So
spectacularly successful had been Japan's modernization in the Meiji
period that the Japanese were convinced that they had found the solution
to the problem of how to adapt Western culture to East Asia, and they
saw themselves as leading the way for the other cultures. Inspired by
Fenollosa and his disciple Okakura Kakuzo, Japanese artists had combined
traditional Japanese techniques - particularly those of the Kano School,
marked by a propensity for smooth surfaces and decorative effects - with
Western realism and a more contemporary subject matter to create
nihonga,
or "Japanese painting." Though many of the Chinese pioneers of modern
art studied in Japan, it was the brothers Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng,
with Chen Shuren and their friends and pupils, all Cantonese, who
brought the
nihonga
style to China and dedicated themselves to the creation of a New Chinese
Painting (xin guoliua).
In 1892,
as a boy of thirteen, Gao Jianfu entered the studio of the professional
painter Ju Lian in Lishan, where he served his apprenticeship for the
next seven years, painting chiefly birds and flowers, grasses and
in-sects, in the careful, realistic, brightly colored style of his
master. Chen Shuren as well was close to Ju Lian, eventually marrying
his grandniece, and Gao Qifeng may also have studied briefly with him.
It was in Ju Lian's studio that Chen Shuren met Gao Jianfu, sometime
between 1902 and 1909, and they remained friends until Chen's death in
1948.
In 1903
Gao Jianfu went to Canton, where his horizons began to broaden under the
patronage of the painter and collector Wu Deyi, who introduced him to
works in the great tradition. He entered the Canton Christian College
(later Lingnan University and then National Sun Yatsen University),
where he encountered a French teacher of painting known only by his
Chinese name, Mai La. More important was his meeting with one of the
many Japanese teachers then in China, Yamamoto Baigai, who fired him
with the ambition to study in Japan and taught him the rudiments of the
language. In the winter of 1906 he left for Tokyo. Cold, hungry, and
almost destitute, he was rescued there and restored to health by his
revolutionary friend Liao Zhongkai. After returning to Canton for the
summer holiday, he went back to Tokyo in 1907, taking his
nineteen-year-old brother Qifeng with him.
In the
meantime Chen Shuren, more politically conscious, was working for an
anti-Manchu newspaper in Hong Kong. When Sun Yatsen's revolutionary Tong
Meng -Hui was formed in] 905 he became a member and a close associate of
leading Cantonese revolutionaries, including Liao Zhongkai and Wang
Jingwei. He spent 1906-12 in Kyoto and 1913?6 in Tokyo, then devoted
himself increasingly to politics. Sun Yatsen sent him to Canada in 1917
to head the Canadian branch of the Guomindang.
It is
said that when Gao Jianfu first began to study in Tokyo it was Western
art that attracted him, and that he joined societies formed to promote
it. His surviving works from the period, however, show little evidence
of such enthusiasm. The most obvious and consistent influence in his
early work is that of leading
nihonga
painters Kano Hogai, Hashimoto Gaho, and Takeuchi Seiho, which
lie absorbed during two years of very intense study in Tokyo, although
it is not clear whether lie studied in the official Tokyo School of Fine
Arts (Tokyo bijutsu gakko) in Ueno Park or in the independent Japan Fine
Art Institute (Nihon bijutsu in), founded by Okakura Kakuzo. Croizier in
his study of his Lingnan School thinks the latter more likely, and in
any case it would have been difficult for a Chinese, newly arrived, a
stranger to the land and almost to the language, to gain admittance to
the prestigious national academy. Gao Jianfu may also have spent some
time in Kyoto, for his style shows that he was as much influenced by the
masters of the Maruyama-Shijo School, Maruyama Okyo and Matsumura
Goshun, as he was by the
nihonga
pioneers in Tokyo. Chen Shuren, who also studied in Kyoto for a time,
felt that influence even more directly.
These
artists believed passionately that they could create a new Chinese art
through a synthesis of East and West. Here Gao Qifeng explains his
purpose:
I took up the study of
Western art, paying particular attention to portrait painting, light
and shade, perspective, etc. I then picked out the finest points of
Western art and applied them to my Chinese techniques as to [sic] the
masterful strokes of the pen, composition, inking, coloring, inspiring
background, poetic romance, etc. In short, 1 tried to retain what was
exquisite in the Chinese art of painting, and at the same time adopt
the best methods of composition which the world's art schools had to
offer, hereby blending the East and the West into a harmonious whole.
