Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century

By Michael Sullivan

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520337527

Michael Sullivan

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Chinese Art

in the Twentieth Century

A. Huang Pin-hung» Blue Landscape

(Painted at the age of 89)

Chinese Ink and Colour

Chinese Art

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

by Michael Sullivan

with a foreword by

SIR HERBERT READ

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles:

© 1959 Michael Sullivan

Printed in Great Britain

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angelest California

English Edition

Faber and Faber Ltd., London, England

For

MY FATHER

Preface

MY only qualification for interposing these few words between the reader and Mr. Sullivan’s text is my personal knowledge of the author and admiration of his great qualities as a sensitive scholar and scholarly critic, and these qualities will be obvious enough without my recommendation. I might, however, be allowed to draw attention to the universal interest of this particular subject. Chinese art in the twentieth century might at first sight seem to be a specialist’s field, and a hasty look at the illustrations will not reveal their deep significance for the Western public. Too many of them seem merely to suggest an uneasy compromise between two traditions, those of the East and the West. But the more we study this new art of China, the more complex and interesting it becomes. Western art in this same twentieth century has evolved from naturalism to abstraction, and though the change has been revolutionary, it has been accomplished without interference from an alien culture. It is true that some Oriental influences did penetrate Europe; the decisive effect of Japanese prints on artists like Gauguin and Van Gogh is a well-known example. But a painter like Cézanne, the pivot on which the whole revolution turns, always insisted that he was reanimating the European tradition, doing Poussin again after nature, etc., and other exotic influences, such as African or Mexican sculpture, are always absorbed into a stronger current flowing from indigenous sources. In China during the same historical period a very different transformation has taken place—an attempt has been made to escape from the oldest artistic tradition in human history and to see the world with Western eyes. In so far as this ambition (comparable, perhaps, with the ambition to imitate Western methods of industrial production, to wear Western clothes, etc.) leads to an imitative art (with only a slight difference of accent) the Western critic will be inclined to deplore it as one more example of the general levelling and lowering of taste and sensibility due to the efficiency of modern methods of communication. The intenser values in art, he may feel, are the product of more intimate pressures. To come across a work of art in the Western style in Peking or Shanghai may give one the same sense of disillusionment that one experiences on meeting some too obvious representative of one’s own country in similar places. The currency of art is debased if it is robbed of its native ore.

Into this situation, complicated enough as a cultural or aesthetic phenomenon, there enters the ideological demand for an art that is popular, even an art that is propagandist, at the service of a political party. Mr. Sullivan deals only briefly with this factor, towards the end of his book, but it is an ever-present problem in Communist China. It may be, as Mr. Sullivan suggests, that the Chinese artist has too strong a sense of history, and therefore of his native artistic traditions, to impose any rigid orthodoxy of socialist realism—neverthe less, presenting itself as it does as a further degree of Westernization, or as the Chinese would say to himself, of modernization, there is a certain inevitable force in this political argument, and one cannot deny that some of the results have rather more artistic merit than the politically determined art of other Communist countries.

Meanwhile Western art, in its most advanced phases, has come to a point where it meets the ancient Chinese tradition. As the East turns to the West, the West turns to the East. Action-painting, as practised by many European and American artists, has adopted the principle of visual abstraction, the ancient Chinese tradition described by Mr. Sullivan in his second chapter, most particularly the principle of ku-fu yung-pi, the quality which gives the art of calligraphy its beauty and vitality.

Some of the words used by Mr. Sullivan to describe the art of calligraphy could be applied without change to the symbolic abstractions of Western artists like Soulages and Ubac, Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey. It is not surprising that this new phase of Western painting has had a rapid expansion among contemporary Japanese artists, and in that manner the Eastern tradition has completed a cycle of development.

Mr. Sullivan’s book, therefore, far from being a specialist study, illuminates the condition of art throughout the world. He quite rightly describes the Chinese situation as ‘an age of transition’; everywhere in the world (except perhaps in Russia) art is in the same state of turmoil, and our confident expectation that out of this turmoil a new era of creative achievement will emerge is nowhere so well founded as in this great renaissant country where art has always been an integral part of the conception of culture.

