A New Turn in Chinese Painting

"China’s Other Cultural Revolution" by Charles Ruas, in Art in America (Sept. 1998), 575 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012.

Once the Communists came to power in China in 1949, heavy-handed socialist realism in art was in, and traditional Chinese calligraphy, or ink painting (guohua), was out. During the calamitous Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, Mao Zedong’s regime went much further, trying to wipe out all traditional Chinese approaches to art, in favor of militant propaganda conforming to Mao’s every exalted thought.

"The Chinese people," notes Ruas, a writer and critic, "learned to loathe and fear traditional Chinese forms," since to do otherwise was to risk one’s life. But since the early 1980s, as the hold of communist ideology has weakened and the regime has relaxed its grip on the economy, Chinese officials—turning to their nation’s Confucian heritage for ideological strength in the face of Western decadence— have made an about-face, encouraging the traditional style of art.

"Suddenly," Ruas writes, "ink painting was sanctioned for its ‘Chineseness’ but shorn of its historical and ideological context, its roots in the ideal of the Chinese literati, those elite masters of calligraphy and painting with their high Confucian moral and intellectual standards, and their sense of history."

Surveying the modern part of the massive historical survey of Chinese art exhibited last year by the Guggenheim museums in New York and Spain, Ruas notes that the neo-traditionalist ink and watercolor paintings done since 1980 "hark back . . . to the experimentation of the Shanghai school which began in the last century and lasted through World War II." Ironically, this school was not free of Western influence: just the opposite, in fact. In the mid-19th century, Ren Xiong (1823–57) and other artists in the wealthy, Westernized port city of Shanghai incorporated Western influences in both technique and subject matter into traditional Chinese brush-and-ink painting. The Western taste for realism is seen in such works as an undated scroll self-portrait by Ren Xiong, and in his brother Ren Yi’s individualist portrait of a fellow artist in The Shabby Official (1888).

The calligraphy of today’s neo-traditionalists "can be powerful and expressive," Ruas says, "but the subject matter often reiterates timeworn political clichés, as illustrated by Shi Dawei’s 1993 portrait of Mao standing next to an old peasant." Other artists, showing a strong Western influence, "plunge directly into abstract compositions with great technical mastery."

Missing from the Guggenheim exhibition (mounted with the cooperation of the Chinese Ministry of Culture), Ruas points out, was the work of the more rebellious contemporary Chinese artists from the generation that knew the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. Boldly experimenting with modern techniques, they "continue in the spirit of those artists who, earlier in the century, employed oil painting to communicate their alienation and protest."