Conflict and Change:
The Fine Arts Revolution and Chinese-Style Painting
Cai Yuanpei’s Thinking on Art - The Emergence of ‘Fine Arts’ - Chen Duxiu - Background to the Birth of Chinese-Style Painting (Zhongguo-hua) - Chen Shizeng - Huang Binhong - Qi Baishi - Zhang Daqian - The Lingnan School and Its Painters.
Cai Yuanpei’s Thinking on Art
In June 1907, Cai Yuanpei embarked on studies in Germany, and his thoughts on aesthetic education took shape during his time there. Courses attended by Cai Yuanpei at the University of Leipzig included philosophy, literature, history of civilization, anthropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, and theory of painting.
Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgment as having no connection to self-interest had an obvious influence on Cai Yuanpei. After returning to China to take up educational work, Cai’s high regard for aesthetic education became a life-long credo. What Cai Yuanpei got from Kant’s philosophy was not just ordinary aesthetics. By merging different kinds of knowledge, he found a natural way to join the Christian spirit of God as the highest good with an uncontrived search for the realm of attainment belonging to Chinese thought. Cai Yuanpei hoped, by way of a new mode of education to foster new character traits, building on a foundation by no means lacking its own historical civilization. Cai Yuanpei advocated aesthetic education, a project which could undoubtedly change a person’s view of happiness. He hoped that people would use a new view of life to assess the goals of rank and repute pursued by many. Aesthetic education was doubtless connected to everything implied by the word ‘happiness, which is why people keep hoping to develop a rounded and healthy character and renew their awareness of the world in order to remain in harmony with it. Yet Kant noted that the aim of perfecting character is not to bring about happiness; the key is how we can judge if we are qualified to enjoy happiness. The central issue of a moral code is teaching people to know how they can deserve to have the happiness they should have. Thus genuine happiness refers to goodness which is as nearly perfect as possible; it is not related to an experiential sense of possession. Cai Yuanpei put plenty of such thinking into his ideas about citizen education.
In 1912 Cai Yuanpei began serving as China’s first minister of education. The thinking expressed in his ‘Opinions on New Education’ was all-embracing. He proposed a structure that paved the way for systematic education in the 20th century, to include education for national military preparedness, education for economic strength, education for civil morality, education for a new worldview, and education for a sense of beauty. The crucial thing was that he believed aesthetic education could be effective in instilling such a world-view:
Education in a world-view cannot be drilled into students’ heads in a few days. Also, its relation to the phenomena of experience cannot be captured by stiff and simplistic language. So what path should we follow? The answer is through aesthetic education. A sense of beauty goes together with a sense of dignity; it bridges the world of phenomena and the world of real things. Kant was a pioneer in recognizing this, and no subsequent philosophers have disputed him.[1]
More than ten years later, he still persisted in this viewpoint: ‘I propose aesthetic education, because the sense of beauty is transcendental. It can break down the prejudices regarding the self and others; it can break down self-interest and partiality when one confronts choices of life or death, or of gain and loss. Thus in education we should pay it particular attention’.[2] Such statements were a major influence on many artists at that time. Many years later when recalling Cai Yuanpei, Liu Haisu clearly referred to the rich ethical conceptions in Cai’s thinking, and he even quoted full passages from Cai Yuanpei’s original writings.
After starting his term as president of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei hoped to promote at Peking University the kind of free academic atmosphere he had grown used to in Germany. Thus he instituted an educational policy described as ‘inclusive and tolerant’. Under the academic banner of inclusion and tolerance, Cai Yuanpei quickly moved to assemble a group of figures who would influence history from different perspectives. They included activists and progressive thinkers such as Chen Duxiu, Zhou Zuoren, Zhang Shizhao, Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong, and Li Dazhao; yet conservative scholars like Gu Hongming, Liu Shipei, Huang Kan, Chen Hanzhang, and Cui Shi were also retained. Cai Yuanpei’s roundabout strategy by way of education was soon demonstrated by the students’ actual political activities. Luo Jialun, a student of Peking University who played an active role in the May Fourth Movement, recalled an intriguing remark that Gu Hongming made in class: ‘Right now in China there are only two good men, one is Cai Yuanpei and the other is me, because after Mr. Cai tested into the Hanlin Academy, he gave up his official post and went off to make revolution, and he’s still making revolution. What about me? Since I followed Zhang Wenxiang to become an official of the former dynasty, right up until now, I have continued to be a monarchist’.[3]
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were few among the intellectual elite who were as innovative and engaged in the fine arts and aesthetic education. Cai Yuanpei and other members of the elite concerned for their people’s future promoted the founding of schools, organizations, and societies of art devoted to a totally new aesthetic education. For young artists who longed for support from the older generation, Cai Yuanpei’s words and actions were a constant source of support. Cai Yuanpei had such faith in the efficacy of art that he believed only art education could solve the problem of how to elevate the moral level of the whole citizenry.
The Emergence of ‘Fine Arts’
One year after Cai Yuanpei published his ‘On Replacing Religion with Aesthetic Education’, the painter Lü Cheng (1896-1989), who had studied in Japan, published a signed letter to Chen Duxiu, titled ‘Fine Arts Revolution’ in New Youth on January 15, 1918 (vol.6, no.1). Although he used the term ‘revolution’, his arguments were directed at the current state of Chinese calligraphy and painting. The ‘revolution’ he spoke of entailed a theoretical sifting that he hoped to see in the art world, to clarify once again what kind of fine arts this society needed. By this time the term ‘fine arts’ (meishu) was commonly used in Chinese.
Ordinary readers familiar with Chinese history should be aware that until the end of the 19th century, the term ‘fine arts’ was not to be found in Chinese historical and cultural writings. Poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seals’ had matured and developed fully in the Song dynasty, and these terms did not need to be modified, much less replaced by other terminology. The use of the term ‘fine arts’ in Chinese first began as the borrowing of the Japanese coinage bijutsu. In fact, translated terms like meishu (fine arts) and meishu-shi (fine arts history) were first coined in Japanese, based on Western terms, but using traditional Chinese characters.
In 1871, the Austro-Hungarian government issued an invitation to governments of countries worldwide to take part in the World Exposition in Vienna. The term ‘bijutsu’ (‘fine arts’, Chinese: meishu) first appeared in a Japanese translation of the invitation letter in German. In the following year, the Meiji government issued this letter as a nationwide bulletin, in which the word ‘fine arts’ (bijutsu) appeared several times, with an annotation explaining its meaning. Before long, in 1876, Japan founded the College of Engineering Fine Arts School, where Western art was taught, and the term ‘fine arts’ began to be used in the field of social and cultural education. In 1881, at the Second Domestic Economic Promotion Exposition, a report by Fukuda Keigyō titled ‘Outline of Fine Arts’ used the term ‘fine arts’ and thus this term became one of the earliest examples of new scholarly terminology.
In 1882 the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa travelled to Japan and gave a lecture titled ‘The True Meaning of Fine Art’, and the Japanese term ‘bijutsu’ (meishu) was used in the translation of the title of his lecture. In the following year, the Japanese scholar Nakae Chōmin (1874-1901) translated L’esthetique (1878) by the French author Eugène Véron for publication, using the related new coinage bigaku (aesthetics) in rendering the title.[4]
In 1902, Wang Guowei (1877-1927) published a book of translations under the title Ethics. In the glossary at the back of the book he renders ‘fine art’ as meishu. This is regarded as the first use in Chinese of this term which had already appeared in Japanese publications. However, right from the beginning, Wang Guowei used the terms meixue (‘aesthetics’) and meishu in the context of literary criticism. From June to August 1904, in his ‘Critique of Dream of Red Mansions’, Wang used these terms in such phrases as ‘an overview of life and fine art’ and ‘the aesthetic value of the Dream of Red Mansions’.[5]
In 1913 Lu Xun wrote an essay titled ‘Opinions on the Dissemination of Fine Art’, which was collected in the very first issue of Ministry of Education Compilation Office Monthly. In this article, Lu Xun first set out to define ‘fine art’ for his readers:
The term ‘art’ (meishu), which we now use, was not used in ancient China and is a translation of the English word art. The word art, as in fine art, has its origins in Greece, where it meant something like the Chinese word yi. There were nine gods to which the ancients prayed so they could acquire mastery of particular arts. This is like the Chinese artisan Huatu, to whom people pray or make offerings. However, now the word ‘art’ (meishu) in Chinese implies the idea of beautiful, but arts like those mentioned above are skills to be mastered, and should not be called art.[6]
Lu Xun went on to define the meaning of the term as follows: ‘Art has three key elements: natural objects (tianwu), conceptualization (sili), and beautification (meihua)’.[7] Lu Xun’s essay was divided into four sections: 1) What is Fine Art?; 2) Types of Fine Arts; 3) The Aim and Utility of Art; and 4) Means of Disseminating Art.
