Power is shown at the Chinese National Art Gallery, in Beijing.

Mid-November: Condemnation of the April 5, 1976, demonstrators is reversed. Fall: “Democracy Wall” at Xidan becomes a site for spontaneously posted citizen’s complaints.

March: Hu Yaobang becomes head of the Chinese Communist Party Organization Department.

December 18 and 22: The Third Central Committee meeting of the Eleventh Party Congress overturns the “Two Whatevers.” The meeting serves as starting point for China’s reform and opening. Deng Xiaoping is appointed to leadership roles in party, military, and civilian government and assumes control of China.

May 23–June 30: The Exhibition to Commemorate the 35th Anniversary of Mao’s Yan’an Talks is shown at the Chinese National Art Gallery, in Beijing; the exhibition of the same title is shown at the Shanghai Art Gallery and many other cities.  

July: Deng Xiaoping reemerges in public. August: Hua Guofeng becomes chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and announces that the Cultural Revolution is over.

1979

January 1: Diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China are normalized. January 26–February 24: New Spring Exhibition is held in Beijing, with a preface written by Jiang Feng.  

August 1–October 5: The Exhibition in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army Beijing takes place at the Chinese National Art Gallery.  

November: People’s Literature (Renmin wenxue) publishes Liu Xinwu’s short story, “Banzhuren,” the first literary work to criticize the Cultural Revolution. December: College entrance examinations resume. 1978

January: Hua Guofeng’s article “Uphold Mao Zedong’s Revolutionary Line in Literature and the Arts” is published in the official art journal Meishu. February: Meishu congkan (Art anthology) begins publication in Shanghai, the first journal to publish modernist art. March: The exhibition Nineteenth-Century French Rural Landscape Painting opens in Beijing and on April 25 in Shanghai. May 12: People’s Daily publishes “Practice Is the Only Measure of Truth,” a challenge to the infallibility of Mao Zedong thought. May 16: The Shanghai branch of the CAA resumes activity. August 11: Shanghai Wenhui Bao publishes Lu Xinhua’s short story “Scar,” initiating a literary movement exposing the Cultural Revolution. November: Rehabilitation of Rightists by the Chinese Communist Party Organization Department

320

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

February 11–18: The Twelve-Man Painting Exhibition at Huangpu District Children’s Palace, in Shanghai, shows modernist painting.  

February 17–March 16: Chinese military clash with Vietnam.  

March: The CAA resumes activity. May: Wu Guanzhong challenges socialist realism in Meishu by suggesting that formal beauty in art is as important as subject matter. June: World Art (Shijie meishu) begins publication by CAFA. August: Serial Pictures Monthly (Lianhuan huabao) publishes an illustrated version of “Maple,” based on a Scar short story by Zheng Yi. September 27: Outdoor Stars (Xingxing) exhibition with twenty-three participants opens in the garden of China Art Gallery; September 29, the exhibition is closed by the police; October 1 there is a Stars Protest March from Xidan Democracy Wall to Beijing Municipal Party Committee Headquarters. October 31: The National Congress of Literary and Art Circles opens. Officials express both praise and criticism of the Stars. November 3: Jiang Feng becomes chairman of the CAA.

November 23–December 2: The first Stars exhibition resumes indoors at Huafangzhai, Beihai Park.

December: The Chinese Artists Association condemns bourgeois liberalism. Abstract painters are targeted.

 

December: The Airport Mural project is completed. Yuan Yunsheng’s Water Splashing Festival provokes controversy about nudity in art. December 6: Democracy Wall is closed. 1980

Britain announces that most Hong Kong residents are ineligible for British citizenship. 1982

February: Former chairman of the PRC Liu ­Shaoqi is posthumously rehabilitated; Hu Yaobang becomes secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party. February 10: The Fifth National Art Exhibition opens in Beijing for the thirtieth anniversary of the PRC; silver medals are awarded to Scar paintings: Cheng Conglin’s A Snowy Day in 1968, Gao Xiaohua’s Why?, and Wang Hai’s Spring.

June: Deng Xiaoping becomes chairman of the Central Military Committee; Hu Yaobang becomes chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. September 15: 250 Years of French Painting exhibition opens at the Chinese National Art Gallery, then travels to the Shanghai Museum. 1983

March: Rehabilitated rightist oil painter and printmaker Mo Pu is appointed director of ZAFA.

May 5: A Picasso exhibition opens at the Chinese National Art Gallery; in June the show moves to the Shanghai Exhibition Hall.

July 16: The Contemporaries (Tongdairen) exhibition is held in Beijing.

September: An experimental painting exhibition at Fudan University in Shanghai closes after four days.

August 26: Four special economic zones—Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen—are established. September: Zhao Ziyang is appointed prime minister.

September 19: Parisian abstract expressionist Zhao Wouki (Zhao Wuji) has a solo exhibition at the Chinese National Art Gallery.

October: Wu Guanzhong’s article “The Beauty of Abstraction” is published in Meishu.

September: Soviet-trained oil painter Xiao Feng is appointed director of ZAFA.

November: Hua Guofeng is dismissed as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

October 11–12: The Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign is officially launched.

November 20, 1980–January 25, 1981: The trial of the Gang of Four is held.

November 1983: Hanart TZ opens in Hong Kong, showing contemporary art.

December: Hu Yaobang conclusively condemns the Cultural Revolution in a Chinese Communist Party meeting.

December: The Chinese Artists Association condemn spiritual pollution.

 

 

 

 

December 20: The Second National Youth Art Exhibition opens in Beijing.

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum opens. 1984

Private sales of artwork not yet permitted. 1981

March 27: The Hammer Collection is exhibited at the Chinese National Art Gallery.

November 1: The Chinese Painting Research Institute is established in Beijing; Li Keran is director.

 

December 11, 1984–January 10, 1985: Selected works from the national exhibition are shown at the Chinese National Art Gallery.

February 1: The second national exhibition of prizewinning lianhuanhua is held in Beijing. September 1: The Museum of Fine Arts Boston exhibits seventy American paintings, including a Jackson Pollack and a few abstract works at the Chinese National Art Gallery, in Beijing, and from October 20 through November 19 at the Shanghai Museum.

October 1–31: The sixth national exhibition, juried to avoid works with “Spiritual Pollution,” is held in nine venues, with 3,723 artworks.  

Britain announces the return of Hong Kong and Kowloon to China at the expiration of the New Territories lease in 1997. 1985

April 5: Meishu sichao, a journal of contemporary art theory, is established in Wuhan. April 21: The Huangshan Conference on Oil ­Painting establishes critical justification for avant-

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garde art in the official sphere. Criticism of the sixth national exhibition, and even of the national ­exhibition system itself, is widely expressed and published elsewhere.

Spring: Contemporary Oil Paintings from the People’s Republic of China, sale exhibition including work from the Seventh National Art Exhibition, is held at Harkness House, New York.

June: New Concrete Image exhibition in Shanghai, Nanjing, Kunming, and Chengdu takes place, a small-scale artist-funded event.

Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China is held at Pacific Asia Museum, in Pasadena, California.

July: People’s Communes are abolished.

Thirty-eight years of martial law in Taiwan is ended by President Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingkuo).

July 6: Zhongguo meishubao is established.

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum holds its first exhibition of art in new media, Experimental Art: Perfor‑ mance and Space.

November 18: Robert Rauschenberg’s ROCI exhibition opens at the Chinese National Art Gallery. December 2: ’85 New Space exhibition is held at ZAFA gallery. Fourth Congress of the Federation of Literary and Arts Circles (FLAC) calls for “creative freedom”; ’85 New Wave movement began.

Meishu sichao ceases publication. The Thirteenth Lausanne Tapestry festival exhibits Chinese work from the Varbanov group. 1988

Maryn Varbanov returns to China to teach contemporary fiber arts. The Beijing International Art Palace (Guoji yiyuan) is established, which held fifteen exhibitions between 1986 and 1989. 1986

December 22, 1988–January 8, 1989: Nude Oil Painting is exhibited at the Chinese National Art Gallery; it moves to the Shanghai Art Gallery on ­February 1.  

June 19: Horizon ’86 Group Painting exhibition is held at Shanghai Art Gallery. July 24–August 30: The show Avant-garde Chinese Art is exhibited at City Gallery, New York, and subsequently at Vassar College.

June 26: The Taiwan Provincial Art Museum opens in Taichung.

 

August 15–19: A conference on new wave art is cosponsored by Zhongguo meishubao in Zhuhai.  

February 5–19: The China-Avant Garde exhibition at the Chinese National Art Gallery concludes the ’85 New Wave movement. April 15: Hu Yaobang’s death is followed by demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Fall: Students demonstrate against corruption and for greater democracy in major Chinese cities.

May 15: Zhao Ziyang resigns and is replaced by Jiang Zemin as Chinese Communist Party general secretary.

November 1: The Hubei Youth Art Festival opens; exhibition at twenty-eight venues includes many artistic experiments by self-organized art groups.

May 20–October 5: The Seventh National Art Exhibition is shown in eight cities.  

The Institute of Art Tapestry Varbanov is founded at ZAFA, in collaboration with a carpet factory.

June 4: The Shanghai Drama Academy opens a new commercial art gallery.

January: Hu Yaobang resigns and Zhao Ziyang is appointed Chinese Communist Party secretary general.

June 4: Student protesters and others in Beijing are killed by the People’s Liberation Army. A threeyear political, cultural, and economic retrenchment begins.

Anti-bourgeois liberalism campaign officially launched.

322

1989

September 28–October 5: Xiamen Dada exhibition is organized in Fujian.  

1987

October 15: A two-man show by Xu Bing and Lü Shengzhong opens at the Chinese National Art Gallery; this is China’s first conceptual installation art in an official gallery, although it is not identified as such by the authorities.

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

September 5–October 5: An exhibition of prize­ winning works from the Seventh National exhibition is held at the Chinese National Art Gallery.

September 30: Hong Kong Christie’s conducts the first auction of contemporary Chinese oil ­paintings, including work by Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, and others.

 

Magiciens de la Terre, at Pompidou Center in Paris, includes three avant-garde Chinese artists now abroad. Fall: A nationwide investigation ensues as well as a purge of personnel involved in or sympathetic to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Many artists and critics flee abroad; those abroad do not return. 1990

January 1: Zhongguo meishubao is forced to cease publication; progressive editors of other art journals are subsequently suspended. Experimental artists lose a publication platform.

The foreign-owned art gallery, Red Gate Gallery, is established in Beijing. I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne Anymore, an exhibition of New Wave and avant-garde oil paintings, opens at the Pacific Asia Museum, in ­Pasadena, California. 1992

January: Deng Xiaoping conducts a symbolic inspection tour of new economic zones in southern China. Party Congress approves new economic developments and thaw begins. June: Chinese artists participate in K–18, in conjunction with the Kassel Documenta.  

May 20–30: The World of Women Painters, including artwork by Yu Hong and Wei Rong, is exhibited at CAFA’s new commercial gallery.  

July 7: Chine Demain pour hier, an exhibition of avant-garde Chinese artists abroad, opens in Pourrieres, France. September 19–20: The second exhibition of New Literati Painting is held at the Chinese Painting Research Institute in Beijing.  

Dislocated avant-garde artists and critics establish a community at Fuyuanmen Village near Yuanmingyuan, in Beijing. Lee Deng-hui becomes the first native-born president of Taiwan. Exhibition of 300 Years of Art in Taiwan opens at the Provincial Art Museum in Tai-chung. The decision is made to begin development of the rural Pudong district in Shanghai. 1991

April 19–22: The “Xishan Conference” (officially the “New Era Art Creation Conference”), at which young critics advocated on behalf of avant-garde artists, is held by the Art Research Center of the China Academy of Arts in Beijing; this point of view is subsequently attacked in the official art press.  

August 29–September 30: The Exceptional Passage, organized by the Museum City Project, in Fukuoka, exhibits the work of avant-garde Chinese artists abroad.  

August: The PRC’s first art auction house, Duoyun­ xuan Auctions Limited, is established in Shanghai. October 11: New Pudong District is established in Shanghai for national economic development. International investment in China, stalled by the events of June 4, 1989, begin to resume. October 20: The First Guangzhou 1990s Contemporary Art Biennial opens. The Beijing Municipal Artists Association opens a commercial gallery, Guoji yiyuan (International Garden of Art), in the new Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza on Wangfujing, a hotel constructed on the former site of the Chinese Artists Association headquarters. The gallery is directed by Liu Xun. The Shanghai municipal government begins remaking People’s Square, formerly the site of Mao-era mass rallies, into a civic and cultural area. The new Shanghai Museum building was constructed between 1993 and 1996 across the street from the new city hall, followed by the Urban Planning Exhibition Center and Grand Theater. On humanitarian grounds, the White House grants permanent residence status to PRC citizens in the United States during and immediately following the June 4, 1989, massacre. Many artists establish new careers in the United States.

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1993

January: China’s New Art Post-1989 opens in Hong Kong, then travels to Australia and North America and introduces cynical realism and political pop.

contemporary oil painting and new media. Subsequently the gallery is moved to its own space in Fuxing Park.

January 30: China Avant-garde! opens in Berlin and subsequently travels to Rotterdam, Oxford, and elsewhere in Europe.

May 18: The First Shanghai Biennale at the Shanghai Art Gallery is the first government-organized biennial in China; shows work in Western media.

May: The China Guardian (Jiade) auction house is established in Beijing.

May: The first foreign-owned gallery to occupy its own space, the Courtyard Gallery, opens in a renovated courtyard house adjacent to the Palace Museum in Beijing.

June 13: PRC artists are shown for the first time at the Forty-Fifth Venice Biennale; art from Taiwan is also shown.

December 6: An auction of contemporary Chinese art is held at Zhongshang shenjia.

July–September: Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-garde in Exile is shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio.  

Deng Xiaoping’s signal to reopen China’s economy, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is implemented. Travel restrictions are relaxed and development of the Pudong New Economic Zone in Shanghai is accelerated. Jiang Zemin, the former Shanghai mayor and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since 1989, assumes presidency of China. 1994

Para/Site, the first artist-run exhibition space in Hong Kong devoted to installation and performance art, is founded. Lion Art (Xiongshi meishu), based out of Taipei, ceases publication. 1997

July 1: The colony of Hong Kong is retroceded by Britain to Chinese control. Zhu Rongji, the former Shanghai major, is appointed premier; implementation of economic reforms accelerates.

March: China Guardian, Beijing, auctions oil paintings for the first time in the PRC. October 12: PRC artists are shown for the first time at the Sao Paulo Biennial.

1998

Performance artists and other avant-garde ­artists establish an artists’ community at Xiaobao Village, Songzhuang, in the ­Beijing suburbs. Many move in from Yuanmingyuan. December 27: The Eighth National Art Exhibition opens at the Chinese National Art Gallery, in Beijing; competition from other exhibition venues reduces the significance of this event.

The Second Shanghai Biennale is held. 1999

324

The first foreign-owned commercial gallery, Shangart, opens in a hotel in Shanghai, specializing in

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

The First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, in Japan, includes contemporary Chinese artists. The Taiwan Provincial Art Museum is renamed National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. More than twenty Chinese artists show at the Forty-Eighth Venice Biennale.

The Gwangju (Kwangju) Biennial in Korea shows Chinese artists.

1996

 

June 13: The First Taipei Biennial, Site of Desire, is held at Taipei Municipal Art Museum, curated by Nanjo Fumio of Japan.

The Forty-Sixth Venice Biennale includes Chinese artists.

May: First auction of Chinese oil paintings by Sotheby’s Hong Kong is held.

February 6–May 25: A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China is held at the Guggenheim Soho, the modern half of China: 5000 Years. The exhibit travels to Guggenheim Bilbao, July 18–November 1, 1998.  

The Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts is renamed China Academy of Art. 1995

February 19: Deng Xiaoping dies.

December 20: The colony Macao is retroceded by Portugal to Chinese control. 2000

September 9: The Second Taipei Biennial, The Sky Is the Limit, curated by Manray Hsu (Taiwan, aka Xu Wenrui) and Jerome Sans (France), opens. From

this time on, the Taipei biennial has been curated collaboratively by local and international curators. November 6, 2000–January 6, 2001: The Third Shanghai Biennale, Haishang/Shanghai, is held at the Shanghai Art Museum (formerly the Shanghai Art Gallery).  

The Fourth Taipei Biennial, Do You Believe in ­Reality?, is held. 2005

There is more than a tenfold expansion in art academy admissions this year. Major expansions and relocations of art school campuses abound. 2001

July 1: The Poly (Baoli) Auction House is established in Beijing, with military backing.

The First Chengdu Biennale, Model Easel, occurs.

The first Chinese national pavilion at the Venice Biennale is established by the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

The 798 Art District is founded in Beijing. Beijing is awarded the 2008 Olympics; a ­massive demolition of the Qing dynasty city begins in preparation. 2001–2008: New buildings for the Capital Museum, the National Center for the Performing Arts, the Stadium (aka the Bird’s Nest), CCTV headquarters, and other major architectural projects in Beijing are constructed.

The Second Guangzhou Triennial, Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for ­Modernization, takes place, and in 2008 the ­exhibition explores interactions between center and local.

The Second Beijing Biennial is held. The Second Chengdu Biennale, Century and Heaven, takes place.

 

2002

2006

The newly constructed Suzhou Museum, designed by I. M. Pei, is opened. Sotheby’s New York holds its first auction of contemporary Chinese oil paintings.

The Fourth Shanghai Biennale, Urban Creation, occurs. The First Guangzhou Triennial, Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990–2000, takes place.  

The Fifth Taipei Biennial, Dirty Yoga, is held. 2007

The Third Chengdu Biennale, Reboot, takes place.

2008

The Shanghai Biennale, Translocal Motion, occurs.

The Third Taipei Biennial, Great Theater of the World, takes place.

September 6–November 16: The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Farewell to Post-colonialism, takes place.

The No. 50 Moganshan Arts District in Shanghai begins to develop in an old textile factory.

August 8: The Beijing Olympics begin.

 

The Third Beijing Biennial starts.

Shangart establishes a space. Shanghai’s bid for 2010 International Expo is ­successful. Subway construction and other infrastructure and architectural developments are accelerated. 2003

The Sixth Taipei Biennial takes place. 2009

July 28–August 20: The Fourth Chengdu Biennale, China Narratives, takes place.

2010

The Shanghai Expo; the Eighth Shanghai Biennale, Rehearsal; the Fourth Beijing Biennial; and the ­Seventh Taipei Biennial are held.

2011

September 22: Original Problem: Return to the Museum Itself, the first in a series of five exhibitions comprising the Fourth Guangzhou Triennial, opens.

2012

The Ninth Shanghai Biennale, Chongxin fadian, takes place.

The Beijing Biennial is inaugurated. Fear of the SARS epidemic abounds; many events are canceled.

2004

The Sixth Shanghai Biennale, Hyperdesign, is held.

The Fifth Shanghai Biennale, Techniques of the ­Visible, is held. The foreign-owned Shanghai Gallery of Art is ­established in a renovated building on the Bund, in Shanghai.

