Session 77: Modern Institutions of Art in Republican China

Organizer: Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University

Chair: Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego

Discussant: Christopher A. Reed, Ohio State University

Keywords: China, art, institutions, modern, Republican.

The collapse of the Chinese imperial system and accompanying institutional changes during the first two decades of the twentieth century severely challenged the survival of Chinese painting and pictorial art. Not only court painting, but also the learned practice of scholar-amateur art, and even the traditional printing of woodblock illustrations and New Year’s pictures, were all forced to the edge of obsolescence. As artists and artisans lost their previous economic and social support, the very purposes that had nurtured Chinese art for a millennium came into question. Yet, despite all odds, a combination of new institutions, public and private, ranging from colleges and publishing houses to professional societies and art clubs, emerged in the 1920s and 1930s with a diverse set of claims, and offering real support, for the theoretical and practical necessity of painting and pictorial art in modern China. This period has been little studied by art historians, despite its foundational importance in the modern Chinese art world. The focus of the panel is the creation of new artistic institutions, or institution-like structures, within the Republican period art world, whether physically, such as a school, museum, or exhibition space, or conceptually, such as an informal art club. The speakers will present new art historical research on four major (and often competing) genres of modern Chinese art, oil painting, ink painting, modern woodcuts, and folk art, from the perspective of institutional developments of the Republican period.

The Institutionalization of Oil Painting as a Chinese Art,1920–1935

Ruilin Chen and Tongyun Yin, Tsinghua University, Beijing

Although oil painting was introduced by missionaries to the Chinese court in the Qianlong era, it was not taken seriously as a medium for art until the twentieth century. Within the space of about fifty years, however, it became the most prestigious form of contemporary art, a status it enjoys today. How did this happen? Its ascent began in the 1920s when an elite group of Chinese artists educated in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. simultaneously returned to China. Under Cai Yuanpei’s direction, two national art colleges in Beijing and Hangzhou were founded, and European-trained educators of distinctly different viewpoints were appointed to head them. This paper will explore specific ways in which the new institutional structures, aimed at modernizing China’s culture and society, effectively changed the nature of Chinese art. The modern art schools of Beijing and the Shanghai region, led by art educators such as Xu Beihong, Lin Fengmian, Wang Jiyuan, Liu Haisu, and Chen Baoyi, and aided by new public venues such as galleries and journals, were key factors in institutionalizing oil painting in the decade of the 1920s. By examining the larger meaning of changes made in the art school curricula at institutions such as Beijing Art School, Hangzhou National Art Academy, and Shanghai Art School, evolving notions of Chinese modernity, and of oil painting’s place within it, may be defined for the visual arts.

The Theoretical Transformation of Ink Painting into China’s National Art in the 1920s and 1930s

Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego

At the beginning of the twentieth century, ink painting in China. was challenged by the introduction of Western painting into the new Chinese educational system. Moreover, its very survival was actively criticized by prominent cultural theorists, who chose it as a symbol of Confucian backwardness. As a result, China’s strong native artistic tradition was completely excluded from the early art education curricula of the 1910s and 1920s. This paper will examine the process by which China’s leading ink painters in the 1920s and 1930s overcame these practical and theoretical challenges. By introducing guohua into the new art-school curriculum and by establishing Chinese art history as an academic subject in the 1920s, painter-historians such as Chen Hengque, Zheng Wuchang, Huang Binhong, and Pan Tianshou provided the theoretical support necessary for the viability of ink painting in modern China. The theoretical framework and institutional structures established in that period provided crucial structures that enabled it to rebound and to survive. By reinvigorating the practice of ink painting in the 1920s and 1930s, it led to a series of major Chinese art exhibitions in China, Japan, and Europe. In this context, the new ink painting served as a Chinese response to modernity. The conceptual framework that supported the revival of guohua was so effective both in domestic and international terms that it was able to survive in the cultural frameworks established in both post-1949 China and Nationalist Taiwan.

Bringing Folk In: Audience and Display in the Folk Picture Exhibition of 1937

Felicity Lufkin, University of California, Berkeley

The Folk Picture Exhibition, held in Hangzhou in 1937, was the first large, formal public exhibition of folk art held in China. The "folk pictures" it presented were cheap, colorful woodcut prints, mainly of religious subjects, also known as New Year pictures and paper joss. These sorts of prints had long been part of the visual culture of the ordinary Chinese household, but both their categorization as folk art and their display in the modern space of the exhibition hall were new. In imperial China literati had largely ignored these prints, never thinking of them as art; in the new Republic some government officials had condemned them as relics of superstition incompatible with modern progress. The organizers of this exhibition, however, succeeded in reframing them as materials worthy of display and study. In this project, the exhibition organizers drew on several different sources of institutional support, including both academic affiliations and the periodical press. In addition, they deliberately drew attention to the institution of exhibition itself, implying that the unorthodox materials they put on display could both transform the exhibition as an event, and be transformed by the act of exhibition. By looking at this exhibition, we can see not simply how the category of folk art was constructed in the Republican period, but also how interactions between formal and informal institutions, even some apparently marginal to the mainstream art world, shaped ideas about art.

The Modern Print Society and Institutionalization of the Woodblock Print in 1930s China

Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University

The Modern Print Society, founded in Guangzhou in 1934 by a group of young Cantonese artists who were educated in Shanghai and Tokyo, and informally mentored through correspondence with Lu Xun, was of seminal importance in establishing the structure of publications, exhibitions, and communications that led to the modern woodcut’s recognition as a legitimate form of modern art. Their success was such that their art not only became the art of resistance in Nationalist regions after 1937, but was so well-regarded in the liberated zones that by the end of the war it was able to claim to be the art of the Chinese revolution itself. Only late in his long life did Li Hua, founder of the Modern Print Society, make mention of the group’s connections with the Tokyo modernist "White and Black Society" (Shiro to Kuro), and the active program of exchange publications between the two groups. This paper will examine the impact of Japanese modernist groups on the formation of the modern Chinese print in the 1930s.