The original author 丨 Fang Wen
Excerpt from Xiao Shuyan
Between Two Cultures: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Painting
Author: Fang Wen
Translator: Zhao Jia
Edition: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House
December 2020
Modern and Contemporary Studies of Chinese Art History
Earlier Chinese paintings before the 18th century followed a cyclical development model of "decline-evolution" and "growth-decline-revival". By the 19th and 20th centuries, China's long-term efforts to modernize under the onslaught of Western culture seemed to threaten the continuation of the reproducible tradition of ancient China. After the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, ancient Chinese paintings, traditional Sinology and literary style before 1800 AD were all considered part of China's classical heritage.
In 1925, with the establishment of the Palace Museum, the previously rare palace collection was opened to the public for observation and study for the first time. However, this renewed focus on tradition was opposed by the New Culture Movement advocated by Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) and Hu Shi (1891-1962). In the late 1910s and 1920s, they advocated the transformation of Chinese culture through Western studies at Peking University, the birthplace of new ideas. At that time, traditional Chinese painting was called "Chinese painting", as opposed to "Western painting". This division has played a leading role in the cross-cultural discussion of the identity and value of traditional Chinese culture between the East and the West. The "Western School" advocates the use of Western models to improve Chinese painting, while the "Traditional School" tries to seek self-positioning and development ideas from the history of Chinese art.
The beginning of the 20th century was a pivotal period in Chinese history, when the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and established an unstable new government of the Republic of China, and it was during this period of political confusion that Chinese art and archaeology made great strides. In 1900, the Taoist monk Wang Yuanzhen discovered the long-sealed Tibetan Scripture Cave in the Thousand Buddha Caves in Dunhuang, northwest of Gansu Province. The discovery attracted european, Japanese and Chinese explorers, scholars and artists to study the local Dunhuang murals from the 5th to the 14th centuries. With the establishment of the Republic of China, a large number of exquisite Chinese paintings and antiquities were brought to Japan by former Qing dynasty elders and officials. As a result, Japan's Taisho period (1912-1926) also ushered in the golden age of Chinese art collection. The famous antiquarian and late Qing dynasty widow Luo Zhenyu (1866-1940) befriended the famous Japanese sinologist Naitō Konan (1866-1934) during his stay in Japan. Hunan Naito was a major advisor to many of Japan's emerging industries, banking elites, and many other well-known collectors of Chinese art, including Abe Fusajirō (1868-1937), Yamamoto Teijirō (1870-1937), and Ogawa Chikanosuke, whose collections are now in the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art.
For Japanese scholars, they began to come into contact with chinese literati paintings from the "Juntaiguan Left and Right Accounts". Written in the 15th century, this ancient book contains Chinese Song and Yuan paintings collected from the Muromachi period (1392-1573) in Japan. From 1922 to 1923, Naito Hunan presented a series of lectures on the history of Chinese painting at Kyoto Imperial University. His new view of history focuses on Chinese literati painting in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, revising earlier understandings of Chinese painting based on the Zen buddhism and courtyard paintings of the Southern Song Dynasty collected in the Middle Ages in Japan. From 1921 to 1931, the Japanese government sponsored six Sino-Japanese art exhibitions. The last two exhibitions in 1928 and 1931 exhibited works by exemplary masters. These exhibitions made Japan a major export market for Chinese painting, and then achieved the glory of many Chinese painting masters at that time, such as Wu Changshuo (1844-1927), Qi Baishi (1864-1957) and Zhang Daqian (1899-1983).
In the Taisho era, when these rare early Chinese paintings flowed in, Japan, which was gradually rising nationalism, was returning to the tradition from the Westernization Restoration of the Meiji era (1868-1912). The resulting sinology fever not only cultivated a generation of Japanese sinologists, but also triggered the revival of Chinese literati painting style in Japan. At that time, the so-called "Nanzong" paintings of the late Ming critic and painter Dong Qichang (1555-1636) were called "Nanzong" in Japan. Since the 17th century, "Nanhua" has been copied by traditional Japanese ink painters (mainly based on Facsimiles of Chinese paintings). In addition, another important factor that promoted the wave of "Orientalization" at that time was the article "The Revival of Literati Painting" written by Ōmura Seigai (1867-1927), a professor at the Tokyo Art School and a well-known historian of Chinese art in Japan. The article defines the literati painting style as the "pan-Asian" (Oriental, meaning Sino-Japanese) artistic orthodoxy, and compares the difference between the emphasis on "spirit" in Eastern literati painting and the "realism" in the West. He further illustrates this with photography, a product of industrial mechanization:
Western paintings are easy to enter the common eye... (Today's) stream of innovators, mostly advocating naturalism, but also using sketching to correct its (traditional literati painting) abuses... His writing of nature is exquisite and meticulous, and his painting is far less natural than photography. And the glass mirror and the photosensitive drug, the mechanical method produced by science, can be better than painting, who does not scorn its stupidity... If sketching is the ultimate in art... Since the invention of photography, painting has perished... However, it is not true that painting is more important... In addition to the cover sketch, there is still a territorial ear of its inherent power.