 

Major Events in Modern Chinese Art

325

Notes

chapter 1

1. Shan Guolin, “Painting of China’s New Metropolis: The Shanghai School, 1850– 1900,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradi‑ tion in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 20–34. For Zhang Xiong, also see Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Transcending Tur‑ moil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire, 1796–1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992), 138–39. 2. Sizing is a general term to refer to the application of a protective glaze or stiffening to the surface of paper or fabric. Because silk and “raw” Chinese paper are both soft and extremely absorbent, a ground intended to receive finely detailed or richly colored painting, like this example, would be treated with layers of starch or gelatin to keep the ink and pigment on the surface and under control. 3. For more on Ren Xiong, see Brown and Chou, Transcending Turmoil, 164–72, and Britta Lee Erickson, “Patronage and Production in the Nineteenth Century Shanghai Region: Ren Xiong and His Sponsors,” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1997. 4. Translation slightly modified from Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 129. Also see James Cahill, “Ren Xiong and His Self-Portrait,” Ars Orientalis 25 (1995): 126, online at http://www.jstor .org/pss/4629491 (accessed June 30, 2011). 5. One of the last masterpieces of Chinese woodblock-printed illustration is the Drinking Cards with Illustrations of the Forty-Eight Immortals (Liexian jiupai), designed by Ren Xiong in 1854 for the one-month birthday celebration of his son Ren Yu (1854– 1901). It is one of four sets of illustrations he created during the final years of his brief  

 

 

 

 

 

327

life. First painted as a set of drinking cards for party guests, Ren Xiong subsequently, in collaboration with skilled block-­cutter Cai Zhaochu, published it in book form. Cai carefully carved Ren Xiong’s fine-line figure paintings on pear-wood blocks, a material known for its hardness, evenness, and durability in printing. For one of several available reproductions, see Liexian jiupai [Drinking Cards with Illustrations of the Forty-Eight Immortals] (Beijing: People’s Art Publishing House, 1987). 6. The best-known and earliest surviving work in the tradition of Gu Kaizhi is the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Ladies of the Palace in the British Museum. For some debates about its date and significance, see Shane McCausland, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll (London: British Museum Press, 2003). 7. The painting is now in the Shanghai Museum; see Shan Guolin, “Painting of China’s New Metropolis,” 26. 8. Jesuit historian J. de la Servière wrote that one could still see Ferrer’s sculpture Christ Entombed on the main altar at the Dongjiadu church as well as many statues and basreliefs at Xujiahui. J. de la Servière, Histoire de la mission du Kiang-nan, vol. 1 (Shanghai: l’Orphelinat de Tou-sè-wè, Zika-wéi, 1914), 105, 211–13. 9. The summary of the artistic activities of Shanghai’s Jesuits in these paragraphs is taken from Wan Qingli, “Zhongguo xiyanghua zhi yaolan” [The cradle of China’s Western painting], in Huajia yu huashi: Jindai meishu cong­ gao [Painter and painting: History of modern art manuscripts] (Hangzhou: Zhongguo meishu xueyuan chubanshe, 1997), 148–57. 10. The Xujiahui cathedral, designed by Ferrer, was dedicated on the feast day of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, July 31, 1851. According to Servière, Ferrer’s school was so successful that it sent works all over China. It attracted European tourists and was still flourishing in the early twentieth century. J. de la Servière, Histoire de la mission du Kiang-nan, 211–13. 11. Ren Yi’s son recalled in an inscription that his father sketched in pencil this way. In an article introducing this document, Shen Zhiyu suggests that it confirms a close friendship between the two men, and that Ren may have learned the practice from Liu Dezhai. “Guanyu Ren Bonian de xin shiliao” [New historical material on Ren Bonian], Wen­huibao, September 7, 1961, p. 4. 12. Translation from Kuiyi Shen, “Wu Changshi and the Shanghai Art World in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2000, p. 162. The Wu Changshi inscription is not currently mounted on the painting but is cited by Lin Shuzhong in Wu Changshi nianpu (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin meishu chubanshe), 31.  

 

 

328

Notes

13. Shen, “Wu Changshi and the Shanghai Art World,” 162. 14. For a good discussion of such issues, see James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Tradi‑ tional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 15. Zheng Wei, “Shanghai Fanshops from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century,” unpublished paper, presented on May 22, 1998, Guggenheim Museum, New York. 16. This handscroll is now in the Kyoto National Museum. 17. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 18. “Thief in the Flower Garden” was ostensibly the true story of a celebrity courtesan named Wang Sibao. A wealthy client tried to win her affection but, despite great expense, he found that she still loved others. In revenge, he booked her services for the evening and then, as she slept, he cut off her long hair, destroying her livelihood. See Julia  F. Andrews, “Commercial Art and China’s Modernization,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China, (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 183. 19. Ellen Johnston Laing, Art and Aesthetics in Chinese Popular Prints: Selections from the Muban Foundation Col‑ lection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2002). 20. For biographies, see Brown and Chou, Transcend‑ ing Turmoil, 256–60, and Elizabeth Bennett, “Chao Chihch’ien (1829–1884), a Late Nineteenth Century Chinese Artist: His Life, Calligraphy, and Painting,” PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1984. 21. Chen Zhenlian, Jindai zhongri huihua jiaoliushi bijiao yanjiu (Hefei: Anhui meishu chubanshe, 2000), 141– 52; Kuiyi Shen, “Shanghai-Japan Connection in the Late Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Turmoil, Representation, and Trends: Modern Chinese Paint‑ ing, 1796–1949 [Shibian xingxiang liufeng: Zhongguo jindai huihua, 1796–1949 xueshu yantao hui lunwenji] (Taipei: Chang Foundation in collaboration with the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2008), 233–58; and Ajioka Yoshindo, “Kaijohai to nihon to no kakawari” [On the relationship between Shanghai school and Japan], UP, no. 422 (December 2007). This is mentioned by Yang Yi, Haishang molin, 1919, reprint of 1920 edition (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989), 76. 22. See Jonathan Hay, “Notes on Chinese Photography and Advertising in Late Nineteenth Century Shanghai,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s–1930s, edited by Jason C. Kuo (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 95–119.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chapter 2

1. Mayching Kao, “Reforms in Education and the Beginning of the Western-Style Painting Movement in China,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China, (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 148. Kao’s work on early history of art education is foundational. Also see Mayching Kao, “The Beginning of the Western-Style Painting Movement in Relationship to Reforms in Education in Early Twentieth-Century China,” New Asia Aca‑ demic Bulletin 4 (1983): 373–400. 2. Normal colleges continued to enjoy great academic prestige and impact in the art world throughout the twentieth century. 3. An excellent study of this period is Douglas R. Rey­ nolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: Harvard University Press, 1993). 4. Yoshida Chizuko provides a careful list and other detailed material on the activities of Chinese students at the school from early school records. See Yoshida Chizuko, “Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō no Gaikokujin Seito” [Foreign students of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, part I], Tokyo Gei‑ jutsu Daigaku Bijutsu Gakubu Kiyo [Bulletin of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music], no. 33 (March 1999): 5–74. 5. This was Cai’s most important policy statement as he began transformation of the Qing dynasty educational curriculum into that of the new Republic. The 1912 speech, “Duiyu jiaoyu fangzhen de yijian” [My views on the aims of education] was published multiple times, appearing in Minlibao, February 8–10; Lingshi zhengfu gongbao, no. 13 (February 11, 1912); Jiaoyu zazhi 3, no. 11 (February 1912); and Dongfang zazhi 8, no. 10 (April 1912). Our summary is indebted to Kao, “Reforms in Education and the Beginning of the WesternStyle Painting Movement in China,” 153. See also William J. Duiker, Ts’ai Yuan-pei: Educator of Modern China (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 44–46. 6. Cai Yuanpei, “Yi meiyu dai zongjiao shuo” [Replacing religion with aesthetic education], Xin Qingnian 3, no. 6 (1917): 509–13; English translation in Modern Chinese Lit‑ erary Thought, edited by Kirk Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 182–89. 7. The most accessible study of this group is Ralph Croizier’s Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) School (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1988. Also see The Art of the Gao Brothers of the Lingnan School, edited by Mayching Kao (Hong Kong: Art Museum, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995); and Christina  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chu, “The Lingnan School and Its Followers: Radical Innovation in Southern China,” in Andrews and Shen, A Cen‑ tury in Crisis, 64–79. 8. Croizier, Art and Revolution in Modern China, 68. 9. This account is based, as far as possible, on the school’s archives, now preserved in the collection of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, as well as on newspapers and periodicals of the time. The best overview, despite internal inconsistencies, is still that by Zhu Boxiong and Chen Ruilin in Zhongguo xihua wushinian (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1989). In English, Jane Zheng (Zheng Jie) has recently published short articles about the school, also based on these archival sources, such as “The Shanghai Fine Arts College: Art Education and Modern Women Artists in the 1920s and 1930s,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 192–235. 10. Cai Yuanpei, “Jieshao yishujia Liu Haisu” [Introducing artist Li Haisu], in Haisu yishu jiping (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1984), 10, reprinted from Beijing jing‑ bao, January 14, 1922. 11. Liu Haisu’s Portrait of a Girl (1919) is a good example. 12. Her return to Shanghai from America was reported in Shenbao, August 9, 1919; Wang Zhen, ed., Shanghai mei‑ shu nianbiao, 1900–2000 [A chronology of art in Shanghai, 1900–2000], 91. 13. “Shijie meishu” [World art], Meishu zazhi [Fine arts], no. 2 (July 1919): 1–6. We use here, for consistency, the En­ glish name the Shanghai Art Academy. The school was called Shanghai meishuyuan in 1912, Shanghai tuhua meishuyuan in 1915, Shanghai meishu xuexiao in 1920, Shanghai meishu zhuanmen xuexiao in 1927, and Shanghai meishu zhuanke xuexiao in 1930. 14. Chen Baoyi went to Japan in 1913, where he is said to have studied in a studio associated with the former White Horse Society, called the White Horse Western Painting Research Institute [Hakubakai yōga kenkyūjo]. 15. Chen Duxiu, “Xianzhen yu Rujiao” [Constitutionalism and Confucianism], Xin Qingnian 2, no. 3 (1916): 1–4. 16. Hao Chang, “Neo-Confucianism and the Intellectual Crisis of Contemporary China,” in The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China, edited by Charlotte Furth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), 281. 17. See Chen Duxiu’s letter to Lu Cheng, in Xin qingnian 6, no. 1 (1919): 85, 86. 18. The Four Wangs that Chen Duxiu mentions here are the four early Qing orthodox painters—Wang Shimin (1592–1680), Wang Jian (1598–1677), Wang Hui (1632–1717), and Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715)—whose work was still emulated by some traditionalists in the early twentieth century.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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19. The essay was published as an independent volume that reproduced the manuscript in Kang Youwei’s own calligraphy and as an article in the journal edited by Zhou Xiang, Zhonghua meishubao (October 1918). See Ma Lin, Zhou Xiang yu Shanghai zaoqi meishu jiaoyu [Zhou Xiang and early art education in Shanghai] (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Art Press, 2007), 188. chapter 3

1. Chen Shizeng, “Wenrenhua de jiazhi” [The value of literati painting], Huixue zazhi [Journal of the Beijing daxue Huafa yanjiuhui], no. 2 (January 1921): 1–6. 2. On literati painting, see Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 16, 191–240. 3. Chen Shizeng, “Wenrenhua de jiazhi” (1921), 5. 4. Ibid., 5–6. 5. Chen Shizeng, “Wenrenhua zhi jiazhi” [The value of literati painting], in his Zhongguo wenrenhua zhi yanjiu [Research on Chinese literati painting] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1922; eighth reprint, 1941), 9–10. 6. See Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists in Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 8–9. 7. Established by Jiang Baoling in the old town of Shanghai in 1839, it attracted many artists who were active in the city, including Li Yunjia, Fei Danxu (1801–1850), and Yao Xie (1805–1864). See Yang Yi, Haishang molin [Shanghai’s forest of ink] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1989), reprint of 1919 edition, entry on “Jiang Baoling,” 59; and Xu Zhihao, Zhongguo meishu shetuan manlu [Notes on Chinese art groups and societies] (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1994), 3–4. Jiang Baoling also wrote a book about Shanghai painters, Molin jinhua [Current comments on the forest of ink] (1852) that has been reprinted many times. 8. The activities of the society were documented in a colophon written by Wu Zonglin in 1864 on a now-lost painting, The Elegant Gathering of the Pinghuashe, which was painted by members Qian Hui’an (1833–1911), Wang Li (1813–1879), and Bao Dong (active 1849–1866). See Yang Yi, Haishang molin, entry on “Wu Zonglin,” 61–62. 9. Yang Yi, Haishang molin, entry on “Qian Hui’an,” 72–74. 10. For an excellent study of Wang Zhen, see Walter B. Davis, “Wang Yiting and the Art of Sino-­Japanese Exchange,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008. For other recent research, see Hsing-yuan Tsao, “A Forgotten Celebrity: Wang Zhen (1867–1938), Businessman, Philanthropist, and Artist,” in Art at the Close of China’s Empire, Phoebus VIII, edited by Ju-hsi Chou (Arizona: Arizona Board of Regents,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

330

Notes

1998), 94–109; and Kuiyi Shen, “Wang Yiting in the Social Network of 1910s–1930s Shanghai,” in At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai, edited by Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 45–64. 11. Interview with Wu Changye, grandson of Wu Changshi, by Kuiyi Shen in August 1994 and October 1995 in Shanghai; also see Zhu Guantian, “Wu Changshi yu riben youren zhi jiaoyou,” in Huiyi Wuchangshi [Memories of Wu Changshi] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1986), 73–75. 12. A photo entitled “The Celebration Party for the Establishment of Sino-Japanese Art Colleagues Association,” published in Liangyou Pictorial [Young companion] no. 44 (February 1930): 19, shows Wang Zhen, Ye Gongchuo, and Di Chuqing with the Japanese consul in Shanghai, Mr. Tanaka, Sawamura Sachio, the Japanese painter Yokoyama Taikan and his wife, and other Japanese. In 1931, Wang Zhen led a group of Shanghai painters—including Qian Shoutie, Wu Hufan, Sun Xueni, Li Qiujun, Zheng Wuchang, Zhang Shanzi, and Zhang Daqian—to participate in the Fourth Sino-Japanese Art Exhibition in Tokyo. 13. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Japanese Impact on the Republican Art World: The Construction of Chinese Art History as a Modern Field,” Twentieth Cen‑ tury China, 32, no. 1 (November 2006): 4–35; and Kuiyi Shen, “Fu Baoshi and the Construction of Chinese Art History,” in Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution, edited by Anita Chung (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 27–32. 14. Zheng Chang, Zhonguo huaxue quanshi [A complete history of Chinese painting] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1929). 15. Julia F. Andrews, “The Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui) and Chinese Landscape Painting,” in Ershi shiji shanshui hua yanjiu wenji [Studies in twentieth-century shanshuihua], edited by Lu Fusheng and Tang Zheming (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 2006), 556–91. 16. See also Ellen Johnston Laing on Wu Shujuan in Views from the Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists, 1300– 1912, edited by Marsha Weidner and others (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988), 172–73. 17. For more on the romantic and tragic career of Chang Yu (Sanyu), see Rita Wong (Yi Shufan), Sanyu: Catalogue Raisonneé: Oil Paintings [Chang Yu youhua quanji] (Xindianshi: Guoju jijinhui in association with University of Washington Press, 2001); Sanyu: Catalogue Raisonné: Oil Paintings, volume 2 (Taipei: Li Ching Foundation, 2011); and Sanyu, l’écriture du corps (Paris: Museé des arts asiatiques Guimet; Milan: Skira, 2004).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

18. This summary is largely based on the research of Delin Lai. See “Searching for a Modern Chinese Monument: The Design of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 1 (March 2005): 22–55. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 36, translation from Wang Yiting’s, “Wang Yi­ting guanyu Sun Zhongshan lingmu tu’an ping pan baogao” [Report by Wang Yiting on the designs of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum]. 21. Lai, “Searching for a Modern Chinese Monument,” 45 and 47. 22. Christina Chu, “The Lingnan School and Its Followers: Radical Innovation in Southern China,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 70. 23. Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker, “Shanghai Modern,” in Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945, edited by Jo-Anne BirnieDanzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian (Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 21; and Xu Jiang, “The ‘Misreading’ of Life,” in Birnie-Danzker, Lum, and Zheng, Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945, 75–77. David Clarke, “Exile from Tradition: Chinese and Western Traits in the Art of Lin Fengmian,” in Col‑ ors of East and West: Paintings by Lin Fengmian (Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong, 2003), 12–25. 24. Xu Jiang, in Birnie-Danzker, Lum, and Zheng, Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945, 77. 25. See Craig Clunas, “Chinese Art and Chinese Artists in France, 1924–1925,” Arts Asiatiques 44 (1989): 100–106. 26. Wu Tung, Painting in China since the Opium Wars (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1980), 17. 27. Xu Zhihao, Zhongguo meishu shetuan manlu, 89. 28. Cai Yuanpei, preface (dated October 15, 1929), to Meizhan tekan (Jiaoyubu quanguo meishu zhanlanhui tekan) (np, nd), vol. 1, “Jin,” unpaginated. The two-volume catalog lacks publication information, but both volumes include advertisements for publications by Youzheng shuju. The notice in volume 1 claims publication credit for the catalog and is dated September 1930. Old library catalogs give Zhengyishe as the publisher, which Ellen Laing believes applies to volume 2, “Gu.” E-mail communication, July 11, 2008. This catalog is usually cited with a date of 1929. 29. They included educators from Beijing’s Jingshi Art Academy; Guangzhou’s Lingnan University and Municipal Art School; Shanghai’s China Art College [Zhonghua yishu daxue], New China Art College [Xinhua yishu daxue], South China Arts Academy [Nanguo yishu xueyuan], Shanghai Arts College [Shanghai Yida], China Women’s  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art School, and Lida Art School; and Nanjing’s National Central University. 30. The exhibition opened on May 24, 1929, at the French school [Faguo xuetang] on Huanlong Road. Members Lin Fengmian, Lin Wenzheng, Liu Jipiao, Cai Weilian, Wu Dayu, and Li Puyuan came to Shanghai from Hangzhou to hold a press conference. See Shanghai meishuzhi [Annals of Shanghai art], edited by Xu Changming (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2004), 645. 31. Meizhan 5 (April 22, 1929). Ying Chua, “Art and the Public in Republican China: Critical Debates on the 1929 National Art Exhibition,” unpublished paper, College Art Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, February 22, 2009. 32. It is believed that Li Shutong may have initiated the practice in China. For a 1913 photograph of his class, see Mayching Kao, “Reforms in Education and the Beginning of the Western-Style Painting Movement in China,” in Andrews and Shen, A Century in Crisis, 156. 33. Shanghai Municipal Archives preserves contemporary documents that somewhat conflict with later versions of the story. See Julia F. Andrews, “Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai: Liu Haisu and the Nude Model Controversy,” Chungguksa Yongu—Journal of Chinese Historical Researches (The Korean Society for Chinese History), no. 35 (April 2005): 323–72, special issue, “Chinese History through Art”; “Luotihua lunzheng he xiandai zhongguo meishushi de jiangou,” in Studies on Shanghai School Paint‑ ing (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2001), 117–50, reprinted in Zhao Li and Yu Ding, ed., Zhongguo youhua wenxian, 1542–2000 [Documents about Chinese oil painting] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002), 501–11. 34. The studio also organized an exhibition for charitable purposes at Ningbo Tongxianghui in 1929. The four-day exhibition received donations of paintings and calligraphy from more than sixty artists. Participants included traditional ink painters (such as Chen Shuren, He Xiang­ning, Chen Xiaodie, Hu Shi, Zhang Daqian, Zhang Shanzhi, Zheng Wuchang, and Pan Tianshou) and also ­Western-style painters (Pan Yuliang, Ding Song, Wang Yachen, Wang Jiyuan, Tang Yunyu, and Zhang Yuguang).  

 

 

 

 

chapter 4

1. Lü Qingzhong, “Xin huapai lüeshuo,” Dongfang zazhi 14, no. 7 (July 15, 1917): 99–100. 2. Lü Cheng, “Xiyang meishushi” [Western art history], originally published in Shanghai, 1921, reprinted in Zhao Li and Yu Ding, eds., Zhongguo youhua wenxian, 1542–2000 [Documents on Chinese oil painting, 1542–2000] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002), 427.  