HERBERT READ

Acknowledgements

THE material for this book has been gathered partly in conversations with the artists themselves, partly by correspondence, and partly from such scattered articles, reviews and biographical notices as have appeared from time to time. The difficulty of checking information was greatly increased when my own original notes were lost in a train between Chester and London shortly after I returned from China. Moreover Chinese artists with whom I have spent many delightful hours in studios or tea-houses were often, to my intolerant Western mind, maddeningly vague about dates and details. To them, the fact that a certain painter did or did not capture the spirit of the old masters was more important than the question of whether he was, or was not, born in Wuhsi in 1908.While this attitude was of course perfectly right, it proved a constant source of frustration to the historian. Sometimes, to increase the difficulty, the artist in question was found to have deliberately juggled with his own age. A notable case is that of Ch’i Pai-shih, who as a young man had been told by a fortune-teller that on reaching his seventy-fifth year he would enter a phase of evil influences, but that he could cheat the fate decreed for him by Heaven by skipping two years, which he accordingly did. So it is that, although born in 1863, seventy-five years later he had reached the venerable age of seventy-seven. In many cases, not even this much information is procurable.

I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of the artists whose work is represented in this book, and who gave me much valuable information. I should like particularly to mention P’ang Hsün-ch’in, Liu Hai-su, Fu Pao-shih, Wu Tso-jen, Liu K’ai-ch’u, Hsiao Ting, Tseng Yu- ho, Chang An-chih, P’an Yu-liang, Hua T’ien-yu and the late Hsti Pei-hung. I am also very grateful to Professor Yüan Chia-hua, Professor Serge Elisséeff, Arthur Waley and Professor Ivor Richards, all of whom read the manuscript in whole or in part and made many helpful suggestions. For permission to use photographs I am indebted to William Acker, Dr. Gustav Ecke and Mrs. Ecke (Tseng Yu-ho), William Fenn, Alice Boney, the University of Malaya Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the French Ministry of Education, Marc Vaux (Paris), A. C. Cooper (London), and most of all to the artists themselves. When the photographs for the illustrations were taken, many of the paintings were still in the possession of the artists. If they have since passed into the hands of private owners I hope they will accept this acknowledgement.

To Geoffrey Hedley are due my special thanks for the great trouble he took in securing photographs and information for me after I left China. In a period when conditions were growing daily more chaotic, he found time to seek out artists, borrow their paintings and take them to be photographed in the Lister Institute, Shanghai, and in addition collected valuable biographical data, often with great difficulty.

My gratitude is due to the Harvard-Yenching Institute for financial assistance towards the publication of this book. I should also like to thank Sir Herbert Read for writing the Preface.

Finally, I owe a fourfold debt to my wife,—for detaining me four more years in China after I had made other plans, for enabling me to know many Chinese to whom I would otherwise have been a foreigner, for her work on the book itself, and finally—to borrow a phrase that Roger Fry used under similar circumstances—for her gentle but persistent pressure’ without which this book would have remained forever unfinished. Had she not insisted on the present dedication, the book would have been dedicated to her.

A Note on the Romanization of Chinese Words

The modified Wade-Giles system is used throughout except in the case of well-known place names, for which I have used the Chinese Post Office spelling.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Contents