Omura Xiya adopted the traditional view of Chinese scholars, believing that painting should transcend the characteristics of analog form and external beauty, which are parallel to Western realism, and then realize the first article of Sheikh's "Six Laws" - "vivid rhyme". Under the influence of authors such as Omura Nishiya, two of the most expressive personality masters of the 17th century, Shi Tao and Bada Shanren, became the most sought after painters by Japanese artists and collectors. In 1926, the master painter Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883-1945) published a book about Shi Tao, which contained illustrations of Shi Tao's masterpieces from the Japanese collection. These include the old collection of the Japanese collector Kuwana Tesujō (1864-1938) and the album "Guizhuo" (including a frame of "Yamagami") now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the inscription at the end of the album, Tomioka Tessai (1837-1924), a master of the Southern School and a loyal admirer of Shi Tao, transcribed a passage of admiration for Shi Tao by Zheng Xie (1693-1765), one of the "Eight Monsters of Yangzhou", and thus sorted out the historical origin of Chinese literati painting in the 18th century and its gradual evolution into modern Japanese "southern painting".
Tomioka Tetsusai's inscription in Shi Tao's "Gui zhao shang shang" book
In 1922, the year after Omura's essay on Xiya was published, Chen Hengke (1876-1923), a professor of fine arts and theorist in Beijing, published an article entitled "The Value of Literati Paintings" and translated Omura's essay into Chinese appended to the text. Chen Hengke wrote:
Painting as a thing is also a sexual spirit, a thinker, an activist, a non-instrumental person, and a non-simple person. Otherwise, it is as straight as a camera, the same, and the crowd is the same... The elements of literati painting, the first character, the second learning, the third talent, the fourth thought. With these four, it can be perfected. Cover art as a thing, to touch people, to the spirit of the corresponding also. Have this feeling, have this spirit, and then be able to touch people and feel themselves.
It can be said that Chen Hengke's remarks have set the tone for the debate on traditional Chinese painting styles in modern times.
However, the revival and study of Chinese tradition is not limited to China and Japan. In the United States, Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) began to build a large-scale collection of Chinese and Japanese art for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA, since the 1890s. In 391878, Fenorosa went to Japan as a lecturer in philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University. It coincided with the popularity of Western art in Japan at the end of the 1870s. Fei Shi, who was fascinated by traditional Japanese art at first sight, saw this situation and vigorously opposed the tendency of Japanese painting to be arbitrarily Westernized. In 1887, he was commissioned to work at the Tokyo Imperial Museum and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. 411890 Fenorosa became director of the Asian Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and began to work on building the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston into an important city for the display and study of Japanese art outside of Japan. In 1897, the position of Fei was succeeded by his Japanese student and Japanese national art activist Okakura Kakuzō (1862-1913). Since coming to Boston in 1904, Okakura Tenshin has devoted himself to building a first-class collection of Chinese art. At the same time, his books "Oriental Ideals" (1903) and "Tea Book" (1906) also made him famous.
Ernst Fenorosa
While Fenorosa and Okakura Tenshin were working in Boston to accumulate and expand their collections, the millionaire Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919), who made his fortune on his own, was also trying to build his personal collection of Chinese and Japanese art. In 1906, he donated his personal collection to The Smithsonian Institution, along with the founding fund of The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington. Freell was a natural lobbyist who tried to persuade American museums to start collecting asian art. In the 1910s, when the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was collecting Chinese art under the direction of Okakura Tenshin, its president, Gardiner M. Lane, said he was "always worried that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with Morgan's financial support, would step into the competition to collect Chinese art." In 421912, John C. Ferguson (1866–1945), a Methodist missionary, scholar and collector of Chinese paintings living in China, persuaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art to appoint him as an agent to buy art in China. At Freer's suggestion, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reached an agreement with Faucaysen in late 1913 to take over Faucaisen's collection of Chinese paintings in a half-buy, half-given manner. In the 1930s and decades after World War II, Laurence Sickman (1906–1985) and Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008), two connoisseurs and curators, helped the Nelson[1] Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas, with their exceptional professional vision and professionalism City) and The Cleveland Museum of Art have successfully built a high-profile collection of Chinese art.
Okakura Tenshin
In November 1935, the Chinese government loaned Chinese art overseas for the first time to participate in the exhibition at The Burlington House in London. In the 1930s, the West also officially began to study Chinese painting. Just as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston collected Song paintings based on Japanese taste in the early days, the West initially focused on the study of Song paintings. Until 1949, the Wildenstein Gallery in New York held an "Exhibition of Masters of Chinese Painting in the Ming and Qing Dynasties", which ushered in a major turning point in the study of the history of Chinese painting. Western research interests have since shifted to later Chinese painting. From 1961 to 1962, a major exhibition of Chinese art from the National Palace Museum in Taipei was held in the United States. The exhibition toured five major cities in the region, which further stimulated the great enthusiasm of the United States for the study of Chinese painting.