In 1920 Cai Yuanpei gave a definition of fine arts in an essay titled ‘The Origin of Fine Arts’:
‘Fine arts’ is a term used in both a broad and narrow sense. The narrow sense refers in particular to architecture, sculpture, illustration, and craft works (including decorative items, ornaments, etc.). The broad sense encompasses these together with literature, music, and dance.
This definition fixed the boundaries for subsequent references to the fine arts. After this, no one continued to include literature and poetry in the scope of fine arts. Anyway, people did not concern themselves over precise implications of ‘fine arts’. There seems to have been no disagreement with treating ‘art’ as the original English term for meishu.
In any case, the term ‘fine arts’ became popular under Western influence, and its use was encouraged by the government. New art education was backed up by new textbooks. As early as 1917, A History of Fine Arts by Jiang Danshu was published by Commercial Press following its review and approval by the Ministry of Education. The format of this work, which simply divided world art history into the two ‘systems’ of ‘Oriental fine arts’ and ‘Western fine arts’, thoroughly broke away from the traditional rubrics of poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seals; in its educational conception and concrete instructional approach, it marked the beginning of the use Western ideas and methods in art pedagogy.[8]
This fine arts revolution encompassed various tasks—to expound what the fine arts are; to clarify anew the history of China’s fine arts; to introduce the history of Western art, especially in its modern forms; and to research the universality of human art. Viewed historically, the term ‘fine arts’ was a symbol of revolution, used to encapsulate certain problems concerned with art that this era had to resolve.
Chen Duxiu
For Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), actively engaged in a revolution in culture and thought, Lü Cheng’s use of the concept ‘fine arts revolution’ was highly useful and when he heard it he was ‘beside himself with elation’. Chen Duxiu not only responded immediately to Lü Cheng but also published his reply in that same issue of New Youth, likewise under the heading ‘Fine Arts Revolution’. Yet we soon discover that Chen’s reply turned the revolution in a direction other than what Lü Cheng proposed. As an intellectual and politician, Chen Duxiu has long been the subject of controversy. New Youth, which he edited, was not only a propaganda organ for new politics and revolutionary thought, it was a platform that also publicized new concepts of literature and art. Chen did not, as Lü Cheng suggested, focus on the issue of the deleterious effects of Western cultural influence. Instead he criticized the ‘Four Wangs’ of the early Qing and their influence:[9]
If we want to improve China’s painting, we first have to wage revolution against the Four Wangs, because we cannot improve Chinese painting without adopting the realist spirit of Western painting. Why is this? A writer, for example, must use realism before he can draw on the ancients’ techniques, give free play to his own talent, and write something that is uniquely his, not an imitation of the ancients’ writings. Painters must also use realism before they can give free play to their own talent, paint their own paintings, and not fall into the rut of the ancients.[10]
Chen Duxiu expressed extreme revulsion for paintings in the xieyi (‘freely rendered’) style of the Northern and Southern Song. He also believed that the lineage from the late-Yuan painters Ni Zan and Huang Gongwang through the Ming work of Wen Zhengming and Shen Zhou was a ‘horrible type of Chinese painting’ (Zhongguo ehua). Chen Duxiu informed his readers that his family had many ‘Wang paintings’ in its collection, but ‘less than a tenth of them had creative themes’. They were most likely executed using the four great accomplishments—copying (lin), imitating (mo), recreating (fang), and emulating (fu)—employed to re-work old paintings. Hardly any were original creations by the painters themselves. Such is the most terrible aspect of the Wang School’s influence on Chinese painting’.[11] As revealed in this passage, Chen Duxiu advocated that painting break away from what he called ‘the tradition of re-painting’ (fuxie) and make revolution against ‘Wang paintings’ by working creatively using realist methods. But in a society where the tradition of ‘Wang paintings’ was deeply rooted, what kind of realism could be considered a fruition of revolution? One can see that Chen Duxiu, prompted by his concern for the world of experience, had thrown the ancients’ intuitive methods to one side, and he even evinced little interest in the specific theories and methods of Western painting. He focused on painting as a direct reflection of visual reality. His thinking was a far cry from the demands of the traditional literati, who were concerned about ethical roles and the cultivation of inner intention they entailed.
Background to the Birth of Chinese-Style Painting (Zhongguo-hua)
In 1917, Kang Youwei (1858-1927) at the age of 60 simply stated that ‘in modern times painting in China has gone into extreme decline’, but he pointed to no concrete indicators of decline but instead expressed dissatisfaction with the paintings of literati like Su Dongpo and Mi Fu. In 1904, Kang Youwei travelled to Italy and when he saw paintings from the Renaissance, his understanding was that Western painters sought ‘verisimilitude’ or ‘authenticity’ (zhen) but Chinese painters did not. In his Discussion of Material Salvation for Our Country, Kang Youwei wrote of ‘the scenes of light and shadow that all contend for verisimilitude’ in paintings by Raphael, the Italian Renaissance painter who had been praised by Xue Fucheng, a 19th century envoy to Europe, in his Diary of a Mission to England, France, Italy, and Belgium. Kang’s description makes one feel that this reformist political figure placed extremely high value on faithfulness to the objective world. Based on his sense of retinal accuracy, Kang Youwei wanted people to believe that ‘today’s European and American painting employs methods similar to painting of the Six Dynasties, the Tang, and the Song periods’. This remark was apparently derived from the classification and resemblance of ordinary visual experience. Put simply, Kang Youwei believed that artistic value lay with realist (xieshi) painting.
In fact, in the study of late-Qing painting, the term Zhongguo-hua referred more often to ‘paintings of China’, and only when the Qing government was overthrown and a smattering of ‘Western-style paintings’ (yanghua) began appearing along the streets and alleys of Chinese cities did the terms Zhongguo-hua (‘Chinese-style painting’) and guocui-hua (‘national essence painting’) come to gain wider acceptance as alternatives to ‘foreign-style paintings’. In an early document we find the following statement:
I don’t know the year and date for sure, but at any rate from the day that ‘national painting’ (guohua) became a subject in Chinese schools, and ‘foreign painting’ (yanghua) like other sciences was also included in the curriculum and studied enthusiastically by Chinese people, the term ‘national painting’ was born. If we check back to why this term was coined, we find that it was in distinction to foreign painting. For instance, only after there were ‘foreign goods’ did we have the world ‘national goods’ (guohuo); only after we were faced with foreign languages did we have ‘national language’. At first it was not meant to be a value judgment. When the national essence group first appeared, they thought it was their duty to preserve our national essence; subsequently they became advocates for preservation, and the value of ‘national essence’ went up. It got to the point that even ‘national dregs’ (guozao) went up in value. However, today ‘national painting’ is ‘a mass of dregs’ (yituan zao). However, since it basks in the reflected glory of the national essence activists, it seems to have become our national essence.[12]
Yet when the slogan ‘improve Chinese painting’ (gaizao Zhongguo-hua) appeared in 1917, the expression ‘national essence painting’ appeared constantly in newspapers like New Youth, and when Heavenly Steed Society’s catalogues distinguished between ‘guohua’ (national painting) and ‘youhua’ (oil painting), the inner perplexity of Chinese traditional calligraphers and painters became evident. The setting up of departments, faculties, and classes in guohua by a succession of fine arts schools also furthered the spread of this ambiguous neologism.