 

 

Notes

331

3. The best English-language study of the Storm Society is Ralph Croizier, “Post-Impressionists in Pre-War Shanghai: The Juelanshe (Storm Society) and the Fate of Modernism in Republican China,” in Modernity in Asian Art, edited by John Clark (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1993), 135–54. See also Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 62–64; Hiunkin Pang [Pang Xunqin] (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2006), and Schudy [Qiudi] (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2006). 4. Duan Pingyou, “Zizhu Juelanshe huazhan,” Yishu xunkan 1, no. 5 (October 11, 1932), 10. Translation from Croizier, “Post-Impressionists in Pre-War Shanghai,” 140. 5. The Chinese name Taimeng huahui is a transliteration rather than translation of deux mondes (two worlds), emphasizing its foreign flavor. This group, which was left-leaning politically, included more than twenty people, including Zhou Duo, Duan Pingyou, Liang Baibo, Tu Yi, and Hu Zuoqin. 6. In attendance at the preliminary meeting on August 1, at which the manifesto and charter were planned, were Shanghai Art Academy director Liu Haisu, along with professors Ni Yide, Wang Jiyuan, Fu Lei, Pang Xunqin, and Zhang Ruogu (?–1967). 7. “Bianji yutan” [Editor’s afterword], Yishu xunkan 1, no. 4 (October 1, 1932). 8. Also see Pang Xunqin, Jiushi zheyang zouguo laide [This is how it happened] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2005), 134, for the dates of October 10–17, 1932, which is corrected in subsequent publications. 9. The “Storm Society Manifesto,” as published in Yishu xunkan 1, no. 5 (October 11, 1932): 8. 10. Wang Jiyuan, “Juelan (Storm) duanhe,” Yishu xun­ kan 1, no. 5 (October 11, 1932): 10. 11. For publication of this painting and other work from the Storm Society’s third exhibition, see “Juelanshe huazhan chupin” [Third Exhibition of the ‘Torrents Society’], Young Companion, no. 111 (November 1935): 21. 12. The founders included Liang Xihong (1912–1982), Zhao Shou (1912–2003), Zeng Ming, Li Dongping, Li Zhongsheng, Fang Rending (1901–1975), and Su Wonong (1901–1975). 13. The title of this work, Color (Yan), may also be translated as “Face,” a semantic vagueness that corresponds to the visual ambiguity and is probably an intentional part of the artist’s surrealistic approach. 14. For more detail on the woodcut movement, see Pearl S. Buck and others, China in Black and White: An Album of Woodcuts by Contemporary Chinese Artists (New York: The John Day Co., 1945); Shirley Sun, Modern Chinese Woodcuts  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

332

Notes

(San Francisco: Chinese Culture Foundation, 1979); Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Modern Woodcut Movement,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Cen‑ tury China (New York: Guggenheim Museum and Abrams, 1998), 196–225; Li Xiaoshan and Zou Yuejin, Minglang de tian: 1937–1949 jiefangqu muke banhuaji [Prints from the Liberated Zone, 1937–1949] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 1998); Iris Wachs and Chang Tsong-zung, Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints: From the Commu‑ nist Revolution to the Open-door Policy and Beyond, 1945–1998 (Israel: Museum of Art Ein Harod, 1999); Li Shusheng and Li Xiaoshan, Hanning dadi: 1930–1949 guotongqu muke ban‑ huaji [Prints from the Nationalist-controlled Zone, 1930– 1949] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2000); Julia F. Andrews, “The Art of the Revolution: 1931–1949,” in The Art of Contemporary Chinese Woodcuts (London: Muban Foundation, 2003), 32–47; Kuiyi Shen, “The Modernist Woodcut Movement in 1930s China,” in Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945, edited by Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian (Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 262–82; Tang Xiaobing, The Origins of the Chinese Avant-garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Woodcuts in Mod‑ ern China, 1937–2008, edited by Joachim Homann (Hamilton, N.Y.: Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, 2009). 15. Itagaki Takao, “Jindai meishu shichao lun: Yi ‘minzu di secai’ wei zhu de” [On the historical currents of modern art: Centering on “national color”], translated by Lu Xun (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1929). 16. Lu Xun wrote prefaces and notes for three volumes on woodcuts, two from Europe entitled Modern Woodcut Selec‑ tions [Jindai muke xuanji], and the third from the Soviet Union, Selected Prints from New Russia [Xin’E huaxuan]. 17. Uchiyama Kakichi, “Guanyu banhua de yixie huiyi” [Some memories of woodcuts], translated by Sun Haoyuan, Banhua (1957), no. 3, reprinted in Li Hua, Li Shusheng, and Ma Ke, ed., Zhongguo xinxing banhua yundong wushin‑ ian [Fifty years of the New Chinese Print Movement] (Shenyang: Liaoning meishu chubanshe, 1981), 212–14. 18. Uchiyama Kakichi, “Early Chinese Woodblock Prints and Me—A Memory of the Woodcut Training Class,” in Lu Xun yu muke [Lu Xun and woodcut], edited by Uchiyama Kakichi and Nara Wao (Beijing: People’s Art Press, 1985), 3. 19. See Iikura Shohei, ed., The 1930s, Shanghai, Lu Xun (Tokyo: Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, 1994), 48– 101; and “The Chronicle of Fifty Years of the Chinese New Woodcut Movement,” in Li, Li, and Ma Ke, Zhongguo xin­ xing banhua yundong wushinian, 3–121. 20. Meffert, a pupil of Kathe Kollwitz, fled Berlin after the Nazi takeover, settling in Argentina from about 1936 to  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1962. There he taught design and published cartoons and prints under the names Clément Moreau and Clément Rousseau. See Jean Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, translated by David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2006), 574. 21. See “Lu Xun and Käthe Kollwitz,” in Uchiyama Ka­ kichi and Nara, Lu Xun yu muke, 190–91. 22. This painful period is described very well by David E. Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002), 151–62. 23. Uchiyama Kakichi, “Early Chinese Woodblock Prints and Me—A Memory of the Woodcut Training Class,” in Uchiyama Kakichi and Nara, Lu Xun yu muke, 2–4. 24. Jiang Feng’s recollections of this event are summarized in Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 12–27. All the students were male. 25. Several of Lu Xun’s students, including Chen Zhuo­ kun (1908–2002), Chen Tiegeng (1908–1969), and Li Xiushi (1911–1938), had studied at the prestigious Hangzhou National Art Academy; Zhong Buqing (b. 1910) and Deng Qifan (1910–1933), at the Shanghai Art Academy; and three others, Le Yijun (1910–ca. 1997), Miao Boran (1910– 1967), and Ni Huanzhi (1909–1959), at private art schools in Shanghai, such as New China Art Academy and the Shanghai Arts School. Five of them—Hu Zhongmin, Huang Shanding (1910–1996), Jiang Feng (1910–1982), Gu Honggan, and Zheng Luoye (1910–1936)—were not full-time students but were involved in various evening art clubs, including the White Swan Painting Club, the leftist Shanghai Eighteen Art Society, and the Communist-run League of Left-Wing Artists. 26. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 29. 27. Wang Xinqi, Lu Xun meishu nianpu (Guangzhou: Lingnan Art Press, 1986), 189. 28. Preface to Muling muzhan [Wooden Bell Woodcut Exhibition] April 1, 1933, reproduced in Lu Xun cang zhong‑ guo xiandai muke quanji, vol. 1, p. 1145. 29. All issues of the journal are reproduced in Lu Xun cang zhongguo xiandai muke quanji, vol. 5. Selections appear in Andrews and Shen, A Century in Crisis, figures. 87, 89, 90, 98, 100–102. 30. Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, 82. 31. For more on cover art, see Julia F. Andrews, “Commercial Art and China’s Modernization,” in Andrews and Shen, A Century in Crisis, 181–95. For a different genre of commercial art, see Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happi‑ ness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,  

 

2004), and for additional examples of cover design, see Scott Minick and Jiao Ping, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twen‑ tieth Century (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990). 32. Kuriyagawa Hakuson, Symbol of Depression [Kumen de xiangzhen], translated by Lu Xun (Beijing: Weiming she, 1924). 33. Chen’s original name was Chen Shaoben. In Japan he called himself Chen Jie, but on his return to China he took the name Chen Zhifo. See Li Youguang and Chen Xiufan, Chen Zhifo yanjiu (Nanjing: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 1990), for an excellent introduction to his early life.

 

chapter 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. We use the romanized term guohua to signify any painting made in ink and/or water-based Chinese pigments on a ground of Chinese paper or silk. Although the dictio­ nary definition of guohua is “traditional Chinese painting,” in practice the term refers simply to the medium rather than the technique, subject matter, style, size, or format of the work. It is applied even if the brushwork and composition are not traditional at all. In the late Qing dynasty and early Republican era, the more neutral term shuhua (painting and calligraphy), which made no attempt to take account of the existence of European art, was used to refer to Chinese ink painting. More recently, artists of cosmopolitan inclination have begun referring to their art with another neutral term, probably of Japanese origin, shuimohua (ink-and-water painting). In most cases, however, the special characteristics of Chinese paper or silk as a ground is an essential factor in the effects achieved with ink. The label guohua has now been replaced in many contexts by Zhongguohua (Chinese painting). The term guohua was used most consistently between the mid-1920s and the early twenty-first century. It often bears a burden of cultural nationalism and patriotism. 2. For a reference book with histories of some of these groups, see Wang Yichang et al., eds., Zhongguo meishu nianjian [1947 yearbook of Chinese art] (Shanghai: Shanghai shi wenhua yundong weiyuanhui, 1948); also reprint, Shanghai, 2008. 3. The city of Beijing (Northern Capital) was called Beiping (Northern Peace) for about two decades after the capital was relocated to Nanjing (Southern Capital) in 1928. For convenience, we refer to it consistently as Beijing except in some institutional names. 4. Wu Changshi’s first solo show was held at Takashimaya Department Store in Osaka. His international success increased his reputation at home and elevated the status of Chinese painting in general. Qi Baishi, similarly, only rose to artistic fame through his success in the Sino-Japanese exhibitions organized by Jin Cheng’s group. Notes

333

5. There is a body of literature on premodern literati painting too extensive to cite here. For some discussion of the period in which condemnation of the traditions of court painting and professional painting became codified, see James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644 (New York: Weatherhill, 1982); and Wai-kam Ho, Marc Wilson, and Judith Smith, eds., The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992). 6. For an early description of the Beijing conservatives, see Chu-tsing Li, Trends in Modern Chinese Painting (The C. A. Drenowatz Collection), Artibus Asiae Supplementum 36 (Ascona, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1979), especially 11–17. More recently, art historian Xue Yongnian of CAFA has pointed out in lectures the significance of Jin Cheng’s experiments with European effects of light and shade. 7. Wang Yichang et al., eds., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, “History,” 5. The journal Yiguan was published between February 1926 and 1929. Also see Xu Zhihao, Zhongguo mei‑ shu shetuan manlu [Notes on Chinese art groups and societies] (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1994), 76. Youzheng Book Company, owned by art enthusiast Di Baoxian (Di Pingzi), also produced elegant collotype reproductions of masterpieces of Chinese painting and calligraphy. 8. Among valuable English-language studies of Huang Binhong are Jason C. Kuo, Innovation within Tradition: The Painting of Huang Binhong (Hong Kong: Hanart Gallery in association with Williams College Art Gallery, 1989); and Claire Roberts, Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Zaixin Hong has also published an impressive series of articles about Huang and his circles, including “Twentieth Century Chinese Landscape Painting in the West: The Case of Huang Binhong,” in Ershi shiji shanshuihua yanjiu wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2006), 525–55. 9. Lisa Claypool has argued in conference presentations for the similarity between the projects of exhibiting and publishing works of art in the later Qing and early Republican period. 10. The Republican government appointed a new director of the Palace Museum, Yi Peiji, in 1928. He asked Ma Heng and an English-speaking administrator from Beijing, Wu Ying (1891–1959), to take over administrative duties. Wu Ying launched the new journal the following year. 11. For the Bee Painting Society and the Chinese Painting Society, see Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s– 1930s, edited by Jason Chi-sheng Kuo (Washington, D.C.:  

 

 

 

 

334

Notes

New Academia Publishing, 2007), 79–93; and a preliminary version, Julia F. Andrews, “Traditional Chinese Painting in an Age of Revolution, 1911–1937: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai,” in Chinese Painting and the Twentieth Century: Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition (Hangzhou: Zhejiang People’s Fine Arts Press, 1997), 578–95. 12. The society’s “ganshi” or administrators in 1930 were Zhang Shanzi, Xie Gongzhan, Lu Danlin, Xu Zhengbai, Li Zuhan, Qian Shoutie, Sun Xueni, Zheng Manqing (Yue), Ma Mengrong, He Tianjian, and Zheng Wuchang. See Mifeng, no. 11 (July 21, 1930): 1. To this list may be added Wang Shizi. Some members were Xie Yucen, Yu Jianhua, Wang Geyi, Xiong Songquan, Xie Zhiguang, Wang Yiting, Ying Yeping, and Zhang Daqian as well as some of the subsequent founders of the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, including Wu Qingxia and Li Qiujun. See Wang Yichang et al., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, “History,” 9. 13. This article, published in Mifeng (Bee journal) 11–12 (June 21 and July 1, 1930), is cited in Wang Yichang et al., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, “History,” 6. 14. Wang Yichang et al., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, “History,” 6. 15. Huang Binhong, “Zhizhi yi wenshuo” [About the relationship between culture and country], Guohua yuekan 1, no. 1 (1934): 6. 16. He Tianjian, “Zhongguo huahui lilun shang zhi yanshu,” Guohua yuekan 1, no. 2 (1935): 3–4; “Shuhuahui yu zuofeng zhi shifei,” 1, no. 2 (1935): 20–21; “Zhongguo shanshuihua jinri zhi bingtai jiqi jiuji fangfa,” 1, no. 5 (1935): 100–103; and “Huihua zhi biaozhun lun,” 1, no. 9–10 (1935): 184–88. 17. Meishu shenghuo 3–4 (1934) and Huaxue yuekan 1 (1932). 18. Shidai 9, no. 8 (1936): 4, 5. 19. Carol Lynne Waara’s dissertation, “Arts and Life: Public and Private Culture in Chinese Art Periodicals, 1912– 1937,” University of Michigan, 1994, provides an overview of Meishu shenghuo magazine and its staff. 20. A full translation from Qian Shoutie, “Benkan chuangshi gao duzhe” [To readers on the debut of this publication], Meishu shenghuo 1 (April 1934), appears in ibid., 204–5. 21. These anthologies include Jin, Tang Song,Yuan, Ming, Qing minghua daguan (Masterpieces of Jin,Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing painting) as well as Ouzhou minghua daguan (Masterpieces of European painting), Shijie minghu‑ aji (Masterpieces of world painting), and also [Xu] Beihong huaji (Paintings of Xu Beihong). 22. Zheng Wuchang, “Xiandai zhongguo huajia ying fu zhi zeren,” Guohua yuekan 1, no. 2 (December 1934): 17.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

23. In addition to this association, he participated in a smaller one, the Society of Nine, with Zhang Daqian, Zhang Shanzi, Tang Dingzhi, Lu Danlin, Xie Yucen, and three others. 24. According to the account in Wang Yichang et al., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, “History,” 12–13, the former group involved more than two thousand Shanghai artists who worked in all media and two hundred members from other parts of China. Zheng Chang, the name by which the artist published his writings, authored a number of other books about Chinese art history, including Research on the History of Chinese Mural Painting, An Interpretation of Shitao’s “Huayulu,” and A General History of Chinese Painting Theory, some of which were still in print as late as the 1960s. See Wang Yichang et al., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, zhuan, 109. 25. Beyond its idealistic, culturally nationalistic, and practical aims, the group was quite proud of the fact that it eventually was registered with the government. The group was also asked to fulfill some quasi-governmental functions. See Andrews and Shen, “Traditionalist Response to Modernity,” 85. 26. For more on the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, see Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “Traditionalism as a Modern Stance: The Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society of 1930s Shanghai,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–29. There is some dispute as to when exactly in the late Qing period the school was established. See Julia F. Andrews, “Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai: Liu Haisu and the Nude Model Controversy,” Chungguksa Yongu—Journal of Chinese Historical Researches (The Korean Society for Chi‑ nese History) 35 (April 2005): 326–42. 27. Gu Fei’s brother, the poet Gu Foying, married her painting friend Chen Xiaocui, who also wrote poetry. 28. The catalog was published as Tōsō Genmin meiga tai‑ kan (Tōkyō: Ōtsuka Kōgeisha, 1929). 29. As Yen Chuanying describes, a growing concern about the removal of ancient masterpieces by foreign collectors stimulated further efforts to publish and exhibit them. See Yen Chuanying, “Art Exhibitions, 1850–1949,” in Encyclopedia of Modern China, edited by David Pong, vol. 1 (New York: Charles, Scribner’s Sons, 2009), 83–84. 30. After selection in Beijing the paintings and calligraphy were again examined in Shanghai by Ye Gongchuo, Pang Yuanji, Wu Hufan, Di Baoxian, Zhang Heng, Zhao Shuru, Zhang Junmo, Zhang Shanzi, Chen Dingshan, Xu Bangda, and Wang Jiqian as well as by art historian Victoria Contag. 31. Percival David, “The Exhibition of Chinese Art,” Bur‑ lington Magazine for Connoisseurs 67, no. 393 (December  

 

 

 

 

 

1935): 239–51. The event was held in London from November 28, 1935, to March 7, 1936. For a more recent European account, see Jason Steuber, “The Exhibition of Chinese Art at Burlington House, London, 1935–36,” The Burling‑ ton Magazine 148, no. 1241 (August 2006): 528–36; online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/20074523. 32. As Clarissa von Spee has noted, the quality of the paintings selected was uneven by modern standards and the criteria and procedure used in their selection unclear. The event may be viewed, however, as the beginning of systematic authentication and connoisseurship of Chinese painting in modern times. See Clarissa von Spee, Wu Hufan and Twentieth Century Connoisseur in Shanghai (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH, 2008), 48–49, 51. 33. Liu’s exhibition was sponsored by the China Institute Frankfurt and the Kunstverein Frankfurt; the much larger Japanese show by the Society for East Asian Art and the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin had sponsorship of the Japanese government. See Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker, “Shanghai Modern,” in Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945, edited by JoAnne Birnie-Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian (Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 30–31. 34. Quoted in ibid., 32. 35. Others involved in the two-year planning process included Di Baoxian, Zhang Shanzi, Wang Zhen, Zhang Shanzi, Chen Shuren, Lin Wenzheng, Xu Beihong, Victoria Contag, and Otto Kümmel. Suggestions and complaints about the selection process were published during the course of the planning. 36. Tsuruta Takeyoshi, Chūgoku kindai bijutsu daiji nenbyō [Chronology of events in modern Chinese art] (Izumi-shi: Kuboso kinen bijutsukan, 1997), 55 and 57. 37. These works were seized by the Soviets in 1945 at the end of World War II and have not been returned. Fifteen of them have been identified in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. 38. Birnie-Danzker, “Shanghai Modern,” 39. 39. More than a hundred new streets and roads were to be built named with characters that included in the title “Republic of China, Shanghai Municipal Government,” thus “Zhong hua min guo Shang hai shi zheng fu.” Eleven included the character “Zhong,” ten were named with “Hua,” five “Min,” ten “Guo,” nine “Shang,” thirteen “hai,” fifteen “shi,” twelve “zheng,” and eight “fu.” 40. For an excellent account of this period, with particular focus on the work of American architect Henry K. Murphy in this endeavor, see Jeffrey Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914–1935 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press). Plate 10 is an illustration of the memorial arch designed by Dong for the cemetery.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

335

41. The now problematic terms “Occident” and “Orient” were commonly used in art theory of the Republican period. We adopt them here to reflect the perception by Chinese of that time of Asia’s relationship to a hegemonic European culture. 42. For helpful discussion of Ye Gongchuo, see Kuiyi Shen, Max Yeh, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Jason Kuo, The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2006). 43. See Meizhan, special bulletins on the First National Art Exhibition, ten issues, April 10–May 7, 1929. Ye recruited Zhang Daqian to serve on the exhibition committee. 44. For good discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s lecture tour in China, see Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). For discussion of the Chinese studies school at Visva-Barati University at Santiniketan, see Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2008). 45. Zheng Zu’an discussed the planning, completion, and destruction of the new complex in “The Fall of New Civic Center of Greater Shanghai in 1937,” presented at the panel “Special History and Visual Documents,” in the ECAI Shanghai Conference, Fudan University, Shanghai, May 11, 2005. 46. For a discussion of the Nanjing city plan, see Cody, Building in China, 173–203. 47. Sun might be posthumously credited (or blamed) for the idea of damming the Yangzi River for hydroelectric power, another part of his proposal that was only implemented in the late twentieth century.  

