Red is not the only colour

Art and Artists of 20th Century China

December 6, 1996

The visitor in search of art during the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-76) would have found the galleries shut and only a handful of landscapes on view in airports and hotel lobbies. Otherwise all that remained was posters and collective art. In these, Mao strode Christ-like over the hills to make revolution. Every famous artist had disappeared. Within two years of Mao's death in 1976, the art scene was transformed. Scholar artists were no longer obliged to place electric pylons in impossible positions on their landscapes. A new generation of young artists, taking "Picasso as our model and Kollwitz as our guide,'' produced nudes, self-portraits, impressionist and abstract lookalikes to shock and baffle the public.

One of the many merits of Michael Sullivan's superb history is to put this recent period in the context of earlier decades. The story of 20th-century Chinese art has been throughout "a complex interplay of aesthetics, politics, cultural and social history'' as it sought to escape "the stifling grip of tradition''. Long before the Red Guards, the poet artist Wen Yiduo wrote that traditional art was "a ditch of dead water".

Browsing among western ideas and styles could produce very bad art, as Sullivan observes honestly. The same would happen in the 1950s when Soviet social realism became the obligatory flavour - and more recently in much of the experimental art of the 1980s.

Yet some painters understood that while Chinese art was moving westwards, modern western art was also moving eastwards and that there might be common ground. Sullivan suggests that when war with Japan came in 1937, Chinese art was on the verge of breakthrough into a mature modernism. Instead, this was delayed for another half century - and has still to be fully achieved.

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Sullivan's narrative history is punctuated by some excellent profiles of individual artists, many of whom he has known personally. Again he avoids conventional piety. How refreshing to be told that Xu Beihong in Nanjing, well known in Chinese restaurants for his galloping horses, was "not an artist of the first rank''. By contrast Liu Haisu, Xu's prewar rival in Shanghai, kept up his exuberance to the end. Sullivan decribes one of his last pictures "drenched with brilliant reds and mineral blues.'' Liu signed it with the defiant words "I am only 85!" In earlier decades as well, Chinese artists were no strangers to political danger. Socially conscious wood engravers, inspired by German expressionism, were targeted by Chiang Kai-shek's secret police. In 1931, 23 of them were chained together and shot. Sullivan reminds us too that radical art during the war against Japan was not confined to the communist base of Yan'an. There were epic migrations: heading for Kunming, the Hangzhou Academy was set on by bandits and bombed from the air.

The past 15 years have seen a profusion of forms, which Sullivan describes with a lively use of anecdote, making allowances for the isolation and naivety of many younger artists. The mid-1980s was the high tide of the "forward movement of Chinese art'' in every realm from hyper-realism to the abstract. Those elders who had survived now emerged to re-instate the wenrenhua - the art of the literati. Sullivan notes that this can be full of invention, but too often is "an easy short cut in which shallow thought can be hailed as spontaneity". There are plenty of inferior scholar-artists these days producing works at high prices for tourists.

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By the late 1980s most of the nonconformist artists had moved abroad. The new tide was dashed on the rocks of the Beijing massacre. Some artists are deeply scarred by those terrible days. Others employ pop-art to re-interpret Maoist politics "almost affectionately'', says Sullivan, "as part of Chinese folk culture".

This fascinating story, told here so well, arrives at the 1990s with the emergence of performance art, conceptual art and multimedia presentations. Has tradition been discarded and Chinese art become universal art? I suspect for most artists it is not so simple. After such a long journey through this epic history, their cultural belongings cannot just be left behind in the luggage office.

John Gittings, a writer on China, formed the Chinese Visual Arts collection at the School of Languages, University of Westminster.

Art and Artists of 20th Century China

Author - Michael Sullivan
ISBN - 0 520 07556 0
Publisher - University of California Press
Price - £50.00
Pages - 392

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