From a broader perspective, the term ‘Chinese painting’ must have appeared in the late-Qing period at around the time as another concept, namely ‘national learning’ (guoxue) or ‘Chinese sinology’. ‘National learning’ was clearly proposed to counter the Western scholarly system (termed ‘Western learning’). However abundant the content embraced by the term ‘national studies’ given the many schools of thought it embraced, one could still justifiably limit it to traditional scholarship before the early 20th century. Westerners habitually break the humanities down into philosophy, politics, religion, and history, but traditional Chinese intellectuals broke scholarship and thought down into the categories of ‘meaning and principle’ (yili, roughly approximate to exegesis), ‘practical engagement’ (jingshi, roughly equivalent to statecraft), ‘belletristic rhetoric’ (cizhang), and ’textual criticism’ (kaoju, roughly equivalent to hermeneutics). Two world civilizations, as a result of geography, writing systems, and other complex reasons, expressed things quite differently, but the conscious emphasis on ‘the national essence’, ‘the national past’, and ‘the old learning’ by Chinese scholars indicated conservative adherence to habitual thought patterns and their own familiar civilization. Seen overall, the appearance of a term like ‘national learning’ at the beginning of the century indicated that the advent of Western scholarship constituted a grave challenge to traditional culture.
People by and large took a diminishing interest in traditional, classical ideas and research methods, believing that the learning of the past needed renewal and re-ordering, both in terms of content and reference tools, and this seemed to suggest that a revolution was needed in the use of terminology and the integration of source materials. Thus Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang paid no heed to the subject areas defined by Confucius or Han-era ‘ancient text’ classicists. They had no wish to use the texts of the ancients to explain culture or current phenomena. Instead, they made direct use of Western thinking and methods. For example, Hu Shi never abandoned his conviction that the pragmatism of John Dewey was the foundation of his own cultural thought and social program.
Therefore, in the area of art, the advent of Western painting led Chinese intellectuals to abandon, once and for all, their Chinese cultural centrism, and even though they might use the term ‘national essence painting’, they were well aware of the boundaries of the concept, and in a situation where talk of the ‘national essence’ and ‘national essence painting’ became ubiquitous and various distinctions became extremely blurred, they then gradually adopted the overarching concept of ‘Chinese-style painting’ (Zhongguo-hua) to delineate such art from ‘Western painting’, as a necessary reassessment of the indigenously developed art of calligraphy and painting.
Among traditional calligraphers and painters, Jin Cheng (1878-1926) is an interesting case. Among the custodians of traditional art, the depth and solidity of traditional influences on him were apparent. Over ten of Jin Cheng’s brothers and sisters studied in the West, and he himself studied in England (initially to study Western law). He also travelled to the United States and France to collect information about legal systems and art. However, he criticized ideas about evolution that were then current in the art field:
All affairs in the world can be encompassed by old or new theories, but the endeavor of painting is different, for its works cannot be simply characterized as old or new. In our country from the Tang dynasty until now, what period has been without its eminent masters? These famous people did not become famous by disparaging their predecessors’ paintings as outdated. Instead they kept faith with the path of the ancients and carried the ancients’ intentions onward. They were well aware that there is no such thing as old versus new; rather, what is new is also old, because when the old is transformed, its oldness is also new. If one is mired in novelty, one will soon find that the new will also become old. [13]
Jin Cheng seemed to accept the appearance of newness in painting, but ‘only the sensibility can be novel, because the sensibility cannot be reduced to technique but is to be found instead in the realm of thought’. However, Jin Cheng’s ‘sensibility’ (yi) was probably somewhat akin thing to his fuzzy notion of ‘the ancients’ intentions’ (gu yi). Jin Cheng backed up his advocacy of ‘national essence’ with action. In 1920, due to his government position, he persuaded President Xu Shichang to earmark part of the Boxer Indemnity, which had been returned by Japan, for use by Chen Shizeng, Zhou Zhaoxiang, and himself to found the Chinese Painting Research Society. These earnest individuals proposed a slogan that would make them the longstanding butt of ridicule: ‘Advocate refinement, preserve the national essence’. Jin Cheng’s prominent political ranking also added to his influence.
Among the unique conservatives of the Late-Qing and early Republican period, mention must be made of Lin Shu (1852-1924), a renowned scholar and translator, who once taught at Peking University. With the help of collaborators who provided oral rendition, he wrote translations in the Chinese classical language of more than two hundred Western novels (from the United States, England, France, Russia, Greece, Germany, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, and Spain). His translation of Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils became part of the shared memories of a generation of young educated Chinese.[14] In painting, Lin Shu’s main interest lay in the brush technique of the ‘Four Wangs’, and he would compose poems to accompany his own ink paintings, maintaining the elegance and sensibilities of traditional calligraphers and painters. Lin Shu was well aware of the distinction between Western painting and Chinese traditional calligraphy and painting, and he was acquainted with the unique features of Western painting such as chiaroscuro, shading, and perspective. In his Painting Discourses from Spring Wakening Studio, he equably discussed the different features of Western and Chinese painting. He adamantly disagreed with efforts to overthrow the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius and, in a letter of 1919 to Cai Yuanpei in which he dared to remark that ‘you now devote your efforts to the Republic while I remain a graduate of the Qing court’, Lin Shu revealed that he maintained his courage at the same time as he had lost his intellectual discrimination.[15]
Chen Shizeng
Among many intellectuals and painters with traditional training, Chen Shizeng’s (1876-1923) interpretation of literati painting—by virtue of his erudition, social role, and character—won broad admiration and approval, while providing support for countless painters working with traditional giving rice paper, ink, brush, and ink stone. Chen Shizeng was well-versed in poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seal carving; he studied oil painting for a time as well, and actual experience of drawing from life deepened his knowledge of Western painting. He was thoroughly steeped in the tradition of calligraphy and painting and even as a youth he was praised for his compositions of poetry and lyrical verse. As a youth, he came under Wu Changshuo’s influence in calligraphy and seal carving. He and Wu often exchanged poems as an expression of their cultivated tastes. In 1920 he joined in establishing the Chinese Painting Studies Association. Heeding his own inner promptings, he established close relationships with traditionalists like Jin Cheng and shared in the pleasures of studying the ‘national essence’.
Along with traditional brush technique, Chen attempted to elucidate the principles of Chinese calligraphy and painting. He even harbored the grand aim of distilling traditional calligraphy and painting down to its quintessence or ‘core’. ‘The Value of Literati Painting’, an article he published in Painting Studies Magazine in 1921, must have been written in response to a mood of encroaching dread. By exploring the issue of value related to Chinese traditional painting, he hoped to explain the justification for Chinese painting’s continued existence; he wanted to communicate to people that amidst chaotic changes traditional painting had its own importance and vitality. Chen Shizeng began by reducing Chinese painting to the rubric of ‘literati painting’, perhaps because he did not wish to debate conceptual issues related to the terms ‘Chinese painting’, ‘national painting’, or ‘calligraphy and painting’, although the concept of ‘literati painting’ posited by Chen was quite diffuse:
What is literati painting? It is painting that bears literati characteristics and contains literati taste, in that there is no unnecessary fuss over artistic mastery within the painting; instead, the richness of literati sensibility must be perceived beyond the painting. This is why it is called literati painting.[16]
Chen Shizeng went on to explain what he meant by the temperament, taste, or sensibility of literati. He believed that the personality of the literatus was refined, his sensibility was elevated, and his cultivation and qualities of character were superior to those of ordinary people, and as a consequence the literati could ‘personally guide others to a marvelous state, turn others towards something hidden and subtle, and lead others to break away from all contaminated worldly notions’.
Chen Shizeng did a great deal to clarify the history of Chinese painting with his erudition, yet he used the same modes of expression that had been recycled continuously for hundreds of years. Chen Shizeng disagreed with treating painting as a ‘photographic device’; he also disagreed that the ‘marvelous realm of art’ could be attained through ‘external appearances’. Because of his experience in Japan, Chen Shizeng possessed knowledge of schools that the ‘revolutionaries’ liked to mention—cubist, futurist, and expressionist. He even made a simplistic, reassuring pronouncement that these Western schools demonstrated that ‘physical resemblance is not sufficient to fulfill the optimal possibilities of art, so one must seek them elsewhere’. From this statement it would seem that he had found confirmation of the spiritual value of literati painting. Chen Shizeng had a wide circle of friends and associates. In 1906 Chen Shizeng became acquainted with Li Shutong in Beijing and remained in contact with him for the rest of his life, while inscriptions and poems by such prominent traditional-style artists as Jin Cheng and Yao Mangfu appear on many of his paintings. These associations also demonstrate Chen Shizeng’s unreserved commitment to literati taste.