 

chapter 6

1. Standard accounts of key aspects of the war may be found in The Cambridge History of China, edited by John C. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, vol. 13, part 2 (Republican China, 1912–1949) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially 492–788. 2. Some recent reference publications have useful outlines of art activities during the war. See Zhao Li and Yu Ding, eds., Zhongguo youhua wenxian, 1542–2000 [Documents on Chinese oil painting, 1542–2000] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002); Xu Changming, ed., Shanghai mei‑ shuzhi [A chronology of art in Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2004); Wang Zhen, ed., Shanghai meishu nianbiao, 1900–2000 [A chronology of art in Shanghai, 1900–2000] (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2005); and Wang Yichang et al., eds., Zhongguo meishu nianjian, 1947 [1947 yearbook of Chinese art] (Shanghai:  

 

 

 

 

 

336

Notes

Shanghai shi wenhua yundong weiyuanhui, 1948; reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2008). 3. The exhibition was limited to work that had appeared in neither the 1929 National Exhibition nor the London Exhibition of 1935. For the catalog, see Jiaoyubu dierci quan‑ guo meishu zhanlanhui zhuanji [A special collection of the Second National Exhibition of Chinese Art under the auspices of the Ministry of Education], 3 volumes. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937). The catalog, in three volumes, reduced these to three main topics: (1) masterpieces of premodern Chinese painting and calligraphy; (2) modern ink painting and calligraphy; and (3) modern Western-style painting, design, and sculpture. 4. New York Times reporter F. Tillman Durdin wrote, in a report filed on December 22, 1937: “For the Japanese, the capture of Nanking was of paramount military and political importance. Their victory was marred, however, by barbaric cruelties, by the wholesale execution of prisoners, the looting of the city, rape, killing of civilians and by general vandalism, which will remain a blot on the reputation of the Japanese Army and nation.” See F. Tillman Durdin, “Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking after Chinese Command Fled,” New York Times (1923–Current file), January 9, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851–2007), p. 38. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), revived general interest in this tragedy, along with some controversy. 5. The National Salvation Movement began as early as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Shanghai war of 1932 but certainly became more urgent following the 1937 invasion. 6. The group included Hu Kao, Te Wei, Zhang Ding, Liao Bingxiong, Lu Zhiyang, Huang Mao, Liang Baibo, Xuan Wenjie, Zhang Xiya, and others. They also published Ten-day Cartoon Magazine [Manhua xunkan] and Cartoon Weekly [Xingqi manhua]. 7. Lu Shaofei (1903–1995), who published Jiuwang man‑ hua, was editor-in-chief of Shidai manhua [Modern cartoon]. Jiuwang manhua’s editor was Wang Dunqing (1899– 1990), a 1923 graduate of St. John’s University who had been a major artist for Shanghai’s earliest cartoon magazine, Shanghai manhua. In addition to Wang, the artists of Jiu‑ wang manhua included Zhu Jinlou, Zhang Wenyuan, Ye Qianyu, Zhang Guangyu, Cai Ruohong, Liao Bingxiong, Te Wei, Zhang Leping, Hu Kao, Shen Yiqian, Hua Junwu, Zhang Ding, Ding Cong, Huang Yao, Chen Yanqiao, Lu Zhiyang, Wan Laiming, and others. Huang Ke, “Zuoyi wenyi yundong zhong de ertong meishu,” in Shanghai mei‑ shushi zaji [Miscellaneous notes on the history of art in  

 

 

Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 2000), 175. In the same period, Yu Feng returned to Shanghai from Nanjing and became a cartoonist for Salvation Daily [Jiuwang ribao] before moving to Hong Kong in 1938. 8. The department had three divisions: drama and music, headed by playwright Hong Shen; film, under Zheng Yongzhi; and painting and woodcuts, officially headed by the absent Xu Beihong but actually run by Ni Yide. Wang Shikuo, Feng Fasi, Duan Pingyou, and Zhou Lingzhao all worked in this division. 9. Ye Qianyu also founded the All-China Cartoon Circles Resistance Association. 10. The exhibition was administered by Li Qun, Ma Da, Chen Jiu, Lu Hongji, Huang Zhufu, and Liu Jian’an, with the assistance of An Lin, Chen Yanqiao, Duan Ganqing, Liu Xian, and Luo Gongliu. 11. In addition to the five founders, the organization relied on artists scattered all over China, including five Lu Xun followers—Jiang Feng, Hu Yichuan, Wo Zha, Chen Tiegeng, and Wen Tao—who had already joined the Communist Eighth Route army in Shaanxi, Lai Shaoqi (Guangzhou), Huang Xinbo and Chen Yanqiao (Hong Kong), Li Hua (Hunan), Zheng Yefu (Zhejiang), Zhang Wang (Guangdong), and Feng Zhongtie (Sichuan). 12. According to Pang Xunqin’s reminiscence, the team to negotiate the merger consisted of four professors from each school: Pang Xunqin, Wang Manshuo, Li Yixin, and Wang Linyi from Beijing; and Liu Kaiqu, Wang Ziyun, Lei Guiyuan, and Li Puyuan from Hangzhou. The position of school president was replaced by an administrative committee. Lin Fengmian’s friend and right-hand man, Lin Wenzheng, is conspicuously missing from the roster. Only six faculty members of the Beiping Art Academy went to Yuanling. The directorship passed through many hands during this decade: art historian Teng Gu (1939), ink painter Lü Fengzi (1940–1942), designer Chen Zhifo (1942–1944), and guohua painter Pan Tianshou. 13. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 91– 125. Also, for a particularly sensitive account of the general tone of the Chinese art world in this period, see Michael Sullivan, Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 14. A number of Kosugi’s works of this type are now in the Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo. 15. The museum building designed by Xu Jingzhi and Li Huibo in the Liao style, with Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen advising, began construction in 1936 in Nanjing. In Kunming the National Central Museum Preparatory Office (Guoli zhongyang bowuyuan choubeichu) was directed by  

 

 

 

 

archaeologist Li Ji. Completed in 1948, the anthropology building is now the main hall of the Nanjing Museum. 16. By 1943 colonial powers had formally recognized the termination of extraterritoriality in Shanghai. 17. The school moved to Alley 155, Route Stanislas Chevalier (Xuehuali lu, now Jianguo zhonglu). Among the faculty were Wang Yachen, Pan Boying, Xu Xiyi, Wang Shengyuan, Rong Junli, Jiang Danshu, Zhou Bichu, Shi Zhongda, Shu Peiyu, and Yang Jianlong. Altogether, the school was in operation for eighteen years and trained a number of influential artists. 18. For issues related to life in the occupied areas, see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intel‑ lectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Timothy Brook, Col‑ laboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 19. Muke yishu [Woodcut art], no. 2, 1943, np. 20. Lloyd E. Eastman, “Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945,” in Fairbank and Feuerwerker, Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, part 2, p. 555. 21. Yang Han, “Banhua huodong zai xinsijun,” in Li Hua, Li Shusheng, and Ma Ke. Zhongguo xinxing banhua yundong wushinian, 1931–1981 [Fifty years of the new Chinese print movement, 1931–1981] (Shenyang: Liaoning meishu chubanshe, 1981), 315. 22. “Jiang Feng nianbiao” [A chronology of Jiang Feng], hereafter JFNB, in Jiang Feng Meishu lunji [Jiang Feng’s writings on art], edited by Hong Bo et al. (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1983), 320. 23. Bo Songnian, Zhongguo nianhua shi [A history of Chinese new year’s pictures] (Shenyang: Liaoning meishu chubanshe, 1986), 177; Yan Han, “Yi Taihangshan kangri genjudi de nianhua he muke huodong” [Recollections of the new year’s pictures and woodcut activity in the Taihangshan anti-Japanese base], in Li, Li, and Ma, Zhongguo xin­ xing banhua yundong wushinian, 1931–1981, 308–9; and Hu Yichuan, “Huiyi Luyi muke gongzuotuan zai dihou,” in Li, Li, and Ma, Zhongguo xinxing banhua yundong wushinian, 1931–1981, 297. 24. For a translation and discussion of Mao’s text, see Bonnie S. McDougall, “Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary,” Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, No. 39, University of Michigan, 1980. 25. Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 14. The Yan’an print movement is also discussed in Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the Peo‑ ple’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

337

Press, 1994), 18–27, 96–105; and in James Flath, The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 134–49. 26. China in Black and White: An Album of Woodcuts by Contemporary Chinese Artists, with commentary by Pearl S. Buck (New York: John Day Co., 1945).  

 

 

chapter 7

1. For excellent surveys of this period, also see Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Repub‑ lic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China, 1949–1984 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998). 2. A temporary museum first opened at Tuancheng in Beihai Park in 1950, but it soon moved to the more central location. 3. The panels were: East 1. Burning Opium in Humen (Cause of the Opium War, 1839) by Zeng Zhushao; East 2.  The Jintian Uprising (The Taiping Rebellion, 1851) by Wang Bingzhao; South 1. The Wuchang Uprising (1911 revolution) by Fu Tianchou; South 2. The May Fourth Move‑ ment (1917) by Hua Tianyou; South 3. The May 30th Move‑ ment (1925) by Wang Lingyi; West 1. The Nanchang Uprising (1927) by Xiao Chuanjiu; West 2. Anti-Japanese Guerillas (1937–1945) by Zhang Songhe; North 1. Victoriously Crossing the Yangzi River to Liberate All of China (1949) by Liu Kaiqu; North 2. Support for the Battle Front (Civilians support the PLA, 1948–1949) by Liu Kaiqu; and Welcome [to Beijing of] the People’s Liberation Army (1949) by Liu Kaiqu. 4. Also see these recent accounts of this commission: Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Cre‑ ation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 24–36, and Chang-tai Hung, “Revolutionary History in Stone: The Making of a Chinese National Monument,” China Quarterly, no. 166 (June 2001): 457–73. 5. The Russian sculptor began with a class of twentythree students. Their geographic distribution and number would seem to correspond with the prestige of the national academies from which they came: eight from Beijing, five from Hangzhou, three from Shenyang, two from Si­chuan, two from Guangzhou, two from Xi’an, and one from Shanghai. One each from Shanghai, Sichuan, and Hangzhou were condemned as rightists in 1957 and only twenty graduated. Sculpture students who went to the USSR were Qian Shaowu, Dong Zuzhao, Wang Keqing, Cao Chun­ sheng, and Situ Zhaoguang. 6. Ai Zhongxin, “Sulian de youhua yishu” [Soviet oil painting], Meishu no. 11 (1954): 7.  

 

 

 

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Notes

7. For more on Soviet painting instruction, see Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 150–53. 8. Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1980), 58. 9. Much of this section and this translation are based on Kuiyi Shen, “Publishing Posters before the Cultural Revolution,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 177, 182–84. 10. For discussion of these construction projects see Wu, Remaking Beijing, 108–26; Laing, Winking Owl, 90–91; and Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 227–29.  

 

 

 

 

chapter 8

1. From Zhou Yang, “Wei chuangzao gengduo de youxiu de wenxue yishu zuopin er fendou—yijiuwusan nian jiu yue ershisi ri zai zhongguo wenxue yishu gongzuozhe dierci daibiao dahui shang de baogao” [Struggle to create even more excellent works of literature and art—report on September 24, 1953, at the Second National Congress of Literary and Arts Workers], Wenyibao, no. 96 (1953, no. 19): 12. 2. Works such as these were available to him for study in Hangzhou and Shanghai collections. 3. Some have labeled him the founder of the Yellow Earth school, borrowing the name of Chen Kaige’s 1984 film set in the same yellow loess plateau region of northwestern China. 4. Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 36–38. 5. Ten years after the land reform movement that aimed to free China’s impoverished farmers by redistributing the fields previously owned by wealthy landlords, in the late 1950s the Chinese state took control of agricultural land. As part of the Great Leap Forward’s move toward a more perfect Communism, this collectivization of agriculture was accompanied by a system of free dining halls set up across the nation. In many cases, family cooking pots were confiscated and melted down in backyard steel furnaces. 6. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker and Co., 2011). 7. The art historian Xiao Ping has suggested further that this phrase comes from a revolutionary slogan criticizing Qing officials Li Hongzhang and Weng Tonghe, as the latter was a Changshu native. 8. Preface by the artists to the exhibition flier, “Li Keran,  

 

 

 

Zhang Ding, Luo Ming shuimo xieshenghua zhanlanhui” [Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming ink sketch exhibition], September 1954, translation in Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 170. 9. The artist inscribed in the upper-right corner two lines from Mao Zedong’s 1925 poem “Changsha,” which have been translated as follows: “I see a thousand hills crimsoned through / By their serried woods deep-dyed.” In Mao Tse‑ tung Poems (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 3. 10. The party secretary in Nanjing, Ya Ming, who collaborated on People’s Commune Dinning Hall, was particularly supportive and became a good painter himself. In Xi’an, Shi Lu took over after the founding director, Wang Zhaoyun, was declared a rightist in 1957. Wang remained involved in their activities as a painter, and his technical and stylistic influence remained strong. 11. Among former members of the Lake Society were Chen Banding, Yu Fei’an, Hu Peiheng, Wang Xuetao, and Hui Xiaotong. In Shanghai, those hired who were previously prominent in the Chinese Painting Society included Tang Yun, Xie Zhiliu, Sun Xueni, and Qian Shoutie, and in the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society were the artists Li Qiujun, Chen Xiaocui, Wu Qingxia, Zhou Lianxia, Pang Zuoyu, and Lu Xiaoman. 12. In close examination of the painting, a patch may be seen where the stick was cut out. 13. We are grateful to Nanjing artist and art historian Xiao Ping for this suggestion. 14. Anita Chung, ed., Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 15. The poem, written in 1936, appears in many collections, including the bilingual Mao Tsetung Poems (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 46–49. 16. Discussion of the commission appears in Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue, “Wanfang gewusheng zhong tantan women chuangzuo ‘Jiangshan ruci duojiao’ de diandi tihui” [Discussions, amidst the sounds of song and dance everywhere, of realizations made while creating This Land So Rich in Beauty], Meishu no. 10 (1959): 14; and Guan Zhendong, “Qingman guanshan—Guan Shanyue zhuan” [Feeling fills the passes and mountains—a biography of Guan Shanyue], Renmin ribao [People’s daily], overseas edition, August 2 and 3, 1989. 17. For a translation of the seventeenth-century version of the Journey to the West (Xiyouji), in one hundred chapters, see Wu Ch’eng-en (1500-ca. 1582), Journey to the West, 4 vols., translated by Anthony Yu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977–1983).  

 

 

 

 

chapter 9

1. Among the excellent recent studies of the Cultural Revolution are Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006); Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002); Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, ed., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China (Lantham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Richard King, ed., Art in Tur‑ moil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010); Melissa Chiu and Shengtian Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution (New York: Asia Society, 2008); as well as numerous books on Chinese posters, including Stefan R. Landsberger, Marien Van der Heijden, and Kuiyi Shen, Chinese Posters: The IISHLandsberger Collections (Munich: Prestel, 2009). 2. Britta Erickson, “The Rent Collection Courtyard, Past and Present,” in King, Art in Turmoil, 121–35. 3. Shengtian Zheng, “Brushes Are Weapons: An Art School and Its Artists,” in King, Art in Turmoil, 99. 4. See Geremie Barme, “Beijing’s Bloody August,” online at http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/­beijings _bloody_august_by_gere.php (accessed April 10, 2010), p. 7. 5. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press, 1977), 313–14. This event was commemorated by many Red Guard paintings. One such anonymous guohua, executed in a style derived from that of Jiang Zhaohe or Li Qi, was probably painted by an academically trained artist or art student at one of the major art academies. See the front cover of China Recon‑ structs, no. 2 (1968). 6. A Maoist “loyalty dance” was often performed to this ubiquitous tune in public rituals during the Cultural Revolution period. 7. The collaborative creators of the poster are credited as the Workers Revolutionary Rebel Team of the Worker-­ Peasant-Soldier Printing Factory and the Red Paintbrushes of the Shanghai Drama Academy’s “Revolutionary Building.” 8. Zheng, “Brushes are Weapons,” 100. 9. Kuiyi Shen, “Propaganda Posters and Art during the Cultural Revolution,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution, 150.  

 

 

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10. The artist was then a college student at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, which he had entered from the elite art middle school of the Lu Xun Academy of Art in Shenyang. His original name was Liu Chenghua, but because of a typo in the first printing of his painting, he changed his name to match that attached to his iconic work. 11. For recent scholarship, see Shengtian Zheng, “Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan: A Conversation with the Artist Liu Chunhua,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolu‑ tion; and Zheng, “Brushes Are Weapons,” 93–106. 12. A photograph of this peculiar spectacle, which took place at the Peking Foreign Languages Printing Press, was reproduced on the back cover of China Reconstructs 17, no. 10 (October 1968). Liu’s painting is reproduced on the front cover of the same issue. 13. Meisner, Mao’s China, 335. 14. Zhang was himself an art student at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts who had risen through the Red Guard movement to become provincial leader. For recent reminiscences that discuss Zhang, see Shengtian Zheng, “Art and Revolution, Looking Back at Thirty Years of History,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution, 19–39; Zheng, “Brushes Are Weapons,” 93–106; and Shen Jiawei, “The Fate of a Painting,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revo‑ lution, 132–47. Zhang was known to have participated in a meeting with Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan on May 19, 1968, in which he criticized Pan Tianshou and the previous Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts administration. Pan Tianshou did not survive the difficult period, and Zhang was condemned to prison after the Cultural Revolution. Some publications refer to a Gang of Four in the art world consisting of Wang Mantian, Zhang Yong­sheng, Jiang Qing, and Yao Wenyuan. All were imprisoned after the Cultural Revolution except Wang, who committed suicide. 15. According to an official who served as her subordinate from 1970 to 1976, she was a relative of Mao’s translator. She was more commonly believed to be a niece of Mao, as reported in Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 73. 16. The Huxian peasant paintings were exhibited in the West in the 1970s and achieved some popularity. See Ralph Croizier, “Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity,” in King, Art in Turmoil, 136– 63; and Ellen Johnston Laing, “Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958–1976: Amateur and Professional,” Art International 28, no. 1 (January–March 1984): 1–12. 17. Shen Jiawei, “Suzao fanxiu qianshao de yingxiong xingxiang—youhua ‘Wei women weida zuguo zhangang’ chuangzuo guocheng” [Modeling the heroic image of the Anti 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes

 

revisionist Advance Guard—The process of creating the oil painting Standing guard for our great fatherland], Meishu zil‑ iao, no. 9 (July 1975): 32–36. More recently, Shen has written: “I used my scrapbook of source material to write and copy notes on the process I followed in creating the painting. These notes were half true and half fabricated. This was because at that time any kind of writing, even personal diaries, could be subjected to public reading. Any politically incorrect word could bring disaster in its wake. So I had to make sure that even my notes on my creative process were in keeping with official standards.” Shen Jiawei, “The Fate of a Painting,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution, 144. 18. Shen Jiawei, “Suzao fanxiu qianshao de yingxiong xing-xiang.” 34. 19. “Xuexi ‘santuchu’ chuangzuo yuanze—buduan tigao chuangzuo ziliang” [Study the creative principle ‘The three prominences’—Ceaselessly raise creative standards], Meishu ziliao, no. 3 (October 1973): 34–35. Laing first discussed the “three prominences” (san tuchu) as applied to painting, in her Winking Owl, 72. 20. Sketches and visual diaries by noted artists who were sent down to the countryside have recently been exhibited and published. Gu Xiong, “When We Were Young: Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages,” in King, Art in Turmoil, 107–18; Wang Lin, “A Pictorial Record of the Cultural Revolution, Luo Zhongli’s Early Works,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution 165–77; and Melissa Chiu, “Xu Bing, Artist Notes,” in Chiu and Zheng, Art and China’s Revolution, 107–17.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chapter 10

1. An excellent discussion of this painting may be found in Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: A Semiotic Anal‑ ysis, the Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003), 76–87. 2. Wang Aihe, ed., Wuming (No Name) Painting Cat‑ alogue (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), especially Wang’s introduction to each volume, “Wuming: Art and Solidarity in a Peculiar Historical Context.” No written documentation exists to confirm the precise date of the underground exhibition, and its participants disagree on whether it was held in late 1974 or the very beginning of 1975. Also see Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974–1985 (New York: China Institute, 2011), especially 15–58. 3. Workers Cultural Palaces offered classes for factory workers. With normal educational channels closed during the Cultural Revolution, they provided the only formal art education urban artists might receive. 4. Good accounts of the origins of the Xingxing group  

 

 

 

may be found in The Stars: Ten Years, with a foreword by Chang Tsong-zung (Hong Kong: Hanart 2, 1989). Also see Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, Blooming in the Shadows. 5. “Promoting the Young to Leading Posts,” Beijing Review, no. 9 (March 4, 1985): 15. 6. “Writers Promised Free Expression,” Beijing Review, no. 2 (January 14, 1985): 6. 7. “Humanism Has a Place in China,” Beijing Review, no. 6 (February 11, 1985): 29–30. 8. Shengtian Zheng, interview with the authors, Vancouver, August 13, 1998. 9. The work is now called No Water Today. Wu Shanzhuan, Red Humour International (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005). 10. Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 387. 11. Julia F. Andrews, “Art in Its Environment,” in Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu, Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile, exhibition catalog (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1993), 24–27; also see Philip Vergne and Doryun Chong, eds., House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, exhibition catalog (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2006). 12. Huang Yong Ping, “Xiamen Dada—Postmodern,” translated by Yu Hsiao-hwei in Vergne and Chong, House of Oracles, 76–77. 13. One of Wu’s paintings from 1986–1987 purported to sell cabbage. In the exhibit Fragmented Memory, at the Wexner Center in Columbus in 1993, he sold mechanized toy pandas. Like the shrimp he sold in Beijing, they were products of Wu’s hometown of Zhoushan. See Andrews and Gao, Fragmented Memory, 32–35. 14. Authors’ translation of a sign worn around the artist’s neck.  

