The Beginnings of Skepticism:
Scar Art, The Stars Art Exhibition and the Origins of Modernism
The Post-1976 Background – Sichuan Scar Painting - The Life-stream and Chen Danqing - The Revolution in Form - ‘The Stars’ Art Exhibition - Modernism: Concepts and Controversies -
The Post-1976 Background
In February 1977, an art exhibition was staged in the China Art Gallery to ‘warmly celebrate’ Comrade Hua Guofeng’s assumption of the posts of chairman of the Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission and the victory over the Gang of Four’s conspiracy to usurp the Party and state power. In order to explain this turn of historical events, an important subject of history paintings was the depiction of Mao Zedong on his the sick bed handing Hua Guofeng the note saying ‘you handle matters and I’ll rest assured’. Jin Shangyi, well familiar with the practice of art following events, and another painter Peng Bin painted an oil painting titled You Handle Matters and I’ll Rest Assured. We can easily imagine that if the ideological background had not changed, they might have gone on painting specific political events in the same way forever, regardless of how those events were appraised historically and regardless of whether those political personages were again overthrown.
By May 1977, the Gang of Four’s Cultural Revolution no longer continued, but earlier on 7 February, an editorial approved by Hua Guofeng and titled ‘Study the Document Well and Grasp the Main Program’ was published in People’s Daily, Liberation Army Daily and Red Flag, and in them people could read a description of what were called the ‘two whatever classics’: ‘All policy decisions of Chairman Mao, we will firmly safeguard; every instruction of Chairman Mao, we will follow consistently’.
Yet, through the demands and efforts of senior leaders in the party including Ye Jianying, Chen Yun, and Wang Zhen, Deng Xiaoping, who was dissatisfied with the policy of the ‘two whatevers’, had resumed working in July 1977.
On 10 May 1978, the internal publication of the CPC Central Party School titled Trends in Theory published an article authorized by Hu Yaobang and titled ‘Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth’, subsequently republished in Guangming Daily (11 May), and in People’s Daily and Liberation Army Daily on the following day. Readers were startled by the statement that ‘making a song and dance about oneself is no proof of the truth, nor is wholesale propaganda and great political power’. The article was obviously directed against Hua Guofeng’s ‘two whatevers and four upholds’, and the aim was to conduct a reappraisal of the Cultural Revolution, through theoretical and rhetorical revision, and to redress grievances and reverse the unjust verdicts made during the Cultural Revolution. Supported by Deng Xiaoping and the incumbent Vice-Minister of National Defense Luo Ruiqing, Hu Yaobang drafted two articles –– ‘The Most Basic Principle of Marxism’, published in Liberation Army Daily on 24 June, and ‘Everything in the Subjective World Must Be Tested in Practice’, published in Trends in Theory on 10 September, and in People’s Daily on 26 September. These were intended to legitimate thoroughly the political position which maintained that ‘practice is the sole criterion for testing truth’.
As expected, on 25 November, a decision of the central plenary session of the working conference reappraising the Tiananmen incident of 5 April 1976 reinterpreted the previously labeled ‘counter-revolutionary incident’ as ‘a revolutionary incident’, and that movement of young people opposed to autocracy and advocating democracy was now described as having been directed against the Gang of Four, not the Party or the people.
On 13 December, at the closing session of the Central Committee’s working conference, Deng Xiaoping called on people to ‘emancipate their minds, seek truth from facts, unite as one, and look to the future’. He argued that if there was not a clean break with rigid thinking, ‘the Four Modernizations’ had no future, and even stressed that at this time the creation of democracy was required.
Later, on 18 December 1978, the CPC held its Third Plenary Session of the 11th Party Central Committee, and the decision was taken ‘to transfer the focus of Party work to the socialist modernization drive from 1979 onwards’. In this way it was announced that the period in which class struggle was regarded as the key link had come to an end, and the meeting called for the whole Party to emancipate its thinking and seek truth from facts.
In the same way in which new criteria of truth had to be established in politics and the economy, art also needed to become involved in the issue of the criteria of ‘authenticity’. At first, artists through their description of the older generation of revolutionaries could show that the authenticity of revolutionary history was not as it was depicted during the Cultural Revolution, when only Mao was depicted as the one who made great efforts, but that many other revolutionaries had contributed to history. At an art exhibition in 1977 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the PLA, people could see how artists were grappling with the concept of trying to restore historical veracity in their works, but the artists used techniques identical to those of early socialist realism from before the Cultural Revolution and were simply reviving the political standpoint of the 1950s.
The novella Scar by Lu Xinhua, published on 11 August 1978 in Shanghai’s Wen Hui Daily, was a publishing event. This sentimental novel expressing dissatisfaction with the Cultural Revolution touched a chord with readers because it went against Mao’s principle spelled out at Yan’an that literature and art could only describe the brighter side of reality. The novel provided Chinese readers with a story of personal tragedy and emotional setback. Of course, the suffering of the protagonist in the novel focused attention on simple issues: What is this kind of suffering? How could such a sad reality come about?
People so loathed the nightmarish Cultural Revolution, that the publication of Scar led to many more works of ‘scar literature’ being readily accepted. At this point in time, ‘exposure’ was what people wanted. As Mao Zedong once said, ‘all dark forces that harm the masses must be exposed’. Exposé literature, which had been dismissed as worthless by Mao Zedong as early as 1942, was revived from the ashes to become a major component in the new art and literature of the following decade. Writers were reassured by these developments and took their understanding of the situation from the conclusion of the ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of the Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’: ‘History has already clearly determined that the Cultural Revolution was initiated by a mistaken leadership and fomented by a counter-revolutionary clique who used it to bring disastrous internal chaos to the Party, the nation and the people of all nationalities’.[1] The Cultural Revolution was regarded not as a decade of socialist construction, but as a decade of fascist dictatorship over the Chinese people.
The ‘scar’ phenomenon in the art world could first be discerned in works of the April Fifth movement, such as Yin Guoliang’s Thousand Year Crime, Bai Jingzhou’s Standing Firm in the Midst of Chaos, and Cai Jingkai’s The Road of Truth. The phenomenon could also clearly be seen in art works celebrating the heroic Zhang Zhixin: Wang Keqing’s The Powerful One, the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts’ Chinese Painting Group’s series of painted panels titled Struggle for the Truth, and a set of paintings titled Brave Warrior Defending the Truth by the Liaoning Art Museum’s Sketching Group, as well as Wen Lipeng’s oil painting Daughter of the Earth. The themes of these works provided a historical critique of the Gang of Four through the eulogy of heroic characters, whether it was someone judged by the Gang of Four to have been a ‘thug’ in the 1976 Tiananmen incident or reviled as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ as in the case of Zhang Zhixin. In these works, the important thing was not the art but the political attitude.
For the vast mass of the Chinese population, the typical work of Scar Art was the picture-story book Maple published in the 1979:8 issue of the monthly Picture-story Books. The work prompted a great response and debate in which most people maintained that the work touched on universal issues. This story in 32 frames was an adaptation by Cheng Yiming, Liu Yulian and Li Bin of the famous novel by Zheng Yi of the same title. The work used a naturalistic technique to relate a tragic love story set in the Cultural Revolution. The work recounted the simple and tragic story of a young man, Li Honggang, and a young woman, Lu Danfeng, who though secretly in love found themselves in separate battling factions and tormented until each other’s deaths.
The tragedy lies in how the pious Red Guards in each faction were locked in an irrational frenzy that completely destroyed the true meaning of ‘piety’ and ‘truth’ as they each defended what they regarded as the truth. The authors of this work stated clearly: ‘With this work we forfeited our own futures and for the entire nation our work would have extremely serious consequences. But at that time, we firmly believed that we were destroying an old world. The Red Guard movement struck at the ordained order, spreading out from the schools into society, destroying and attacking everything that we once respected, yearned for and pursued. Yet all of this was basically unselfish and pious in its motivation as we unhesitatingly submitted to an unprecedentedly enormous spiritual strength. This may have been the tragedy of our generation’. Maple proclaimed that the Chinese people will never forget how that religious movement was a fraud, ‘a fraud in which the people were the sacrificial victims’. Targeting the critical spirit in Maple, some critics accused the authors of Maple of ‘looking back’ or being retrograde and the work of being politically harmful. Sales of the eighth issue of Picture-story Book were even curtailed for several days. However, the pure story told through wholesome images played a role in reviving people’s long shut down thinking and Maple touched off widespread reaction.