Huang Binhong
Huang Binhong (1865-1955) received a conventional education during his childhood, studying the Four Books and Five Classics; in 1875 his studies broadened to include poems, essays, and lyrics, along with practice in calligraphy and painting. In the spring of 1899, the year following the 1898 Reform, Huang Binhong was accused for the first time of involvement with the ‘revolution’. Regardless, convinced of the importance of ‘culture’ (wen) for national survival, Huang joined the ranks of the ‘national heritage’ or ‘national essence’ faction (guocui-pai). In 1908 the National Heritage Journal, nos.45 and 48, published ‘Binhong Discusses Painting’, in which Huang introduced the history of painting in China under the headings of ‘Origins’ (Huayuan), ‘Schools’ (Paibie), ‘Emulation of Ancients’ (Fagu), ‘Academic Style’ (Yuanti), ‘Evaluating Works’ (Zhongpin), and ‘Valuing Culture’ (Shangwen), thereby initiating a new recognition of Chinese traditional art among Chinese scholars at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1909 Huang Binhong, accepting the entreaties of Deng Shi, took part in an editing project to preserve classical knowledge, and in the spring of 1910, Huang joined the Chinese Calligraphy and Painting Research Society. Judging from the group’s ‘articles of association’, members of this association, the forerunner of the Tijin Hall Calligraphy and Painting Society, were mostly traditional calligraphers and painters. They hoped that the Society, ‘through frequent gatherings and mutual critique, would be of help in preserving the national heritage’.
In 1911, Huang changed a character in his personal name (Binhong, from bin meaning ‘riverbank’ to bin meaning ‘guest’), and under his new name began editing the ‘Fine Arts Series’ in March of that year. This series of publications, which Deng Shi also took part in editing (for the first three issues), regularly appeared until 1936, by which time a total of 160 volumes had been published, and it earned sustained acclaim and influence for Huang. The scope of the series encompassed ‘calligraphy, painting, carving, seals, ceramics, bronzes, jade, stones, and all manner of antiques and antiquities’. The phenomenon of collecting, classifying, and introducing traditional art under the novel category of ‘fine arts’ indicates Huang Binhong’s thoughtful and dedicated attitude, as well as demonstrating that he and his friends had begun to accept this overarching concept from abroad which embraced various forms of art.
In 1912, by the time Huang Binhong was laying the groundwork for the Zhen Society, he was already acquainted with Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng, who had come to Shanghai from Guangdong. Although his views on Chinese painting were totally different from theirs, Huang wrote ‘Origins of the True Record Illustrated Magazine’, an article about these two painters and their illustrated publication venture, for the May 13th issue of Shenzhou Daily. Huang Binhong at this time remained a revolutionary sympathizer, and although the Qing dynasty government had just been overthrown, the revolutionaries were not just faced with the task of constructing a new republic but were dealing with how to interpret the power structure of that republic’s government and to answer questions about its future. Due to Huang’s early political experiences, he did not have many major political differences with the two Gaos. Perhaps Huang Binhong was not interested in discussing disparate views with Gao Jianfu, or perhaps he was cautiously evaluating changes in the art field, but while Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, and Chen Shuren were sparing no effort to promote their Eclectic School (zhezhong-pai) calling for the modification of ‘Chinese-style painting’ using Western techniques, Huang Binhong simply wrote a preface to Chen Shuren’s book New Painting Method (Xin huafa), in which he tactfully reminded these innovators from Guangdong that ‘new methods of painting often arise, but it is important not to discard former ways’. The important point here is that Huang Binhong never endorsed the use of Western techniques to modify Chinese painting, whatever his personal relations may have been with innovators like Chen Duxiu, Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren, Xu Beihong, and Liu Haisu. In a letter to Fu Lei (1908-1966), Huang Binhong once again ridiculed the Eclectic School for losing its ‘soul’, stating that ‘the Eclectic School is neither Eastern nor Western. The soul of national painting has already drifted beyond the empyrean, and only someone charismatic can rescue it from its present dire straits’. He even went on to say, ‘Painting has national character, not temporal character’. He himself stated many times that changes in form and presentation should not predetermine spiritual content. His view that calligraphy and painting share one origin, and that painting would not exist without calligraphy, was a reiteration of traditional literati ideas of painting.
Huang Binhong emphasized ink and brush in theory, but more than that he drew on his sensitivity as a painter to elucidate the subtleties of brush and ink. As he wrote in the conclusion of Fine Points of Ancient Painting, ‘We need to realize that the spirit of ancient painting lies in subtleties of using brush and ink, and not simply in a series of compositional variations’. Later, in the contrasts enumerated by Huang we see how he understands the brush and ink form and was critical of all that was ‘dead, rigid, forced, turbid, thin, meager, unsettled, vapid, superficial, ingratiating, glib, adrift, weak, and gaudy’; he emphasized all that was ‘heavy, large, lofty, substantive, actual, firmly grounded, fluid, old, unsophisticated, alive, clear, comely, harmonious, and forceful’.
Huang believed that there were ‘real mountains’ (zhenshan). Beginning in middle age, he devoted much time to wandering among mountains and rivers, carrying with him copies of famous ancient paintings. His aim was to verify the source of their painting methods and find a basis for his own ink technique. At around the age of sixty, Huang Binhong distanced himself from the direct influence of his predecessors and began taking risks in his use of ink. He gave up widely spaced, diluted, and pure effects and tried working with a buildup of ink. He favored ‘black, dense, thick, and heavy’ treatments as a corrective to the unhealthy trend towards ‘soft decadence’ that he saw in late-Qing painters.
The hallmark of Huang Binhong’s paintings is his use of built-up ink over large areas. Huang’s efforts to innovate in ink and brush techniques readily relates to the deconstruction of the elements within his system of painting, and this deconstruction of ink art—as implied by the use of large areas of solid ink—would become a phenomenon frequently seen in 20th century ink painting. Of course Huang Binhong remained steadfastly within the sphere of time-honored ink brush technique. He believed that ‘the national character in national painting (guohua) can only be seen through ink and brush’. Thus he summed up a set of brush techniques (even, round, halting, heavy, and variant) and ink techniques including thick ink (nongmo), diluted ink (danmo), broken ink (pomo), accumulated ink (jimo), splashed ink (zimo), dry ink (ganmo), and leftover ink (sumo). At the same time, he believed that contemporary nature did not fundamentally differ from the landforms that confronted the ancients; the important thing is to preserve the inwardness in one’s grasp of nature.
Qi Baishi
Qi Baishi (1864-1957) was a native of Xiangtan in Hunan province, and during his lifetime he used many pen-names and soubriquets. In 1889 he accepted the name ‘Huang’ given by his teacher, with the style ‘Binsheng’ and the alternate style ‘Baishi Shanren’ (White-Stone Hermit). After that he was known widely as Qi Baishi. Qi Baishi was born to an ordinary family of farmers, and beginning at the age of fourteen, Qi Baishi learned woodworking and then ornamental carving. Like many devotees and novices of painting, Qi Baishi’s study of painting began with copying from The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual (1882). This painting manual, named after the Mustard Seed Garden Villa that Li Yu had built in Nanjing, is the primer from which various painters have learned traditional painting methods. Before he set off on his travels in 1902, Qi Baishi’s sources of knowledge were limited to instruction by established scholars from among the traditional gentry. Qi Baishi’s early method of portraiture was close to that of graphite drawing, but his handling of shape and line in his images of aristocratic women owed much to his study of the Mustard Seed Manual.
The years from 1902 to 1909 were a period of extensive travel during which Qi Baishi undertook five major journeys encompassing Hunan, Hubei, Henan, Hebei, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Guangxi, and Guangdong. As with many painters, travel brought about a change in Qi Baishi’s style. In 1909 Qi returned from Shanghai to his native place, where he led a life of tranquil ease. With income earned during his travels, Qi Baishi built an estate for himself, in an attempt to live the life of a country gentleman. Not only did such a way of life let him follow his muse and retain his zest for unalloyed simplicity, it imbued his temperament with a touch of the other-worldliness typical of the literati:
Rainfall resounds on a thatched hut, and my poems turn out passably
Plum-flowers are cast on window paper; each painting vies with the next.