 

 

 

 

 

chapter 11

1. A note about Romanization: In this chapter artists are identified by the Romanized pronunciation most often seen in English-language writings, followed by the Mandarin version in pinyin. The pinyin spelling is used consistently in the glossary, however. 2. An unusual group of his surviving paintings, now in the Medical Historical Library at Yale University, are medical illustrations commissioned by American missionary doctor Peter Parker to document the sometimes grotesque afflictions of his patients in Guangzhou. 3. For a study of the early history of photography in China, with particular reference to Guangdong, see Oliver Moore, “Zou Boqi on Vision and Photography in ­Nineteenth-Century China,” in The Human Tradition in

Modern China, edited by Kenneth James Hammond and Kristin Eileen Stapleton (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 33–54, and Oliver Moore, “Photography in China: A Global Medium Locally Appropriated,” IIAS Newsletter 44 (Summer 2007): 6–7. 4. For further discussion of the Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, see chapter 5 in this book. 5. For a study of art societies in Hong Kong, see Zhang Huiyi, Xianggang shuhua tuanti yanjiu (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Art Department, 1999). 6. As though to emphasize the faithfulness of their links to true Chinese painting, in February 1927 in the great auditorium in Hong Kong, they held a large exhibition of 670 works owned by 14 collectors, mainly of the Ming and Qing period but also some of the Tang and Song dynasties. This is believed to be the first time Hong Kong citizens had an opportunity to see such private collections of antique art exhibited. More than three thousand visitors attended on the opening day, including Gao Jianfu. 7. After almost a decade in Canada, beginning in 1885, Li Tiefu moved south to New York, where, after meeting Sun Yat-sen, he threw himself into raising money for the revolutionary cause. After his revolutionary service from 1909 to 1911, he returned to his art studies at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. In 1929, the year of both the artist’s sixtieth birthday and the great stock market crash, Li returned to Guangzhou. In 1932 he re­located to Kowloon, where he remained until the Japanese took over at the end of 1941. In 1950 he was given several honorary positions in the new government. 8. Other similar artists are the American educated realist Wong Chiu Foon (Huang Chaokuan; 1896–1971), Chui Tung Pak (Xu Dongbai; 1900–1989), Wang Shaolin (1909– 1989), and sculptor Liang Zhuting (1886/7–1974), who returned in 1928 after study in Ontario. 9. He is said to have exhibited in 1930 in Belgium and Lyon. See “Chronology of Deng Fen,” online at http:// www.deng-fen.com/Deng_Fen/chronology/en/. 10. This structure, completed in 1932, was the first Chinese library in Hong Kong. It subsequently was converted exclusively to museum use. The exhibition was documented in three large volumes. 11. The first director was Fu Luofei (1896–1971), who was succeeded by Zhang Guangyu. Members included Te Wei, Mi Gu, Ding Cong, Fang Cheng, Cai Dizhi, Wen Tao, Yang Nawei, Zheng Yefu, Zhang Yangxi, Huang Yongyu, Wang Qi, Wang Duwei, Guan Shanyue, Yang Taiyang, Huang Miaozi, Yang Qiuren, Xu Jianbai, Fu Luofei (1896–1971), and sculptor Fu Tianqiu. 12. It was also funded partly by the United States Infor 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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341

mation Agency (USIA) and showed in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Penang, Rangoon, and K ­ uching, Malaya, in museums and British Council offices. 13. Chen Shiwen enrolled in the first class at the Hangzhou National Art Academy but in 1929 left for France on a government scholarship arranged by Cai Yuanpei. He studied first at Lyons and then in Paris and then taught in Shanghai from 1937 to 1941. In 1941 he became director of the art department at Yinshi University, in Jinhua, Zhejiang (named for the Nationalist hero Chen Yinshi), as it began its flight south from the Japanese. During that period he participated in the Nine Man Painting Society with Ding Yanyong. In 1945 he returned to Shanghai to teach in the oil painting department at the Shanghai Art Academy but in 1950 moved to Hong Kong. 14. Upon his return from Tokyo in 1925, he settled in Shanghai, teaching at Lida Academy and Shenzhou Girl’s School. Then, with the assistance of Cai Yuanpei, he and fellow Tokyo School of Fine Arts graduate Chen Baoyi established the Chinese University of the Arts (Zhonghua yishu daxue) in 1925, for which Ding served for a time as director. The following year he, Chen Baoyi, and Guan Liang organized the Oil Painters Joint Exhibition to promote the new art. 15. For good publications on the life and work of C.C. Wang, see Jerome Silbergeld and Chi-ch’ien Wang, Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1987); Wang Chi-ch’ien, Meredith Weatherby, and Joan Stanley-Baker, Mountains of the Mind: The Landscape Painting of Wang Chi-Ch’ien (New York: Walker/Weatherhill, 1970); and Wang Chi-ch’ien, Mountains of the Mind: The Landscapes of C.C. Wang (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, 1977). 16. In 1983, Johnson Chang (Chang Tsung-zong), opened a second gallery space, known as Hanart TZ or Hanart 2, to show modern Hong Kong art. It has remained vigorous since the classical gallery was closed. See chapter 12. 17. See David Clark, Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolo‑ nization (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001), 175–85, for further discussion, including use of Tsang’s writing in motifs for fashion and graphic design. 18. On Para/Site, see ibid., 70–99; and on Tsang, see ibid., 76–79. 19. Yen Chuan-ying (Yan Juanying) has been one of the pioneers of modern Taiwan art history. Also see Jason C. Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Post-War Taiwan (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 2000). John Clark was also an early observer of modern art in Taiwan; see his Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).  

 

 

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Notes

20. For a description of the Bunten and Teiten exhibition system, see Shūji Takashina, J. Thomas Rimer, with Gerald D. Bolas, Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting (Tokyo: Japan Foundation; St. Louis: Washington University, 1987). 21. For additional discussion of this problem, see Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Post-War Taiwan, 35–37. Kuo also points out that Japan instituted a similar exhibition in its other Asian colony, Korea (the Senten), in 1922, with the first section of each called tōyōga. 22. Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (New York: Dutton, 1905). 23. Chuan-ying Yen, “The Demise of Oriental-Style Painting in Taiwan,” in Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, edited by Yuko Kikuchi (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 84. 24. Ibid., 89. Additional material may be found on the National Museum of Fine Arts website, although some English translations should be used with caution. For a strong defense of the positive aspects of Japan’s artistic policies by Huang Dong-Fu, see his “The Development of the Oriental Painting Style in Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial Period,” online at http://taiwaneseart.ntmofa.gov.tw/thesis/ B6-1.doc (accessed August 2, 2010). 25. See Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Post-War Tai‑ wan, 54. 26. For the catalog, see Chinese Art Treasures: A Selected Group of Objects from the Chinese National Palace Museum and the Chinese National Central Museum, Taichung, Tai‑ wan, exhibited in the United States by the Government of the Republic of China at the National Gallery of Art, Washington 1961–1962 (Geneva: Skira, 1961), and for one discussion of its organization, see Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott with David Shambaugh, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 99–104. 27. See Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Cen‑ tury China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 181–85, for further discussion of artists in these groups. 28. Liu’s rebuttal is mentioned in Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Post-War Taiwan, 96. 29. See Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), for a detailed bibliography of East Asian language writings. 30. For more on Yang Yuyu (Yang Yingfeng), see Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, 188–89. 31. See Gao Minglu, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asian Society Galleries, 1998), plate 62.  

 

 

 

 

chapter 12

1. Francesca dal Lago, “The Voice of the ‘Superfluous People’: Painting in China in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s,” in Writing on the Wall: Chinese New Realism and Avant-Garde in the Eighties and Nineties, edited by Cees Hendrikse (Rotterdam: Groninger Museum-Nai Publishers, 2008), 24. 2. Sui Jianguo as quoted in Wu Hung, Transience: Chi‑ nese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3. Dal Lago further suggests that the people in propaganda photographs were selected “for their formal matching properties,” like a “process of home decoration.” She has identified the source of the image as a photograph of Mao visiting his hometown, Shaoshan, in 1959. See dal Lago, “Voice of the ‘Superfluous People,’” 29–31. 4. Francesca dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal (1999): 47. 5. Technically these outfits should be called “Sun Yatsen” suits, the name by which they are known in China. Sun adapted them from Japanese military uniforms. 6. Online at http://www.hanart.com/artistEssayDetail .php?artist_number=1&essay_number=16 (accessed February 25, 2012). 7. Zhang Dali as quoted in The First Guangzhou ­Triennial–Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chi‑ nese Art (1990–2000), edited by Wu Hung (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002), 262. 8. The new economic policies permitted, or even encouraged, state employees to supplement their salaries with freelance work. Typically a newscaster might do TV advertisements. 9. The curators for the three shows were Xu Hong for the Shanghai Biennale, Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen for the Guggenheim exhibition, and Gao Minglu for Inside Out. 10. The term “superfluous people” is used by Fran­cesca dal to translate xiao renwu, a literary term that refers to insignificant minor characters in contrast to important, heroic ones. The former, of course, are the vast majority of the populace. See dal Lago, “Voice of the ‘Superfluous People,’” 21. For useful translations of Chinese art theory of this period, see Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010).  

 

 

chapter 13

1. Among notable exhibitions of the 1980s were Painting the Chinese Dream: Chinese Art Thirty Years after the Revolu‑ tion, curated by Joan Lebold Cohen and exhibited in 1982 at Smith College and the Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary

Chinese Painting: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China, organized by Lucy Lim and exhibited in San Francisco and five other American cities, in 1983; and AvantGarde Chinese Art: Beijing/New York, organized by Michael Murray and exhibited in 1986 at Vassar College and the City Gallery (City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs). The Star group and their avant-garde poet friends, the Today (Jintian) group, were celebrated in “Poems et Art en Chine: Les ‘Non-Officiels,’” Doc(k)s, no. 41 (Winter 1981–82). An exhibition of Chinese paintings in the collection of Atlantic Richfield, Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China, was exhibited at Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California in 1987. I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne, was held in Pasadena in 1991 with assistance from Tang Qingnian, a member of the China/Avant-Garde curatorial team. Both exhibits were documented in catalogs authored by Richard Strassberg. The Stars: Ten Years, a retrospective exhibition organized by Hanart, was held in Hong Kong and Taipei in 1989. Demand for Artist Freedom: Xingxing’s Twentieth Anni‑ versary was held at Tokyo Art Gallery in 2000. Magiciens de la terre, organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989, revealed the existence of an avant-garde in postMao China. A small number of commercial galleries and other nonprofit exhibition spaces had showed contemporary Chinese artists in the 1980s. 2. The exhibit A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradi‑ tion in the Art of Twentieth Century China, curated by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, opened at the Guggenheim on February 6, 1998, and Inside Out: New Chinese Art, curated by Gao Minglu, opened at Asia Society on September 15 of the same year. For a perceptive essay by Tsong-zung Chang outlining the history of overseas exhibitions and studies of Chinese art in the 1980s and 1990s, see “Beyond the Middle Kingdom: An Insider’s View,” in Inside Out, edited by Gao Minglu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 67–75. 3. In addition to recent acquisitions and film series, see Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, edited by Wu Hung (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). 4. Magiciens de la terre (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989), catalog of an exhibition held at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle-La Villette, from May through August of 1989. 5. Art Chinois, Chine Demain Pour Hier (Paris: Carte Secrete, 1990), exhibition held in Pourrieres, Aix-enProvence, France. 6. See Exceptional Passages (Fukuoka, Japan: Museum City Project, 1991).  

 

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7. Cities on the Move, edited by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje; New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1997), exhibited in London, Vienna, Bordeaux, New York, and Copenhagen. 8. See Wu Shanzhuan Red Humour International (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005). 9. The Chengdu Biennale was temporarily suspended in 2003 because of the SARS epidemic. 10. The formal owners of the original gallery were the Beijing Artists Association and its parent organization, the Beijing Federation of Literary and Arts Workers.

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Notes

11. For discussion of a number of interesting examples, see Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 2000). 12. “Zhang Xiaogang: On the Record,” China Daily, November 24, 2009, online at http://news.cultural-china .com/20091124155807.html (accessed November 24, 2009); and Le-Min Lim, “Zhang Xiaogang Is China’s MostValuable Artist, Hurun Says,” Bloomberg.com, February 26, 2009, online at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/ news?pid=email&sid=a68D_f6a_ndA (accessed July 23, 2010).

Selected Bibliography

Andrews, Julia F. “Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai: Liu Haisu and the Nude Model Controversy.” Chungguksa Yongu—Journal of Chinese Histori‑ cal Researches [The Korean Society for Chinese History], no. 35 (April 2005): 323– 72. Chinese version: “Luotihua lunzheng he xiandai zhongguo meishushi de jiangou.” In Studies on Shanghai School Painting, 117–50. Shanghai: Duoyunxuan and Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 2001. Reprinted in Zhong‑ guo youhua wenxian, 1542–2000 [Documents about Chinese oil painting]. Edited by Zhao Li and Yu Ding, 501–11. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002. ———. “Exhibition to Exhibition: Painting Practice in the Early Twentieth Century as a Modern Response to ‘Tradition.’” In Turmoil, Representation, and Trends: Mod‑ ern Chinese Painting, 1796–1949, 23–58. Shibian xingxiang liufeng: Zhongguo jindai huihua, 1796–1949. Taipei: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2008. ———. “The Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui) and Chinese Landscape Painting.” In Ershi shiji shanshui hua yanjiu wenji [Studies in twentieth-century Shanshuihua]. Edited by Lu Fusheng and Tang Zheming, 556–91. Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 2006. ———. “Japanese Oil Paintings in the First Chinese National Art Exhibition of 1929 and the Development of Asian Modernism.” In The Role of Japan in Modern Chi‑ nese Art. Edited by Joshua A. Fogel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. ———. Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. ———. “Sanyu and the Shanghai Modernists.” In Sanyu, l’ecriture du corps. Edited by  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

345

Jean-Paul Desroches and Rita Wong, 67–83. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Museé Guimet, 2004. ———. “White Cat, Black Cat: Chinese Art and the Politics of Deng Xiaoping.” In Word and Meaning: Six Con‑ temporary Chinese Artists. Edited by Kuiyi Shen, 19–29. Buffalo, N.Y.: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2000. Andrews, Julia F., and Gao Minglu. Fragmented Mem‑ ory: Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile. Exhibition catalog. Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1993. Andrews, Julia F., and Kuiyi Shen. A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Cen‑ tury China. Exhibition catalog. New York: Guggenheim Museum and Abrams, 1998. ———. “The Japanese Impact on the Republican Art World: The Construction of Chinese Art History As a Modern Field.” Twentieth Century China 32, no. 1 (November, 2006): 4–35. ———. “Schudy, the Storm Society, and China’s Early Modernist Movement.” In Schudy (Qiudi), 62–75. Nanjing: Jiangsu Education Publishing House, 2006. ———. “Traditionalism As a Modern Stance: The Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society.” Mod‑ ern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–30. ———. “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai.” In Visual Cul‑ ture in Shanghai, 1850s–1930s. Edited by Jason Chi-sheng Kuo, 79–93. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2007. Andrews, Julia F., and Joan Lebold Cohen. Post-Mao Dreaming: Chinese Contemporary Art. Exhibition catalog. Northhampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art, 2009. Andrews, Julia F., and Xiaomei Chen, eds. Visual Culture and Memory in Modern China. Special issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall 2000). Andrews, Julia F., Claudia Brown, David E. Fraser, and Kuiyi Shen. Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War through the Cultural Rev‑ olution, 1840–1979. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and Echo Rock Ventures, 2000. Andrews, Julia F., Kuiyi Shen, and Richard Vinograd. Chi‑ nese Painting on the Eve of the Communist Revolution: Chang Shu-chi and His Collection. Exhibition catalog. Stanford, Calif.: Cantor Arts Center, 2006. Avant-garde Chinese Art: Beijing/New York. Essay by Michael Murray. Exhibition catalog. New York: Vassar College Art Gallery and City Gallery, 1986. Barmé, Geremie R. “Arrière-Pensée on an Avant-Garde: The  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

346

Selected Bibliogr aphy

Stars in Retrospect.” In The Stars: Ten Years. Edited by Chang Tsong-zung. Hong Kong: Hanart 2, 1989. ———. In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ———. Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Barmé, Geremie, and Jon Minford. Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Barnhart, Richard, et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Berghuis, Thomas J. Performance Art in China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006. Birnie-Danzker, Jo-Anne, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds. Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945. Exhibition catalog. Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2004. Boers, Waling. Touching the Stones: China Art Now. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2007. Brook, Timothy. Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Brown, Claudia, and Ju-hsi Chou. Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire, 1796–1911. Exhibition catalog. Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992. Buck, Pearl S., et al. China in Black and White: An Album of Woodcuts by Contemporary Chinese Artists. New York: John Day Co., 1945. Burg, Christer von der. The Art of Contemporary Chinese Woodcuts. London: The Muban Foundation, 2003. Bush, Susan, and Hsio-yen Shih. Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Cahill, James. The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644. Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982. ———. The Painter’s Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. Pictures for Use and Pleasure. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. ———. “Ren Xiong and His Self-Portrait.” Ars Orientalis 25 (1995): 119–32. ———. “The Shanghai School in Later Chinese Painting.” In Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting. Edited by May­ ching Kao, 54–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Chang, Arnold. Painting in the People’s Republic of China: The Politics of Style. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980. ———. “Tradition in the Modern Period.” In TwentiethCentury Chinese Painting. Edited by Mayching Kao, 21– 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Chang, Tsong-zung, ed. The Stars: Ten Years. Exhibition catalog. Hong Kong: Hanart 2, 1989.  

 

 

 

 

 

———, and Petr Nedoma, eds. A Strange Heaven: Contem‑ porary Chinese Photography. Exhibition catalog. Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2003. Chengdu shuangnianzhan, 2001 [Chengdu Biennale, 2001]. Exhibition catalog. Chengdu: Sichuan meishu chubanshe, 2001. Chen Lüsheng. Geming de shidai: Yan’an yilai de zhuti chuangzuo yanjiu [Revolutionary art since the Yan’an era, 1942–2009]. Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2009. ———. Xin Zhongguo meishushi, 1949–1976. [The art history of the People’s Republic of China]. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2000. Chen Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002. ———. Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-discourse in PostMao China. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contempo‑ rary Art Awards (CCAA), 1998–2002. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002. Chinese Art Treasures: A Selected Group of Objects from the Chinese National Palace Museum and the Chinese National Central Museum, Taichung, Taiwan, exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington 1961–1962. Exhibition catalog. Geneva: Skira, 1961. Chiu, Melissa, and Shengtian Zheng, eds. Art and China’s Revolution. Exhibition catalog. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Chow, Rey. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Chuang Shen. “Art and Politics: Study of a Special Relationship in Contemporary Chinese Painting.” In TwentiethCentury Chinese Painting. Edited by Mayching Kao, 178– 94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Chūgoku kindai kaiga kenkyūsha kokusai kōryū shūkai ronbunshū [The proceedings of the International Conference for Chinese Modern Paintings Researches]. Kyoto: Kyoto National Museum, 2010. Chūgoku kindai kaiga to Nihon [Modern Chinese painting and Japan]. Exhibition catalog. Minoru Nishigami and Motoyuki Kure. Kyoto: Kyoto National Museum, 2012. Clark, John, ed. Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium. Hong Kong: New Art Media Ltd., 2000. ———. Modern Asian Art. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. ———. Modernity in Asian Art. Canberra: Wild Peony, 1993. Clarke, David. Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001.  