CHAPTER I The Rebirth of China

CHAPTER II Traditional Chinese Painting

CHAPTER III The Modern Movement

CHAPTER IV The Realist Movement

(i) WOODCUT

(ii) CARTOON

CHAPTER V Sculpture and the Decorative Arts

(i) SCULPTURE

(ii) THE DECORATIVE ARTS

CHAPTER VI An Age of Transition

APPENDIX I Leading Chinese Art Schools and Societies, 1910-1949

APPENDIX II A Biographical Index of Modern Chinese Artists

Index

CHAPTER I

The Rebirth of China

In the summer of 1944 the All-China Art Association organized its second national exhibition in Chungking. Pictures chosen for the exhibition were to be hung in two halls, ‘Chinese Painting’ (kuo-bud) in one hall, ‘Western Painting’ (hsi-yang hud) in the other. P’ang Hsün-ch’in, several of whose works are reproduced in this book, submitted three or four pictures to the kuo-hua section. The panel of judges took one look at them and suggested that he take them across’to the Western department. He did so, only to be told that they belonged with the traditional paintings in the other hall. The organizers then started an argument among themselves as to where P‘ang Hsün-ch’in’s pictures should be put. While the artist stood patiently waiting for them to decide, he too began to wonder where, precisely, he belonged. Was he really a Chinese painter at all?

This little incident is more significant than it might at first appear, for behind it lies a situation that reaches back through the style of the artist into his training and experience and that of all modern Chinese painters who have not wholly ignored the tide of history. It is the dilemma of all oriental artists and intellectuals who have found themselves heirs to one tradition and claimants to another. It reveals, in fact, a crisis that has cleft Chinese culture, and to a greater or lesser extent the cultures of all Asian countries—from top to bottom. Forty years ago this crisis was thought to be causing China to disintegrate. Books were appearing with such titles as The Break-up ofChinat or What’s Wrong with China? Now it is clear that this spiritual conflict was not a symptom of disintegration but the first stirrings of a rebirth. The struggle between East and West, between one tradition and the other, which is taking place within Asian society can now be seen as a generative process; but, until it is resolved, there can be no rest for the man of feeling and imagination. Something of this tension, this sense of being cut adrift from one tradition and yet not fully masters of the other, must appear in the work of artists discussed in this book.

It is both characteristic and symbolical that the violent shock of the Opium War of 1840-2 should have marked the beginning of Western influence on modern China. Two centuries earlier, the Jesuits at the Imperial court had impressed a small circle of scholars with their skill in astronomy and geography, and had even made converts among the imperial household. But subsequent trade embassies and Catholic missions had failed to make any further impression on an empire whose self-sufficiency was admirably expressed in Ch’ien Lung’s celebrated letter to George III.1 But the struggle that culminated in the first and second Opium Wars was different. Not only was China’s sovereignty threatened, but it was threatened by those very barbarians whom she had hitherto despised. The Taiping Rebellion which followed revealed even more clearly to her leaders China’s dangerous weakness, and the urgency of adopting Western military techniques. Two great statesmen, Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang, seeing the dangers, set about bringing the army and navy up-to-date. Arsenals and factories were opened, the first steamship was built on Chinese soil by an American-returned student in 1868, the first permanent railway laid in 1880 and the first telegraph, from Shanghai to Tientsin, in the following year. Japan was by this time well on the road to Westernization. Her highly-centralized military dictatorship could ensure that the most radical reforms would be enforced quickly and ruthlessly, whereas in China the more indolent régime lacked both the will and the authority to impose the reforms which might—and in fact eventually did—contribute to its downfall.

The modernization of China, in spite of the hostility and resistance of most sections of Chinese society, arose as the direct outcome of her humiliation by external and internal reverses, and it was hastened, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, by three main agencies. The first was the coming to China of foreign engineers and technologists who built railways, arsenals and harbours. The second was the practice, started in the sixties and seventies, of sending promising students abroad to study. The third, and most powerful, was the flood of translations of foreign books that appeared in the years following the Taiping Rebellion. To begin with, these translations were mostly associated with technological institutions such as the Kiangnan Arsenal, and dealt chiefly with science, engineering and mathematics, which were just then being introduced into the schools for the first time. But gradually the realization spread that the West had more to offer than railways and telegraph lines. K'ang Yu-wei and other leaders sought to find the meaning behind the techniques that were being imported so indiscriminately, and thus interest gradually began to spread to Western philosophy and political theory. Yen Fu, sent to England to study navigation, translated Huxley, Spencer and Mill; Darwin’s evolutionary theory made a profound impression and was bitterly attacked by the conservatives. And gradually, under the influence of the Western scientific approach, a