In deep mountains where few guests come, I close the gate and sit,
Feeling old I take my ease, in laughing acceptance of Heaven.
[‘Sitting Idly in Xiao Studio’]
Qi Baishi’s second entry into Beijing in 1917 was hardly of his own choosing, but the new ties he struck up there with Chen Shizeng and Yao Mangfu marked a turnabout for him. After a trip back to Hunan in the following year, he entered the capital again in 1919 and finally settled in that city which offered so much that was necessary for success. Due to the assistance he received from Chen Shizeng, Qi’s paintings made a great impact at the Second Joint Sino-Japanese Exhibition in 1921. Even Chen Shizeng was surprised to see Qi’s pieces sell out. Yet even though Qi resolved to ‘cut off my imitative hand’ in pursuit of a new style, for a considerable period he was still clearly modeling his style after the xieyi (‘free renderings’) of Wu Changshuo. Qi Baishi himself said that due to urging by Chen Shizeng, he had ‘created his own red flower and inky leaf school’.
During what was termed his ‘elderly change of style’, Qi Baishi broke away from prior influences. Qi understood that in an ancient city that was starting to accept Western influences, people’s tastes were growing away from seasoned rusticity and remote aloofness. He chose subjects that were quite ordinary, always from everyday life, and rendered them in brushwork and colors that people could understand. Such treatment, de-emphasizing the refined, high-minded literati flavor, was a task at which Qi Baishi, as a one-time farmer, could readily become proficient. Later, objects which one might find anywhere in a rural village became the subjects of his paintings—gourds, fruit, and leafy vegetables; plows, rakes, and hoes; katydids and locusts—all of which he presented to urban viewers in the xieyi style that had once belonged to literati painting. Such freshness had seldom been seen in earlier ink paintings. In fact, Qi’s subject matter was quite far-ranging: landscapes and human figures, plants, insects, birds, and implements of daily living—any of these might provide a subject for his brush.
After settling in Beijing, Qi was appointed in 1926 to the National Beijing Art Academy, under the presidency of Lin Fengmian, where he could take pride in having taught—either directly or in a ceremonial sense—such students as Chen Banding, Xu Beihong, Yu Fei’an, Li Kuchan, and even the opera star Mei Lanfang. Apart from this, he was often given positions and held in unrelenting esteem by Xu Beihong— in 1928 at the Art School of Beiping University and in 1946 at National Beiping Art Academy.
Qi Baishi often told people, ‘The marvelous thing about painting is to be found in the space between resemblance and non-resemblance’. He stressed the importance of ‘resemblance in spirit’. Mistakes can easily be made when attempting to understand such phrases, because the boundary between ‘resemblance’ and ‘non-resemblance’ is fairly indefinite, and the sense of ‘between’ is hard to pin down. Fresh-water shrimp are the subject of many of Qi Baishi’s paintings: anyone can see that his fluent grasp of brush and ink rendered shrimp especially true-to-life. This resulted from the painter’s sustained observation of shrimp over many years and his insightful way of rendering them. The special properties of water-based ink and rice paper allowed this Chinese painter to convey, with highly deft motions of his ink-dipped brush, the look of waterborne shrimp that cannot be realized in oil-based pigments.
Zhang Daqian
Among painters who used the traditional tools of art, no one had a more assured grasp of ink and brush on paper than Zhang Daqian. His practice informed his colleagues that anyone who mastered the techniques to express every state of being could imbue his paintings with the spiritual resonance (shenyun) and elusive profundity possessed by ancient masterpieces.
Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), styled Jiyuan, was born in Neijiang, Sichuan. The earliest useful documentation about Zhang’s situation begins in early 1917, when he traveled to Japan to study textile dyeing at the Kohei School in Kyoto. One can imagine that Zhang Daqian’s studies in Japan could have been confined to textile dyeing, and that he must have witnessed the fashion for painting that was then the vogue in Japan. In 1919 Zhang Daqian returned to China and became a student of the calligrapher Zeng Xi, from whom he received the name Jiyuan which he used to sign paintings throughout his life. In 1920 Zhang went to Shanghai to assume the post of superintendant at the Nanjing Liangjiang Superior Normal School, where the young Sichuanese placed himself under the mentorship of Li Ruiqing. Zhang Daqian methodically studied calligraphic styles—clerical script, seal script, stele form, kai style, and grass-style—thereby mastering the skills he would later need for applying calligraphy to painting. At the same time he frequently copied paintings by Shitao and Bada Shanren in the private collections of Li Ruiqing and Zeng Xi, thus acquiring a discerning eye for the styles of ancient painters and the skill to copy them as closely or as freely as he wished. It was also during this period that Zhang began to execute facsimiles of Shitao and Bada. Before long, Zhang was assimilating the techniques of such ancient masters as Tang Yin, Shen Chun (Baiyang), Xu Wei (Qingteng), Jianjiang, and Zhang Feng, and even those of such famous painters of that anomalous metropolis Shanghai as Ren Bonian and Wu Changshuo. Zhang’s comprehension of ink art technique was so outstanding—beyond what any normal person could aspire to—that admiration of his copying ability spread by word of mouth. Within a few years, Zhang Daqian could lay claim to tremendous mastery and control, not just of calligraphy and poetic inscriptions, but also the whole range of painting subjects, from landscapes and portraits to flowers and birds. In terms of technique, he was equally at home with gongbi (fine brush), xieyi (free rendering), and mogu (sunken bone) painting.
Like the majority of Chinese painters, Zhang Daqian found direct inspiration in natural scenery. In 1927 he and his brother Zhang Shanzi lodged for several months at Mount Huangshan, where they wrote poetry and painted. In 1929, after travels in Korea, Zhang returned to Shanghai and served on the management committee of the First National Fine Arts Exhibition. Later, Zhang travelled extensively—Huangshan, Suzhou, Changsha, Nanyue, Hengyang, Beiping, Luofu Mountain, Dian Lake, and Yangshuo, participating in and organizing exhibitions. By the time he held his first exhibition in Beiping (1934), Zhang Daqian had already earned a broad reputation. In the spring of 1941 Zhang Daqian decided to conduct an artistic survey of the Dunhuang grottoes. He set out in the spring of that year, but had to turn back halfway due to the death of his brother Zhang Shanzi, and only in May did he set out again. As Zhang Daqian explained, the first thing he did upon arriving in Dunhuang was to assign serial numbers to the grottoes. Over five months he prepared a detailed inventory of the grottoes, which totaled 309 in number, that was more complete, meticulous, and systematic than the catalogue prepared by the French scholar Paul Pelliot who had recourse to photography. Zhang Daqian organized his own relatives, along with Tibetan painters like Ang Ji, in a painstaking and highly effective effort to copy the murals in the grottoes. In keeping with Zhang Daqian’s demand ‘not to inject subject interpretations’, the team adopted an assembly line approach: Zhang limned the outlines of the figures to ensure accuracy of form, and his sons and nephews then worked with the Tibetan painters to add color in stages. In depicting the almsgivers who appeared in the paintings, Zhang Daqian stressed the importance of realism, because without attention to such details, it would have been hard to assign dates to the figural portrayals. In his Portrait of Auspicious Deva, painted in 1942, we can see fullness in the painter’s contours, so different from the wispy treatment of figures in the late Qing period. In his work of 1943 titled After a Tang Painting of the Red Robed Warrior Yang Zhi, the dimensions (189cm × 88cm) and intense color serve to legitimize his striking innovations in rendering figures. At a time when Chinese painters could not fully respond to the use of oil-based colors brought back from Europe, they saw nothing unsuitable in these colors taken from traditional Dunhuang art. The painter staged two exhibitions—Exhibition of Zhang Daqian’s Copied Murals of Dunhuang and Exhibition of Paintings by Zhang Daqian, held respectively in Lanzhou (August 1943) and in Chengdu and Chongqing (1944), which met with an enthusiastic response.
