RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

CHINESE PAINTING IN THE XX CENTURY: ARTISTIC, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza" - STUDI ORIENTALI - ROMA(RM)

Research Unit Leader

Alida ALABISO

Description

The scope of this research is to retrace the evolution of Chinese painting in the last century, to show how the Western techniques have been received and confronted with the traditional Chinese techniques. The èart concerning painting will be conducted by the group of "La Sapienza" University while politics, economics and social problems will be examined by the group of Cagliari University.
The birth of modern painting in China may be retraced to the so-called Shanghai School flourished in the years 1850-1900.
The formation of the Shanghai school style owes a great debt to the remarkably talented Ren Xiong, ( 1857 at the age of 34) and to his family. Painters of the Ren family and their students produced a great array of innovations in painting between the 1860s and the 1890s, particularly in the traditional genres of figure painting and bird-and-flower painting.
The "Shanghai school" was followed by the Lingnan School (1900-1950, centred in Guangzhou (Canton) in the south of China.
The development of a Cantonese manner of painting began in the nineteenth century, but did not attain national visibility and a distinctive style until the first part of the XX century. The leader of the Lingnan School of painting was Gao Jianfu (1879-1950?), who joined the Alliance Society (Tongmeng hui), founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1905 to overthrow the emperor. After 1911 he devoted himself instead to a revolution in art. In his painting, publications, and teaching, he promoted the development of a New National Painting (xin guohua). He and his followers, most notably his younger brother Gao Qifeng, combined the local style with elements of Western and Japanese realist painting to create an art that they hoped would be more accessible to the citizenry of China's new republic than the literati painting of the past.
During the Republican Period (1911-1950), the art education in China's modern schools was dominated by European artistic techniques. Painting in the traditional medium of ink and color on paper was now referred to as guohua (national painting), to distinguish it from Western-style oil painting, watercolor painting, or drawing, and became only one of several options for a Chinese artist.
Artists of this period agreed that innovation was necessary, but believed progress could be, and should be, achieved within the confines of China's own cultural tradition.
A prominent group of guohua painters, including Wu Changshi, Wang Zhen, Feng Zikai, Chen Hengke, and Fu Baoshi, had strong ties to Japan, where similar nationalistic cultural trends were on the rise. Others, such as Wu Hufan, He Tianjian, Chang Daijian and Zheng Yong, based their work upon a return to the highly refined classical techniques of the Song and Yuan periods. A third group, dominated by Xu Beihong, followed the footsteps of Gao Jianfu in trying to reform Chinese ink painting by adding elements of Western realism.
The French-trained Lin Fengmian, appointed director of the Hangzhou National Art Academy in 1928, trained several generations of influential modernists.
Xu Beihong, who also studied in Europe in the 1920s, was appointed to head the art department of National Central University in the capital, where he promoted an opposing practice, that of academic realism.
In addition to these two dominant institutional trends, other influential artists who studied in Japan or Europe came back to China committed to styles ranging from post-impressionism to fauvism and finally, in the 1930s, to surrealism.
The pluralism of the Chinese art world in the 1930s was destroied by the outbreak of the Pacific war, which forced many artists into an eight-year exile in China's interior. For those who continued to paint, a new, self-reflective tone replaced the joy to be seen earlier in the decade, and social commentary became a more common theme in painting.
The People's Republic of China was established on October 1, 1949. Following the principles established in Mao's Yan'an Talks on Art and Literature of 1942, the new government set about creating a new art for the new nation. It was decided that oil painting would be a primary focus, and that Soviet socialist realism was the most appropriate model. Young artists were sent to Leningrad to study. Between 1959 and 1961, these artists produced major history paintings in the new manner for the state buildings erected around Tian'anmen Square. Establishing both a Chinese socialist realist style and a revolutionary iconography, this group of paintings determined the course of China's artistic development.
The early 1950s saw a systematic program to replace classical Chinese ink painting with an art that was socially useful and not tied to modes of brushwork considered backward. This was accomplished through training a younger generation of painters in principles of Western academic drawing, which they then applied to guohua figure painting. The young artists created an unprecedented mode of Chinese painting, in which new techniques were used to paint themes that had never before been seen in traditional Chinese art.
The traditionally trained older artists remained marginalized during the first years of new China. They reemerged, with Zhou Enlai's assistance, in the late 1950s, when Institutes devoted to the preservation of Chinese painting were established in a few major cities.
In 1959 Zhou Enlai took the role of spokesman for a policy which urged that "one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend." In the art world, aspirations pent up for a decade seemed to burst forth in a variety of traditionalist and quasi-traditionalist paintings. Pan Tianshou successfully transformed his paintings into the monumental size needed for public display. He Tianjian filled his classical landscapes with contemporary iconography. The Nanjing and Shaanxi painters made innovations in socialist landscape painting, while other artists, like Wu Hufan and Lin Fengmian, remained committed to an apolitical realm of pure art.
During the "Cultural Revolution" the artists were compelled to develop a new iconography for the cult of the Chairman Mao.
As China's institutional structure was slowly reconstituted in the period between 1971 and 1976, a series of national art exhibitions were organized under the supervision of Mao's wife Jiang Qing. The new work was intensely propagandistic in tone, and was required to adhere rigidly to the theatrical and sometimes bombastic style that had been developed at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. However, these exhibitions brought into the limelight a new generation of artists, those who had learned to paint while working on farms, in military camps, and in factories, and who painted subjects from their own experiences. The most common theme was a glorification of the contribution of working citizens to the development of the nation.
The abrupt removal of the dictatorial control of the arts, after the death of Mao in 1975 and the end of the "Cultural Revolution" plunged the art world into a newly experimental mode. Most work produced between 1976 and 1980 was built upon the strong realist foundation of the preceding era, but the themes were unlike those seen in recent decades. They were reflections upon recent history and society and impassioned complaints about the Cultural Revolution.
As China reopened to the global community in the 1980s, Chinese art entered a renewed period of pluralistic development. Two decades of steady contact with the outside world have yielded an intense reconsideration of China's native artistic traditions. Painters of the last fifteen or twenty years have created remarkably varied work in guohua, China's traditional medium of ink on paper.
The last two decades have witnessed momentous economic, social, and political changes in mainland China and throughout the "Chinese world." Artists in urban centers and elsewhere in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (now a special administrative region of China) have responded to these changes with an explosion of diverse work that is simultaneously exhilarating and bewildering. Using a variety of media, from ink and oil painting to installation and performance art, many Chinese artists in the region and abroad are grappling with what it means to be Chinese in an age of globalization.