Sichuan Scar Painting
In 1979, the first national art exhibition since the Cultural Revolution, the National Art Exhibition Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the Nation, was held in the China Art Gallery. At variance with ‘positive’ and ‘healthy’ works with which audiences were familiar, several students from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts exhibited works that were tragic in theme and gloomily evocative. Gao Xiaohua’s Why (1978) and I Love the Oil Field (1978), Cheng Conglin’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 (1979) and Wang Hai’s Spring (1979) shocked audiences. With these works the phenomenon of Scar Art had fully emerged.
Gao Xiaohua (b.1955) was the son of army parents who were constantly being relocated when he was growing up. He also worked for several years in the army, and had ineradicable memories of the fighting and other more indirect experiences in Chongqing during the Cultural Revolution. The theme of his painting titled Why addressed confusions and doubts about history and present political reality, adopting a position that did not accord with the earlier artistic criteria of the official artists’ association. This disconnect was so obvious that the theme was not only ‘exposing’ questions but directly raising other questions. In composition, the work was completely different from the familiar composition in which the viewer’s gaze was directed upwards; Gao Xiaohua adopted a view from above, in order to create a ‘sense of being suppressed’, and this was designed to enhance the tragic theme of the work. In his treatment of color and use of oils, Gao used gray tones and thick paint, so that the emotions were subdued and gloomy. [2] Such a painting was clearly an interrogation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The dramatic drift brought about by scar realism was fully expressed in the paintings of Cheng Conglin (b.1954). Cheng’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 evokes Ivan Surikov’s Morning of Streltzi’s Execution and Feodosia Morozova. In the tragic scene in which a battle has just ended, we cannot see the real perpetrators of the battle, only one of the defeated being escorted by the victors into the darkness. The artist was showing us the pointlessness and absurdity of this conflict, the numbing quality of which was not simply revealed in the way in which the victors with their weapons are greeted by their classmates as enemies nor in the victors holding cameras to photograph the ‘glorious historical moment’ nor in the glares of hatred that the victors cast in the direction of defeated, but more profoundly in the way in which the victors feel confident that they are heroes who fought to defend the truth and resolutely uphold glorious Mao Zedong Thought, not realizing that history would make a mockery of all these events.
Cheng Conglin’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 was a farewell delivered with anger and sorrow to a brave and ignorant era, before he embarked on his next work, A Summer Night of 1978. In an essay about this work, Cheng Conglin summarized his involvement with these two works: ‘In 1979, I was 24 years old. As an appropriator of ideas, I used the context of the existence of other persons to express my own feelings about life. In that year, I painted Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968. In 1980, I was a year older. As a nihilist standing to one side, I wanted to separate myself quickly from those who had preceded me and to create boldly my “own form of expression”. In the summer vacation of that year, I painted A Summer Night of 1978 and for me this was a profound lesson’.[3]
When A Summer Night of 1978 was exhibited, it attracted unfavorable criticism. Some said that the work lacked a distinct theme and color, was unfocused, crudely executed, ‘unrealistic, inflexible and nondescript’. The work had a subtitle: ‘As an onlooker, I feel the yearning of my nation’. The sensation of movement and contrast throughout the work revolved around the point of yearning. The hundred or so young people in the work seemed to be pondering and listening, while some were lost in thought and blankly staring. Others were feigning sleep or were awake, while others moved without resolve, seeming oblivious, suspicious or fatuous.
Wang Hai (b.1956) was a student of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts at that time. His painting Spring had been very successful at the first exhibition in Chengdu, but when first examined by the planning group its inclusion in the show was nearly cancelled. In its composition Spring was very simple; a female ‘educated youth’ stands beside the simple and crude door of a rural house and has placed a basin of cactuses on the ground to one side. Apart from an ordinary comb which she holds in her hand, there are no objects apart from two swallows painted on the wall and a straw hat hanging from it. The real charm of Spring was that it had no clear theme, and this forced audiences to discard the practice of verifying the imagistic representation of simply delineated themes, a mode of appreciating art with which they had long grown familiar. For many years people had examined works of art to see whether they fully expressed the ideology or thinking of the artist and so what a work eulogized or exposed necessarily had to be obvious. Yet Spring broke with that mode of thinking. Moreover, the artist totally disregarded the aesthetic of ‘red, light and bright’ to which people had grown familiar and adopted a gray fundamental tone for the work. In this way, the entire picture embodied a ‘neutrality’ that was open to further criticism.
In 1980, at the national youth art exhibition, another student of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Wang Chuan exhibited his Goodbye! Little Path. This painting made an emotional impact on audiences. Wang Chuan (b.1953) had this to say about the conception of this work:
On such a difficult and painful path, I can see and feel a fading almanac of the ten-year catastrophe which held so many of our sweet smiles and sad songs. These opened up my vision for painting, allowing me to see a million youths bravely fare-welling their past lives and going forward, but I still felt the trepidation of not knowing where to go and the repentance of a lonely soul. She does not have the courage to say good-bye to her former life. She is waiting for the future to summon her. She is tormented by the past and present, and has not found happiness and joy. I feel myself deeply stirred and sense my responsibility to give priority to a sense of social morality and my own artistic conscience, and enthusiastically protect those youths who quest for a better fate and who have been so unfortunate. I faced the conflict between destiny and reality, having chosen to pursue this theme of the spirit struggling for the light through this puzzling and confusing uneasiness. For the masses I want to sing the praises of the artistic world of the true, the good and the beautiful, but the beauty of the soul can only be recalled with pain. And so I began to paint this picture.[4]
Although this statement reveals a tendency to artifice, it is imbued with spiritual authenticity. The tone of the painting is warm compared with that of Spring, but this atmosphere refuses to allow us to feel the slightest joy and so the warm tone of the work evokes a sense of sorrow, which was undoubtedly the artistic conscience of the painter. For China’s ‘educated youths’, the unusual lives they had experienced were undoubtedly worth recalling. In rural settings so far away from the city, they had obviously endured unbearable tribulations, but by sharing in suffering and commiseration as well as through proximity to nature they developed a bucolic nostalgia for that rustic experience. Perhaps the artist wanted to ‘endow that girl with the courage and strength to be able to say goodbye to that path’, and part of the charm of the painting is not the finality of ‘saying goodbye’ but the pain of remembering.
The large oil painting Father painted in the summer of 1979 by Luo Zhongli (b.1948) made a big impact on critics and audiences when it was shown in a number of exhibitions in 1980, and it was even published in 1981 in the official journal Fine Arts.[5] The painting also won first prize in the second national exhibition of works by young artists in that year. Most audiences in China at that time had not heard of hyperrealism or Chuck Close, and so standing before this enormous and meticulously executed oil painting, they could only sigh with admiration for the wealth of feeling in the face of this old man who had experienced the many vicissitudes of life. There was a connection between Father and the school of hyperrealism, which Luo Zhongli acknowledged:
Technique was something I did not think about, and I was only hoping to be utterly precise – the more precise the better. Previously I had seen some American photorealist portraits and the impression they gave me definitely influenced me in painting this work, because I felt that this form was the most powerful for conveying my feelings and ideas in their entirety. Eastern and Western art always draw from each other and reflect each other. Form and technique only serve as the language to convey my feelings and ideas, and if this language was able to express what I wanted to say then I could draw lessons from it.[6]
However, one critic, Shao Yangde, suspected Luo’s motivation and aims in painting the work and, in ‘Creation, Appreciation and Critique: A Reading of Father and Its Critical Evaluation’, he wrote that Luo crying out on behalf of this night-soil collector is ‘utterly superfluous and even weird’, accusing the painter of having invested this peasant with any lofty revolutionary ideals’. Shao believed the artist was simply blackening the reputation of this socialist peasant. Shao Yangde’s view shows that in 1979 and 1980 many people in China were still shrouded in political masks and still unwilling to see or acknowledge problematic realities. As a result, Luo Zhongli’s Father provided a harsh critique of people who still thought rigidly, and the depiction of real images of peasants remained a challenge to those who had been subjected to political lies for a long time, regardless of whether they were critics or propagandists. This malnourished old man with the weather-beaten black and wrinkled face, holding the broken porcelain bowl and bearing all the marks of cruel fate, is a genuine representative of the laboring classes and is far removed from the over-idealized image of the new peasant with lofty ideals. His very existence was an indictment of history. What is interesting, as Luo Zhongli revealed, was that when Father was being vetted for inclusion in an exhibition one ‘leading comrade’ proposed that ‘a characteristic of the new peasants under the socialist system’ be added to the work, namely a ballpoint pen behind his left ear. The ballpoint pen would express the progress or superiority of the new society.