The war’s end left Zhang Daqian with no time to complete his planned survey of grottoes in Xinjiang; he now believed that the important thing at this time was to enter social circles of the upper strata, and so he returned to Beiping. At the same time, he continued collecting ancient paintings which were in private hands. Two of the important ancient art works which he was thought to have recovered from private collections at this time were a work by Gu Hongzhong from the Five Dynasties period—Han Xizai’s Night Revels—and Dong Yuan’s Xiaoxiang River Scene from the Southern Tang. At any rate, Zhang Daqian again devoted his time to works by the ancients—whether collecting, copying, or reproduction them.
In 1950, when his old Kuomintang friend Luo Jialun invited him to exhibit his work in India, he took the opportunity to begin a survey of Indian art. In subsequent years, Zhang Daqian ranged worldwide in his travels. In 1956 he began his experiments with ‘splash ink’ (pomo) technique, and his meeting with Picasso in that year was frequently cited to indicate the international status attained by at least one Chinese painter. After his world travels and exposure to the scenery of the Americas, Zhang produced splash ink and colored ink works which broke away from the Chinese ink art tradition and verged on abstraction. They also reflected influences from his early period in Japan and from American abstract expressionism.
The Lingnan School and Its Painters
Unlike the social groups engendered by the art institutes of Beijing and Shanghai, the Lingnan School did not receive its name from the artists themselves. Even such key members as Gao Jianfu did not agree with the use of this term to categorize their art. According to a recollection by Gao Jianfu’s student Guan Shanyue titled ‘On the Lingnan Painting School and Innovation in Chinese-style Painting’, ‘Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, and Chen Shuren were not satisfied with the term Lingnan School back then, because it had a sense of narrow regionalism; it could easily be misunderstood as a merely regional painting group’. To be sure, it is the suggestion of regionalism in the term ‘Lingnan’ that has often led to its loose, overly extended use. In fact, Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng used the terms ‘Eclectic School’ or ‘new national painting’ to highlight their artistic revolution.
Documents reveal that the Lingnan Painting School did not have a definite, unified artistic position. Not until 1937 did Gao Jianfu, prompted by his teaching needs, write down his random observations about art, and Gao Qifeng left few written records detailing his thinking about art. Chen Shuren usually referred to his thoughts and feelings only in poetry. Only when attacked by a polemical adversary, such as Huang Bore, did Gao Jianfu call on his student Fang Rending to debate issues regarding the ‘new national painting’, and such acerbic, emotionally charged writing should by no means be viewed as a theoretical manifesto of the Lingnan Painting School. Actually, the writings which Fang Rending completed after 1941 were no more than a summary and appraisal of his own artistic experiences. Thus it is perhaps more fitting to view the Lingnan Painting School as an art trend or phenomenon that simply took place in the Guangdong region, and especially in Guangzhou. Under the historical rubric of the Lingnan Painting School one can also list a few other key painters: Guan Shanyue, Li Xiongcai, Huang Shaoqiang, Zhao Shao’ang, and Yang Shanshen.
In ‘My View of Modern Painting’, Gao Jianfu linked the ancients’ ‘doctrine of the mean’, a Confucian term, with his own ideas of ‘eclecticism’ and ‘renewal’; his meaning was simple: all artistic strengths, whether ancient or modern, foreign or Chinese, are mine to use. However, such a written statement does not amount to artistic practice. The problems faced by the Lingnan painters in their process of ‘eclectic compromise’ and ‘merging synthesis’ differed according to each individual. As for the slogan calling for an artistic ‘compromise of East and West, merging ancient and modern’, this was an outlook shared by nearly all artists in the 1920s and 1930s who wanted to change China’s modern art by way of Western art. As to what lay behind the term ‘eclectic compromise’ (zhezhong), there were no limits to elucidations of the term, with every person adopting a different explanation.
In his youth Gao Jianfu (1879-1951) was a student of Ju Lian (1828-1904) and began by copying Ju Lian’s paintings. Up to the age of 27, Gao Jianfu was influenced by traditional calligraphy and painting; although his gaze was drawn to real objects, he adopted the method learned from his teacher—dabbing a moistened brush into a pigment dish so that the half-dry pigment, affected by the action of water on the paper surface, would give rise to gradations of density. In this way one could render effects of light and shadow. This method, which was described using the terms zhuangshui (‘color diffusion’) or zhuangfen (‘pigment diffusion’), also came from his teacher Ju Lian.
In 1906, Gao Jianfu traveled to Japan and around that time he met Liao Zhongkai and came under the influence of Liao and Sun Yat-sen, and at the same time joined their revolutionary organization—the Tongmenghui. Gao Jianfu visited the artist Takeuchi Seihō, and Gao’s works reflected his admiration for Takeuchi’s use of line. Even so, in his early works Gao also blended many elements of Yokoyama Taikan’s ‘sunken line’ (mo-xian) technique. He enthusiastically amended Oriental painting by means of Western painting techniques. After returning to China in 1907, Gao Jianfu organized the China Assassination Squad, which was involved in assassinating Manchu government officials. As a result of his exposure in The True Record: Illustrated Magazine of President Yuan Shikai’s probable involvement in the assassination in 1913 of the president of the Kuomintang, Song Jiaoren, a warrant was put out for his arrest by the Yuan Shikai government, and once again he and Gao Qifeng went to Japan. In 1914 he returned to China. Although he had joined Sun Yat-sen’s new party, the China Revolutionary Party, while in Japan, Gao continued operating the Aesthetics Press which he had founded in 1912, while redirecting his enthusiasm for political revolution toward the ‘fine arts revolution’ and ‘national painting revolution’. In 1915, a tank and an airplane provided unusual, non-traditional subject matter for one of Gao’s works—Two Monstrous Objects of Sky and Earth. In 1920, when Sun Yat-sen set up the Guangdong Military Government, Gao returned from Shanghai to Guangdong and was appointed head of the Guangdong Applied Arts Bureau and president of Guangdong Provincial Industrial School. His proposals to found a ‘Central Academy of Fine Arts’ and a program to protect antiquities did not receive financial backing. However, he succeeded in staging the Guangdong Provincial First Fine Arts Exhibition in the following year. At this exhibition people could see works quite unlike traditional paintings in both content and expression. People who regarded painting and calligraphy as forms of self-cultivation or who adhered to the traditional literati demeanor were shocked when he proposed to ‘raise the flag of artistic revolution in Guangdong and mount a challenge to the rest of the country’. They realized that such thinking was practically a head-on rejection of the traditional refinements of calligraphy and painting.
In 1923, on the foundation of the onetime Spring Slumber Hall and Spring Wonder Hall, Gao Jianfu founded the Spring Slumber Painting Academy; he recruited students and promoted his ‘new national painting’.
In the 1930s Gao Jianfu’s reputation was at its height. In 1932, responding to Japan’s bombing of the Oriental Library in Shanghai, he painted a realist work depicting the wanton Japanese destruction titled Burning Ruins on the Eastern Battlefield. In 1935, although teaching at Spring Slumber Painting Academy consumed most of his time, he accepted a concurrent appointment as professor in the Art Department at Nanjing Central University, hoping to promote his ideas about art at this important institution.
The acrimonious dispute about the plagiarism of Japanese painting by painters of the Lingnan School which would embroil Gao Jianfu and Huang Bore (1901-1968) in Guangzhou perhaps it did not emerge from such fundamental differences of ideas and taste as the famous earlier dispute between Xu Beihong and Xu Zhimo. At first the young Huang Bore tried to point out that simply re-arranging elements based upon a Japanese painter’s work or, even worse, affixing one’s own signature to a piece by a Japanese painter, was a wrongful act of ‘plagiarism and duplication’. In 1926 Gao Jianfu had organized an Exhibition of New School Paintings at the Henan Art Fair, and the Kuomintang government had disbursed funds to buy works by the ‘two Gaos’, which had attracted the notice of the public and art circles. Gao Jianfu was quite incensed that just when ‘new national painting’ was being promoted and achieving recognition, someone would expose facts of ‘plagiarism’ and direct ridicule at his school of painting. He did not admit to his opponent’s accusations, so he asked his student Fang Rending to respond to the challenge issued by members of the Guangzhou Guohua Study Society, which Huang represented. Fang Rending wrote his ‘New National Painting and Old National Painting’ as a response to Huang Bore.
