Transformations of Tradition, 1980 to the Present
As China reopened to the global community in the 1980s, Chinese art entered
a renewed period of pluralistic development. A significant body of work
in contemporary Western formats and styles, including oil painting, installations,
and video art, has been shown in Europe and the United States in recent
years. One might expect a shrinking globe to yield cultural homogeneity,
but, on the contrary, two decades of steady contact with the outside world
have yielded an intense reconsideration of China's native artistic traditions.
Painters of the last fifteen or twenty years have created remarkably varied
work in guohua, China's traditional medium of ink on paper.
In the 1850s, as we have seen, ink painting was China's only serious
painting. The twentieth century saw art in Western formats, media, and styles
assume a dominant position in the Chinese art world. Painting of the period
between 1950 and 1980 was created largely within the goals and constraints
of socialist realism. Artists who work in ink today are thus fully aware
of alternatives to traditional painting. Three major trends within guohua:
literati-expressionism, neo-traditionalism, and post-traditionalism, exemplify
issues that remain crucial to the Chinese art world as a whole. Of particular
importance to Chinese artists at this moment in history is the manner in
which they negotiate the increasingly complex relationships between cultural
or national identity and the global art world.
Artists today may use traditional painting tools and formats for purposes
unimaginable a century ago, and it is notable that many artists have abandoned
the traditional scroll or album format for Western frames. Modernist ink
painters may be inspired by the drama of abstract oil painting, work such
as that of Zao Wouki. Others rethink the unfulfilled possibilities of various
modern and post-modern schools of Western art. Their innovations move Chinese
painting in new directions, and are clearly part of the hybridization of
contemporary global art.
A small but significant group of painters oppose the mainstream with a singular
purity, seeking to realize the highest aspirations of China's traditional
painting in the contemporary world. Important to all these artists, and
to their audiences, is the belief that an art based on China's native traditions
is vital today, and will remain so in the twenty-first century.
Literati-Expressionism
A recent current of superbly painted work, Literati-Expressionism,
was created primarily by older traditionalists, artists born shortly after
the turn of the century who remained active in the 1980s. They received
solid classical educations and were instructed in traditional use of the
Chinese brush, but from an early age were exposed at school and in urban
society to both Chinese and Western art. The natural evolution over the
course of their long artistic careers from the classical tradition of literati
brushwork to unique personal imagery has produced subtle landscapes with
a strongly modern flavor.
Mostly trained in the Shanghai-Suzhou area, these artists share a remarkable
technical facility that has led some scholars to consider them the last
practitioners of literati painting. The quality called loftiness in literati
painting theory refers to a perfectly balanced emotional distance, an art
achieved through suggestion and not domination; implication and not explication.
The artist reveals himself intuitively , but this self, however eccentric
or individualistic, is rarely primal, raw, or messy, but instead is the
result of conscious cultivation of character and knowledge. The ability
to sail effortlessly through the administration of mundane, if important,
affairs, showing the world only the cool essence of one's personality, is
a fundamental part of the scholar-official's cultivation that survives in
the literati aesthetic. The viewer is left, then, with a responsibility
to bring to the work a similar self-awareness, and to attempt an engagement
with the intellect and personality behind the painting, as well as with
its image.
Careful examination of each landscape in the first group will make clear
the originality of the artist. Their quite varied styles, ranging from the
substantiality of Li Keran, to the orderliness of C.C. Wang, and finally
to the flamboyance of Chang Dai-chien, create very different openings for
conversations between viewer and artist.
Neo-Traditionalism
The work of a younger generation of painters, now mainly in their 40s and
50s, share similar qualities of refinement with literati-expressionism,
but its artists are perhaps more remarkable for having grown up in a later
time, when the literati culture and aesthetic was no longer to be found
in the society in which they live. The best of their work, which is even
more varied than that of the older generation, similarly lifts the viewer
outside his or her normal psychological state for a journey into the artist's
imaginary landscape. Beyond their powerful landscape visions, all artists
of this group share a mastery of traditional techniques that nearly disappeared
during the preceding three decades, and are thus doubly exceptional in their
generation.
With the benefits of modern publishing, museum displays, and academic instruction,
these artists have familiarized themselves with the styles and techniques
of Chinese painting of all periods. The strength of their personal manner
is based on reconsideration of the best to be found in the history of China's
art. The rational quality in their revivalism is founded on knowledge, but
this knowledge is constantly renewed by a passion to rediscover, comprehend,
renew, and then make visible the essence of China's cultural tradition.
The selection and transformation each artist ultimately makes of history
is thus a completely unique act of spiritual, intellectual, and artistic
creation.
Post-Traditionalism
The Post-Traditionalist trend, by artists from two broadly distinct
backgrounds who paint in ink, is characterized by its detachment from classical
Chinese painting. One group of artists was trained as oil painters, and
only came to guohua painting later in life. Their guohua preserves,
often intentionally, traces of a fully developed aesthetic quite different
from that of literati painting and often employs quite non-traditional techniques.
Another group of artists was trained as socialist realist figure painters.
They were educated during a period when traditional painting techniques
and principles were largely prohibited in the schools, but they have now
rejected both the subject matter and styles of that era. Many of them today
refer to themselves as "The New Literati Painters," in opposition
to socialist realism, but their painting, even at its most traditional,
betrays a sense of ironic pathos or even cynicism in the face of the past.
Their work thus represents not continuity but a disjunction or break with
the tradition of classical Chinese painting. Employing unprecedented techniques
to create novel images, these artists have contributed to a pluralism that
may be different in nature from that of the 1930s, but is no less lively
in its diversity and ambition.
A trait shared by socialist realist painting and by a great deal of contemporary
Western art is its public nature. The small scrolls and albums produced
throughout much of China's history, even the most famous masterpieces, were
normally appreciated and discussed in a private setting. Art that is too
large to be viewed in a domestic context has a very different function.
Guohua painters of various artistic inclinations have accepted the
twentieth century egalitarian idea of making art to be seen primarily by
the museum-going public, rather than by elite circles of private collectors.
In this process, they have internalized many aspects of international art.
Their choice of brushwork, use of ink and color, compositions, formats,
media, and physical structures enrich traditional techniques or imbue the
tradition with new implications.
In a twentieth century often dominated by official art, oil painting rather
than guohua has been China's institutional mainstream. With the gradual
withdrawal of official patronage in the past two decades, however, Chinese
artists of all genres have been left equal before the world. It is significant
that so many have chosen to work in the traditional ink media, and to address
primarily, although not exclusively, China's own 1.3 billion citizens. Their
feat, which may be of greater significance in the coming century, has been
to reestablish guohua painting as a major current in China's artistic
development.
Text information prepared by Dr. Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen
Last updated 27 February, 1998 by Janice
M. Glowski.
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