He Duoling (b.1948) was another student of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. In 1982, He Duoling created the oil painting The Spring Breeze Has Returned. If in We All Sang this Song, the human emotions adhere to a kind of vague retrospective, then The Spring Breeze Has Returned, which caused a great sensation when it first appeared, clearly expressed more complex emotions with humanity. The work shows the obvious influence of the American painter Andrew Wyeth, and in its placement of the young girl seated on the cold gray meadow we see clear echoes of Wyeth’s Christina’s World. In his quest to create a monumental work, He Duoling came closer to this goal with his large oil painting of 1984 titled Youth, which was very much an image of ‘our times’, down to the faded army uniform, the rolled up trouser legs and open sandals. At the same time, the environment of images was abstracted. In this work the painter was expressing loneliness and the tragedy in which this can result. The painting Youth in fact intimates that youth itself may already been abandoned, at the same time as the search for history and the vagueness of the future have taken on an aesthetic appearance. Compared with many earlier works treating the theme of educated youth, Youth was unique for the effects it achieved and the state of mind it evoked. The pure young girl who sits in the wilderness in her old army uniform is one of the most moving images of this period. In a sense, Youth summarized the treatment by Chinese artists of the scar themes or of educated youth in this period and signaled a farewell to the past. There was no more that artists could say about that period which was so painful to recall.
The Life-stream and Chen Danqing
In the tide of Scar Art, artists prompted by their thirst and curiosity about reality cast their vision to the remote mountains far beyond their own living environment, and turned to a primitive, simple and honest life, and this imperceptibly seemed to become a new trend. For artists like Luo Zhongli, this effort seemed to signify a spiritual and emotional homecoming, while for other artists like Cheng Conglin, this was an exploration of experience. Yet, generally speaking, this trend, what was called ‘the life-stream’ (shenghuo-liu), encompassed a spiritual essence that was a continuation and proclamation of the humanitarian emotions of Scar Art. Chinese artists for a period of time paid closer attention to daily life and to excavating and revealing the beauty of human nature to be found in everyday life. If we say that Scar Art was a critique of the hypocritical art of the past and if this critique took instinctive humanistic emotions and ideas as its basis then after Scar Art, artists expressed themes that were not dramatic and combative as they unearthed and expressed everyday psychological states of ordinary people, which was a continuation and deepening of the humanistic spirit and which gave full play to pure and simple human emotions.[7]
Zhou Chunya (b.1955), a student at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, was one of the first painters to reject totally literary themes. When his fellow students were depicting the grief of history in their paintings, Zhou Chunya in 1981 went to the colorful Ruo’ergai grasslands together with Zhang Xiaogang, and later they went many times together to these places to paint plein-air landscapes and figures.[8] For him, the themes expressed by painters of Scar Art did not represent the totality of art; on the contrary, the crudeness and splendor of the life in Tibetan areas were the direct focus of his attention. He described his painting of 1980 titled A New Generation of Tibetans as follows:
After I left the grasslands where I had experienced life in the wilds many of the specific details soon faded from my memory, but I was left with the strong, rich colors of the place and the images of the honest and rough Tibetan people, through which rich lines of color coursed. When I went to the grasslands for the first time, my deepest impression was of the five children in my oil painting ‘A new generation of Tibetans’. I had not intended to paint in any particular style, and if my present work has individuality, that’s only because I wanted to make my work different from that of other painters. The highlighting lines in my paintings and the natural images appear distorted, but my subjects and the compositions demanded this and I was not motivated by my subjective ideas. I wanted to be able to touch nature directly with innocence and honesty, like an innocent child looking at the world.[9]
Like Zhou Chunya, Zhang Xiaogang (b.1958) was very interested in early Western modernist painting. During his time as a student at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he went with Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing and some other friends passionate about art to Nuobei which resembled Barbizon in France in order to do plein-air sketching:
At that time the entire Chinese art scene was under the domination of Soviet art and our plein-air painting trips were really an attempt to find compositions and colors and the painting emotions that had been found earlier by the Barbizon school and the Russian Peredvizhniki. This painting from life was very difficult because there was something difficult and forced about extracting works in a ‘gray timbre’ or with ‘a poetic elegance’ from the red laterite earth, brilliant blue skies and wild nature of Yunnan. I faced the same situation when I returned to Guishan several times later. While I was moved by its red earth, stone houses, tree trunks and narrow winding paths, I was searching everywhere to extract traces of the masterpieces with which I had gradually become more familiar. Perhaps Nuohei was this magical but neutral place, which made one think of other places and spawned illusions at the same time as it provided a temporary lodging. In one respect, I do not have a great interest in the local folkways and customs or the simple primitive life style of this place; on the other hand, I was always moved by the tranquility that seemed to emanate from some unique religion, by the trees and paths, and by the wandering people and sheep who seemed to have some rich sense of music.[10]
Obviously, Zhang Xiaogang was also of one of the early ‘life-stream’ artists, and he acknowledged that he was influenced by Van Gogh in his early years, feeling an affinity with this mentally troubled Dutch artist for whom the trembling of the soul was the most important thing. In the early writings of Zhang we can discern the artist’s innate vigilance, his love of nature and the depth of his emotion, but he was instinctively careful to avoid the tawdry feelings that nature could bring to someone with no sensitivity. Before graduating in 1982, Zhang Xiaogang kept expressing purity and freedom in his work, and an inner sincerity that impelled his escape to nature and its inspiration. Works like Approaching Storm and Clouds in the Sky document the expressionism in his approach to the ‘life-stream’.
One of the important painters of the life-stream movement was Shang Yang (b.1942), who cast his vision in the direction of northern Shaanxi province. Born in Kaixian county, Sichuan province, he graduated in oil painting from the Hubei Academy of Arts. At the outset of his creative career, Shang Yang demonstrated an infatuation with the yellow earth plateau remote from southern culture. After two field trips into the upper Yellow River valley and the loess hinterland, Shang Yang painted Yellow River Boatmen. In Mother of the Loess Plateau, painted in 1983, the artist extols this barren mountainous area of the Yellow River Basin and its people to a quasi-religious reverence. In this work, the image of the mother, the stone wall behind her and the loess hills in the background link together, hinting at the inseparable bond created by life a warm and intrepid environment. Shang Yang’s use of warm yellow tones endows the landscape of rock and loess with poetry. While stillness and warmth replace the bare desolation, the gate of worn stones and the barren earth and slopes are imbued with a rich romantic air. In these works, what some critics described at the time as ‘Shang Yang’s yellow’ came to be the central player. This side-lit loess with its duller brownish yellow was not at all bright and appealing, exhibiting only a natural mood.
The most important representative ‘life-stream’ painter was Chen Danqing (b.1953). Enthusiastic about Soviet oil painting in his younger years, his Tibetan series created in 1980 were outstanding works of the ‘life-stream’ genre.[11]
Chen Danqing had lived as a commune member in the countryside for eight years, and during that time, he painted Writing to Chairman Mao and Tears Fill the Bumper Harvest Fields. These two oil paintings utterly conformed to the unified Chinese painting of the day in technique, artistic language and even in spiritual content. Yet, the imagery in Tears Fill the Bumper Harvest Fields seemed to demonstrate the particular interest of the painter in those ethnic areas and their people’s lives. This interest continued until 1980, when Chen Danqing, as a graduate student in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, created his graduation piece, the Tibetan series.