 

 

 

 

Cohen, Joan Lebold. The New Chinese Painting, 1949–1986. New York: Abrams, 1987. ———. Painting the Chinese Dream: Chinese Art Thirty Years after the Revolution (Painting and Sculpture, 1978–1981). Exhibition catalog. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1982. Convergences: Chen Wen Hsi Centennial Exhibition. Exhibition catalog. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2006–7. Croizier, Ralph. Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) School of Painting, 1906–1951. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ———. “Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity.” In Art in Turmoil: The Chi‑ nese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976. Edited by Richard King, 136–63. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010. ———. “Post-Impressionists in Pre-War Shanghai: The Juelanshe (Storm Society) and the Fate of Modernism in Republican China.” In Modernity in Asian Art. Edited by John Clark, 135–54. Canberra: Wild Peony, 1993. Cushing, Lincoln, and Ann Tompkins, eds. Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007. dal Lago, Francesca. “Between High and Low: Modernism, Continuity, and Moral Mission in Chinese Printmaking Practices.” PhD dissertation. New York University, 2005. Davis, Deborah S., et al., eds. Urban Spaces in Contempo‑ rary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Davis, Walter B. “Wang Yiting and the Art of Sino-­Japanese Exchange.” PhD dissertation. Ohio State University, 2008. DeBevoise, Jane. “Seismic States: The Changing System of Support for Contemporary Art in China, 1978–1993.” PhD dissertation. University of Hong Kong, 2008. Dillon, Nara, and Jean Oi, eds. At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. Doran, Valerie C., ed. China’s New Art, Post-1989, with a Retrospective from 1979–1989. Exhibition catalog. Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 1993. Elliott, Jeannette Shambaugh, with David Shambaugh. The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Ellsworth, Robert. Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 1800–1950. New York: Random House, 1988. Erickson, Britta. On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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347

Encounter the West. Exhibition catalog. Stanford, Calif.: Cantor Art Center, Stanford University, 2005. ———. “Patronage and Production in the Nineteenth-­ Century Shanghai Region: Ren Xiong (1823–1857) and his Sponsors.” PhD dissertation. Stanford University, 1997. ———. “Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing.” In Three Installations of Xu Bing. Exhibition catalog. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. ———. Word Play: The Art of Xu Bing. Exhibition catalog. Washington, D.C.: Freer and Sackler Gallery, 2001. Ershi shiji shanshuihua yanjiu wenji [Studies on twentieth-century Shanshuihua]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chuban­she, 2006. Ershi shiji zhongguo chengshi diaosu [Twentieth-century Chinese urban sculpture]. Nanchang: Jiangxi meishu chuban­she, 2001. Fairbank, John C., and Albert Feuerwerker, eds. The Cam‑ bridge History of China. 15 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Farrer, Anne. Wu Guanzhong: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Painter. Exhibition catalog. London: British Museum, 1992. Feng Bin, and Kuiyi Shen, eds. Chongxin qidong: Disanjie Chengdu shuangnianzhan [Reboot: The Third Chengdu Biennale]. Exhibition catalog. Shijiazhuang, Hebei: Hebei meishu chubanshe, 2007. Fibicher, Bernhard, and Matthias Frehner, eds. Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Fogel, Joshua A., ed. The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Fong, Wen. Between Two Cultures: Late Nineteenth and Twen‑ tieth Century Chinese Painting from the Robert H. Ells‑ worth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibition catalog. New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2001. Fu, Shen C. Y., and Jan Stuart. Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien. Exhibition catalog. Washington, D.C.: Freer and Sackler Galleries Publisher, 1991. Galikowski, Maria. Art and Politics in China, 1949–1986. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. Gao Minglu. Wuming: Yige beiju qianwei de lishi [The no name: A history of a self-exiled avant-garde]. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007. ———, ed. Inside Out: New Chinese Art. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asian Society Galleries, 1998. ———. The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art. Exhibition catalog. Buffalo, N.Y.: Albright Knox Art Gallery, 2005. ——— et al., eds. Zhongguo dangdai meishushi, 1985–1986  

 

 

348

Selected Bibliogr aphy

[Contemporary Chinese art, 1985–1986]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1991. ———. Bawu meishu yundong [The ’85 Movement]. 2 vols. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008. Goldman, Merle, ed. China’s Intellectuals and State: In Search of a New Relationship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Grosenick, Uta, and Caspar H. Schubbe, eds. China Art Book. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2007. Haipai huihua yanjiu wenji [Studies on Shanghai school painting]. Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 2001. Hajek, Luber. Contemporary Chinese Painting. London: Spring Books, 1961. Hay, Jonathan. “Ambivalent Icons: Works of Five Chinese Artists Based in the United States.” Orientations 23, no.7 (July 1992): 37–43. ———. “Notes on Chinese Photography and Advertising in Late Nineteenth Century Shanghai.” In Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s–1930s. Edited by Jason C. Kuo, 95–119. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2007. Hearn, Maxwell K., and Judith G. Smith. Chinese Art / ­Modern Expressions. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001. Hendrikse, Cees, and Thomas J. Berghuis, eds. Writing on the Wall: Chinese New Realism and Avant-Garde in the Eighties and Nineties. Exhibition catalog. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers and Groninger Museum, 2008. Henriot, Christian. Shanghai: 1927–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———, and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds. In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. He Wanli. Zhongguo dangdai zhuangshi yishu shi [Chinese contemporary installation art, 1979–2005]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2008. History of Chinese Oil Painting: From Realism to Post-­ Modernism. Exhibition catalog. Hong Kong: Schoeni Art Gallery, 1995. Homage to Tradition: Huang Binhong, 1865–1955. Exhibition catalog. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1995. Homann, Joachim, ed. Woodcuts in Modern China, 1937– 2008. Exhibition catalog. Hamilton, N.Y.: Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, 2009. Hong, Zaixin. “Twentieth Century Chinese Landscape Painting in the West: The Case of Huang Binhong.” In Ershi shiji shanshuihua yanjiu wenji, 525–55. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2006. Hou Hanru. On the Mid-Ground. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

———, and Gabi Scardi. Wherever We Go: Art, Identity, Cultures in Transit. Milan: 5Continents, 2006. Hou Hanru, Yung Ho Chang, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Totalstadt–Beijing Case: High-speed Urbanization in China. Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2007. Huang Guangnan (Huang Kuang-nan). Taiwan huajia pingshu [Analysis of five Taiwanese painters]. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1998. Huang Rui, ed. Beijing 798: Reflections on Art, Architec‑ ture, and Society in China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 and Thinking Hands, 2004. ———. The Stars Times. Beijing: Thinking Hands and Guan Yi Contemporary Art Archive, 2007. Jiangsu huakan [Jiangsu Art Journal]. Kao, Mayching. “China’s Response to the West in Art, 1898–1937.” PhD dissertation. Stanford University, 1975. ———, ed. Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. King, Richard, ed. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010. Knight, Michael, and Dany Chan, eds., Shanghai: Art of the City. Exhibition Catalog. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum—Cheng-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, 2010. Koppel-Yang, Martina. Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese AvantGarde, 1979–1989, A Semiotic Analysis. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003. Kraus, Richard C. Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ———. The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. ———. Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambi‑ tions and the Struggle over Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kuo, Jason Chi-sheng. Art and Cultural Politics in Post-War Taiwan. N.p.: CDL Press, distributed by University of Washington Press, 2000. ———. Chinese Ink Painting Now. Exhibition catalog. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2010. ———. Heirs to a Great Tradition: Modern Chinese Paintings from the Tsien-hsiang-chai Collection. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. ———. Innovation within Tradition: The Painting of Huang Binhong. Hong Kong: Hanart Gallery in association with Williams College Art Gallery, 1989. ———, ed. Taiwan shijue wenhua: Yishujia ershinian wenji [Visual culture in Taiwan, 1975–1995]. Taipei: Yishujia chubanshe, 1995.  

 

 

 

 

———, ed. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850–1930. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2007. La biennale di Venezia, 48 esposizione internazionale d’Arte. Venice: Marsilio, 1999. Lai, Delin. “Chinese Modern: Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum As a Crucible for Defining Modern Chinese Architecture.” PhD dissertation. University of Chicago, 2007. Lai, Yu-chih. “Surreptitious Appropriation: Ren Bonian (1840–1850) and Japanese Culture in Shanghai, 1842– 1895.” PhD dissertation. Yale University, 2005. Laing, Ellen Johnston. Art and Aesthetics in Chinese Popular Prints: Selections from the Muban Foundation Collection. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002. ———. “Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958–1976: Amateur and Professional.” Art International 28, no. 1 (January– March 1984): 1–12. ———. An Index to Reproductions of Paintings by TwentiethCentury Chinese Artists. Asian Studies Program. Publication no. 6. Eugene: Asian Studies Proram, University of Oregon, 1984. ———. Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Cul‑ ture in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. ———. The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Landsberger, Stefan, Marien Van Der Heijden, and Kuiyi Shen. Chinese Posters. Munich: Prestel, 2009. Lang Shaojun. Qi Baishi. Tianjin: Yangliuqing huashe, 1997. Lee, Leo Ou-fan, ed. Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. ———. Shanghai Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Lee, Stella Y. “Art Patronage of Shanghai in the Nineteenth Century.” In Artists and Patrons: Some Social and ­Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting. Edited by Chu-tsing Li and James Cahill, 223–31. Lawrence: Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, 1989. Lent, John, ed. Illustrating Asia: Comic and Picture Books, Humor and Fan Magazines. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Li Chao. Shanghai youhuashi [History of oil painting in Shanghai]. Shanghai: Shanghai Peoples Fine Arts Publishing House, 1995. ———. Zhongguo zaoqi youhuashi [History of early period oil painting in China]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2004. Li, Chu-tsing. Liu Kuo-sung: The Growth of a Modern Chi‑ nese Artist. Taipei: National Gallery of Art and Museum of History, 1969.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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349

———. Trends in Modern Chinese Painting (The C. A. Dre‑ nowatz Collection). Artibus Asiae Supplementum 36. Ascona, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1979. Lim, Lucy, ed. Contemporary Chinese Painting: An Exhibi‑ tion from the People’s Republic of China. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco: Chinese Cultural Foundation, 1984. ———. Wu Guanzhong: A Contemporary Chinese Artist. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco: Chinese Cultural Foundation, 1989. Link, Perry, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul Pickowitz, eds. Pop‑ ular China. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Lin, Xiaoping. Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Lin Xingyu. Taiwan meishu fengyun 40 nian [Forty years of art in Taiwan]. Taipei: Zili wanbao she, 1987. Li Qingxian. Taiwan meishu licheng [A history of art in Taiwan]. Taipei: Zili wanbaoshe, 1992. Li Zhujing (Chu-tsing), and Wan Qingli. Zhongguo xiandai huihuashi: Minchu zhi bu, 1912–1949 [A history of modern Chinese painting, Republican section]. Taipei: Rock Publishing International, 2001. Lü Peng. Ershi shiji zhongguo yishushi [A history of art in twentieth-century China]. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2006. ———. Zhongguo dangdai yishushi, 1990–1999 [Nineties art China]. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2000. Meishu [Art]. 1954–66; 1976–present. Meishu congkan [Art journal]. 1978–88. Meishu guancha [Art observation]. 1995–present Meishu shilun [Art history and criticism]. 1981–95. Meishu sichao [Trends in art criticism]. 1984–87. Meishu yanjiu [Art Research]. 1957–present. Minick, Scott, and Jiao Ping. Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. London: Thames and Hudson Publisher, 1990. Ni Zaiqin. Taiwan meishu de renwen guancha [A cultural perspective on Taiwan art]. Taipei: Yishujia, 2007. Noth, Jochen, et al., eds. China Avant-Garde: Counter-­ Current in Art and Culture. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993. Paris-Pekin. Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2002. Parson, Bruce. Gu Wenda: The Dangerous Chessboard Leaves the Ground. Toronto: Art Gallery of York University Publisher, 1987. Pu Xinyu shuhua quanji [The complete paintings and calligraphy of P’u Hsin-yü]. Taipei: Huanqiu shushe, 1978. Qi Liangchi, ed. Qi Baishi yishu yanjiu [Studies on Qi Baishi’s art]. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1999. Reed, Christopher. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

350

Selected Bibliogr aphy

Capitalism, 1876–1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2004. Ruan Rongchun, and Hu Guanghua. Zhongguo jinxian‑ dai meishushi [The history of Chinese modern art, 1911– 1949]. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe, 2005. Sanyu: l’écriture du corps (Language of the Body). Paris: Musée des arts asiatiques Guimet and Skira: 2004. Schudy (Qiu Ti). Nanjing: Jiangsu Education Publishing House, 2006. Shanghai shuangnianzhan, 2000 [Shanghai Biennale, 2000]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2000. Shanghai shuangnianzhan, 2002 [Shanghai Biennale, 2002]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2002. Shanghai shuangnianzhan, 2004 [Shanghai Biennale, 2004]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2004. Shanghai shuangnianzhan, 2006 [Shanghai Biennale, 2006]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2006. Shanghai shuangnianzhan, 2008 [Shanghai Biennale, 2008]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2008. Shanghai shuangnianzhan, 2010 [Shanghai Biennale, 2010]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2010. Shen, Kuiyi. “Concept to Context: The Theoretical Transformation of Ink Painting into China’s National Art in the 1920s and 1930s.” In Writing Modern Chinese Art: Historiographic Explorations. Edited by Josh Yiu, 44–52. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2009. ———. “The Japanese Impact on the Construction of Chinese Art History as a Modern Field: A Case Study of Teng Gu and Fu Baoshi.” In The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art, 228–241. Edited by Joshua A. Fogel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. ———. “Shanghai-Japan Connection in the Late Nineteenth and Beginning of Twentieth Century.” In Tur‑ moil, Representation, and Trends: Modern Chinese Paint‑ ing, 1796–1949, 233–58. Kaohsiung: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2008. ———. “Wang Yiting in the Social Network of 1910s–1930s Shanghai.” In At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-building in Republican Shang‑ hai. Edited by Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi, 45–64, 229– 34. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Art‑ ists. Exhibition catalog. Buffalo, N.Y.: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2000. ———. “Wu Changshi and the Shanghai Art World in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” PhD dissertation. Ohio State University, 2000. ———. Zheng Wuchang. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2000. ———. Zhou Brothers: Thirty Years of Collaboration. Elm 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hurst Art Museum and Chicago Cultural Center. Stuttgart, Germany: Distributed by Hatje Cantz, 2004. Shen, Kuiyi, and Julia Andrews. Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974–1985. Exhibition catalog. New York: China Institute, 2011. Shen, Kuiyi, Max Yeh, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Jason Kuo. The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2006. Sheng, Hao, ed. Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition. Exhibition catalog. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010. Silbergeld, Jerome, and Dora Ching, eds. ARTiculations— Undefining Chinese Contemporary Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. ———, with Cary Y. Liu and Dora C.Y. Ching. Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2009. ———, and Chi-Chien Wang. Mind Landscape: The Paint‑ ings of C. C. Wang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987. ———, and Dora C. Y. Ching, eds. Persistence-Transforma‑ tion: Text As Image in the Art of Xu Bing. Princeton, N.J.: Tang Center in association with Princeton University Press, 2006. ———, and Jisui Gong. Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. Smith, Karen. Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008. Spence, Jonathan D. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chi‑ nese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. ———. The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990. Strassberg, Richard E., ed. “I Don’t Want to Play Chess with Cezanne” and Other Works: Selections from the Chinese “New Wave” and “Avant-Garde” Art of the Eighties. Pasadena, Calif.: Pacific Asian Art Museum, 1991. Strassberg, Richard E., and Waldemar A. Nielsen. Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China. Pasadena: Pacific Asian Art Museum, 1987. Sullivan, Michael. Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. ———. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. ———. Trends in Twentieth-century Chinese Painting. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969. Sun Meilan. Li Keran yanjiu [Studies on Li Keran]. Nanjing: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 1991.  

 

 

Sun, Shirley Hsiao-ling. “Lu Hsun and the Chinese Woodcut Movement, 1929–1936.” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1974. ———. Modern Chinese Woodcuts. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco: Chinese Culture Foundation, 1979. Taiwan meishu yu shehui maidong [Artistic development and social transitions in Taiwan]. Kao-hsiung: Kao-hsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2000. Tang, Xiaobing. The Origins of the Chinese Avant-garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Tseng Yuho (Zeng Youhe). “Chinese Painting Overseas: A Personal Account of Chinese Painters outside Chinese Society.” In Twentieth Century Chinese Painting. Edited by Mayching Kao, 224–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Tsuruta Takeyoshi, ed. Chūgoku kindai bijutsu daiji nenbyō [Chronology of events in modern Chinese art]. Izumishi: Kuboso kinen bijutsukan, 1997. Turmoil, Representation, and Trends: Modern Chinese Paint‑ ing, 1796–1949. Kaohsiung: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2007. Valkenier, Elizabeth. Russian Art, the State, and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977. Vergne, Philip, and Doryun Chong, eds. House of Oracles: A  Huang Yong Ping Retrospective. Exhibition catalog. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2006. Vine, Richard. New China, New Art. Munich: Prestel, 2008. Wachs, Iris, and Chang Tsong-zung, ed. Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints: From the Communist Revolution to the Open Door Policy and Beyond, 1945–1998. Exhibition catalog. Ein Harod, Israel: Museum of Ein Harod, 1999. Wang Aihe, ed. Wuming huaji [Wuming (no name) painting catalog]. 13 volumes. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Wang Mingxian, and Yan Shanchun. Xin Zhongguo mei‑ shushi, 1966–1976 [Art history of the People’s Republic of China]. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2000. Wang Yichang et al., eds. Zhongguo meishu nianjian, 1947 [1947 yearbook of Chinese art]. Shanghai: Shanghai shi wenhua yundong weiyuanhui, 1948. Reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2008. Wang Zhen, ed. Shanghai meishu nianbiao, 1900–2000 [A chronology of art in Shanghai, 1900–2000]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2005. Wan Qingli. Wan Qingli meishu wenji [Wan Qingli’s essays on art]. Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2004. Wan Qing minchu huihuaxuan [Selected late Qing and early republican paintings]. Taipei: National Museum of History, 1997.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selected Bib liogr aphy

351

Wan Xinghua. Fu Baoshi yishu yanjiu [Studies on Fu Baoshi’s art]. Nanchang: Jiangxi meishu chubanshe, 2009. Weidner, Marsha. Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists, 1300–1912. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988. White, Julia, ed. Mahjong: Art, Film, and Change in China. Exhibition catalog. Berkeley: Berkeley Art Museum, 2008. Wilson, Mark, Sue-An van der Zijpp, Sabine Wang, and Carol Yinghua Lu, eds. New World Order: Contempo‑ rary Installation Art and Photography from China. Exhibition catalog. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers and Groninger Museum, 2008. Wong, Aida Yuen. Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Wright, Amanda. “Qiu Ti’s Contribution to Juelanshe and the Intersection of Modernist Ideology, Public Receptivity, and Personal Identity for a Woman Oil Painter in Early Twentieth-Century China.” PhD dissertation. University of Kansas, 2011. Wue, Roberta M. “Making the Artist: Ren Bonian (1840– 1895) and Portraits of the Shanghai Art World.” PhD dissertation. New York University, 2001. Wu Hung. Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, between East and West. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001. ———, ed. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. ———. Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contem‑ porary Chinese Art. Exhibition catalog. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2008. ———. Exhibiting Experimental Art in China. Exhibition catalog. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art. Beijing: Timezone 8, 2008. ———. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Cre‑ ation of a Political Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art. Exhibition catalog. New York: China Institute Gallery, 2006. ———. Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century. Exhibition catalog. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago, 1999. ———, and Christopher Phillips. Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China. Exhibition catalog. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2004.  

 

352

Selected Bibliogr aphy

Wu Hung, with Wang Huangsheng and Feng Boyi, eds. The First Guangzhou Triennial—Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990–2000). Exhibition catalog. Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002. Wu Shanzhuan Red Humor International. Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005. Wu Tung. Painting in China since the Opium Wars. Exhibition catalog. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1980. Xiandai yu hou xiandai zhi jian: Li Zhongsheng yu Taiwan xiandai yishu [Between modern and post-modern: Master Chun-shen Li and modern art in Taiwan]. Exhibition catalog. Taichung: Guoli Taiwan meishuguan, 2005. Xianggang yishujia [Hong Kong artists]. Volume 1. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1995. Xie Dongshan (Hsieh Tung-shan), ed. Taiwan dangdai yishu, 1980–2000 [Contemporary art in Taiwan]. Taipei: Yishujia chubanshe, 2002. Xingxing xiang [Toward a new image: Twenty years of contemporary Chinese painting, 1981–2001]. Beijing: Beijing Contemporary Visual Arts Development Co. 2001. Xinmeishu [New art]. 1980–present. Xiongshi meishu [Lion art]. 1971–1996. Xu Changming, ed. Shanghai meishuzhi [A chronology of art in Shanghai]. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2004. Yang, Alice, Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian Amer‑ ican Art. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Yang Chia-ling. New Wine in Old Bottles: The Art of Ren Bonian in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai. London: Saffron, 2007. Yang Siliang. “Pan Tianshou and Twentieth-Century Traditional Chinese Painting.” PhD dissertation. University of Kansas, 1995. Yang Xiaoneng, ed. Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Paintings in Twentieth Century China. Stanford, Calif.: Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, 2010. Yeh, Catherine. Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Yeh, Wen-hsin. Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ———, ed. Wartime Shanghai. London: Routledge, 1998. Yen Chuan-ying (Yan Juanying), ed. Taiwan jindai meishu dashi nianbiao [Chronology of events in modern Taiwanese art]. Taibei: Xiongshi meishu, 1998. ———. Shanghai meishu fengyun: 1872–1949 Shenbao yishu ziliao tiaomu suoyin [Events in Shanghai art, 1872–1949,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

an index of art references in Shenbao]. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology, 2006. Ye Zonggao. Fu Baoshi nianpu [A chronology of Fu Baoshi]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004. Yishu dangdai [Art China]. 2001–present. Yishujia [Artist]. 1975–present. Yiu, Josh, ed. Writing Modern Chinese Art—Historiographic Explorations. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2009. Zao Wou-Ki. Paris: Editions Cercle d’Art, 1988. Zhang, Hongxin, and Lauren Parker, eds. China Design Now. London: V&A Publishing, 2008. Zhang Huiyi. Xianggang shuhua tuanti yanjiu [Studies on Hong Kong painting and calligraphy societies]. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Art Department, 1999. Zhang, Zhaohui, Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Xu Bing and Cai Guo-qiang. Hong Kong: Timezone 8. Zhao Li, and Yu Ding, eds. Zhongguo youhua wenxian,  

 

 

1542–2000 [Documents on Chinese oil painting, 1542– 2000]. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002. Zhengyan shidai: Taiwan dangdai shijue wenhua [Contemporary Taiwanese arts in the era of contention]. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2004. Zhu Boxiong, and Chen Ruilin. Zhongguo xihua wushin‑ ian, 1898–1949 [Fifty years of Western-style painting in China, 1898–1949]. Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1989. Zhu Qi. Xianggang meishushi [History of Hong Kong art]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2005. Zhu Zhu. Yuandian [Origin point]. Hong Kong: Shijie yishu chubanshe, 2007. Zou Yuejin. Xin Zhongguo meishushi [A history of Chinese fine arts, 1949–2000]. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002. ———, ed. Mao Zedong shidai yishu [Art in the era of Mao Zedong]. Guangzhou: Guangdong meishuguan, 2005.  