Gao
Jianfu was even more ambitious when he wrote, "I think we should not
only take in elements of Western painting. If there are good points in
Indian painting, Egyptian painting, Persian painting, or masterpieces of
other countries, we should embrace all of them, too, as nourishment for
our Chinese painting." but the ideal-ism of the Lingnan artists reached
far beyond the mere creation of a new school of painting. Gao Qifeng
again:
The student of art must try to adopt
a much loftier viewpoint and imagine himself charged with an
altruistic mission which requires him to consider his fellows'
miseries and affliction as his own. He will then work hard on the
production of only such pictures as will effect a betterment of man's
nature in particular and bring about an improvement of society in
general, thereby presenting the new spirit of the art in all its glory
and grandeur.
Here Gao
Qifeng echoes Fenollosa, who claimed that the
nihonga,
which he helped to create, would "dominate all Japan in the near future
and . . . have a good influence over the world."
Gao
Jianfu returned from Japan in 1908. After a stay in Canton, where lie
held a one-man show, he went to Shanghai in 1912 and at once plunged
into its cultural life. After starting a hand-decorated ceramics
business - one of his pieces won a prize in 1912 at the Panama
Ex-position - he set up the Aesthetics Bookshop (Shenmei shuguan) and
launched
Zhenxiang huabao
(The true record), a magazine that ranged over politics, industry,
society, and art and was well illustrated with photographs and
reproductions, many of them the Lingnan painters' own works
(fig.1 >>). Although it ran for less than a year,
Zhenxiang huabao
broke new ground as the first of many journals to bring art to the
literate public. Liu Haisu, in 1912 a sixteen year old just embarking on
his life as a painter, later remembered that Shenmei Shuguan was the
first place in Shanghai, other than traditional mounting shops, where
paintings were publicly sold.
The Gao
brothers continued to teach and paint in Shanghai until 1918, but Gao
Jianfu always felt some-thing of a stranger in this region, where the
Shanghai school of painting was so firmly entrenched. When Sun Yat-Sen
appealed to him to join the Canton government as a member of the
Guomindang Industrial Art Commission and head of the Provincial Art
School, it was an opportunity he could not resist. Gao Qifeng also took
up a teaching career in Canton.
Chen
Shuren, by contrast, stayed at the center of political affairs after his
return from Canada in 1922, holding a number of government posts, which
eventually took him to Nanjing. As a painter he remained an amateur,
less confined by style and doctrine than the Gao brothers. Consequently,
after an initial "Japanese" phase, his later works are either
traditional or conventional or show a hint of Western realism, absorbed
with apparent lack of conscious intent. He sketched constantly in the
open air, in pencil or color, so his later landscapes based on his
sketches are generally closer to nature, less contrived, than those of
the Gao brothers. His easy, assured brushwork suggests the work of an
amateur painting not to convey a message or demonstrate a theory but
simply because he enjoyed it fig. 2 >>. His
poems are described by Lawrence Tam as "plain and straightforward,
elegant and sincere" ?qualities that mark his later paintings as well,
and qualities one seldom finds in the work of the Lingnan painters.
In 1923 the Gao
brothers established their Spring Awakening Art Academy (Chunshui
huayuan) in Canton. Now at last they were able to promote their own
Chinese version of the
nihonga.
Among friends and com-patriots, free of competition from the powerful
Shanghai School, the Chunshui Academy flourished. Gao Jianfu was also
tireless in organizing exhibitions and art associations. In 1930 he went
on a long tour of India that took him to the Ajanta caves, to Nepal, and
to a meeting with Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta. Al-though he later
painted some pictures inspired by Indian themes - copies of the Ajanta
wall paintings, the Ganges at dusk, a conventionally melancholy (and
very Japanese) view of ruined stupas - the effect of his Indian sojourn
seems rather to have deepened his leaning towards Buddhism and things
spiritual. Late in life he was a frequent visitor to a Buddhist temple
in Guangxi, whose abbot dedicated a pavilion to him for his own use.
Gao
Jianfu often painted flowers, plants, and grasses in his own version of
the Chinese literary style, and occasionally - perhaps to establish his
credentials with those who did not care for the Japanese element in his
work - he painted landscapes in the orthodox tradition of Tang Yin and
Lan Ying. After his early birds, flowers, and plants in the Ju Lian
manner, though, most of his works are consistently synthetic, with a
smooth finish and artificial sfumato effects (fig.
3 >>). He loved sunsets and twilight moods, as shown in his
painting of the Five Story Pavilion in Canton of 1936, while his
penchant for conventional Japanese themes appears in his monkeys and
owls in the trees silhouetted against the moon. Even his rendering of so
thoroughly Chinese a subject as the burning of Qin Shihuangdi's A-pang
palace is based on a Japanese treatment of the theme. The influence of
Takeuchi Seiho and other
nihonga
painters is also obvious in the lions and tigers as symbols of patriotic
vigor that the Gao brothers and Chen Shuren liked to paint early in
their careers.
