MCLC: AAS Republican art panel

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Tianshuang Liang <310612 at soas.ac.uk>
Subject: AAS Republican art panel
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Dear all,

We would like to call your attention to join us for an AAS panel on
Republican period Art. We look forward to an intellectual stimulating
conversation with those interested in this topic.

Sincerely yours,
Tianshuang Liang

Friday, March 28, 2014
Time: 8:30 to 10:30am

Location: Philadelphia Marriott, Room 410

"Conceptual and Practical Innovations in Chinese Art of the Republican
Period"

Chair: Michel Hockx (SOAS, University of London)
Discussant: Julia F. Andrews (The Ohio State University)

Presenters: 
Liying Sun (University of Heidelberg)
Ka Ming Kevin Lam (Northwestern University)
Shaoqian Zhang (Oklahoma State University)
Tianshuang Liang (SOAS, University of London)

This panel explores novel aspects and understandings of Chinese artistic
creation during the Republican period (1911-1949). Cutting across
conventional distinctions between established genres, media, and
localities, the panel emphasizes the complex transcultural, crossregional,
and mediated aspects of artistic innovation of the period. Which stimuli
led Chinese artists to reflect on their practices? How were globally
circulating ideas appropriated, manipulated, and integrated? Which types
of conceptual and practical innovation can be perceived across styles
previously considered to represent separate “schools,” and how were they
employed across different media? In response to these questions, the four
papers present richly documented studies of specific artistic phenomena,
highlighting newly available primary materials, and contributing to a
wider revisionist historiography of Republican-era culture.

Liying Sun explains how nude figures were integrated into the traditional
artistic genre of “Portraits of One Hundred Beauties” through a case study
of Hu Yaguang (1901-1986), while Kevin Lam explores the role of
large-scale Euro-American figure painting and examines the reception of
this genre in the Chinese art world. Shaoqian Zhang discusses how
political-themed calendar posters employed stylistic hybridity in order to
educate the Chinese urban population of the 1920s and 1930s. Tianshuang
Liang questions the perceived regional origins of the Lingnan School and
shows how these painters promoted the notion of syncretism to reconstruct
the aesthetic value of Chinese art in a global context. Julia Andrews, who
has published widely on modern Chinese art, will act as discussant. Michel
Hockx, who specializes in Republican-era print culture, will chair the
panel.


Portraits of One Hundred Naked Beauties: Artistic Innovation,
Transculturality, and Popular Periodicals in 1920s China
Liying Sun (University of Heidelberg)

Existing scholarship has examined how nude figures were accepted in
sketch, oil paintings, and calendar posters in the Republican Era. It
remains to be explored how nude figures, as one of the most prominent
Western visual components, were transculturally introduced and integrated
into traditional art forms in the Republican Era, particularly those
considered “low” or “commercial” in later historiography. Taking Luoti bai
mei tu (Portraits of One Hundred Naked Beauties, 1925) as an example, this
paper explores the artist Hu Yaguang’s (1901-1986) conceptual and
practical innovation in the process of integrating nude figures into bai
mei tu (portraits of one hundred beauties), a long existing artistic genre.

The paper consists of three sections. I first explore Hu’s artistic
education and heritage by studying his family background and social
networks, particularly his close relationship with a group of
Shanghai-based artists, commercial or not, such as Zhang Yuguang, and Xie
Zhiguang. Then I trace Hu’s earlier line drawing portraits of fashionable
women published in various popular periodicals. The last section closely
investigates the typology of the naked beauties and the possible sources
of the album. I read the album against nude photographs and illustrations
appearing in 1920s popular periodicals, and against the popular bai mei tu
drawn by Hu’s contemporaries. I argue that Hu’s conceptual and practical
innovation was rooted in his interaction with popular periodicals, which
for many artists offered the very first transcultural site for drawing
conceptual inspiration, to practice illustration, and to negotiate with
the print market.