As the youth who exposed the truth about Gao Jianfu’s ‘plagiarism’ of Japanese paintings, Huang Bore, in his 1925 piece titled ‘The Distinction between New School Plagiarizing and Creative Work’, was quite rational in his discussion of issues regarding ‘creative work’, ‘stylistic copying’, and the modest conventions of literati painters.[17] Huang Bore totally disagreed with the statement that Chinese art was lacking in ‘creativity’, and reminded readers that when ancient painters wrote ‘in imitation of X’s style’ on their works, ‘this was no more than an expression of modesty, but an acknowledgment of their roots as painters. In 1925 Huang Bore also wrote an essay titled ‘Expressionism and Chinese Painting’ to point out that realism and impressionism, which he called naturalism, were quite well thought of in China, but that they had already been replaced by new artistic forms in Western countries.
There are almost no records documenting the dispute surrounding the Lingnan School in 1926, and what remains are later summaries of key points in the debate: views on ‘literati painting’, drawing from life, plagiarism and creativity, the inheritance and innovation of traditional culture, the merging of East and West, and the question of Japanese painting (Nihonga). Although the issues touched on were quite broad, they boil down to clear divergences on the ideas and methods of traditional painting. In June 1927 Fang Rending refuted, in no uncertain terms, the defense of literati painting which Chen Shizeng had presented in Studies on Chinese Literati Painting, published in 1922, and until 1942 Fang Rending continued to emphasize that ‘the art we need is not otherworldly; rather, it should be worldly and pertain to life’. He said that this was why it was important to paint human figures.
Gao Jianfu and Pan Dawei, Huang Bore’s successor, were at the center of two cliques in Guangdong that had divergent tastes. All arguments and opinions were turned into a polemic and war of words between the two cliques. One group, comprising fourteen painters who called themselves the Guihai Cooperative Society (later the Guohua Research Society), was organized by Pan Zhizhong together with Huang Bore, Yao Liruo, Deng Songxian, Li Yaoping, Lu Zhenhuan, Huang Junbi, Lu Zishu, Zhao Haogong, and Wen Youju. The Chinese-style painting promoted by this group was different from the ‘new guohua’ which they spurned as ‘a non-Western, non-Eastern hybrid plagiarized from Japan’ by the ‘two Gaos’ and others.[18] In his artistic practice, Gao Jianfu did draw extensively on the resources of Japanese painting. In Gao’s painting After Rain at Kunlun of 1914 we can see his reworking of Nakai Kōkoku’s Landscape and his Evening Snow, Desolate Village draws on a painting by Yamamoto Shunkyo (1871-1933). As for Gao Qifeng’s Morning Breeze, painted in 1921 and exhibited at the First Guangdong Province Fine Arts Exhibition, in this work we can see After Rain painted in 1907 by Takeuchi Seihō, with Gao Qifeng making no changes to Takeuchi’s layout except to reverse the direction of the egret’s flight. In Gao Jianfu’s Epang Palace Reduced to Ashes, people can also detect Gao’s ‘plagiarism’ of Kimura Buzan’s (1876-1942) Conflagration at Epang Palace. Such instances were so numerous that they caused considerable embarrassment when enumerated by the accusers in this polemical war. In the end, the dispute ended when the Eclectic School cited remote antiquity as their basis and declared the debate at an end.
Gao Qifeng (1889-1933) attracted attention as a result of the success of an exhibition of his work in Guangzhou in 1910, and people later spoke of ‘the two Gaos of Lingnan’ to highlight the prestige of the two brothers. Gao Qifeng joined his brother in founding The True Record: Illustrated Magazine and the Aesthetics Press. When the government of Yuan Shikai issued a warrant for his arrest, he went to Japan a second time, and there began studying printmaking and printing technology. In 1918 he returned to Guangzhou and became director of the Fine Arts and Printmaking Program at the Guangdong Primary Industrial School. In 1921 he and his brother, along with some companions, initiated the Guangdong Provincial First Fine Arts Exhibition. By this time people could see the momentum of the new guohua, and that it posed a severe challenge to traditionalism. In 1925 Gao Qifeng was named honorary professor at Lingnan University, where he emphasized to students that in painting one needs to ‘elucidate the new spirit of the times’. Gao Qifeng’s subject matter fell largely within the scope of fauna and flora, and in depicting these subjects, he painted from life like Ju Lian and Yun Nantian, and while studying in Japan he also absorbed influences from Tanaka Raishō and Takeuchi Seihō. When viewers saw his paintings, they would invariably express surprise at how he captured the life-like spirit of tigers, lions, and pine-perching eagles.
Chen Shuren (1883-1948) was a native of Panyu county, Guangdong. At the age of seventeen he placed himself under the mentorship of Ju Lian. In 1905, he already belonged to the pool of talent at Current Affairs Pictorial, and in October of that year he joined the revolutionary Tongmenghui in Hong Kong. In May 1908 Chen Shuren was admitted to the design faculty of Kyoto Municipal Arts and Crafts School, and in the following year he transferred to the painting faculty. In 1911 he returned for a short time to China. In April 1916 he graduated from the Humanities Program of Tokyo Private Rikkyo University, by which time he was already director of the Canada Office of the China Revolutionary Party. In August of that year, Aesthetics Press published a joint album of artworks by Chen Shuren, Gao Jianfu, and Gao Qifeng titled Selected New Paintings. Throughout his life Chen Shuren had a dual identity as politician and artist; his colleagues were filled with surprise and admiration at his energetic pursuit of both roles. Although he ran into trouble as a politician on account of his resignation over the Kuomintang ‘Party purge’ in 1927, Chen Shuren never encountered a severe political crisis. As an artist, he won high praise from prominent social figures and members of the art community. He viewed art as a path of self-tempering beyond utilitarian questions, a view that differed markedly from Gao Jianfu’s heroic artistic consciousness.
Chen Shuren’s subject matter embraced birds, flowers, landscapes, and animals. Like all students who studied fine arts abroad, his motive for studying in Japan must have been his dissatisfaction with the current state of traditional art in China. At the same time, he hoped that by studying Western painting, he could bring about a change in art. In 1908 Chen Shuren, while in Japan, translated an abridgment of a book by an English author, The Fine Arts, which was serialized in Current Affairs Pictorial.
It is easy to understand why, in a painting like Chen Shuren’s Remnant Snow on Luoji, we can see Yamamoto Shunkyo’s Snow on Luoji Mountain. This was an era when people, due to feelings of dread and urgency, had no choice but to ‘swallow things in big gulps’. But unlike the ‘Misty Style’ of other early students which stemmed from the hazy, obscure work of Yokoyama Taikan, Chen Shuren quickly accepted the strong-lined style of Yamamoto Shunkyo and Takeuchi Seihō, although he may have been interested in the Môrô-tai (Misty Style) at the beginning. Chen Shuren liked to express a carefree state of mind by depicting the Bombax celba (red silk-cotton) flowers, which for him represented the regional characteristics of Lingnan. He used a realist technique to render the body and texture of tree trunks, and the swallows swooping through the branches signal the coming of spring. The technique used to depict the flowers relied directly on color, without outlining in ink.
In winter 1931 Chen Shuren went to Guilin on Kuomintang Party business, and his landscapes of Guilin all appear to be outlines of mountains without textural strokes, and we can hardly characterize his evenly applied patches of color as the traditional ‘sunken bone’ (mo-gu) technique. The visual effect of such works comes closer to works in India ink, done with a hard-tipped pen, and verging on sketches drawn from life. In many works Chen Shuren’s taste in form, owing to his fondness for geometric, linear structures, shows his tireless use of lines to render stony rubble or uphill roads. Such works were usually based on sketched materials gathered in the field and then completed after the painter returned to his studio. The lines in the paintings closely resemble those in a sketchbook, and the effect of such treatment marks a departure from the concentrated and careful lines that are a special feature of literati painting. Unlike in Western paintings, these works do not feature profuse treatment of scenic details, especially of the mountain sides; his brush has a light and the thin colors are spread as if in a watercolor, consummating the painter’s fresh and uncluttered taste.