What is the "modernity" of 20th-century Chinese painting?
What is "modern" in Chinese painting from the 19th to the 20th centuries? Some equate modernity with the Westernization of Chinese art, while others try to find elements of early modernity in the history of Chinese painting. Western academic research on 20th-century Chinese painting began with Michael Sullivan's 1959 chinese art in the Twentieth Century. In 1973, he published The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. He was most practical in his 1996 book Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China, which placed art in the context of China's turbulent social and political upheaval. According to Sullivan, the modernization of Chinese painting meant Westernization. According to the two official classifications of Chinese art academies, national and Western, Sullivan reviews the history of westernization of Chinese art and compares it with the revival of traditional painting.
Recently, another wanqingdi has advocated a China-centered approach to research, which is consistent with Paul Cohen's 1984 book Discovering History in China. The latter describes three Western-centric models of research: Western shock-Chinese response, traditional-modern, and Western imperialism. Wan Qingdi advocated that the study of Modern and Contemporary Chinese art history must be based on the perspective of China and placed in the Chinese cultural background, rather than judged from the perspective of Western modern art and theory, and should also be compared with Chinese and Western cultures from the perspective of broad humanities.
When the late Qing dynasty scholars, inspired by the early Qing Dynasty, began to conduct archaeological research on the style of epigraphy, they took a distinctly "modern" position and regarded the development of ancient calligraphy as a historical phenomenon. Unlike Su Shi and Zhao Meng, who revived the early style of calligraphy and regarded it as a coherent and vivid tradition, the Jinshi artists of the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty believed that the ancient calligraphy discovered by archaeology was divorced from the current world. Implicit in this is the assumption that 20th-century Chinese art reformers, including the "Westernized school," also held this view. Li Keyan (1907-1989), Shi Lu (1919-1982) and others have unremittingly explored the expressiveness of the stele when defining the "modernity" of their respective art. At the same time, due to the simulation realism of ancient Chinese painting to the Tang and Song dynasties, the descendants of the Tang and Song dynasties in the 20th century regarded themselves as modernists who revived the realistic style of Chinese painting. This concept is also the reason why Zhang Daqian, who copied and recreated the style of Tang and Song paintings, was not blamed.
Zhang Daqian's paintings
Literati painting in the 14th century witnessed the evolution of Chinese painting from "shape to shape" to "expression of my intention" or "freehand". This evolution is similar to the practice of Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and others in the early 20th century who replaced imitation with performance. Modern Chinese theorists, fully aware that Western painters themselves have betrayed and abandoned imitation realism, have no shortage of insight into this shift. As Chen Hengke wrote at the time:
Western paintings can be described as extremely similar. Since the 19th century, the study of light and color in scientific principles has been subtle in the experience of objects and images. Recently, the Impressionists have done the opposite. Not heavy on the object, full-time subjective. The transformation of Cubist, Futuristic, Expressive, and Lianyi performances also shows that the shape is not enough to exhaust the length of art, and it cannot but be sought.
The modern Western artist's rejection of form implies a possibility that the Eastern and Western artistic traditions will share the same path. With what Clement Greenberg calls "the phenomenon of evoking art with art," we may be able to better understand this common destiny: realistic illusionism uses art to hide art and mask the medium. Modernism, on the other hand, uses art to arouse attention to art. The ancient masters regarded the limitations that make up the material—the flat picture, the shape of the frame, the characteristics of the paint—as negative factors of painting that can only be recognized indirectly or implicitly. Modernist painting, on the other hand, took these limitations as positive factors that could be openly affirmed.
Zhao Mengfu "Shuangsong Pingyuan Map"
This phenomenon existed in Chinese painting at the beginning of the 14th century. Take Zhao Mengfu's "Shuangsong PingYuantu" as an example, which uses pure calligraphic brushwork to play rhythms on the plane. The focus of his work shifted from analog reproduction (or, to paraphrase Greenberg's term "realistic illusionist art") to the medium itself, i.e., the use of pictorial and ideographic linguistic protocols to express "a flat picture ... Characteristics of pigments".
This example is not given to show that Zhao Meng "won" the competition with European "modernity", but only to show that both Eastern and Western traditions have undergone a transformation from realism to abstraction. For Western painters, this shift was "the last Jedi defection to illusion", but Chinese painters did not create non-objective art. We look forward to a better understanding of the lives of some of the leading modern artists and their artistic careers during the most turbulent periods of Chinese history by focusing on the visual evidence in works of art and placing them in the context of Chinese art history and comparative cultural values.
The above content is excerpted from the book "Between Two Cultures: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Painting", which has been authorized by the publishing house.
Editor 丨 Xiao Shuyan
Introduction part of the proofreading 丨 Li Xiangling
Source: Beijing News