Seven works that made up the Tibetan series, namely Mother and Son (Mu yu zi), Going to Town nos.1 and 2 (Jincheng, zhiyi, zhi’er), Khampa Men (Kangba hanzi), Worshipping the Gods (Chaosheng), Shepherd (Muyangren) and Girls Washing Their Hair (Xi fa nü), were quite original and novel at the time for depicting ordinary life with utterly non-dramatic and non-literary themes, yet they were regarded by even his classmates at the academy, Chen Danqing complained, not as ‘original paintings’ (chuangzuo) so much as ‘studies’ (xizuo). Because of the impact on artistic teaching and thought of Soviet socialist realism of the 1950s, ‘original painting’ in the Chinese art world referred only to works with literary themes, and this signified that artists made use of ‘typicality’, plot details and characterization to express ideas and convey emotions. The problem was outlined in an article in which Chen Danqing discussed his series of seven works:
I wanted to let people see that on the remote plateaus people lead valiant and rough lives. If you have seen the herdsmen of the Khampa areas, you realize that there are such real men. I saw them standing in the street in groups every day, exchanging trinkets or selling butter. Their eyes have a piercing gleam, their brows are strong, and, with their hair wound up into a plait at the top of their heads they saunter along with a swagger, pendants swinging from their waist. They stride with a heroic gait and they look fearsome. People admire them. From head to toe they look like the ideal candidate for the portrait artist, and I wanted to capture them just as they are. Even when they simply stand, they are a painting.[12]
Chen Danqing’s Tibetan series was an exploration and demonstration in oil painting techniques using the traditional language of oil painting. From Going to Town nos. 1 and 2 (1981) to Khampa Men (1980), Shepherd (1980) and Pilgrimage (1980), the unique characteristics of oil painting were exemplified by the highlighted content of the works and revealed the genre’s allure. Like Luo Zhongli, Cheng Conglin, and He Duoling, Chen Danqing was someone who did not hesitate to draw on other artists, and he proclaimed his passion for Rembrandt, Corot, and Millet, as he explained in discussing his sources:
I knew that this kind of pursuit would not seem to be in keeping with the times, and I would be unable to avoid people singling me out as an imitator and as someone picking up foreigners’ secondhand goods. I do not take much notice of this. I know that with art there is really nothing either new or old and earlier art can be appropriated by modern painters. My choices and imitations are nothing in particular. In fact, pure original creation has never been very easy to find, and over the past 2,000 years, how many techniques have never been re-used?[13]
If artists wanted to provide their own explanations of what they were doing, then this impatience was in itself possibly the best explanation of their work. Human nature craves praise as humanity craves development; this was the rationale. In the early 1980s, there was a flash of the spirit of critique; the praise of man, life and the force of life itself was simultaneously a counter-attack on cultural tyranny that denied and suppressed human beings. After Luo Zhongli’s Father, the works of Chen Danqing and many other artists gradually formed a ‘life-stream’ running through the Chinese art world. This situation relied on the observation of the ordinary lives of ordinary people with a basic humanistic eye, a personally familiar artistic language to describe the results and feel of this observation, liberated thinking, and young artists with a healthy skepticism and ability to analyze that enabled to look at the world afresh.
The Revolution in Form
From the fall of the Gang of Four from power in 1976 until 1979, the Chinese world of literature and the arts gradually recovered from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Scar Art emerged and was influential, as it symbolically explained the psychological state of artists in this period. However, artists at that time seemed to have not yet realized that the kind of critique of absurd history presented by the emotions and ideas evoked in Scar Art would be far wider ranging and mark the beginning of a phase of even deeper critical self-reflection on the history of the Cultural Revolution. Confronting this situation and atmosphere, critical and theoretical circles appeared amazingly obtuse and numbed. Creative artistic activities were already beginning to pick away at the pack-ice covering the frozen river, but the critics and theoreticians all seemed to be in the freezing water, unable to chip through or respond to the break-up. Yet what critics and theoreticians were insensitive to was realized by the artists themselves. In its 5th issue of 1979, the journal Fine Arts published an article titled ‘The Beauty of Form in Painting’, in which the painter Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010), without much theoretical preparation, proposed in a discursive manner that painting undertake a search for ‘formal beauty’ by which he meant ‘the beauty in form’, touching off a fierce debate that would rage for almost five years on form, content and the beauty of form. In this article, Wu Guanzhong’s tone was impassioned as he argued the case for the plastic arts having their own special characteristics:
The important thing is that fine arts teachers focus on teaching the skills of art (beauty) and discuss the laws and rules governing the beauty of form. For several decades, any talk of form has been shunted into the dreaded confines of formalism and so who would dare to be a Prometheus! The content of teaching must also address more than just the technical skill of depicting the object for it to warrant the grand name of realism! ... I believe that the beauty of form must be the main content of fine arts teaching, the ability to paint objects being only one of the methods of painting and being secondary to the means of grasping the feeling of the object, which is of prime importance. How we recognize and understand the artistic feeling of the object and how we analyze and grasp the formal elements that constitute this artistic feeling should be the important link in the teaching of fine arts, and the staple diet for students in universities and colleges of fine arts![14]
Here, and in another later article ‘On Abstract Beauty’ published in 1980, Wu Guanzhong was ardently proclaiming his personal viewpoint and his words began to create ripples of intellectual response. In ‘On abstract beauty’ he wrote that ‘abstract beauty is the core of the beauty of form and people’s fondness for beauty in form and abstraction is instinctive’. For those people with experience of art in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, these words of Wu Guanzhong were an attempt to salvage art from the extinction wrought by harsh ideological critique. However, when Wu wrote these words, state ideology demanded that free and light speech must only serve to prop up political stability. This provided Wu Guanzhong with a wonderful opportunity to express his heart-felt views that encouraged other artists to be more liberal ideologically. Following the appearance of Wu Guanzhong’s ‘The Beauty of Form in Painting’, a debate on the relationship between form, abstraction, aesthetics and content gradually unfolded and sent waves throughout artistic, critical and theoretical circles. In different ways, artists, aestheticians and critics all aired their own views and participated in this massive debate that went far beyond the confines of artistic issues.
Opposed to Wu Guanzhong’s views, Hong Yiran, in the December 1980 issue of Fine Arts, published an article titled ‘A Discussion on Three Artistic Questions’, which was a response to the many articles that had been appearing on the topic of the beauty of form in art. Hong Yiran clearly presented arguments supporting his opposition to the existence of the beauty of pure form. In his article, Hong Yiran set out to raise the discussion of form to the level of aesthetics or philosophy and to a greater or lesser extent many theorists were now drawn into the debate from this perspective. In the debate, the more representatives articles were: Chi Ke, ‘The Beauty of Form and Dialectics’, Fine Arts, January 1981; Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts Literature and Art Theory Study Group, ‘The Beauty of Form and Its Position in the Fine Arts’, Fine Arts, April 1981; and, Shen Peng, ‘Mutual Control: A Letter Discussing Form and Content’, Fine Arts, December 1981. In these articles and others published over the next three years, the discussion about the relationships between form and abstraction, form and beauty, and form and content gradually deepened and extended, touching on many important topics within the arts. Artists and theoreticians discussed the purpose and nature of art, and the relationship between the study of the emergence of art and form in art, as well as the definition, meaning and characteristics of abstraction, and the distinctions and connections between the beauty of abstraction and the beauty of form. In the context of the debates at this time, some of the other major contributions to the discussion were: Peng De, ‘Aesthetic Function Is the Only Role of the Arts’, Fine Arts, 1982:5; Gao Ertai, ‘The Basic Hierarchy of Artistic Concepts’, Fine Arts, 1982:8; He Xin and Li Xianting, ‘A Tentative Discussion of Abstract Aesthetic Concepts in Chinese Classical Painting’, Fine Arts, 1983:1; Hong Yiran, ‘A Discussion Ranging from the Sense of Form to Beauty and Abstract Beauty’, Fine Arts, 1983:5; Du Jian, ‘The Rhythm of Image and the Image of Rhythm: Several Views on the Question of Abstract Beauty’, Fine Arts, 1983:10; and Ma Xinzhong, ‘A Brief Commentary on the Debate about Abstract Beauty’, Fine Arts, 1984:1.
In these confusing controversies, Gao Ertai’s argued that the special nature of art was unique in his article ‘The Basic Hierarchy of Artistic Concepts’. He argued that what are referred to as art’s aesthetics or form only fulfill ‘superficial’ purposes. Gao’s article concluded by providing art with functionalism, but the aims served by this function had been exchanged for a general notion of ‘the progress of mankind’. Reviewing the entire debate demonstrates that it was in fact a discussion about artistic purpose. Regardless of whether the topic was the relationship between form and content, or the beauty of form or abstraction, the debate fundamentally led, either directly or very indirectly, to the basic aim of art. In other words, why does art exist and who or what does it ultimately serve? Thus the dispute concealed within it issues which had nothing at all to do with art.
Wu Guanzhong’s description of ‘direct experience’ (tiyan) in his ‘The Beauty of Form in Painting’ warrants our attention:
I was doing plein-air painting in the fields around Shaoxing, when I came to a small pond on which green algae and red duckweed were being blown by the wind into musically rhythmical patterns. The fields of rape flowers were being buffeted so that contrastive dark shadows appeared because the plants were thicker and thinner in different places. The artistic sense of concealed beauty enchanted me, so that I remained there for a long time unwilling to leave. But if I had painted this as ‘untitled beauty’ I would have been savagely attacked! Thinking about this on the way home, I suddenly thought of a way around the problem. In a corner of the composition, where the shadows formed, I would position some laborers with red flags and call it something like ‘the east wind blows across the banks’ and this would spare me the criticism! The next morning, I hurried to the pond with my paints. My God! During a single night, a wind blowing from the West had destroyed nature’s composition. The green algae, the red duckweed and the yellow rape flowers...none of the content had changed. But the organization and the relationships had been altered and the forms had changed, losing the sense of rhythm and the sense of beauty! I no longer wanted to paint the scene![15]
This piece readily evokes Kandinsky’s description of a similar experience, but Wu Guanzhong’s specific historical linguistic context meant that his experience and feeling touched on the general creative psychology that prevailed among Chinese painters for many years in the Cultural Revolution and even in the years prior to the 1960s. When they were moved by something beautiful that aroused in them a spontaneous and strong desire to create then they immediately had to consider the savage criticism their work would be likely to arouse. The reasons were very simple. Creating a work of art that embodied a particular rhythmic pattern or a remote aesthetic and artistic conception was effectively a bold assertion that art existed for the sake of beauty, which was in diametrical opposition to the Party’s requirements regarding the political function of art. Hence, Wu had to consider how he should add laborers with red flags in the corner where the inverted shadows formed and give it a name that referred to the ‘east wind blowing’. In fact, for many years, artists’ creative passions were constantly constrained by such questioning of the reasons why artists painted and the creative impulse was thwarted by the consideration of being subjected to a critical mauling. Wu Guanzhong thus brought a deep sense of pain to his article in which he castigated the grip which ‘content’ had on ‘form’ and demanded that greater freedom and latitude of expression be given to form.
