Guan Liang, Tan Huamu, and Ding Yanyong: Their Modern Art Practice and the Phenomenon of the “Tōyō Review”

Abstract

During the late Taishō period, three Guangdong-born Chinese artists, Guan Liang 關良 (1900–1986), Tan Huamu 譚華牧 (1896–1976), and Ding Yanyong 丁衍庸 (1902–1978), were studying in Tokyo, Japan. After their return to China, they engaged daily in a kind of cross-media practice in oil and ink paintings that serves to remind us of the need to rethink the cultural experiment that China’s modern art movements have undertaken since the 1920s, and which has thus far been overlooked. In the face of the sudden rise of attention towards literati paintings in the Japanese art world, and in the midst of the Western modern art currents that were centered in Paris, these Japan-trained artists, with their comparative cultural perspectives, began to re-examine their own cultural tradition and form a cross-media creative model with an intrinsic cultural reflectiveness and innovative outlook. Moreover, the phenomenon of the “Tōyō review” 東洋回顧 that emerged from the intense interactions between the cultures of East and West not only brought about the concept of “Chinese painting,” but also led to the rise of the notion of the “superiority of Chinese art.”