Reviving the Past: Antiquity & Antiquarianism in East Asian Art

Reviving the Past | An Elegant Gathering | Circuits of Exchange The Boundaries of Heaven

As with any period of transition, the Republican era (1911-1949) was one of immense change. Political instability coupled with efforts to dramatically rethink Chinese culture, producing an embattled art world in which dynamic experimentation often clashed with the stalwart defense of tradition. The founding of the Republic in 1911, which ended two millennia of imperial governance, created a ruptured socio-political landscape.

In the north, after the failed attempt of Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916) to re-establish the monarchy, the Beiyang Government—a series of warlords with its capital in Beijing—served as the international representative of China. Shanghai emerged as an economic powerhouse in the region. Under a semi-colonial jurisdiction of foreign concessions, it symbolized both the embarrassing demise of China and the exciting prospect of new ideas that poured in from the West. The intellectual leader of the Republic, Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), created his own regional military government in the southern city of Guangzhou. It was from here that Sun’s successor, General Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975), marched north in 1927 and eventually unified much of coastal China under a new Nationalist Party (KMT) government with its capital in Nanjing.

On the cultural front, intellectuals and artists energized by the New Culture Movement (1919–1929) began serious efforts to reform Chinese society. In literary circles, writers promoted the use the vernacular, “common” language (baihua) in their works. Similarly, many visual artists promoted Western realism as an effective method for promoting social change. However, not all artists took such radical measures. Rather, defenders of ink painting viewed it as a cultural resource, calling it “national painting” or guohua as part of a campaign to legitimize traditional arts as essential to the nation. This exhibition ponders the place of guohua artists during this period, and their efforts to make ink painting a viable and responsive cultural product in the quickly changing Chinese society of the early twentieth century.

This exhibition complements the later-twentieth century ink paintings in A Tradition Redefined, which is on view in the Kress Gallery on the fourth floor.

Schooled in brush-and-ink painting during the twilight years of the Qing dynasty, Xiao bridges classical forms of late imperial literati painting and the new directions that reshaped Chinese art in the twentieth century. In this hanging scroll, Xiao references Wang Hui 汪晖 (1632-1717). Together with his teachers Wang Shimin (1592-1680) and Wang Jian 王 鉴(circa 1598-1677), and his contemporary Wang Yuanqi 王原祁 (1642-1715), Wang Hui formed the so-called “Four Wangs”—a group of staunch conservatives who modeled their painting on the works of canonical “masters.” By the Republican period, the school of Four Wangs was deeply criticized by most reform-minded artists as a primary reason for the degeneration of Chinese painting traditions in the late nineteenth century. However, Xiao remained true to his training and advocated the Four Wang approach throughout his career as an art educator. Many of the academies at which Xiao taught were established in the late Qing and Republican periods to bolster modernization and educational reforms. His continued adherence to what was viewed as an outmoded, unresponsive approach to art doomed him to obscurity for much of the twentieth century. However, as an educator Xiao’s legacy is one of vital transmission, instructing a generation of artists in brush techniques that allowed them to find new means of reviving Chinese painting in the twentieth century.

The artistic career of Wu Zheng, also known as Wu Daiqiu 吴待秋, follows the turbulent years of the fledgling Republic of China. Born to a Shanghai commercial painter, in 1903 he moved to Hangzhou to study for the imperial bureaucratic exams. However, following the 1911 Xinhai Revolution which ended Qing dynastic rule and with it the imperial bureaucratic system, Wu began a career as professional ink painter. A prominent member of the Chinese art world, in the 1920s he helped create the Society to Preserve Chinese Calligraphy and Painting (Zhongguo shuhua baocunhui), a key organization in promoting ink painting as an art form of “National Essence” 国粹 (guocui). Then in 1947, together with two other prominent painters, Wu Hufan 吴湖帆 (1894-1968) and Zhang Daqian 张大千 (1899-1983), he led efforts to establish the first art museum in China, the Shanghai Municipal Art Museum. In 1949, shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he passed away from a brain hemorrhage. This work of gnarled pines and narrow valleys, painted in the manner Kun Can 髡殘 (1612-ca 1674)—one of the Four Monk Painters of the Qing—demonstrates his classical training in Chinese painting. As with many poetic inscriptions, Wu creates an audile element that enlivens the painting, linking image and text.

The inscription reads:

An ancient temple leans toward rocky crags,
Yin and Yang unite together,
Where are the reed pipes being played?
The pine wind itself sighs in response.