This discussion from 1979 to 1984 in Chinese art circles did not result in any conclusion that could summarize the many contributions to the debate. From today’s perspective, the lighter or heavier issues touched on in the course of the debate are now no longer of any importance, yet some of the issues merely touched on but not discussed in depth seem to have had greater significance and value, for example Gao Ertai’s definition of art in the article entitled ‘The Basic Hierarchy of Artistic Concepts’, to which Jiang Feng, chairman of the Chinese Artists Association at that time, retorted:
Someone has devalued the well-known principle that ‘content determines form’, which is a proposition that must be followed by the realist fine arts. Western modernist art theory, which claims a reputation for creative work that breaks into forbidden zones, clamorously cries out in opposition to the notion that content determines form, and emphasizes that form determines content and that form is content, thereby devaluing Marxist reflection theory, …at least it takes the view that materialism’s theory of reflection is not an appropriate category in aesthetics…. Its basic purpose is simply ensuring that now and in the future our plastic arts will incline towards Europe and America, take the artistic road of Euro-American modernism, and ensure that the fine arts break away from life, especially from the social life of struggle; it does not give a passing glance at the glorious truth which Chairman Mao expounded in his speeches to the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, which it regards as now being out-of-date! It denigrates the fine arts of revolutionary realism and the new fine arts of China that have served the masses of the people for 17 years, adopting an attitude towards them of total repudiation.[16]
This passage appeared in an article by Jiang Feng published at the time in Chinese Painting Research. From it we can clearly appreciate how the debate on form and abstraction initiated by Wu Guanzhong touched on questions of politics and the political system. Although 1979 in China saw the tentative beginnings of opposition to and criticism of what might be called the forces of inertia, the range and depth of this criticism were extremely limited.
In 1978, two years after the overthrow of the Gang of Four, the January issue of Poetry published Mao Zedong’s ‘Letter to Comrade Chen Yi Discussing Poetry’. In this letter, Mao Zedong briefly discussed several questions about writing poetry:
Now poetry’s language relies on imagistic thinking, rather than direct statement, as in prose, and so metaphor and analogy must be used. Most Song dynasty poets did not understand that poetry relies on imagistic thinking and as soon as they went against the rules governing Tang dynasty poetry their work was flavorless. These are only casual observations about classical lines of verse. If one wants to write modern poetry imagistic thinking is still necessary to reflect the class struggle and the struggle for production. Nothing classical is called for.[17]
This letter of Mao Zedong was written in 1965, but only published in 1978, when it was still regarded as thought-provoking, arousing excitement and interest in cultural circles throughout the country and touching off heated debates on the question of thinking of images in poetry. One year after Mao Zedong’s death, his simple statement that poetry relies on thinking in images touched off heated debate throughout the country. The decision of Fine Arts to reprint Mao Zedong’s ‘Letter to Comrade Chen Yi Discussing Poetry’ in its first issue for 1978 was a signal that it was maintaining solidarity of action with the Central Committee, and perhaps the imperceptible influence this action had on artists was quite unexpected by those who published this enigmatic brief letter. Its publication in Fine Arts was interpreted by artists and critics as a signal that questions of form in art were now officially and safely on the agenda for discussion. The proposal and discussion of this question, in fact, laid the legitimate foundation for the discussion in art circles of the question of form and abstraction in painting one year later. This is confirmed when we recall Wu Guanzhong’s statement in ‘The Beauty of Form in Painting’ that ‘the thinking in images that takes place in the plastic arts is somewhat more concretely expressed through thinking in forms’. By concretizing the thinking in images in the plastic arts as thinking in forms, Wu Guanzhong took a hurried and urgent leap in logic.
Seen historically, the key to the controversy did not fall into the category of either theory or art, but outside the range of these concepts, deductions, arguments and refutations. In these debates which were at times fierce and at other times well-tempered, we see the beginnings of a spirit of sweeping critique of cultural authoritarianism, and they played a role in encouraging artists to search more boldly and freely for their own language and chip away at the solid pall of ice thrown up the Cultural Revolution.
‘The Stars’ Art Exhibition
The idea of staging the Stars Art Exhibition initially came from Huang Rui (b.1952), a worker in a leather goods factory, and Ma Desheng, a draftsman working in a government organization. By the end of 1978, a preparatory group headed by these two young men had been established. Joining the group were Zhong Acheng, a temporary editor at World Books, Li Yongcun (a.k.a. Boyun), who had just matriculated as a graduate student in the Department of Art History of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and Qu Leilei, who worked in the lighting department of China Central Television. The inaugural meeting was held in Huang Rui’s home at no. 76, Dongsi Shitiao in Beijing.
Huang Rui, who had proposed the group exhibition, later recalled the process of selecting art works:
It was up to Ma Desheng and me to decide who was suitable for the show after we had seen their works. It was quite dramatic at Wang Keping’s, where we crowded into his room and were startled by his many weird wood carvings. I said: ‘Your works will cause a sensation during the exhibition’. He said: ‘Well, so let me be in it’. But he did not even know the most sensational artists like Matisse or Kandinsky. At Yan Li’s house, we went to look at Li Shuang’s paintings. I only knew that Yan Li was a poet. Apart from Li Shuang’s paintings, there was a painting in a completely different style. Yan Li said that was his painting and he asked me: ‘How about it?’ ‘Not bad, it’s something quite fresh’, we told him. ‘Let’s put it in the exhibition’. Yan Li was delighted by the unexpected invitation, and we heard that he drank so much that evening that he got quite ill.[18]
At the beginning of summer 1979, Huang Rui and Ma Desheng formally applied to Liu Xun, the person in charge of the Beijing Artists Association, for permission to stage an exhibition. Liu Xun examined the works at Huang Rui’s home and agreed on the spot to proceed with arrangements, but the schedule for the exhibition space of the Beijing Artists Association was already fully booked and the Stars Art Exhibition would have to wait until the following year. The members of the Stars group conferred, and wanted to press ahead even if they had to stage the exhibition outdoors.
On 27 September 1979, the works in the Stars Art Exhibition were formally hung on the iron railings at the eastern side of the China Art Gallery. The exhibition created a sensation. More than 150 oil paintings, watercolors, pen-and-ink drawings, woodcuts and wood carvings attracted great interest and even some professional art workers went to look at the show. On the second day of the show the police arrived to close it down and demanded that the artists dismantle the exhibition and remove the works. By 29 September, the Stars Art Exhibition was officially in trouble.
After the exhibition was cancelled, the Stars members contacted all related institutions and offices through Liu Xun, the man in charge of the Beijing Artists Association, but to no avail. Then, on the evening of 29 September, the Stars members and people from a number of unofficial publications conferred and decided on the third day, which happened to be the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, to hold a protest march and formally lodge a complaint against the Dongcheng branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. Later, the name of the protest was changed to ‘the march to uphold the constitution’.
On 1 October 1979, participants in the Stars exhibition and some supporters met up in front of Xidan Democracy Wall, and after speeches by Ma Desheng and some others they began their march. They advanced from Xidan towards the office of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee. In the course of the march speeches were delivered and the marchers sang The Internationale and March of the Volunteers. The Beijing Municipal Party Committee refused to meet face to face with the marchers, who finally scattered. The protest march proved to be an international media sensation.