 

 

 

 

Selected Bib liogr aphy

353

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aesthetic education, 28, 31, 37, 39, 40, 62 Ai Qing, 70, 85, 139, 162, 269 Ai Weiwei, 269, 269, 280 Ai Zhongxin, 148, 150, 150, 151 All-China Woodcut Circles Resistance Association, 119, 130, 131, 229, 230 Amoy. See Xiamen (Amoy) Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, 213–20 Antiquarian societies, 97–98 Architecture, 64–65, 109–13, 145–48, 289–90; beginning of national style of, 58–60 Art academies, 69–71 Art auctions, 118, 293, 295 Art clubs, 61, 73, 228, 231, 233 Art market, 18, 71, 105, 141, 161, 208; in new millenium, 290–96 Art shops, of Shanghai, 14–16 Art Movement Society, 63, 65, 73 Art societies, 64, 71, 73–74. See also Painting societies Auction houses, 293 Aurora Art club, 70 Avant-garde oil painting, 74–81; Chinese Independent Art

Association, 80–81; The Storm Society, 74–79. See also China/Avant-Garde Exhibition Bai Sha, 80 Bao Shaoyou, 227, 227, 231 Bao Yahui, 106 Bee Painting Society, 98, 100–102 Beijing, 2, 3, 16, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 59, 62, 67, 82, 88, 89, 94, 96, 105, 110, 113, 117, 120, 134, 136; during Second World War, 128–29 Beijing Art School, 39, 55, 62, 65 Beijing Biennial, 285 Bessin, Andre, 80 Bingshen Art Club, 231 Bodhidharma, 53, 54 Bogu (ancient erudition) paintings, 23 Buddhism, 16, 18, 23, 32, 51–54, 59, 112, 117, 124, 126, 142, 164, 173, 180, 186, 210, 261 Busch, Emil, 59 Cai Dizhi, 130–31, 131

355

Cai Guoqiang, 269–70, 270, 281, 282, 282–83, 285, 295–96, 296 Cai Liang, 155, 155, 166 Cai Ruohong, 147 Cai Weilian, 62, 65, 120 Cai Yuanpei, 28, 31, 32, 37, 39–40, 42, 43, 55, 57, 61–62, 64, 65, 67, 73, 82, 94, 105, 108, 109, 112, 296 Calligraphy, 4, 6, 7, 14–25, 20, 29, 36, 39, 49–52, 55, 97–101, 105–108, 112, 116, 127, 134, 161, 162, 173, 190, 216, 226, 227, 231, 246, 269, 276; “stele school” of, 19–25. See also Epigraphy and epigraphic taste Canton. See Guangzhou (Canton) Cao Bai, 86 Cartoons, 37–39, 56, 85, 89, 118, 119, 126, 141, 142, 148, 187, 226, 229, 230 Castiglione, Guiseppe, 27, 40 Central Academy of Arts and Crafts (CAAC), 187, 210–11, 215, 222, 261 Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), 139, 142, 146, 148, 151, 163, 166, 186–87, 192, 203, 209, 237, 257–8 Central Museum of Revolutionary History, 142, 151 Chan, Luis, 228, 229 Chan Yukkeung (Chen Yuqiang), 241 Chang, Hao, 43 Chang Shuhong, 120, 121, 126, 158 Chang Tsung-zong, 264, 282 Chang Yu (Sanyu), 57, 58, 74, 248 Chao Mei, 181, 181 Chao Shao-an, 231–32, 232 Chao Xun, 4 Chen Banding, 172 Chen Baoyi, 38, 39, 40, 70, 90, 91, 127 Chen Beixin, 150, 202, 202 Chen Boda, 184 Chen Chengbo (Chen Cheng-po), 70, 76, 77, 241, 243, 243, 244, 245 Chen Chieh-jen (Chen Jieren), 253, 254 Chen Chin (Chen Jin), 242–43, 243 Chen Danqing, 207, 207 Chen Duxiu, 43, 44, 45 Chen Guoliang, 57 Chen Hengque, 30, 35–37, 36, 39, 47, 48–49, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 74, 82, 134, 246 Chen Hongshou, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 178 Chen Hui-Chiao, 252, 252 Chen Jiu, 119, 130, 130 Chen Qiucao, 70, 127, 128, 173 Chen Shaomei, 96, 97 Chen Shuren, 32, 34, 35, 70, 103 Chen Tiegeng, 83–84, 84, 85, 86, 86, 132 Chen Xiaocui, 106, 107 Chen Xiaodie, 118 Chen Yanning, 192, 197, 197 Chen Yanqiao, 84, 85, 86, 130, 132, 230 Chen Yifei, 191, 192, 202, 203, 207 356

Index

Chen Zhen, 281, 281 Chen Zhifo, 68, 91, 91 Cheng Conglin, 204–5, 205 Chiang Ching-kuo, 250 Chiang Kai-shek, 115, 118, 250 Chiang Yee (Zhang Yi), 234 China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, 221–23, 257, 276–77 China College of Arts, 70 China Independent Art Institute, 80 Chinese Art Club, 231 Chinese Civil War (1946–49), 134, 136–37, 144, 147, 155, 164, 184, 230, 247 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 44, 59, 118, 132, 142, 145, 161, 184: guohua and, 161–69; history of, and oil painters, 142–45; lianhuanhua and, 177–80; woodblock prints and, 131–33, 180–81 Chinese Epigraphy, Calligraphy, and Painting Study Society, 97 Chinese Independent Art Association, 80–81, 83, 89, 248 Chinese Painting Research Society, 50, 51, 52, 94, Chinese Painting Society, 98–103, 118, 127, 134 Chinese Renaissance style, 110–12, 113 Chuang Che (Zhuang Zhe), 248, 249, 250 Cixi (dowager empress), 28 Claudot, André, 62, 63, 85, 116 Cohn, William, 109 Commercial art, 89–91, 141, 152, 192, 227, 230 Cormon, Fernand, 61 Courbet, Gustave, 147 Croizier, Ralph, 35 Cui Xiuwen, 286 Cultural Revolution. See Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Curly Beard, 12 dal Lago, Francesca, 257, 282 Daxin (Da Sun) Department Store (Shanghai), 118, 127 Deng Fen, 229, 230 Deng Lin, 282 Deng Shi, 97–98 Deng Xiaoping, 60, 184, 186, 201, 204, 209, 211, 213–14, 223, 261, 263–64, 282 Dezarrois, André, 109 Dianshizhai Pictorial (periodical), 16, 178 Di Baoxian (Di Chuqing), 90, 112 Ding Cong, 118, 126, 126, 230 Ding Song, 38, 39, 56 Ding Yanyong, 40, 70, 80, 91, 232–33, 233 Dong Dayou, 110–11, 111, 117 Dong Qichang, 4, 99, 100 Dong Xiwen, 126, 126, 142–45, 143, 145, 150, 151, 158, 169, 187 Du Jian, 158 Du Xueou, 70 Duan Ganqing, 130 Duan Pingyou, 74, 76 Duckweed Flower Club (Pinghuashe), 51

Dumb Bell (Muling) Woodcut Research Society, 86 Duoyunxuan (Cloud Studio), 16, 291, 293 Eastern Painting Society, 248, 249, 250 East Village (Beijing), 272–73 Education: art academies and, 69; art and, 28–30; Chinese painting and, 55–58; in late Qing dynasty, 28–30; private studios and, 70; study abroad, 30–37. See also New Culture Movement Eighteen Art Society, 73, 83, 85, 86, 116 Epigraphy and epigraphic taste, 19–24, 36, 49, 52, 57, 64, 65, 97, 134, 165, 177, 295 Exhibitions abroad, 49, 51, 53, 55, 61, 63, 70, 94, 95, 99, 107–8, 128, 237, 246–47, 264–270, 281–83, 289 Export paintings, 28, 226 Fang Ganmin, 62, 63, 64, 70, 142, 233 Fang Junbi, 61, 63, 108 Fang Lijun, 263, 263, 264, 282 Fang Rending, 80 Fang Ruo, 96 Fang Xuehu, 70 Fang Zengxian, 164, 165, 166, 166, 181, 193 Fei Dawei, 281 Feiyingge huabao (periodical), 16–17 Feng Chaoran, 102, 104, 104–5, 106 Feng Fasi, 118, 149 Feng Gangbai, 69 Feng Mengbo, 264, 265, 266 Feng Shihan, 226 Feng Wenfeng (Flora Fong), 106, 226–27 Feng Zikai, 90, 91, 173 Ferguson, John C., 32 Ferrer, Joannes (Fan Tingzhuo), 9–10 Fifth Moon Painting Society, 237, 248 50 Moganshan Art District, 291–93 Figure painting, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 37, 52, 103, 106, 124, 128, 152, 162, 165, 166, 170, 178, 193, 194, 220 First Guangzhou Triennial, 284–85 First National Art Exhibition (1929), 58, 64–66, 68, 71, 73, 94, 105, 107, 112, 231 Fong, Flora. See Feng Wenfeng Foreign concessions, Shanghai, 1–2, 15, 17, 42, 69, 70, 106, 110, 115, 117, 127, 128, 134, 146 Four Wang tradition, 41, 44, 47–48, 50, 99 Fu Baoshi, 68, 124, 124, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175–76, 176 Fu Lei (Fou Lei), 74 Fujishima Takeji, 70, 76 Gang of Four, 201, 206, 223 Gao Gang, 144–45 Gao Hong, 149 Gao Jianfu, 30–31, 32–35, 33, 34, 36, 57, 68, 95, 103, 122, 169, 176, 226, 227, 229

Gao Jingde, 191, 193, 194 Gao Minglu, 221, 281 Gao Qifeng, 30–31, 33–35, 33, 34, 60, 95, 109, 113, 226, 227, 231 Gao Xiaohua, 205, 205–6 Gao Yong, 10–11, 18, 19, 51 Geng Jianyi, 215, 217, 218, 221, 264, 270 Gerasimov, Alexander M., 147 Gōhara Kotō, 242, 243 Great Leap Forward, 153, 156, 158, 163, 165, 170; propaganda poster production during, 152 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 69, 78, 102, 111, 145, 158, 159, 173, 201, 201–4, 207, 208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 216, 219, 220, 223, 232, 237, 238, 260, 261, 262, 264, 291; introduction, 183–86; Red Guard art, 186–90; worker-peasant-soldier art, 190–99 Greater Shanghai Plan, 110–11, 113 Gu Bingxin, 178 Gu Fei, 105, 106 Gu Kaizhi, 8, 11 Gu Linshi, 44, 44–45, 48, 104, 234 Gu Qingyao (Koo Tsin Yaw), 102, 106, 231, 231, 233, 237 Gu Wenda, 198, 215–16, 216, 220, 221, 260, 266, 267, 270, 276, 281 Gu Xiong, 222, 222 Gu Yuan, 132, 133, 133, 180 Gu Yun, 106, 238 Guan Liang, 40, 76, 80, 91, 127, 233 Guan Shanyue, 175–76, 176, 192, 192 Guan Zilan (Violet Kwan), 70, 71 Guangzhou (Canton). See Whampoa Guangzhou Municipal Art School, 69, 229, 231, 233, 246 Guo Moruo, 118, 144, 176 Guohua artists, 95, 98, 103, 171; Hundred Flowers campaign and, 176–77; official policies and, 161–62, 171–77; women, 57, 105–107, 215 Guohua painting, 55, 56, 57, 62, 68, 71, 93–94, 102, 116, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 294–95, 296; Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, 141, 161–69, 170, 171; Communist takeover and, 140; Cultural Revolution and, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 197, 208; 1972 exhibition and, 193; painters in Shanghai, 95; revival of, 212–13. See also Landscape painting; Oil painting Ha Qiongwen, 124, 152–53, 153 Hai Bo, 289 Haishang tijinguan (Shanghai Literary and Art Club), 51, 97, 101 Hakubakai (White Horse Society), 32, 33 Hao Boyi, 196 He Baitao, 84, 84, 86 He Jiaying, 285 He Jianshi, 226 He Kongde, 149–50, 150, 154, 157, 194, 202 He Sui, 96 He Tianjian, 98, 100–101, 101, 103, 106, 118, 127, 140, 173 Index

357

He Xiangning, 103 He Youzhi, 178–79, 179 Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui), 56–58, 65, 73, 106, 229 Helbling, Lorenz, 291 Ho Siu-kee (He Zhaoji), 240, 241 Hong Kong: art in, 226–27, 251, 254, 255, 279, 290, 293; art of 1920s and 1930s, 227–28; art of 1950s and 1960s, 230–38; introduction, 225–26; postmodernism and, 238–41; wars in, 1937–45, 115, 117, 120, 229–30, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, 3 Hong Xiuquan, 2 Hou Biyi, 231 Hou Hanru, 221, 279, 281, 285 Hou Yimin, 139, 149, 155, 156, 156, 180, 187, 204 Hsia Yang (Xia Yang), 249, 250, 250 Hsieh, Wilson Ka-ho (Shi Jiahao), 240, 241 Hsu Fu-kuan (Xu Fuguan), 250 Hu Gentian, 69 Hu Kao, 118, 230 Hu Peiheng, 96 Hu Shi, 41 Hu Yaobang, 223 Hu Yichuan, 85, 85, 86, 131, 132, 142, 180 Hu Yuan, 10, 10, 11, 15, 18 Hua Guofeng, 201, 271 Hua Guofeng period: art of, 201–4; new realism and, 204–7; unofficial art of, 207–10 Huapian, 151 Huang Banruo (Wong Po-yeh), 227, 230, 231, 235 Huang Binhong, 45, 54, 55, 97–98, 99–100, 100, 103, 106, 109, 128, 162, 171, 212 Huang Jie, 97 Huang Junbi (Huang Chun-pi), 120, 121, 121, 245, 246, 246, 247, 250 Huang Langping, 80 Huang Miaozi, 230 Huang Naiyuan, 202 Huang Rui, 209, 210, 292 Huang Shanding, 85 Huang Tushui, 241 Huang Xinbo, 130, 131, 230 Huang Yanpei, 67, 105 Huang Yongping, 215, 218, 218, 221, 266, 268, 268, 279, 280, 281 Huang Zhongfang. See Wong, Harold Hui Jun (Hui Zhehu), 94 Hundred Days Reform, 28, 29, 32, 105 Hundred Flowers campaign, 156–57, 172, 176 Ichikawa Kinichirō, 241, 243 The Inaugural Ceremony for the New Nation (Dong Xiwen), 142, 143, 144–45, 145, 151, 187 Independent Painting Research Institute, 81. See also Chinese Independent Art Association International Banking Corporation, 3 358

Index

Japanese art collectors, 4, 23–25 Jesuit missionaries, 9, 27, 38 Jia Youfu, 212–13, 213 Jiang Baoling, 51 Jiang Danshu, 102 Jiang Feng, 70, 83, 84, 85, 131, 132, 139, 140, 147, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 177, 178, 208, 209, 210, 211, 269 Jiang Huaisu, 67 Jiang Qing, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191–92, 193, 195, 196, 197, 201, 202, 205, 208 Jiang Tingxi, 5 Jiang Xin (Jiang Xiaojian), 38, 38, 40, 56, 57, 65, 65, 70, 111, 112, 113, 117, 120, 229 Jiang Zhaohe, 68, 128–29, 129, 134, 162, 163, 165 Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting, 170–171, 170 Jin Cheng, 50, 50–51, 94, 95, 96, 97, 105 Jin Kaifan, 94 Jin Nong, 22, 233 Jin Shangyi, 145, 154, 155, 155–56, 157, 169, 192, 202, 208 Jin Xunhua, 190, 191 Jing Hengyi, 32, 103 Ju Lian, 32, 35, 232 Ju Ming (Zhu Ming), 251, 251 Kang Sheng, 184 Kang Youwei, 28, 29, 44, 57, 150 Kant, Immanuel, 31 Kawai Senrō, 24, 25 Kikuchi Hobun, 227 Klindukhov, Nikolai N., 147 Kollwitz, Käthe, 82 Kuroda Seiki, 32 Kuo Hsueh-hu, 242, 242, 243, 245 Kusakabe Meikaku, 24 Lai Chusheng, 100 Lai, Jun T. (Lai Chunchun), 251–52 Lai Shaoqi, 88, 88, 172 Lake Society (Hushe), 51, 52, 94–97, 98, 103, 128, 172; women in, 105 Landscape painting: reappearance of, 169–77; revival of, 103–5 Laufer, Bernard, 17 Lee, Handel, 291 Lee Mingwei, 254, 254 Lee Teng-hui, 250 Lei Guiyuan, 62 Li Bing, 228 Li Binghong, 148, 151, 230 Li Chaoshi, 57, 62, 74, 76 Li Dongping, 80, 81 Li Hua, 87, 87–88, 88, 130, 136, 137, 148, 151, 180, 181 Li Huayi, 294 Li Huanmin, 180–81, 181, 207 Li Huanzhi, 139

Li Jin, 294 Li Jinfa, 59, 62 Li Jing, 12 Li Keran, 116, 116, 118, 124, 134, 151, 172, 171–72, 173, 197, 212, 212 Li Kuchan, 151–52 Li Meishu, 245 Li Puyuan, 63, 65 Li Qi, 163, 163, 180 Li Qiujun, 70, 98, 103, 106, 107, 107, 118 Li Qun, 86, 119 Li Ruiqing, 29, 30 Li Shan, 221–22, 261, 261, 264, 270, 282 Li Shutong, 30, 31, 31–32, 36, 57, 83, 90, 91, 105 Li Tiefu, 228, 228 Li Weizhuang, 52 Li Xianting, 213, 221, 263, 264 Li Xiushi, 85 Li Yanshan, 231 Li Yishi, 39, 65, 66, 68 Li Yinquan, 123, 123 Li Yinghao, 234 Li Zhongsheng (Li Chun-chen), 76, 80, 233, 248, 249, 249 Li Zuhan, 70, 98, 112 Lianhuanhua (serial picture stores), 141, 177–80 Liang Baibo, 76 Liang Qichao, 28, 32, 146, 246 Liang Sicheng, 146 Liang Xihong, 76, 80, 81 Liangjiang Normal School, 29, 62, 68, 102 Liao Bingxiong, 230 Liao Chi-chun (Liao Jichun), 241, 243, 244, 244, 248 Lin Biao, 184, 191, 202, 208 Lin Boqu, 144, 145 Lin Fengmian, 60, 61–66, 63, 68, 73, 74, 95, 109, 116, 116, 120, 134, 142, 158, 173, 174, 174, 210, 212, 215, 233; first national art exhibition and, 64–66; National Hangzhou Art Academy, 62–64 Lin Gang, 141, 141, 142, 144, 151, 208 Lin, Michael (Lin Minghong), 254, 255 Lin Tianmiao, 271–72, 272 Lin Wenzheng, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 120 Lin Yilin, 271, 274 Lin Yong, 189, 189–90 Lin Yushan, 242 Ling Hongxing, 59 Lingnan school, 32, 35, 60, 169, 227, 229, 231, 232, 237, 246 Literati painting, 2, 4, 5, 10, 18, 22, 24, 37, 47, 48, 57, 74, 95, 99, 103, 104, 134, 220, 295, 296. See also New literati painting Lithography, in Shanghai, 16–18, 178 Liu Chunhua, 187, 187–88, 188–89, 197 Liu Dezhai, 10 Liu Haisu, 38, 40–41, 41, 42, 56, 57, 64, 65, 68, 76, 109, 127, 128, 148, 173; nude model controversy, 66–67 Liu Jian’an, 119