As Chu-tsing Li observed in his famous study Trends in Modern Chinese Painting, “of all the Chinese painters in the twentieth century, the one single artist who represents the continuity of the literati tradition and who can justly be called ‘the last great literati painter’ is Huang Pin-hung [Binhong].” Born into a wealthy merchant family, Huang was encouraged from an early age to pursue his interest in painting and antiquity. After the family business collapsed in 1888, they relocated to their ancestral home in Anhui, near scenic Mt. Huang. He immersed himself in the local painting style known as the Xin’an School 新安画派. In 1907, as a young intellectual, his opposition to the Qing dynasty forced him to seek refuge in the foreign enclaves of Shanghai, where for two decades he taught and worked as a publisher and editor. Huang’s work and ideas reached maturity during the 1930s and ’40s. In his writings he advocated studying Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1127) period works “to trace the past, in order to initiate the future.” Yet, some of his painting techniques, especially his experiments with the effects of light and his autonomous use of brush and ink, converged with those of French impressionism and modernist oil painting. This work was completed when the artist was 85. Although his eyesight was failing by this time, many consider the unencumbered, expressive brush work of his later years as the crowning achievement of a talented and notable career.

As a central figure in the Beijing art world, Hu Peiheng was instrumental in forging many of the institutional and organizational foundations central to modern Chinese ink painting. In 1918, at the beginning of the May Fourth Movement—a socially conscious, culturally grounded effort to modernize China—Hu joined what would eventually be known as the Chinese Painting Research Association (Zhongguo hua yanjiuhui). Under the exuberant leadership of the Western-educated artist Jin Cheng 金城 (1878-1926), this society organized a series of Sino-Japanese joint exhibitions held in Tokyo and Shanghai during the early 1920s. In 1927, in order to honor the death of Jin Cheng, the association changed its name to Hushe huahui 湖社画会 (The Hushe Painting Association). As part of its mission to “promote art and expound national glory” 提倡艺术阐扬国光, the 200-plus members organized exhibitions of antiquities as well as ancient and contemporary paintings. The society also published Hushe Zazhi, which was edited by Hu Peiheng and remains one of the longest running art publications of its kind in China. For this placid composition, Hu draws on his learned understanding of Chinese art history, evoking the contemplative style of Kun Can 髡残 (1612-circa 1692)—one of the Four Monk painters of the Qing dynasty. The inscription reads:

From the boundaries of Heaven a waterfall flows,
The leaves of maples have already turned crimson.
Worldly thoughts are cleansed by the spring,
While leisurely sitting and gazing at the layers hills.

After Kun Can [1612-1697]

Born into an elite family, Chen showed amazing capacity as a painter from a very early age. He was admitted into the prominent Hushe Painting Society when he was only 16, and spent several industrious years pouring over painting collections in Beijing. Not long after reaching international acclaim with a silver medal awarded at the 1930 Exposition internationale coloniale in Belgium, he moved to Tianjin where he gave private lessons for the remainder of his short life. As part of the lengthy inscription, Chen includes a “ci poem in the tune of Southern Song”:

Cloud and mist benefit longevity
The sun’s rays are splendid at dusk
Flowing water blocks the boats on the river Shan,
Where there is a famous mountain, there is the Peach Blossom Spring.

In the painting, an ocean of spring,
In the mountain, a scene of paradise;
On the peak and in the valley,
Gather together the young and the wise;
All unaware that blossoms and birdsong,
Are prevailing over the Chan Temple on Mimo Cliff.

The effort to modernize traditional ink painting began in southern China during the early decades of the twentieth century, coalescing in what would eventually be known as the Lingnan School. Also known as the Southern School, this style flourished under the creative direction of its chief architect Gao Jianfu 高劍父 (1879-1951). After studying oil painting in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, Gao created works that merged Chinese ink painting with western techniques of light and linear perspective, often incorporating the colorful palette of Nihonga painters in Japan. Heavy atmospheric tones were employed to capture impressionistic observations of actual scenes. This was a departure from the idealized, often highly abstracted landscapes of late nineteenth century painting. It was in the 1930s, during the heyday of this school, that Guan began his career, eventually becoming one of the most important artists of the Lingnan School.

A student of Gao Qifeng 高奇峰 (1889-1933), Zhao was one of the better known Lingnan or Southern School painters of the late twentieth century. He developed a distinctive, angular painting style that is echoed in his sharp, linear calligraphy. Painted in Chengdu—the wartime capital of China during WWII—this work is part of an album made for Dr. William P. Fenn, director of the United Board of Christian Colleges.

After returning from Paris in 1930 where he studied in some of the best art academies of interwar France, Pang emerged as one of the most important if not popular figures of the Shanghai avant-garde. Relocated to Chengdu in 1940 during the Japanese invasion of China, he taught at the Sichuan Academy of Art and spent much of his time touring the Southwest, studying the diverse range of ethnic groups that reside in the region. Pang depicts a Miao woman in this work. The Chinese term Miao describes a transnational community with shared linguistic and cultural roots known various as Hmong/Mong, Hmu, A Hmao, and Kho (Qho) Xiong.