On 2 October, the ‘Preparatory Committee of the Stars Art Exhibition’ and the editorial boards of a number of unofficial Beijing publications of that time, including Exploration, Living Earth and April Fifth Forum, drafted a ‘Letter to the People’, which outlined the reasons for the 1 October parade and the course of that event in order to defend their actions:
The Stars Art Exhibition should have been fully protected by the constitution. The event was an art exhibition not a street display of propaganda materials or political posters and was not held in contravention of the six public notices. Therefore, it is completely indefensible sophistry to now claim that the exhibition contravened six public notices.[19]
From 23 November to 2 December, the Stars also held an extremely successful exhibition at Huafang Zhai, the exhibition space of the Beijing Artists Association in Beihai Park.[20] The ordinarily quiet and remote ancient courtyard was packed with people during the event. People’s Daily took the unprecedented step of publishing the self-funded advertisement announcing this continuing Stars Art Exhibition, and on 30 November a forum was held at Huafang Zhai. On 2 December, the last day of the exhibition, a total of 8,000 tickets were sold.
At the beginning of summer 1980, the Stars Painting Society was formally established and registered by the Beijing Artists Association. The main members of the society were: Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Zhong Acheng, Li Yongcun (Bo Yun), Qu Leilei, Wang Keping, Yan Li, Mao Lizi, Yang Yiping, Li Shuang, and Ai Weiwei. The second exhibition of the Stars Painting Society had the support of Jiang Feng and was, as a result, held in the China Art Museum.[21] In the preface to the first Stars Art Exhibition, the artists clearly proposed that their works were intended to fulfill two purposes:
The world provides those who explore with limitless possibilities. We see the world with our own eyes, and use our own painting brushes and knives to engage with the world. In our paintings various emotions are expressed and through our expression we relate our ideals.
In the first Stars Art Exhibition, almost all the timber sculptures were by Wang Keping (b.1949). Wang Keping’s wood carving completely discarded the outmoded sculpting practices of the art institutes and displayed an unrestrained liveliness. His works titled Breathing and Silence made full use of the characteristics of the medium of timber and expressed a state of tension under restraint and pressure. Wang Keping has described these works:
Silence was conceived in keeping with the timber. I found a tree stump with a gash, which I wanted to carve to represent a person’s head. Originally I intended to carve the mouth naturalistically. Suddenly, I felt that the gash was like a mouth clogged with wood. When carving the eyes, I wanted to show one eye closed, but then I thought this could not express my thoughts, because if the figure closed its eyes it might mean that the figure did not dare to open them. Then I wanted to cover the eyes of the figure, in the same way as the Gang of Four had wanted the Chinese people to not see what was happening as though they were blindfolded. It seemed incongruous to use gauze or pieces of wood to cover the eyes when I thought of the contrast between what was natural and what was carved, so then I carved ‘X’s in the position of their eyes, as though strips of paper had been stuck over them.[22]
The sculpture Silence was imbued with a sharp spirit of protest. Wang Keping proclaimed his work to be influenced by the theater of the absurd. Another notable timber sculpture by Wang Keping was the more meticulously carved Long Live the Chairman incorporating the world-famous Little Red Book. One hand of the figure grows out of its head clasping a Little Red Book. The head and the hand are totally distorted, conveying a sense of the absurdity of that fanatical period when Little Red Books were raised to the sky. Wang Keping’s 1978 timber sculpture titled Idol was prepared for the First Stars Art Exhibition, but because of political considerations it was not exhibited. At the Second Stars Art Exhibition, this work by Wang Keping created a sensation. In fact, the facial characteristics of this work had many features in common with traditional sculptures of Bodhisattvas, and food for thought was provided by the five-pointed star on the figure’s forehead and the title of the work.
In the 1979 Stars Art Exhibition, Ma Desheng’s woodcuts, Huang Rui’s works Testament and New Life and Qu Leilei’s group of paintings titled States of Mind all attracted differing degrees of attention from audiences. Works by Ma Desheng owed something to the stylistic characteristics of the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz and this gave his work something of a surrealistic feel.[23] In the oil painting New Life, Huang Rui used several of the stone columns remaining at the site of the Old Summer Palace after it was destroyed to suggest human figures, and the bright colors and strength of these had clear symbolic meaning. In complete contrast to this work, Testament used stimulating colors in an attempt to express a memory of the past. These two works by Huang Rui seemed to throw light on the following statement in the preface to the Stars Art Exhibition: ‘We cannot cut ourselves off from time. The shadows of the past and the light of the future overlap to form our multi-layered lives today’.
In the preface to the Second Stars Art Exhibition in 1980, the artists had this to say:
Real life provides endless subject matter. A series of profound revolutions engages us, confounds us and confuses us. This is undoubtedly the theme of our art. When we combine the liberated soul with creative inspiration, art greatly stimulates life. We will never break with the generations that went before us. Just as we inherit from the older generation, we have the ability to understand life and the spirit to dare to explore it…
An article titled ‘Letter to the Artists of the Stars Art Exhibition’ under the penname Zi Quan appeared in the 1st issue of Fine Arts of 1981, and in this short piece the author complained that there were many works in the Stars Art Exhibition that he did not understand, and ‘not only did I not understand them, but many comrades later told me that they also did not understand them’:
We object to works that turn fine art into diagrams and slogans. But we should acknowledge that art works are things that belong to the category of ideology and are a means of educating people, so that when people see them they are imperceptibly influenced and their communist morality and character are elevated and improved. For this reason, some definite content is required. This hinges on the first issue, which is making works comprehensible and if they merely play with form, nothing meaningful will be achieved… What enjoyment of beauty can someone derive from something that only has the vaguest resemblance to sculpture? What educational benefit can it have?[24]
Without a doubt, the ideas expressed here were widely held. We can say that most Chinese audiences, accustomed to a utilitarian view of literature and art, would react in this way to the works of the Stars artists. The contrast with the reality represented by the ideological quibbling in this carping essay underscored the true historical value of the art produced by the Stars.
Modernism: Concepts and Controversies
The discussion in the early 1980s about ‘self-expression’ in art was probably triggered off by the Stars Art Exhibition, because in the first article addressing the issue there was an indirect critique of that show.
The article, titled ‘Self-expression Should Not Be Regarded as the Essence of Art’, appeared in the 1980:8 issue of Fine Arts under the nom-de-plume Qian He. In it, Qian He set out to refute the view that ‘the essence of the art of painting is the self-expression of the artist’s inner heart’, an assertion that he did not source. Qian He pointed out, because reality ‘determines the artist’s inner heart and the manifestation of the author’s subjective feelings can be either accurate or inaccurate’, the simple emphasis on ‘self-expression’ can obviously lead to the pitfall of subjective idealism. Qian then went on to point out that, by emphasizing ‘self-expression’, the artist was refusing to consider eliciting a sympathetic response in those who attempt to appreciate his work.
The second issue of Fine Arts of 1981 published a defense of the work of Zhong Ming, a member of the Beijing Oil Painting Research Society, and Feng Guodong. Zhong Ming’s As Himself: Sartre was a black and white painted bust of Jean-Paul Sartre against a red background. In the upper left of the painting there is an object resembling a drinking glass with water in it, but no relationship seems to be established between this object, the red background and the image of Sartre in the lower right corner. Feng Guodong’s The Unrestrained is a work in the surrealist style featuring vibrant colors. Some shapes evocative of Miró and Dali are assembled on the ladders and steps in the painting. Zhong Ming, in his essay ‘Proceeding from Painting Sartre: A Discussion about Self-expression in Painting’, declared that in art ‘self-expression and self-selection have an objective existence. Throughout history and in all cultures, if the self were absent from the motivation for all creative art, then the diversified forms of arts today might not have come into existence. It is difficult to imagine how an artist can create and be outstanding in some aspect of art if he himself has no recognition of one kind of form or another.’ Zhong Ming cited Sartre’s thought and accorded the highest praise on this French philosopher who within a few short years would be widely introduced to the Chinese public:
In moving the discussion from Sartre to self-expression in painting, I want to say that Sartre firmly pointed out in his theory that human essence, the meaning of existence and the value of existence were all verified and determined by man’s own actions. As for the discipline of painting, a similar reality exists: Every artist explains himself through his creative motivations and actions.[25]
The March 1981 issue of Fine Arts carried a summary of the speeches delivered at an academic conference organized by the Beijing Artists Association and the Beijing Oil Painting Research Society.[26] Among the published speeches were those by Zhan Jianjun, Chen Danqing, Jin Shangyi, Yuan Yunsheng, and Wen Lipeng, as well as the speech by Wu Guanzhong mentioned previously. In his speech titled ‘Artistic Individuality and Self-expression’, Yuan Yunsheng (b.1937), well-known throughout China at the time because of the controversy surrounding the mural painting for Beijing’s Capital Airport, again stressed artistic individuality, pointing out that ‘social development demands that the artist fully express artistic individuality and his self’. There were two fundamental reasons why the airport mural by Yuan Yunsheng created such a controversy at that particular juncture. The inclusion of naked female torsos, although naturalistic, was nevertheless regarded as an immoral act by the majority of Chinese at that time, and the mural contained what were regarded as experimental elements. Abstraction, distortion and symbolism had all been forgotten for many years by Chinese artists, yet Yuan Yunsheng’s mural ostentatiously made use of these elements. The painter’s own ideas about art forms had already displaced the insistence on depicting ‘the typical reproduction of the typical character in a typical setting’ and formed the central plank of art, and the individuality of form and of the artist had become the most prominent themes of the day. Obviously, Yuan Yunsheng’s insistence that ‘the artist fully express artistic individuality and his self’ was clearly and pointedly pertinent. Having published his article on ‘The Essence of Painting and Self-expression’ in the 6th issue of Fine Arts of 1981, Qian He, on the basis of his original article’s argument, further explained his view that ‘self-expression should not be regarded as the essence of painting’. This article castigated self-expression from the perspective of the relationship between self-expression and an artist’s aesthetic target and from arguments concerning the relationship between an artist’s self-expression and the appreciation of his public. In conclusion, Qian He pointed out that if an artist abandons the relationships between painting and life and between the painter and his audience and focuses only on the essence of painting then this demonstrates that an artist has no understanding of what is called essence.[27]
In this same issue of Fine Arts, directly following the article by Qian He was one arguing a diametrically opposed viewpoint – ‘Another Discussion about Self-expression’. In this article affirming the value of self-expression, the author Zhu Xuchu discussed an issue that was very real and meaningful, namely the existence of self-expression from the perspective of history and the reasons why this concept was stressed in the 20th century West and 1980s China:
When the members of this new generation wake from their nightmare and reflect on the tragic course of their souls and the tribulations they have endured, they must painfully ponder and consider the meaning of their lives and the value of their actions, abandoning that part of them that was unconsciously ‘alienated’. They must propose for themselves the independent right to existence and shout out respect for individuality and self-expression. Such an ideological trend reflects the character of an entire new generation and it will most certainly also be expressed show in our art. This is hardly strange, and highly rational.[28]
Such a view embodied a basic historical attitude and a correct judgment of reality. If the viewpoint and behavior of ‘self-expression’ are only required to be regarded as an abstraction and individualization of artistic language, then such a demand would be naïve; the proposal of ‘self-expression’ at this time in China was not a simple artistic question, but a political issue entailing the individual’s striving for freedom and liberation.