Refiguring China: Figure Painting in Oil in Republican China, 1919 to 1937
Ka Ming Kevin Lam (Northwestern University)

This paper examines the role of Euro-American art in Republican China by
focusing on figure painting executed in oil. While current scholarship has
mainly addressed the role of Euro-American art from a conceptual
viewpoint, this paper offers a more concrete angle by investigating the
production of, and reception to, large scale figure paintings in the
Euro-American mode in China from the late 1920s to the outbreak of the
Second Sino-Japanese War. I argue firstly that figure painting played a
central role in 20th-century Chinese art; and secondly, large scale
Euro-American figure painting was conceived by Chinese artists as the
epitome of "Western” art, and was introduced as an antidote to inspire
Chinese art.

This paper is divided into three sections. The first section discusses how
figure painting assumed centrality when the view that Chinese art was “in
decline” was gaining popularity after the May Fourth Movement (1919). In
the second section, I focus on the Chinese painters of oil up to the
1920s, and I demonstrate that these artists were more concerned with the
technical and commercial aspects of oil painting. In the last section, I
will examine the activities of Lin Fengmian and Xu Beihong, who were both
trained in France and returned in the late 1920s. I argue that, to the
Chinese audience, their ability in painting large canvases in the
Euro-American mode distinguished them from their predecessors who painted
in oil; and these two artists also intended to revive Chinese art with
this specialty.

Turning Political: The Production and Adoption of New Visual Elements in
Chinese Calendar Posters in the Early Twentieth Century
Shaoqian Zhang (Oklahoma State University)

It is generally assumed that the introduction of Western mechanized
printing techniques in China’s late Qing Dynasty changed the nature of
Chinese print culture. As one of the newly emerging forms of Chinese
printed art, yuefenpai, literally meaning advertisement calendar posters,
adopted elements from both traditional Chinese new year pictures (nianhua)
and Western commercial culture. This paper, however, takes a different
perspective and examines politically themed yuefenpai and its role in
exercising political power and educating the urban population in China’s
Republican Period.

Politically themed yuefenpai appeared around the same time as commercial
ones. They expressed and contributed to an evolving awareness of China’s
new international and domestic circumstances linking the pictorial
vernacular with contemporary political issues. They responded to political
upheaval and uncertainty, and provided an arena where difficult issues
involving Chinese identity and the conflict between modern and traditional
elements could be explored. One branch of this yuefenpai gradually evolved
into what are now known as political posters, under the direction of both
the Nationalist and Communist Parties. This paper not only looks at the
process in which modern prints allowed art to take on the dimension of
political propaganda, but also examines their visual styles, which were
formed through a variety of influences, both global and domestic. Their
“hybrid” artistic features parallel those of other artworks in China of
the 1920s-1930s.

Repositioning the Lingnan School: Aesthetic Innovations on the Global Stage
Tianshuang Liang (SOAS, University of London)

In present scholarship, the term “Lingnan School” is commonly used to
designate a painting school founded in the 1910s by three natives of
Canton, Gao Jianfu (1879-1951), Gao Qifeng (1889-1933) and Chen Shuren
(1884-1948). This paper questions the contemporary perception of the
Lingnan School as a regional painting school and queries the assumption
that it had little or no influence outside Guangdong. Based on archival
sources and journals linked with the group, this paper explores the
artists’ commitment to the concept ofzhezhong, or Syncretism. The paper
argues that they aimed at reconstructing the aesthetic value of Chinese
art as a whole, not just of any particular region, by purposefully
advocating a new aesthetic concept of syncretism in a global context.

Three sections are included in this paper. First, I examine how the
artists in question referred to themselves as the Syncretism School, where
this name most likely comes from, and what it means, in order to
reconsider its regional label. Secondly, by recontextualizing the artistic
and social parameters of the school, I argue that the Syncretism School
was one of the mainstream schools on a national, not just a regional
level. Finally, I unravel the aesthetic essence of the Syncretism School,
and explore the artists’ self-projection of the school on the global
stage. This paper not only repositions the Lingnan School in the art world
of the Republican era but also enriches our understanding of aesthetic
innovations of Chinese art.