64 Pang Xunqin (1906-1985)
Son of the Earth
1934
watercolor study
73 x 45 cm
Pang Xunqin Memorial Museum, Changshu
64 Pang Xunqin (1906-1985)
Son of the Earth
1934
watercolor study
73 x 45 cm
Pang Xunqin Memorial Museum, Changshu
Pang Xunqin was one of the most effective advocates
of modernism in the 1930s. He studied at the Académie Julien in Paris,
and after his return to China established a small modernist salon. The name
the group took for itself, which they rendered in English as "The Storm
Society," refers in the original Chinese to a great wave. One of the
members wrote, "we want to hit the rotten art of contemporary China
with a powerful wave." The group held a series of five exhibitions
before the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1937.
The completed version of this work, a large painting in oil, was shown in
the third Storm Society exhibition. Inspired by the terrible Jiangnan droughts
of 1934, its title is an ironic reference to the imperial formulation "Son
of Heaven," a title for the Chinese emperor. Son of the Earth
represents the impoverished Chinese peasant child as a sacrificial victim.
When first shown, the painting was interpreted as criticism of the Chinese
government and its publication was prohibited. It was later destroyed, along
with all the artist's major oil paintings, at the outbreak of the Cultural
Revolution in 1966.