After Fine Arts published a reproduction of the oil painting The Unrestrained and an article about this piece and its author Feng Guodong (1948-2005), the artist promptly came under attack. In the 1981:5 issue of the journal in an article by Du Zhesen titled ‘Art Cannot Be Divorced from the Soil of the People: Words for Comrade Feng Guodong’. Du condemned Feng Guodong for ignoring ordinary people, because he believed people would want to spend ten fen on a bottle of beer or two ice-blocks in preference to looking at paintings. Du systematically attacked Feng for his arrogance and analyzed the attacks expressed in Feng’s own article, and urged Feng to reflect on why he, as a cleaner, had such a sense of grievance. The author wrote: ‘A genuine people’s artist always confronts life, bases himself on reality and has a genuine faith in people, but you, Comrade Feng Guodong, are totally lacking in this spirit’. Obviously, he regarded Feng Guodong’s pessimism as something terrible and pointed out to this troubled artist: ‘You are calling out, but you do not face up to people; you look instead to a “dreamland” and “nihilism”; you are excavating, but not into the depths of the national psyche, only into your pure self. Regardless of what you might now think, I insist that rather than actual life having destroyed you, it is better to say that because you have broken away from the people, you have experienced nervous collapse after entering a blind alley you created’. In probing the reasons for Feng Guodong’s ‘nervous collapse’, the author of the article Du Zhesen applied the yardstick of class analysis – whether or not Feng had broken away from the people. Obviously, Feng Guodong’s ‘nervous collapse’ and his ‘entering a blind alley’ in his creative work all resulted from his ultimate play of ‘self-expression and his distancing himself from the people. Did he break away from the people, because they could not understand his ‘unrestrained’ individuality?
In fact, in China in 1979, artists who proposed that art required self-expression were issuing a call for creative independence. However, the reason why existentialist philosophy as represented by Sartre was so ‘hot’ and fashionable in China at that time was not because Sartre, Camus or some other European philosopher decoded the truth regarding the mystery of life for Chinese people. Existential philosophies simply provided an external opportunity fulfilling the need for the Chinese people to reassert themselves and examine themselves. This need was so strong that Chinese artists unquestioningly accepted the thought of Sartre and others, disregarding the fact that they had not yet been completely presented or explained, or whether they could be transplanted to Chinese culture and society which were quite different from those of France or Germany.
Scholars were among those Chinese opposed to ‘self-expression’. Ye Lang, an aesthetics professor at Peking University, published an essay titled ‘Self-expression Is Not Our Banner’ in the 1981:11 issue of Fine Arts, in which he attempted to prove that the fashion for ‘self-expression’ in China was intimately connected with Western existential philosophy. Ye Lang’s purpose was very obvious. He wanted to prove that those in China who proposed ‘self-expression’ did so without analyzing ‘the theories, slogans, ideological trends of politics, philosophy or aesthetics’ and so it was very ‘dangerous’ having them explain the essence of its true meaning. Ye Lang came to the following conclusion:
In a word, I believe that ‘self-expression’ is a subjective idealism, an irrational aesthetic slogan and an existentialist slogan, which can only lead to an artistic way which breaks with reality and is divorced from the masses. Thus, any artist who believes in Marxism, any artist who resolutely serves the people and socialism or any artist who sincerely pursues the true, the good and the beautiful and respects the laws of art will have no reason to regard ‘self-expression’ as the banner under which he or she works
From June to July 1979, a small exhibition was staged in Zhongshan Park near Tiananmen in Beijing. The exhibition was jointly staged by the Beijing Artists Association, the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the management of Zhongshan Park. The content of the exhibition was impressionist painting, but there were no original works on display, only photographs. Nevertheless, the exhibition attracted many people.
This exhibition may not have been a nation-wide sensation, but its significance was that it was thought-provoking. In his article titled ‘Before and After Impressionist Painting’, Wu Guanzhong referred to it and cited the above visitor’s comment as evidence of the audience excitement it generated. In this article, Wu Guanzhong noted that although the legacy of impressionist painting is a century old, in the China of 1979, ‘only after a thousand entreaties does she appear, holding the pipa that half obscures her face’. Wu Guanzhong pointed out that for impressionism ‘it is no longer problematic whether or not it should or can be emulated, but only whether studying impressionism is too retrograde’, because impressionism ‘is now an old category of painting and it can only be regarded as the curtain raiser for modernism!’[29]
After Wu Guanzhong’s piece appeared, Fine Arts Research published a fairly detailed article by Shao Dazhen on the aesthetic characteristics of impressionism, presenting a positive analysis of impression, musical painting and emotional mood. He said that ‘most of the impressionist painters derived from the social strata of the petty bourgeoisie and the artisan class, and even though Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas came from wealthy bourgeois families, they were nevertheless patriots’. However, the class limitations of the impressionist painters meant that their creative work could not reflect ‘the revolutionary call of the heart, let alone find identity with the thought and actions of the fighting proletariat’.
In the second issue of Social Science Front that appeared in 1979, Wu Jiafeng (1916-1997) also published a long article titled ‘A Reappraisal of the Impressionists’. Wu’s article enumerated various misunderstandings and absurd criticisms leveled at the impressionists. Wu Jiafeng pointed out that the ignorance of impressionism and the prejudice against it made impressionism the most maligned school of painting, variously subjected to the charges of being ‘formalism’, ‘naturalism’, ‘pure aestheticism’, ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘a deviation from tradition’, ‘purely subjective feeling’, a ‘decadent school’, ‘anti-people’, ‘a reactionary school’, ‘the expression of the ideological system the decadent imperialist bourgeoisie’ and something ‘moribund and obscene, poisonous and anaesthetizing’. Wu argued that while impressionism might not be what is usually described as ‘realism’, this should not be the basis for our denying it. Those with no experience or knowledge of history might have been unable to appreciate why a scholar such as Wu Jiafeng was so ambiguous in a debate about a school of art, but the explanation can be found in his article:
For more than decade, battered by the fascist cudgels of the Gang of Four, the art world did not dare openly discuss the impressionists and even in art schools it was not permitted to peruse folios containing their work. If by chance someone remarked that a comrade oil painter’s painting technique was slightly influenced by the impressionists then that comrade would either be seized by panic or his features would betray his gloom.
In fact, the issues of realism and modernism were still not only questions concerning schools within the Chinese art world but were also questions of the political standpoint. For a time the response to these two issues could determine the physical and spiritual destiny of an artist, a critic or a theoretician.