Liu Jipiao, 61, 62 Liu Kaiqu, 146, 147, 221 Liu Kunyi, 28 Liu Kuo-sung, 236, 236–37, 248, 249, 250, 255, 276 Liu Shaoqi, 144, 145, 155, 156, 156, 158, 184, 185, 186, 187, 204 Liu Shi, 245–46 Liu Wei, 264, 282 Liu Wenxi, 166, 167, 193, 194, 194–95, 202 Liu Xian, 118–19, 119, 132 Liu Xiaodong, 259, 286 Liu Xun, 209, 291 Lu Bodu, 10 Lü Cheng, 44, 74 Lu Danlin, 98, 99, 103 Lu Hongji, 119, 130 Lü Qingzhong, 74 Lu Shaofei, 118, 230 Lü Shengzhong, 222 Lu Xiaoman, 102, 106 Lu Xinhua, 204–5 Lu Xun, 30, 43, 62, 73, 82–88, 89–90, 90, 116, 162, 175, 177–78, 180, 191, 192, 193, 230 Lu Xun Academy of Arts and Literature: in Yanan, 131, 132, 149; in Shenyang, 168 Lü Yanzhi, 59–60, 65, 110, 146 Lu Zhiyang, 230 Lui Shou-kwan, 231, 233, 234, 235, 235, 236, 237 Luo Gongliu, 131, 132, 133, 142, 143, 150, 151, 156, 157, 158 Luo Qingzhen, 85–86 Luo Zhongli, 206, 206–7, 215, 217 Ma Da, 119 Ma Desheng, 209, 210 Maksimov, Konstantin M., 148, 149–51, 153, 154, 155, 157, 192, 202, 204 Man, Phoebe Ching Ying, 239–41, 240 Manchu Qing dynasty, 1–33, 35, 37, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 62, 96, 97, 100, 103, 105, 108–9, 164 Mao Zedong, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 155, 155, 156, 157, 163, 163, 168, 169, 172, 174, 175, 176, 184, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194, 202, 204, 207, 210, 223, 261, 262, 262–63, 264, 265, 266, 267; death of, 201; Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and, 183–185, 189, 194 Masaki Naohiko, 243 Massa, Nicolas (Ma Yigu), 9–10 May Fourth movement, 45. See New Culture Movement Mei Qing, 96 Meishu (journal): (1918–22), 40 45; (1934), 63, 64, 81; (1954–66, 1976–present), 177, 202, 206, 211, 213, 218–19 Miao Zi, 22 Ming dynasty, 1, 2, 5, 59, 136, 142, 169, 179, 180, 184 MK Society, 86 Mo Pu, 177 Modern Woodcut movement (Xinxing banhua yundong), 82–89 Index

359

Modern Woodcut Society, 86–88 Money shops (qianzhuang), 3, 52 Monument to the People’s Heroes, 145–47, 146, 153, 223 Morning Flower Society, 82 Murphy, Henry K., 60, 110 Museum of Revolutionary History, 142, 146, 151; socialist realism in, 153–59 Nagao Uzan, 21, 25 Nakamura Fusetsu, 39, 56, 66 Nanking, Treaty of, 1 National Art Academy, 120–21 National Art Exhibition: (First, 1929), 58, 64–66, 68, 71, 73, 94, 98, 105, 107, 112, 231; (Second, 1937), 68, 73, 104, 116–17, 171, 227 National Beiping Arts College, 139. See also Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) National Essence movement, 50–51, 97 National Hangzhou Art Academy, 55, 62–65 National Music Conservatory, 111–12 New China Art Academy, 69, 117; in wartime, 128 New Culture movement, 39–42, 44, 45, 89 New Ink Art, 236–37, 238 New Literati painting, 220–21. See also Literati painting New Wave movement, 220–21 Ni Yide, 70, 76, 76, 78, 91, 127, 233 Nihonga style of painting, 35, 102, 168, 241–43 Nianhua (New Year’s posters), 141–42, 161 Nie Ou, 214 Nixon, Richard M., 191 No Names, 208–9, 213 No Name exhibition, 209 Northern Art Group, 219 Nude models, drawing from, 67 Oil painting: avant-garde, in 1930s, 74–81; Chinese Communist history and, 142–43. See also Painting Opium War, 1 Oriental Banking Corporation, 3 Ouyang Yuqian, 68 Painting. See Guohua painting; Landscape painting; Literati painting; New Literati painting; Oil painting Painting, Shanghai school of, 3–14 Painting Methods Research Society, 39 Painting societies: in 1930s, 94–97; in Shanghai, 51–55. See also Art societies Palace Museum, 51, 98, 108 Pan Dawei, 226, 227 Pan Gongkai, 294, 295 Pan Sitong, 70 Pan Tianshou, 55, 62, 109, 134, 164, 165, 171, 173, 177, 177, 210, 212, 295 Pan Yuliang, 68, 70, 106, 122, 229 360

Index

Pang Xunqin, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 117, 120, 126, 211, 233 Pang Yuanji, 96, 106, 108 Pang Zuoyu, 106, 107 Peasant art, 190–99 Pei, I. M., 241, 289, 289–90 Peng Bin, 202 Peng Zhen, 146 People’s Republic of China, establishment of, 139–41 Perry, Matthew C., 2 Phoebus Society, 61 Pi Daojian, 276 Pingjin (Beiping-Tianjin) Woodcut Research Society, 88 Plain Moon Painting (Suyue) Painting Society, 101, 105 Political Pop, 261–62 Pool Society, 215, 217, 218 Posters, propaganda, in People’s Republic of China, 151–53 Printmakers, at end of WWII, 136–37 Private studios, art education and, 70 Pu Hua, 15 Puru (Pu Xinyu), 95–96, 96, 245, 246–47, 247, 250 Puyi (emperor), 29 Publishing industry: in People’s Republic of China, 151–53; of Shanghai, 16–18 Qi Baishi (Qi Huang), 49, 49–50, 62, 65, 128, 171, 172, 212 Qian Daxin, 152 Qian Ding, 127 Qian Hui’an, 17–18, 18, 51 Qian Juntao, 23, 90–91, 91 Qian Mu, 232 Qian Shoutie, 98, 101–2, 103 Qian Songyan, 170–71, 171, 192, 192 Qian Xiaodai, 179, 179–80 Qianzhuang (money shops), 3, 52 Qin Song, 250 Qin Tianjian, 202 Qin Wenmei, 202, 202 Qin Zheng, 157 Qing dynasty, 25; art and education reforms in, 28–30; decline of, 1; Hundred Days Reform, 28, 29, 31; study abroad in late, 30–31 Qiu Ti, 76, 78, 79 Qiu Zhijie, 276, 277 Quan Shanshi, 154, 154–55 Rauschenberg, Robert, 215, 250 Red Guard, 185–86; art, 186–90 Red Humor, 215; International, 216–17 Ren Xiong, 5, 5–9, 7, 11, 14, 83, 178 Ren Xun, 8, 8, 9, 11, 12, 20, 23, 23, 25 Ren Yi (Ren Bonian), 9–14, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 51, 52, 123, 163, 165, 166 Rent Collection Courtyard, 184, 185; Venice, 282, 282 Repin, Ilya, 149

Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui), 29, 35 Ricci, Matteo, 27 Rong Rong, 272 Rongbaozhai, 16 Rou Shi, 82–83 Saitō Kazō, 63 Salt monopoly, 2–3 Satomi Katsuzō, 66, 80, 81 Scholarly societies, proliferation of, in 1930s, 73–74 Seal carving, 19–23 Second National Art Exhibition (1937), 68, 73, 104, 116–17, 171, 227 Serov, Vladimir, 147 798 Art District, 291–92 Shanghai, 1; architecture of, 109–13; as artistic center, 2, 3; art shops of, 14–16; banking in, 3; commercial art in, 89–91; epigraphy in, 19–24; guohua painters in, 95; as mercantile hub, at turn of twentieth century, 2, 3; municipal government building of, 110–11; publishing industry of, 16–18; school of painting, 3–4; traditionalist painting societies in, 51–55; urban planning and, 110–11; wartime in, 117–18, 127–29 Shanghai Art Academy, 65, 67, 69, 148; first decade, 37–40; formative period of, 55–56; New Culture movement and, 39–42, 44; in wartime, 127–28 Shanghai Biennale (2000), 279–80, 283 Shanghai Cultural Documents Society, 113 Shanghai Library, 111, 111–12 Shanghai Literary and Art Club (Haishang Tijin Hall), 51 Shanghai Municipal Council, 2 Shanghai Museum, 112, 113 Shang Shengbo, 100 Shao Dazhen, 221 Shen Bochen, 38, 39 Shenbao (newspaper), 16 Sheng Xuanhuai, 31 Shen Jiawei, 195, 195–96, 196–97 Shen Yaoding, 184 Shen Yaoyi, 187, 187 Shen Yiqian, 117, 118, 133 Shen Yinmo, 246 Shen Yuan, 292 Shi Hui, 272 Shi Lu, 137, 137, 171, 172, 174–75, 175, 197, 197 Shitao, 175 Shiotsuki Tohō, 242 Shuiyin muke, 181 Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, 204 Sino-Japanese Art Colleagues Association, 53 Sino-Japanese Art Society, 53 Sino-Japanese War, 28, 30, 115–16, 116–18; development of Yan’an style during, 131–32; end of, 134–37; flight to the inland, 119–20; outbreak of, 117–18; Second National Art Exhibition,

116–17; Shanghai and, 127–29; woodcuts during, 129–31; Wuhan period, 118–19 Sixth National Exhibition (1984), 214 Small Sword Society, 2 Smedley, Agnes, 82 Socialist realism: in Museum of Revolutionary History, 153–59; soviet, 147–51 Soldier art, 190–99 Song Dong, 270, 273, 273 Song Haidong, 264 Song Zhongyuan, 127 Spring Earth Painting Research Center, 85 Stalinist art theory, 142 Stars artists, 209, 210, 213 “Stele school” of calligraphy, 22 Stone Drums, 19 The Storm Society (Juelanshe), 74–79, 79 Su Wonong, 80 Suzhou, 2, 3 Suzhou Art Academy, 69, 148 Suzhou Museum, 289, 289–90 Sui Jianguo, 259, 290 Sun Fuxi, 62 Sun Ke, 110 Sun Liang, 264 Sun Runyu, 96 Sun Yat-sen, 29, 58, 110 Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, 58, 59 Sun Zixi, 158, 159, 166, 181 Tagore, Rabindranath, 112, 122 Taiping Rebellion, 2 Taiwan, colonial and postcolonial art of, 241–55 Takeuchi Seihō, 227 Tan Zhenlin, 186 Tanaka Raishō, 33 Tang Xiaohe, 192, 193, 194 Tang Yihe, 120, 121, 121 Tang Yingwei, 88, 88 Tao Yuanqing, 62, 89–90, 90 Tao Zhu, 186 Tateishi Tetsuomi, 244 Te Wei, 118, 230 Teng Gu, 56 Three Step Studio, 215 Tian Han, 68, 118 Tiananmen Massacre, 223, 257 Tianmahui. See Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui) Ting, W. Y., 109 Tsang Tak Ping (Zeng Deping), 239, 239 Tsang Tsou Choi (Zeng Zaocai), 238, 239 Tsong Pu (Zhuang Pu), 251, 252, 252 Tuhua (drawing and painting), 29 Tushanwan Painting Atelier, 10 Index

361

Uchiyama Kanzō, 82, 130 Unnamed Woodcut Society, 86 Urban planning, 109–13 Valéry, Paul, 109 Van Lau (Wen Lou), 234, 235, 235 Varbanov, Maryn (Wan Man), 215 Verostko, Roman, 215 Wada Eisaku, 66 Wallace, Brian, 291 Wang, C. C. (Wang Jiqian), 233–34, 234, 255 Wang Caibai, 68 Wang Chuantao, 97 Wang Daizhi, 61, 62 Wang Dongling, 276, 276 Wang Dongxin, 201 Wang Geyi, 98, 102, 173 Wang Guangyi, 215, 219, 221, 259–60, 260, 264, 265, 282 Wang Hongwen, 201 Wang Huaiqing, 210, 211 Wang Hui, 48 Wang Jiyuan, 57, 66, 70, 74, 76, 122, 229 Wang Jian, 47, 48 Wang Jianwei, 284 Wang Jin Zhang, 96, 105 Wang Jingsong, 262, 262–63 Wang Keping, 209, 209, 210, 210 Wang Li, 4 Wang Linyi, 120 Wang Liuqiu, 149, 157 Wang Mantian, 191, 193 Wang Mengqi, 220 Wang Qi, 130 Wang Rizhang, 134 Wang Shenglie, 166–69, 167 Wang Shikuo, 142, 147 Wang Shimin, 47 Wang Tiande, 295, 295 Wang Yachen, 38, 40, 57, 69, 91, 103, 117, 118, 122 Wang Yidong, 290 Wang Yongquan, 96 Wang Yuanqi, 47, 100 Wang Yuezhi, 62 Wang Zhen (Wang Yiting), 52–53, 53, 54–55, 55, 57, 59, 60, 65, 67, 95, 96, 98, 99, 105, 106, 108, 112, 117, 118 Wang Ziwei, 264 Warlord period, 61, 99 Wei Jingshan, 202, 203 Wen Bao, 158, 159, 166 Wen Yiduo, 133 Weng Fen, 283 Western art, 27–28 Western art history, in Chinese educational system, 56 362

Index

White and Black Society, 88 White Goose Painting Club, 70 White Horse Society (Hakubakai), 32 Wild Grain Woodcut Society, 84 Wind Society, 98 Wo Zha, 132 Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, 105–9, 107, 118, 127, 134 Wong, Harold (Huang Zhongfang), 237–38, 238 Wong Po-yeh (Huang Banruo), 227 Wong, Wucius (Wang Wuxie), 234, 236, 236 Woodblock prints: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, 180– 81; at end of WWII, 137 Woodcut art movement, 82–89 Woodcuts, wartime, 129–31 Worker-peasant-soldier art, 190–99 Wu Biduan, 156, 157 Wu Changshi, 13, 13–14, 19–25, 20, 21, 23, 36, 42, 44, 51, 52, 57, 62, 106, 134 Wu Dacheng, 24, 25, 104 Wu Daiqiu, 99 Wu Dayu, 61, 62, 62, 65, 142, 233 Wu Dongmai, 112 Wu Fading, 39 Wu Guanzhong, 124, 208, 210–11, 214 Wu Hao, 249 Wu Hufan, 100, 104, 109, 113, 116, 127, 140, 173, 173–74, 212, 234 Wu Hung, 281 Wu Jiayou, 16, 17, 25 Wu Mali, 252 Wu Qingxia, 98, 106, 107, 107, 118 Wu Qizhong, 193 Wu Shanzhuan, 215, 216, 217, 221, 260, 282 Wu Shiguang, 38, 40 Wu Shujuan, 57, 106 Wu Shuyang, 40 Wu Tiecheng, 112 Wu Tien-chang, 253, 253 Wu Zhongxiong, 97 Wu Zonglin, 51 Wu Zuoren, 68, 118, 142, 197 Wuhan, city of, 118–19 X-marks, 216 Xiling Seal Society, 25 Xishan Calligraphy and Painting Society, 100 Xiyanghua (Occidental painting), 27 Xia Jiankang, 38 Xia Peng, 86 Xia Yan, 210 Xiamen (Amoy), 1 Xiamen Dada, 215, 218 Xiao Junxian, 30, 30

Xiao Lu, 222, 222–23 Xiao Sun, 96–97, 97 Xiaopenglai Calligraphy and Painting Society, 51 Xie Gongzhan, 100 Xie Haiyan, 103 Xie Zhiguang, 98 Xing Zhibin, 274–75 Xiong Maomi, 275 Xu Beihong, 39, 40, 42, 42, 43, 60, 61, 66, 68–69, 69, 109, 118, 122, 122–23, 123, 134, 142, 151, 162, 163, 164, 169, 171, 180, 229 Xu Ben, 44 Xu Bing, 214, 219, 219–20, 258, 258–59, 259, 264, 268–71, 269, 284 Xu Chunzhong, 190–91, 191 Xu Guangqi, 9 Xu Kuang, 198, 198 Xu Lei, 220, 220–21, 264 Xu Tan, 270 Xu Yong, 193 Xu Yongqing, 38, 39 Xu Zhimo, 66, 102, 106 Xugu, 15, 18–19, 19, 25 Yamamoto Baigai, 32 Yan’an style, development of, 131–33 Yan Fu, 28 Yan Han, 132, 132, 147–48, 148, 157, 177, 197 Yan Peiming, 281, 282 Yan Shuilong, 244 Yan Wenliang, 69, 148 Yang Baoyi, 96 Yang Fudong, 275, 275 Yang Jiechang, 281, 281 Yang Keyang, 136, 137 Yang Qiuren, 76 Yang Sanlang, 244, 244 Yang Shanshen, 231 Yang Shaobing, 287 Yang Taiyang, 76 Yang Xian, 19, 25 Yang Xingxing, 38 Yang Xuejiu, 105–6, 106 Yang Xueyao, 105 Yang Yi, 105 Yang Yinfang, 8 Yang Zhenzhong, 284 Yang Zhiguang, 168, 169, 197–98, 197 Yang Zhilin, 257 Yangzhou, 2, 3 Yao Hua, 246 Yao Wenyuan, 201 Ye Gongchuo, 98, 108, 109, 112–13, 162, 172, 230 Ye Jianying, 201 Ye Luo, 86

Ye Qianyu, 118, 119, 140, 141–42, 148, 169, 230 Yencesse, Ovide, 61 Yi Zhong, 191, 191 Yiyuan Painting Research Institute, 70, 106 Yin Xiuzhen, 271, 271, 288 Ying Yeping, 102 Yip, Wai-lim (Ye Weilian), 234 Young Companion (magazine), 57 Yu Ben, 228, 228 Yu Chuangshuo, 118 Yu Dafu, 102 Yu Fei’an, 95, 95–96 Yu Feng, 209, 230 Yu Garden Calligraphy and Painting Charitable Society, 51–52 Yu Hong, 259, 260, 264 Yu Jifan, 57, 74 Yu Jianhua, 56, 98, 127 Yu Peng, 253, 253 Yu Youhan, 261, 262, 264, 282 Yu Youren, 102–3 Yu Yue, 19 Yu Yunjie, 149, 151, 157, 202 Yuan Shikai, 28, 58 Yuan Yunsheng, 211, 211 Yun Shouping, 5 Zao Wou-ki (Zhao Wuji), 233, 234, 235 Zeng Fanzhi, 265, 265, 293 Zeng Fengji, 15 Zeng Ming, 80, 81 Zeng Xi, 16 Zeng Yi, 80 Zeng Zhiliang, 76 Zeng Zhongming, 108 Zeng Zhushao, 147 Zhan Jianjun, 149, 149, 150, 154, 169, 181, 208 Zhan Wang, 287 Zhang Chenbo, 57 Zhang Chongren, 9 Zhang Chunqiao, 201 Zhang Dali, 274, 274 Zhang Daofan, 108 Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chen), 16, 68, 98, 100, 102, 102, 103, 113, 117, 124, 125, 126, 229, 246, 247–48, 248, 250 Zhang Ding, 171 Zhang Guangyu, 230 Zhang Hongtu, 261–62, 262 Zhang Huan, 272, 273, 273 Zhang Jianjun, 283 Zhang Kunyi, 113 Zhang Leping, 118 Zhang Nian, 222 Zhang Peili, 215, 217, 217, 219, 264, 270, 274, 274 Zhang Shanzi, 98, 102, 112 Index

363

Zhang Shuqi, 68, 122, 122 Zhang Tiao, 116 Zhang Wang, 86, 87, 130, 132 Zhang Wei, 208 Zhang Wenyuan, 118 Zhang Xiya, 148 Zhang Xiaogang, 264, 265, 282, 293 Zhang Xiong, 3, 3, 4–5, 6, 18, 19, 20 Zhang Xuan, 70, 74–76, 75 Zhang Xueliang, 115 Zhang Yu, 276, 276 Zhang Yuguang, 38, 39 Zhang Yuanji, 162 Zhang Zhengyu, 230 Zhang Zhidong, 28 Zhang Zuolin, 62 Zhao Bandi, 275, 275 Zhao Chen, 110 Zhao Hongben, 178, 179, 179–80 Zhao Qi, 120 Zhao Shou, 80, 80, 81 Zhao Wangyun, 171 Zhao Wuji (Zao Wou-ki), 123–24, 215, 276 Zhao Yannian, 151 Zhao Yu, 145 Zhao Zhiqian, 19, 22, 22–23, 23 Zhao Ziyang, 223 Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, 215 Zheng Chang (Zheng Wuchang), 56 Zheng Shengtian, 185, 188, 188–89, 281 Zheng Wuchang, 98, 102–3, 118, 127, 134–36, 135, 137, 140

364

Index

Zheng Yefu, 85, 86, 131 Zheng Zhenduo, 146, 178 Zhong Biao, 287 Zhong Huizhu, 15 Zhong Ming, 208 Zhou Bichu, 127 Zhou Changgu, 164, 164–66, 169–70 Zhou Duo, 76 Zhou Enlai, 60, 115, 118, 140, 145, 172, 184, 186, 191, 192, 195, 197, 202–3, 204, 212, 223 Zhou Lianxia, 106, 107, 118 Zhou Shujing, 40 Zhou Shuqiao, 190, 190 Zhou Sicong, 193, 215 Zhou Tiehai, 266, 267 Zhou Xian, 7 Zhou Xiang, 37–38, 66 Zhou Yang, 162, 210 Zhou Zhengtai, 76 Zhu Cheng, 4, 4, 5, 14, 23, 23 Zhu Da, 12, 134 Zhu Fadong, 273–74 Zhu Jinlou, 148 Zhu Jintang, 15 Zhu Naizheng, 192 Zhu Qizhan, 70, 117, 127 Zhu Xiong, 4 Zhu Yuanzhang (emperor), 59 Zhuangfen, 32 Zhuangshui, 32 Zong Bing, 169

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