National Painting (Guohua) and Color-and-Ink Painting (Caimohua)

A note on terminology is required at this point. The Chinese term xihua orxiyanghua , Western painting, has been used to refer both to paintings by Westerner sand to paintings in Western media by Chinese artists. The difference between the two usages is usually clear from context, but, following Mayching Kao, we will use the term "Western art" to refer to work made by Western artists and "Western-style art" to refer to that made by Chinese.^[62]

The most commonly used Chinese term to describe paintings using the traditional Chinese media is guohua . The dictionary definition of guohua is "traditional Chinese painting,"^[63] though translated literally it means "national painting." In some contexts guohua may be an abbreviation for zhongguohua ,Chinese painting, or, less often, for guocuihua , painting of national essence.^[64]Guocuihua has had negative connotations since 1949 because of its origins in the National Essence Movement, a nativist cultural trend of the early republican period that became extremely conservative, both politically and socially.^[65] In the People's Republic of China, guohua and zhongguohua commonly refer to works painted with traditional Chinese pigments on a ground of traditional paper or silk. The terms thus describe the medium and ground of the painting rather than the style.^[66]

In practice, of course, a range of possible meanings for the term exists, which makes it difficult to translate accurately. Some painters use traditional materials to paint untraditional subjects or employ their materials in untraditional ways, combining Chinese paper with European pigments, for example, or, in recent years, making ink rubbings of paving stones or manhole covers.^[67] Socialist realist guohua painting, which we will discuss in later sections, is the best example of painting that is nontraditional in style but traditional in materials (figs. 49-53). Following common Chinese practice we will call most works executed on Chinese paper or silk with predominantly Chinese pigmentsguohua . Some Chinese paintings depict traditional subjects with traditional materials and in traditional styles (fig. 18). To the extent possible, we will reserve the more narrow English rendering "traditional Chinese painting" for such genuinely traditional work.

Image not available

Figure 18
Huang Binhong, Landscape of Shu,
dedicated to Wang Bomin, 1948, ink
and light colors on paper.

One of the notable changes in the structure of the Hangzhou academy made by the Communist administration was that the national painting(guohua ) department was combined with the Western painting department; this made its structure consistent with that of the academy in Beijing and with Soviet art schools, which, of course, had no need to teach Chinese painting. The new painting department, directed by Mo Pu, did not teach bird-and-flower painting or landscape painting, the standard genres of traditional paint-

ing. Rather, a new emphasis was placed on figure painting, with fundamental technical training devoted to drawing plaster casts of famous sculptures and human models, watercolor painting, and oil painting.^[68] The only traditional techniques taught were outline-and-color painting. Old bird-and-flower and landscape masters such as Pan Tianshou and Huang Binhong did not teach. As part of their thought reform, some of them struggled to paint the new revolutionarynianhua , using styles and subjects to which they were completely unaccustomed. Those influential enough to continue in a public role, such as the elderly landscape painter and art historian Huang Binhong (fig. 18), were pressured to modify their work to suit the new art. Huang was reportedly asked to concentrate on figure painting in his art historical research, which, if true, drastically limited the usual scope of his scholarly activity.^[69] A 1953 article reporting Huang's findings on the outline techniques used in ancient figure paintings would support this allegation.^[70]

The omission of traditional painting from the curriculum continued even after a shift in party policy began to stress more specialized training. In 1955, after Jiang Feng's departure, the art academy in Hangzhou was once again divided in terms of painting media, but rather than reinstituting the national painting department, a new color-and-ink painting (caimohua ) department was founded.^[71] The term caimohua was one favored by the Westernizer Xu Beihong to signify the new and reformed Chinese painting; it was interpreted by traditionalists as excluding purely Chinese styles.

The new department was administered by the watercolorist Zhu Jinlou and other artists with a strong Western leaning.^[72] The curriculum centered on figure painting, fine outline technique, and realistic depiction. All of these qualities were relatively unimportant in mainstream Chinese painting of the late imperial period and thus marked a new, reformist view of Chinese art. Classes were taught in drawing, watercolor, sketching, outline drawing, Western art history, perspective, anatomy, and color. Copying old masterpieces, the traditional didactic method of Chinese painting, was abolished, as was study of traditional techniques of modeling landscape forms with ink texture strokes (cun ).

The new educational policies had two immediate effects. One was that students who painted caimohua had no basis in traditional techniques. As a result, they had to reinvent methods of working with ink, brush, color, and absorbent Chinese paper, a time-consuming and not always successful endeavor. Yet by the mid-1950s, new types of figure painting had appeared. Within the academies, old forms vanished as their practitioners departed.

The second effect was that ambitious students became interested primarily in oil painting, particularly once specialization became acceptable. This trend was well established even in the prewar period. Yan Han, a student at Hangzhou in the late 1930s, switched from oil painting to traditional painting studies only because he lacked money for the expensive foreign art supplies.^[73] The

post-1949 disgrace of the traditional painting faculty and the growing knowledge of Soviet oil painting can only have strengthened the trend toward work in oils. Li Keran later blamed student disinterest in guohua on the leadership.^[74] In an article written during the thought reform campaign of 1951 and 1952, Jiang Feng himself complained about student attitudes at CAFA. He did not lament the fate of traditional painting, but he rued the students' abandonment of the Yan'an spirit. He pointed out that recent graduates lacked enthusiasm for popular work (nianhua , comics and illustration, propaganda posters) and that the entire graduating class requested admission to the graduate program in oil painting. Jiang quotes one extreme student as saying, "I would rather pedal a pedicab than do popularization work."^[75] In keeping with Jiang's view, however, at least one promising graduate of the East China campus, Ding Bingzeng(b. 1927), was assigned to illustrate comic books for a Shanghai publisher rather than engage in painting.^[76]

Strife arose in the relations between Jiang Feng and non-Communist faculty during Jiang's tenure at Hangzhou. Such a situation was probably inevitable, because the academy's preliberation strengths were in precisely those areas that Jiang and many Communists considered decadent: modernist Western painting and traditional Chinese painting. The discord was probably aggravated by mutual contempt between Jiang, the self-educated worker, and the literati-artists that made "class struggle" a daily reality. Whatever the cost, Jiang Feng was largely successful in remolding the academy's artistic approach in line with socialist culture.