From 1979 onwards the lavish attention paid by Chinese art circles to the question of artistic form led to a reappraisal of modernism. In that year, the Central Academy of Fine Arts set up the journal World Art. The editorial preamble in the first issue explicitly stated:
The historical experience of cultural development demonstrates that a self-confident nationality should not isolate itself from the world. In political, economic and cultural development, each nationality should, on the one hand, offer its own experience to other nationalities, and, on the other, modestly study the strong points of other nationalities, in order to remedy its own deficiencies and become more powerful. A simple review of the historical development of art makes this reasoning readily apparent. … Compared with the development of other undertakings, our study of the history and current situation of foreign fine arts should be described as very backward. Especially in the last decade and more, the feudal cultural tyranny relentlessly pursued by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four further cut us off from the world. In this situation, the task of introducing foreign fine arts seemed even more urgent, because only by understanding the world, grasping the abundant materials, and undertaking study and research on the positive and negative experiences of foreign art development can we accomplish the smooth forward development of our socialist fine arts.
The first issue of World Art published articles including ‘The Impressionists’, ‘Van Gogh’s Views on Painting’, and ‘Modigliani’, as well as Shao Dazhen’s ‘Brief Introduction to Western Modernist Art Schools’, which provided introductory summaries of the neo-impressionists, post-impressionists, symbolists, fauvists, cubists, futurists and expressionists. In the second issue Shao Dazhen went on to introduce Dada, surrealism, abstract art, pop art, visual art, op art, action art and hyper-realism. It is very difficult to describe the emotional impact these introductory remarks had on the countless artists and young students studying in art colleges. In contrast to China’s former cultural autocracy and China’s unitary ‘realism’, these colorful Western artistic groups seemed self-evidently abundant and tempting. In the work of the various Western modernist schools that had been already published or which could be ferreted out, Chinese artists once again discovered in how many different ways the world could actually be described and expressed. Realism, which had been scrupulously obedient for so many years, paled beside them. In the wake of suspicions regarding the principles of realism, the need for new forms and adoptions seemed more natural, yet there were inevitably emerging disagreements in the art world about the so called realism and modernism.
Over a long period of time, prior to the clarification of the basic meaning of the concept of realism, the application of the term realism to the work of an artist could determine his life, death, and destiny. Confronted by the new colorful panorama of artistic modernism, people were eager to acknowledge its arrival, but were unable to find the best way to do so theoretically and so naturally fell back on the old criteria with which they most familiar and so used ‘the spirit of realism’ to affirm the rationality of the existence of the modernists. Thus, people at that time welcomed the appearance of an article in the 7th issue of 1980 of Fine Arts by Hu Dezhi titled ‘We Should Not Overlook Any Path That Leads to Truth: Only the Realist Spirit Is Eternal’, because its attitude and approach of embracing and affirming modernism by relying on the ‘the spirit of realism’ could not be readily refuted.
Ultimately surrounding the discussion of the concept of realism were a number of pressing issues faced by art circles at that time: Confronted by such an immense oeuvre of Western modern art being introduced to Chinese art circles, how were Chinese artists to assess its value? What was to be their yardstick for judgment? Was the original yardstick of realism effective in assessing the value of works that were non-realist? How should Chinese artists make their choices? There was an even more urgent issue: After a number of daring young artists staged the Stars Art Exhibition and openly used ‘non-realist’ techniques, and a number of artists had to varying extents turned their back on the dogmatism of realism to pursue effects in their work which were neither realist nor classicist, what attitude should artists adopt?
After 1979, if there had not been discussions about realism and modernist and about form and abstraction, then it is inconceivable that Chinese modern art would later develop its own trends and strength. Obviously, if no new critical spirit was displayed in artists’ work and if artists did not bravely create and put it to use then it is also inconceivable that there would have been any debates about realism and modernism or about form and abstraction.
NOTES:
[1] Annotated version of ‘Resolution on certain questions in the history of the Party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China’ (Guanyu jianguo yilai dang de ruogan lishi wenti de jueyi zhushiben), Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1983, p.30.
[2] Gao Xiaohua told us that his techniques emulated the Soviet painter Kirov’s style.
[3] Jiangsu Art Monthly, January 1985, p.3.
[4] Fine Arts (Meishu), January 1981, p.46.
[5] An editor of Fine Arts at that time, Li Xianting, recalled: ‘In 1980, Luo Zhongli was still a student of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts when he created the oil painting ‘Father’, and when this work was shown in the exhibition of young artists from Sichuan, the head of our magazine’s editorial office visited the show and brought back photographs of this work. I was the responsible editor of the journal at the time and had the authority to issue articles. I saw the photographs of ‘Father’ in the office, but had no relationship with Luo Zhongli and prior to then and had only seen his paintings of female ‘intellectual youth’ (zhishi qingnian). However ‘Father’ particularly impressed me and the dimensions of the work were those usually reserved for a prominent political leader; the image of the peasant father was so compellingly realistic and the work was filled with humanity. Although the artist was at that time still a student, I selected the painting for the front cover of the 1st issue of Fine Arts of 1981’.
[6] Fine Arts (Meishu), February 1981, p.4.
[7] The social, political and cultural background of the time played a definite role in encouraging ‘lifestream’ art, but it has to be acknowledged that these artists’ interest in human nature and ordinary life did not impel them to opt for escapism.
[8] The painter records in his Chronicles (Da shiji) for 1979: ‘In 1979, the library of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts stocked an album of French impressionist painters and it had been put on display on a glass table. Through it we began to know Monet, Cézanne and Pissarro, and later learned about Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso’.
[9] Fine Arts (Meishu), April 1982.
[10] Private document.
[11] The artist wrote in ‘My first plein-air landscape painting’ (Wode diyici youhua fengjing xiesheng): ‘In 1968, the Cultural Revolution was creating chaos. I was 15 and studying oil painting in the midst of that turmoil. After I had painted several icons of Chairman Mao on an iron wall, I regarded myself as an oil painter. With the first winter snow, I invited Zheng Xueming and Li Yunhui, two workers several years older than me who also loved painting, to Xiangyang Park at the western end of Huaihai Road where we painted a view of the Orthodox Church there with its five cupolas. At that time the church had already become the management office for the goods and materials confiscated by the Red Guards in the Luwan district, but because the cupolas were not easily carted off we chose to paint them and it was like something out of a Russian art album, but we had no idea what the Soviet Union, Old Russia and the orthodox Church were about!’ See: Chen Danqing, Superfluous materials (Duoyu de sucai), Jinan: Shandong Pictorial Publishing House, 2003, p.3.
[12] Fine Arts Research (Meishu Yanjiu), 1981:1, p.50.
[13] Ibid., p.49.
[14] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1979:5, pp.33-44.
[15] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1979:5, p.34.
[16] Quoted from ‘A discussion on the question of form and content in the fine arts’ (Guanyu meishu de xingshi yu neirong wenti de taolun), Fine Arts (Meishu), 1983:4, p.14.
[17] Poetry (Shikan), 1978:1, p.3.
[18] Ten Years of the Stars (Xingxing shinian), HanArt, Hong Kong, 1989, p.11.
[19] Ibid., p.18.
[20] On 20 November, Liu Xun of the Beijing Municipal Artists Association unexpectedly informed the members of the Stars that their exhibition could continue at Huafang Zhai in Beihai Park.
[21] The exhibition ran from 20 August to 4 September. On 26 August People’s Daily published the advertisement for the Stars Art Exhibition. Apart from the core members of the Stars group, there were also those who took part in the First Stars Art Exhibition, including Zhu Jinshi (b.1954), Xiao Dayuan, Zhou Maiyou, Shao Fei (b.1954), Gan Shaocheng and Zhang Shiqi. Participating for the first time in the most recent exhibition were Yin Guangzhong (b.1942), Li Yongqi (b.1956), Zhao Dalu (b.1953), Bao Pao, Song Hong, Zhao Gang (b.1954), Chen Yansheng, Zhang Zhizhong, Liu Daxuan (b.1939), Cao Liwei (b.1956) and Wang Jianzhong. The second exhibition caused a further sensation and was extended until 7 September. During the 16 days of the exhibition, it attracted more than 80,000 visitors.
[22] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1980:3, p.9.
[23] Wang Keping commented: ‘Käthe Kollwitz is our banner and Picasso is our pioneer’.
[24] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1981:1, p.41.
[25] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1981:2, pp.7- 9.
[26] Zhong Ming and Feng Guodong both participated in the exhibition of paintings staged by this organization.
[27] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1981:6, p.13.
[28] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1981:6, p.15.
[29] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1979:4, p.49.