Search

In the first half of the twentieth century, members of the public in Britain were familiar with traditional Chinese painting, but not work produced by living artists from Republican China. Public museums did not become enthusiastic about acquiring twentieth-century Chinese pictorial art until the 1960s. Substantial gifts of modern Chinese painting and calligraphy presented by private collectors to the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in the 1990s have contributed to the proliferation of associated exhibitions, illustrated catalogues and scholarly activities. This paper explores the visions and strategies of British museums in forming their collections of modern Chinese painting in the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the institutional histories, acquisition policies and the collections of Chinese pictorial art in the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in order to examine the impetus for initiating new collecting strategies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It also investigates the contribution of individual curators in enhancing the British understanding of modern Chinese painting through acquisitions, exhibitions and publications from the 1960s to the 1990s, which laid a strong foundation for developing vigorous programmes of contemporary collecting and display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1930, the British public took a stronger interest in early Chinese art than in works produced in the pre-modern and modern periods. However, China's cultural diplomacy in Britain during war-time, as well as the interactions between collectors, scholars and artists of both countries, helped refresh Occidental understanding of the tradition and recent achievements of Chinese art. This article examines the ways in which modern Chinese painting was perceived, collected and displayed in Britain from 1930 to 1980 – the formative period for the collecting and connoisseurship of modern Chinese art in the West. It analyses exhibitions of twentieth-century Chinese painting held in museums and galleries in order to map trends and identify the major parties who introduced the British public to a new aspect of Chinese pictorial art. It also discusses prominent Chinese painters' connections with British curators, scholars and dealers, who helped establish their reputation in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the article "Chinese Paintings at the National Library" written by Walter Benjamin in late 1937 after visiting an exhibit in Paris which was published in January 1938 in a monthly literary magazine Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle. It states that Benjamin mentions a few ideas that are central to the art of painting in China such as painting of ideas and ink games.

This research focuses on Pan Tianshou (1897-1971), whose life and work shows how one traditional Chinese artist handled crisis in the dramatic change of art policies during the early People's Republic of China period. His adaptability and mobility in the political hierarchy vividly reinforces how politics has a great impact on art, culture and society. Pan actively faced the radical conversion of artistic policies and began to experiment with a new art form by combining two traditional genres, bird-and-flower and landscape. He was also one of the few artists who continued to produce Chinese ink paintings, to develop a new art form by integrating of traditional and contemporary needs, and to spread the importance of traditional Chinese ink painting to young Chinese artists and the people. These external pressures, thus, allowed Pan to generate his political expression--the unification of traditional and contemporary aesthetics and a new development of art forms for the present society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy's 1958 brush-and-ink painting The People Eat for Free was acclaimed as an exemplary work of collective production (jiti chuangzuo) in the early People's Republic of China. Within a history of theorizing communal creativity, collective production began as a practice of populist nationalism and became the medium of participatory socialism. An examination of the multiple versions and drafts surrounding the painting reveals the contested process of collective production and renders visible intersecting forms of state, official, artistic, and mass participation, while demonstrating the experimental nature of the socialist representational project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on career development and artworks by artist Chuang Che. Topics discussed include his first solo exhibition at the National Arts Hall in Taipei, Taiwan in 1965; characteristics of his paintings, his graduation in arts from the National Taiwan Normal University in 1958, abstract quality in Chinese painting, and role of the art organization Fifth Moon Society for innovations in Chinese painting.

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-à-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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Michael Sullivan (1916-2013) bequeathed to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum a collection of twentieth-century paintings that the museum lauds as "the single greatest private collection of contemporary Chinese art in the West" (Telegraph 2013). This essay remembers Professor Sullivan, his wife Khoan (d. 2003), and the collection that they parented over a period of almost seventy years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the best known painters of the 20th century, Qi Baishi came from a poor family and owed his education to scholars who had recognized his talent and determination. This article tries to answer the question of how much of the literati (wenren) tradition can be traced in Qi Baishi’s works. Although they only form a small portion of his oeuvre, he made paintings which correspond to the literati topics; whether they also comply with the literati aesthetics is more ambiguous, however. Six paintings from the collection of the National Gallery in Prague were selected and analyzed in search of the answer.

The article focuses on the introduction of photography and etymology of the terms for photography in nineteenth century China. The article discusses ways in which the Chinese believed photography to be a Western style of portrait painting, the introduction of photography to China through Hong Kong following the first Opium War and the practice of retouching photographs or adding calligraphy. The article goes on to discusses the sense of wonder suggested in the terms the Chinese used to describe photography, including the use of the word for mirror, and the speed of photography relative to portrait painting.

This article examines the transition of Chinese painting from literati painting, exclusive to the scholar-amateur or scholar elite--the backbone of the Chinese traditional culture--to a new genre, guohua (national or traditional Chinese painting). It studies the role of artistic institutions in this process, using the Shanghai Fine Arts College as an example. This research draws upon a number of primary sources to shed light on the way in which modern art schools institutionalized literati painting, and the rationale of guohua education in the Chinese Painting Department in the College. This research shows that while competing with professional artists teaching in private studios, the College developed its own pattern of guohua education which preserved literati painting principles and enhanced efficiency in teaching technical skills but was intrinsically weak in inculcating the scholarly spiritual content of literati painting. Thus, the College played a role in developing a style of semantically exhausted literati painting known as guohua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of scale as an artistic device, noting that artworks are scaled according to a predetermined rule or a standard of judgment. The relationship between an artistic work's capacity to communicate a specific agenda and the way it uses scale is discussed. The author pays special attention to the social and political implications of the scale used in art through examples of 20th-century Chinese paintings, with particular focus paid to a large painting depicting Mount Yandang by the artist Pan Tianshou.

In 1970, Shi Lu (1919–82) created a group of paintings while suffering from a schizophrenic condition; they were the first paintings he worked on after his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. These historical and pathological circumstances have formed a blind spot shifting the paintings outside the scope of art-historical analysis. This essay pulls them back into the context of artistic and intellectual discourse of Maoist China by reading the paintings and inscriptions not as notations of ‘madness’, but primarily as artistic statements. The paintings are not only expressions of psychological and political stress, but reflect a cosmopolitan worldview that is informed by the Soviet model and the artist's experience of travelling to India and Egypt, as well as cultural events and debates, and political conflicts. These multi-faceted images thus condense a broad scope of cultural and ideological discourses of Maoist China before and during the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]