Chen Shuren had experiences similar to those of Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng: all of them studied under Ju Lian, embraced the political position taken by Sun Yat-sen, and went abroad to study in Japan. Chen Shuren shared the brothers’ ideal of ‘art to save the nation’, and although he did not join them in advocating ‘new guohua’, many people felt it fitting to refer to these three representative figures of the Lingnan Painting School as the ‘two Gaos and one Chen’, or the ‘three masters of Lingnan’.[19]
Fang Rending (1901-1975) took part in April 1929 in the First National Fine Arts Exhibition, held in Shanghai by the Kuomintang government’s Department of Education. Soon afterwards, he went to study in Japan. Prior to this, while studying in law school, he had entered Gao Jianfu’s Spring Slumber Painting Academy, and in 1925 he passed the entrance examinations for the National Advanced Judiciary School (renamed the Guangdong Legal Institute in 1930). During this period, he was so fond of painting that he neglected his legal studies to some extent. Back in 1921, when the new guohua paintings by Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng had been shown in the Guangdong Provincial First Fine Arts Exhibition, Fang Rending had personally identified with the taste of this group. The wording that Fang Rending uses in his ‘Literati Painting and Vulgar Painting’ is reminiscent of what Lin Fengmian wrote in his 1926 essay ‘Prospects of Western and Eastern art’, published in the Vol.22, no.10 issue of Eastern Miscellany. Touching on the topic of art and religion, Lin Fengmian wrote of ‘the harmonization of rationality and emotion’. In his 1927 pamphlet To Art Circles Nationwide, Lin Fengmian also referred to the issue of ‘the consolation of feelings’. Fang Rending wrote another essay, titled ‘The Issue of a Revolution in Guohua: In Reply to Nian Zhu’, in which he said, in the most direct language possible, ‘We are not the only ones who are advocating a revolution in national painting: there are people in Shanghai doing it, and in Beijing as well’.[20] This manner of expression reflected the adversarial emotions felt on both sides of the polemical war.
Yet the dispute, initially about plagiarism, which arose in 1926 was quite bewildering for the young Fang Rending, who lacking material to back up his arguments was quite flustered when his opponents cited numerous examples proving that Gao Jianfu and others had actually duplicated Japanese paintings. Gradually he found himself disagreeing with his teacher’s style of instruction. This, combined with his view that painting should be made more relevant through portrayal of human figures, for which it would be necessary to learn Western techniques, ultimately prompted him to go to Japan. In 1931, following the September 18 Incident, used by Japan as a pretext for occupying Northeast China, Fang Rending made a quick trip back to China and during that time Fang Rending completed a number of paintings: Going to the Fields, Fleeing on a Snowy Night, Sorrow after War, and En Route in a Storm. The subjects of these figure paintings were ordinary people and their lot in life. His Hunter Returning Home, completed at around the same time, is startling because of its unique composition. No Chinese painter had ever tackled a detailed close-up view; viewers were drawn to savor the beautifully rendered details of the prey, yet their gaze was undermined by the work’s odd composition.
NOTES:
[1] Cai Yuanpei, ‘Opinions on new education’ (Duiyu xin jiaoyu zhi yijian), in Minli Bao, 10 February 1912.
[2] Cai Yuanpei, ‘My experience in the education field’ (Wo zai jiaoyujie de jingyan), in Wind of the Universe (Yuzhou feng), no.56, 1 January 1938.
[3] Zhu Weizheng, ‘Gu Hongming’s life and other unverified things’ (Gu Hongming shengping ji qita fei kaozheng), Reading (Dushu), 1994:4, p.30.
[4] Documents show that ‘History of Fine Arts’ (Japanese: Bijutsu shi; Chinese: Meishu shi) and ‘Aesthetics’ (Japanese: Bigaku; Chinese: Meixue), registered as formal course names in the Tokyo University curriculum, first appeared in 1899. Iwaki Ken’ichi, On Sensibility (Ganxing lun), Kyoto: Showato, 2001, p.117.
[5] Wang Guowei, ‘A critique of Dream of Red Mansions’ (Hongloumeng pinglun), Writings of Wang Guowei (Wang Guowei yishu), vol.5, Shanghai Classics Publishing House (Shanghai Guji Chubanshe), 1983, pp.40-60.
[6] Quoted from Lang Shaojun, Shui Tianzhong eds., Selected Documents on 20th Century Chinese Art (Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan), vol.1, Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1999, p.10.
[7] Quoted from Lang Shaojun, Shui Tianzhong eds., Selected Documents on 20th Century Chinese Art (Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan), vol.1, Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1999, pp.10-11.
[8] This book, a textbook for undergraduate courses at teacher training schools, was divided into two parts. The first part is a history of Chinese fine arts and the second, a history of western fine arts. The second section is subdivided into periods of development—ancient, medieval and modern. The first section was subdivided into architecture, sculpture, paintings, and arts and crafts (gongyi meishu).
[9] The Four Wangs were Wang Shimin (1592-1680), Wang Jian (1598-1677), Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715), and Wang Hui (1630-1771). Among them the influence of Wang Hui was most far reaching. In his early years he made a reputation by painting copies that were indistinguishable from famous ancient works. At age 20 he became a student of Wang Jian, and in the following year received instruction from Wang Shimin. At the latter’s country villa, Wang Hui copied a secret collection of famous works. Unlike Wang Shimin and Wang Yuanmin, who did not go beyond the scope of the southern lineage in terms of sources, Wang boldly made a study of the northern lineage. At the age of 60, he accepted a commission to paint Emperor Kangxi’s Southern Tour of Inspection for the palace, which took six years to complete and was said to have been ‘deeply in accord with the emperor’s wishes’. Later the Yongzheng Emperor gave him a topic to illustrate, ‘clear brilliance of mountains and waters’, and so he subsequently adopted the sobriquet ‘Master of Clear Brilliance [Studio]’. Later, he was known through the empire by the complimentary epithet ‘sage of Painting’. His followers were many, and they were referred to as the ‘Yushan School’. Wang Shimin made this comment about Wang Hui: ‘For five hundred years we have not seen anyone who can arrange the ancients into a foot-wide painting or concentrate multiple beauties in his brush-tip in the manner in which Wang Hui can’.
[10] Quoted from Lang Shaojun, Shui Tianzhong eds., Selected Documents on 20th Century Chinese Art (Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan), vol.1, Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1999, p.29.
[11] Ibid., p.30.
[12] Tong Guang, ‘Casual talks on guohua’ (Guohua mantan), originally in Collected Modern Art Criticism (Xiandai yishu pinglun ji), World Publishing House, quoted from Lang Shaojun, Shui Tianzhong eds., Selected Documents on 20th Century Chinese Art (Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan), Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1999, vol.1, p.138.
[13] Quoted from Chen Chuanxi, History of the Aesthetics of Chinese Painting (Zhongguo huihua meixue shi), People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, p.589.
[14] In speaking of their first exposure to western literature, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), Guo Moruo, Zheng Zhenduo, and Mao Dun (1896-1961) all rated Lin Shu’s fiction translations highly.
[15] Xue Suizhi, Zhang Juncai, ‘Lin Shu research materials’ (Lin Shu yanjiu ziliao), Compendium of Materials on the History of Modern Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi ziliao huibian), Fujian People’s Publishing House, 1983, vol.2, p.193.
[16] Chen Shizeng, History of Chinese Painting (Zhongguo huihua shi), China Renmin University Press, 2004, p.137.
[17] Huang Dade ed., Fine Arts Essays of Huang Bore (Huang Bore meishu wenji), People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1997, pp.21-22.
[18] Huang Xiaogeng, Wu Jin eds., Records of the Guangzhou Modern Art Scene (Guangdong xiandai huatan shilu), Guangzhou: Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1990, p.311.
[19] Gao Qifeng was not directly under Ju Lian’s mentorship, but he did learn about Ju Lian’s techniques from Gao Jianfu.
[20] Quoted from Lang Shaojun, Yun Xuemei ed., Fang Rending, Hebei Educational Publishing House, 2003, p.12. Originally printed in Guangzhou Citizen Journal (Guangzhou guomin xinwen), 26 June 1927.