A Study on China’s Lingnan School of Painting: Centered on its Revolutionary and Eclectic Natures

Abstract

In the first half of the 20th century, the Lingnan School of Painting was active in the Chinese painting world for more than 40 years. Its founders, Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, and Chen Shuren, studied in Japan in their early years and followed Dr. Sun Yat-sen in his “political revolution”. After returning to China, they took on a wide range of disciples through art education, thus forming a school of their own. They applied their revolutionary ideas to the field of art and launched an “artistic revolution” movement. By absorbing the modeling techniques of Western and Japanese paintings, they carried out the “eclectic mix of Chinese and Western styles” reform of Chinese painting and tried to break then China’s conservative and rigid feudal culture with this new type of painting so as to realize their goal of “saving the nation with art”. The Lingnan School of Painting had a far-reaching historical impact and played an important role in the development of Chinese society and art.