Xu Beihong Research Articles

The development of 20th century realistic oil painting in China

This article analyses a new period in the methods of teaching the fine arts in China at the Central Academy of Fine Arts which, in the mid-twentieth century, began to intensify. Numerous representatives of artistic figures during this period came to China from the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Soviet masters were invited to China to establish courses, creating conditions for the systematic development of realistic painting techniques. Particular attention is paid here to the Soviet artist K. Maksimov’s educational activities. With a particularly logical and effective method of teaching oil painting, he made a significant contribution to the development of Chinese artists’ systemic approach to realism. The consistent process of realism’s influence in Chinese art is also considered in the context of the educational activities of such significant artists of this school as Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren and others. Analysis of K. M. Maksimov’s students’ works presented at the exhibition of graduates of his course, allows one to conclude that a the artist’s pedagogical activities had a special historical significance for China. The author of the article concludes that it was only the hard work and diligence of Maksimov’s students which enabled a quick response of the Academy of Arts to the necessity of educating a new type of Chinese artist which was, from beginning of the 1980s, to dictate reform and a policy of openness. Refs 5. Figs 9.

A TURNING POINT FORGUOHUA?: XU BEIHONG AND TRANSFORMATIVE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SOCIALIST SPIRIT, 1933–1953

This article investigates a transformative encounter between the Chinese artist Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻 1895–1953) and audiences in the Soviet Union during his 1933–1934 exhibitions of Chinese art in Europe. While Xu was exchanging perspectives and addressing questions about Chinese painting, a misreading of one of his paintings sparked in him a reconsideration of content and form that eventually led to the creation of some of the earliest Socialist realist ink-and-color paintings in China. This addition to his repertoire is arguably more significant to his legacy than his most popular works because of the way it heralded the coming Socialist realist evolution in guohua (國畫 national painting) and the manner in which Xu's choices would meet the ideological needs of the Communist Party well before it secured authority over the direction of China's arts. Special attention is paid to situating Xu's personal work vis-a-vis Republican and revolutionary art and explaining how the concurrent political milieu paved the way for both the prestige of his art in popular and cultural memory and the unprecedented stature of his art education methodologies in China's revolutionary times.

A Turning Point for Guohua?: Xu Beihong and Transformative Encounters With the Socialist Spirit, 1933–1953

A Turning Point for Guohua?: Xu Beihong and Transformative Encounters With the Socialist Spirit, 1933–1953

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton As I begin my service as editor of Twentieth-Century China with this issue, I feel honored to have the opportunity to contribute to this great journal and grateful to my immediate predecessor, James Carter, and the members of the Editorial Board for their support. One of my first scholarly articles appeared in volume 22 of the journal, back when it was called Republican China and edited by the late Stephen Averill. Working on revisions of my manuscript with Steve's wise and kindly guidance was a great foundation for a lasting friendship, and it is a pleasure to pay tribute to him in these pages. As I discovered many years ago, a strong journal can help build a scholarly community. In the case of TCC, our work benefits from the institutional framework offered by the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC). I hope to meet many of TCC's authors, reviewers, and readers at future meetings of the HSTCC. In the meantime, please contact me with any questions or suggestions you have about the journal. This issue begins with an excursion into the forests of Yunnan in the early twentieth century. Mark Swislocki analyzes village policies toward forest conservation and shows that village collectivities had a rich understanding of the significance of forests. Their concerns differed from those of national- and provincial-level forestry officials and activists, who were in the process of creating new tools to try to shape forests, including legislation and educational initiatives. Swislocki effectively highlights the value of forest history as a pathway to study the dynamics of community- and state-building, as well as for understanding China's environment. The next two articles explore aspects of culture before and after the year 1949. Weihong Du identifies a pivotal moment in the career of painter Xu Beihong that she argues had a transformative effect in the history of Chinese painting. Much struck by the comments of some of the Soviet citizens who came to see an exhibition of Chinese art that he took to Russia in 1934, Xu Beihong widened his painterly vision to take in working people and social struggle, creating works that helped constitute the canon of socialist art in the PRC. Guo Wu's article focuses on the Socialist Education movement of the early 1960s and its aftermath, showing how "bottom-up" history took shape and created a standard type of "recalling-bitterness" narrative, "blurring the line between fact and fiction." This development, Wu shows, is important for, inter alia, understanding the worldview of the Red Guard generation. The Korean War is the subject of the fourth article. Michael Sheng provides a detailed analysis of Mao's thinking about participation in the war and war goals, marshaling evidence to show that his decisions were influenced not only by global and domestic events but by his own emotional reactions to these events. Sheng's [End Page 193] work contributes to the worldwide scholarly effort to penetrate the secrets of Cold War politics and assess how the personalities of its major actors affected its history. Our book review editor, Susan Fernsebner, has worked with reviewers to bring us assessments of four new books in the China field, on topics including life and folklore in a north China Catholic community, Zhang Taiyan's Buddhism, opium consumption in republican Guangzhou, and contemporary society and culture in the PRC. The reviews are listed in the printed journal and available to all as a pdf online at www.maneyonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1179/1521538514Z.00000000049. I am grateful to Susan for her contributions to the journal, as well as to James Carter, Maura Cunningham, and the staff at Maney for educating me and helping to make a smooth editorial transition. [End Page 194] Copyright © 2014 Twentieth-Century China

Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement Rossella Ferrari (bio) Xiaobing Tang . Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xii, 300 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-52-024909-7. With this impeccably researched and beautifully illustrated volume, Xiaobing Tang has written the definitive account of a significant yet understudied topic within English-language scholarship on China: the modern woodcut movement that revolutionized Chinese art in the early 1930s. Tang traces its genesis and subsequent dissemination through the Nanjing decade (1927-1937), specifically, from the inauguration of Nanjing as the new Nationalist capital in 1928 to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. The first three chapters reconstruct the historical and institutional context of the early decades of the twentieth century, addressing the key artistic movements and personalities that populated the cultural-artistic field of modern China in the prewar era. Alongside visual artists such as Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, and Xu Beihong, the activities of prominent public intellectuals and writers such as Cai Yuanpei, Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian, and Guo Moruo are also surveyed. One chief protagonist of Tang's engaging narrative is Lu Xun, who is widely acknowledged as the "spiritual patron of the woodcut movement" (p. 4). All three chapters begin with the year 1928, a crucial historical moment in which artistic production started to be institutionalized by the newly-established Nanjing government. They vividly flesh out the excitement, energy, intellectual diversity, and animated spirit of discussion of the time—especially in the commercialized and cosmopolitan environment of Shanghai. Chapter 1 examines various proposals for art instruction on a national scale, in particular Cai Yuanpei's advocacy of "aesthetic education" (meiyu), and traces the emergence of a notion of "art movement" since the second half of the 1920s. Tang details the major debates of the period relating to the modernization of the Chinese visual arts and highlights the decisive role played by Chinese students in Japan and Europe in the introduction and dissemination of foreign styles and aesthetic concepts. The question of function or purpose of the artwork, which constitutes a central aspect of avant-garde theory, is repeatedly addressed in this and other chapters, and so are related notions of autonomy and "art for art" (the "ivory tower") as opposed to "art for life" (the "crossroads," p. 35). This moment was critical in the history of Chinese art, as new trends and schools emerged and cultural producers constantly redefined their historical mission and social role. The "meaningfulness and consequentiality of art" became persistent concerns (p. 3), and increasingly greater emphasis was laid on art's closeness to life praxis and on the artist's direct involvement in social reform. The woodcut movement, [End Page 271] too, came to address questions of function and purpose, but their responses and approaches to contemporary events "would be critically different" (p. 4) from those of other promoters of aesthetic modernity and cultural reform. This difference, along with its anti-institutional disposition, political drive, and innovative visuality, became the key marker of distinction of the modern woodcut community as "a truly avant-garde movement" (p. 218). Chapter 2 deals specifically with the literary field and its intersections with the visual arts. The intellectual journeys of Tian Han and Guo Moruo from Japan to China, their subsequent involvement with the Creation Society, and its shifting ideological orientations testify to the increasing appeal of left-wing political theories and artistic conceptions since the late 1920s. Emergent notions of proletarian and revolutionary art and literature, also shaped by Marxist movements in Japan, paved the way for the advent of the first generation of modern printmakers in the early 1930s. Chapter 3 introduces Lu Xun's long-standing involvement with the visual arts field, his interest in modern Japanese and European prints, and his advocacy of the "creative woodcut" (chuangzuo muke) as a truly modern, vigorous, and revolutionary art form—a belief that would direct his unremitting patronage of this medium until his death in 1936. The key artists, exhibitions, and publications that contributed to the flourishing and expansion of the movement are comprehensively surveyed in chapters 4 and...

Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (review)

REVIEWS Julia F. Andrews. Painters and Politics in the People's Republic ofChina, 1949-1979. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. xv, 568 pp. Hardcover $55.00. Julia Andrews' chronological survey ofthe practice ofpainting and closely related arts in Maoist China joins a body ofrecent work—books, articles, and catalogs— on twentieth-century Chinese art that is much richer than it was when she began her research. Happily, her work is praiseworthy not only because it is pioneering but also because it is clearly organized, convincing in its selection ofkey events and works, and painstakingly researched. As well as making excellent use ofwritten materials, Andrews was able to conduct interviews with an impressive number of artists. Her timely collecting offirsthand accounts of artistic life in the early decades of the People's Republic of China is a contribution in itself. The only disappointment here is that interviewees are identified by alphabetic code, rather than name, but given the political and personal sensitivities involved, this is understandable . Andrews introduces her project with the statement that after 1949, art in the People's Republic of China developed in ways that made it different in style and subject matter from the art both ofthe West and of other Chinese societies, so that by 1979, when China again became accessible to the outside world, art celebrated within China was judged to be either bad or incomprehensible by outsiders . For those who would like a fuller evocation ofthis particular moment, "The Ten Frustrations, or, Waving and Smiling across the Great Cultural Abyss," an account of a visit to China in early 1980 by the perceptive but frankly confused American art critic Lucy Lippard, comes to mind.1 Fifteen years later, the sense of shock and dismay has faded, but Andrews is right in reminding her readers ofthe distinctiveness of the cultural order she will examine. In order to clarify the critical standards and artistic goals ofMaoist China, Andrews chooses to focus on how governmental arts policies and bureaucratic structures—the art academy system , the Chinese Artists Association, and the art publishing system—shaped artists ' careers and guided the production ofparticular works. This approach is both© 1995 by University obvious and welcome, and it allows her to craft an account ofart in the Mao ofHawai'i Pressyears that will be accessible and useful to readers from a range ofbackgrounds and disciplines. 388 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 The first chapter gives a brief account of the Chinese art world in the 1930s and '40s, singling out "revolutionaries" and "academics" as the forces most influential after 1949. Jiang Feng (1910-1982), a left-wing woodcut artist who became a prominent arts administrator, is the paradigmatic revolutionary. Lin Fengmian (1900-1991) and Xu Beihong (1895-1953) represent the academics. Xu was vehemently antimodernist and wanted Chinese art education to follow the European academic realist tradition. His brand of realism was appreciated by the communists , and Xu was invited to stay on as head of the National Beiping Arts College after 1949. Lin, who supported both Modernism and traditional Chinese painting during his time as director ofthe National Hangzhou Art Academy, was marginalized. The second chapter covers the reform of the art world by the new government from 1949 to 1953. Jiang Feng was a central figure, serving as spokesman of Party policy and spearheading the reorganization ofthe art academy system. The Beiping Arts College welcomed the new regime and became the Central Academy of Fine Arts, flagship ofthe new art system. But the "reform" ofthe Hangzhou Arts Academy was less smooth. In all the academies, popularization was the main task. That is, staff and students were directed to create new art that would appeal to the masses by taking extant popular forms as their models. Andrews makes clear that even committed advocates ofpopularization did not see much intrinsic aesthetic value in these forms. Rather, Dong Xiwen's oil painting Founding ofthe Nation represented the high-status image of the early 1950s. Traditional Chinese painting , or guohua, neither "popular" nor "realistic," was believed to have little future. In the period 1953-1957, discussed in chapter 3, Andrews identifies three main trends: first...