Introducing the art of modern China: trends in exhibiting modern Chinese painting in Britain, c.1930–1980

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-401
Author(s):  
Michelle Ying-Ling Huang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese Art ◽  
Modern Chinese Painting

Abstract By 1930, the British public took a stronger interest in early Chinese art than in works produced in the pre-modern and modern periods. However, China’s cultural diplomacy in Britain during war-time, as well as the interactions between collectors, scholars and artists of both countries, helped refresh Occidental understanding of the tradition and recent achievements of Chinese art. This article examines the ways in which modern Chinese painting was perceived, collected and displayed in Britain from 1930 to 1980 – the formative period for the collecting and connoisseurship of modern Chinese art in the West. It analyses exhibitions of twentieth-century Chinese painting held in museums and galleries in order to map trends and identify the major parties who introduced the British public to a new aspect of Chinese pictorial art. It also discusses prominent Chinese painters’ connections with British curators, scholars and dealers, who helped establish their reputation in Britain.

Art and Society in Modern China—A Review Article

1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-602
Author(s):  
Ralph Croizier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
Modern Chinese Art

Until recently, modern Chinese art attracted little scholarly attention, either in China or in the West. Western art historians might occasionally glance at the more traditional kinds of painting in the twentieth century, but their serious publications were on the great periods of Chinese art, Ming or before. The contemporary China-watchers—social scientists and modern period historians—trained their gaze on the harder stuff of politics and economics, ideology and organization. In the United States and the West in general, art seemed to slip through the crack between ACLS- and SSRC-funded research projects. In China, anything on the twentieth century, even art, was too sensitive politically for safe handling. The result was that throughout the Maoist years modern Chinese art could occasionally pique the interest of collectors or dealers outside China or draw carefully calculated praise from critics and publicists within, but it was not a promising area for critical scholarship. Michael Sullivan's pioneering survey, Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, London and Berkeley, 1959—strong on developments in the later Guomindang period when he was in China, but understandably rather out of touch with the main currents in the People's Republic—remained for almost thirty years the sole monument in a neglected field.

The Lingnan School

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Guangdong Province ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Atmospheric Effects ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese Art ◽  
Southern City ◽  
Traditional Chinese Painting

The Lingnan School was a school of modern Chinese painting, originating in and around the southern city of Guangzhou (known in the West as Canton) from the mid-1900s to the early 1950s, which used the traditional Chinese ink and brush medium. The term "Lingnan," or "south of the ridges," refers to the region corresponding to Guangdong Province today, with the capital at Guangzhou. The area was the home to many reformist thinkers and revolutionaries who eventually overthrew the last imperial dynasty, and among them were the three founders of the School: Chen Shuren (1884–1948) and the brothers Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) and Gao Qifeng (1889–1933). Unlike other modern Chinese art movements, the traditional medium was not abandoned but rather updated to serve Chinese modernism. While the techniques remained grounded in traditional Chinese painting, many of the subjects and visual effects were wholly new. New subjects such as spiders, airplanes, and ruins were included, and old subjects were reinvented to symbolize strong nationalist and political messages. A new sense of romanticism was achieved through the extensive use of atmospheric effects in the paintings.

Xu Beihong [徐悲鴻] (1895–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Academic Training ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Dynamic Movement ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Social ◽  
Art Departments ◽  
Modern Chinese Art ◽  
Traditional Chinese Painting

Xu Beihong was a key figure in modern Chinese art who used his Western academic training to remake Chinese art in the 20th century. He began his career in Shanghai as an illustrator and commercial painter. After briefly studying in Japan, he took another opportunity to study in France in 1919 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929). He was an avid defender of French academic style and an opponent of European modernism in the modernization of Chinese art; for this he was sometimes criticized for obstructing artistic progress in China. Returning to China, he served as the head of various university art departments and academies. As one of the first Chinese artists to achieve international fame, he met with many renowned cultural figures, including Rabindranath Tagore, in the interest of creating a unified Asian style of modernism. Addressing the social and political needs of modern Chinese art, his monumental works combined French academic composition and the aesthetics of Realism with traditional Chinese painting techniques and subjects. He is mostly known today for his later monochromatic paintings of horses, done with precisely controlled Chinese brushwork, yet at the same time able to convey a sense of expressive dynamic movement.

Liu Haisu [劉海粟] (1896–1994)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
Art Educator ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Vincent Van Gogh ◽  
Paul Cezanne ◽  
Modern Chinese Art ◽  
Art Schools

Liu Haisu was a painter, art educator, exhibition organizer, and key figure in introducing Western art to China in the 20th century. As the founder of art schools in Shanghai and Nanjing—including the Shanghai Academy, the first art college in modern China—he advocated for a Western style of art education. He encouraged individual students’ creative expression, and attracted much scandalous attention when he introduced nude model drawing into his school in 1920. As an exhibition organizer, he helped introduce modern Chinese art to Europe and Asia. He was involved with many artists’ groups, including co-founding the Heavenly Horse Society, a group that promoted French salon-style exhibitions. Born into a family of distinguished literati, Liu was trained in classical Chinese painting when he was young. After briefly studying art in Shanghai, he traveled to Japan and later Europe to view and learn about Western art. His early works reflected much of what he saw: paintings by Post-Impressionists like Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Returning to China, he became an active promoter of that particular type of European modernism. His later works were mostly in traditional Chinese media and techniques, but they were clearly indebted to the Post-Impressionists in the use of bold colors and expressive brushstrokes.

scholarly journals The Politics of Inscription in Modern Chinese Art

Art History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-153
Author(s):  
Craig Clunas
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Art ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese Art

scholarly journals Works of the artist Zhang Xiaogang in the dialogue of traditions of Western European and Chinese painting

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jitai Wang
Keyword(s):  
Formal Language ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Western European ◽  
Modern Chinese Painting

This article examines the artworks of Zhang Xiaogang as a prominent representative of the modern Chinese painting, peculiarities of his mastery formed in different periods of his creative path under the dual influence of Chinese and Western painting. Transformation and evolution of painting concepts and formal artistic means, claimed in the painter’s “Bloodline-Big Family” series, demonstrate how the “own historical memory” forms new expressive forms of painting. The author compares the interaction of forms and languages in the Western and Chinese painting, as well as analyzes characteristics of the structure of brush strokes of the painter in different periods for showing the formation of the inner spiritual essence. It proves that the clash of concepts of the Western and Chinese painting generated new artistic phenomena, which represent a result of assimilation of painting concepts and “localization” of formal language. The mutual influence of two cultures lead to origination of multiple ideas of plasticity and artistic forms. China has entered the period of “non-modernism”.

scholarly journals Purloined letters: History and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 691-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT BICKERS
Keyword(s):  
Central Core ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Treaty Ports ◽  
Purloined Letters ◽  
China Coast

For John King Fairbank the establishment of the foreign inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a key symbolic moment in modern Chinese history. His landmark 1953 volume Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast culminates with the 1854 Inspectorate agreement, which, he argued, ‘foreshadowed the eventual compromise between China and the West—a joint Chinese and Western administration of the modern centers of Chinese life and trade in the treaty ports’. Without the CMCS, he implied, there could be no modern China. It was the ‘the institution most thoroughly representative of the whole period’ after the opening of the treaty ports down to 1943, he wrote. By 1986 he was arguing that it was the ‘central core’ of the system. ‘Modernity, however defined, was a Western, not a Chinese, invention’, he claimed, and Sir Robert Hart's Customs Service was its mediator.

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