Most consistent in
his adherence to his
nihonga
back-ground, and particularly to the style of his master Tanaka Kaislio,
was Gao Qifeng. In 1929 lie moved into a house
in Canton
which he called the Heavenly Wind Pavilion (Tianfeng Lou), where he
taught till his early death from tuberculosis in 1933. His favorite
student, ZhangKunyi, left her own husband to move in as his nurse and
adopted daughter and perhaps also his mistress, an arrangement that
caused some scandal at the time. She was herself a moderately talented
painter and the devoted custodian of his memory, writing his funeral
eulogy; it was said, in her own blood.
The
Gao brothers were nothing if not patriotic - and modern, after their
fashion. When flying was still a dangerous pastime in China, Gao Jian-Fu
made sketches from an airplane; he used them in
Flying in the Rain
(fig. 4 <<), a scroll showing a squadron of biplanes flying over
a misty ink wash landscape with a pagoda, and in
Two Monsters of the Modern
World, a tank in a
landscape with an air-plane hovering overhead. A number of these
airplane paintings were exhibited in Canton in 1927, accompanied by a
banner bearing Sun Yatsen's slogan, "Aviation to Save the Country." When
war came in 1937. Gao Jianfu and his former students, such as Seeto Ki
(Situ Qi), were well prepared to depict the Japanese bombing and the
ruin of cities.
Realism
of a less contrived sort was practiced by Gao Jianfu's pupils Guan
Shanyue, whose
Waterwheel in Sichuan is
reproduced here (fig. 5), and Fang Kending,
who studied in Japan from 1929 to 1935. On his return Fang contributed
to an exhibition over a hundred paintings, chiefly figure subjects.
Croizier divides them into the realistic -"ordinary people in ordinary
situations"'- and the romantic - "sweet-faced Japanese farm girls,
languorous nudes, and mythological scenes" .1" He was praised by some
critics for reviving figure painting and attacked by others for being
too Japanese, one calling his work a hopeless mishmash of conflicting
styles. When the People's Republic came to power he was able to make the
necessary stylistic adjustments with little trouble.
A more
forceful follower of Gao Jianfu is Li Xiong-Cai. He is above all a
landscape painter, noted for often dramatic compositions marked by dense
textures, strong chiaroscuro, and rather un-Chinese color effects.
Richly realistic in detail, his style too adapted easily to the romantic
realism of China after 1949.
The
Chunshui Academy continued to flourish until the Japanese occupation of
Canton in 1938 drove it to Macao, where Gao Jianfu kept the school
barely alive until it could be reestablished in Canton in 1945. When
"Liberation" closed all private art schools in 1949, Gao Jianfu took his
academy back to Macao once more. He died there on May 22, 1951, not long
after his big retrospective at the Zhongyang Hotel.
It may be
wondered why Gao Jianfu's lead was not followed more widely than it was,
given the thorough technical training lie advocated and his sincerity
and dedication to the creation of a new school of art for China based on
a synthesis of the best from East and West. To begin with, at least, a
number of critics and painters praised him. Xu Beihong saw him as the
"forerunner of the revival of Chinese art." Wen Yuanning, the realist Ni
Yide, and even the fastidious Fu Baoshi lauded the courage with which
lie had thrown off the fetters of hackneyed styles and subject matter."
Whatever one might think of much of the work of the Lingnan painters -
and I must honestly declare my antipathy - it at least focused the minds
of many young Chinese artists on the problem of the East-West synthesis
and showed one approach to a solution.
But there
are reasons why the appeal of the Lingnan movement was always limited.
To begin with, it was just getting under way when waves of anti-Japanese
feeling were sparked by Japan's notorious Twenty-one Demands of 1915 and
intensified by the May Fourth Movement, and later by Japanese aggression
in China. This, we might say, was just Gao Jianfu's bad luck. Secondly,
the Lingnan pai, as the name implies
(Lingnan means
"south of the mountains," in reference to Guangdong Province and the
city of Canton), was essentially a local school. It had little or no
influence outside Guangdong.
The
conservative inheritors of the literary tradition, dismissing the
Lingnan School as "cheap imported Japanese goods," may well have looked
on it as a more insidious threat to the purity of Chinese painting than
was the outright challenge of Western art, while by the 1920s artists
who wanted Western art wanted it pure and from Paris, not in Tokyo's
diluted form. But perhaps the most cogent reason for the school's never
catching on was that it was based on a misconception of the nature and
purpose of art. Good art is produced not by lofty aims or fine
technique, or even by a combination of the two, but by that passion for
form which at the moment of painting excludes all other considerations.
It is the lack of that passion, the utter impersonality of their work,
that in the end robbed the Gao brothers and many of their followers of a
dominant role in modern Chinese painting.
