Guohua Artists, 1953-1957

The Reformers: Guohua Landscapes from Life

The art academy system had, since its establishment in 1950, mandated that all artists master life drawing, a subject usually interpreted as figure drawing. This requirement made the talents of many old guohua artists obsolete. Following Zhou Yang's 1953 speech on developing the national tradition, three faculty members at CAFA, Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming, conceived the idea of reforming Chinese painting by drawing landscapes from life. Their plan met with the initial skepticism of administrators such as Ye Qianyu, newly appointed head of the caimohua department, and Jiang Feng, who felt that success in reforming traditional landscape painting was unlikely in any event. Oil painters, for their part, were dubious that traditional media could be employed successfully for representational purposes. And traditional painters in Beijing opposed the plan because they were against any reform of guohua that might damage its long-established techniques and, by extension, its essential character.^[140]

Nevertheless, the academy granted approval and funding for the artists to travel in southern China for five months in the first half of 1954 and try out their scheme.^[141] The three men spent a month at the art academy in Hang-zhou, hiking around West Lake and the surrounding hills. Each carried a homemade sketching kit so that he could draw with ink and Chinese brush. Every night they met to discuss their results. Other places they visited, either as a group or individually, included Wuxi, Suzhou, Shanghai, the Fuchun River, Huang Shan, and Shaoxing.

Zhang Ding, who had spent many years producing cartoons and woodcuts for the anti-Japanese resistance, confesses that he struggled in his sketches with a conflict between the Western viewpoint, which he defines as objective, and the traditionalist goals of their project. After three months of work, however, he had a breakthrough: he discovered how to express a Chinese point of view, but one that combined the objective and subjective responses to a scene.^[142] The journey was even more important for Li Keran, for it was to be the first stage in his ultimately successful quest to establish a new Chinese landscape painting.

Upon their return to Beijing, the artists' ink sketches were admired by

academy skeptics Ye Qianyu and Jiang Feng, as by the traditionalist Hu Peiheng. At Ye Qianyu's insistence, an exhibition was arranged by the CAA for late September 1954. The accompanying brochure, the title of which was inscribed by Li Keran's mentor Qi Baishi, then in his nineties, stated their goals in unassuming but appealing terms:

In the first half of this year, we had the opportunity to go to the Jiangnan area for an ink painting sketch-from-life trip. Using the expressive techniques of traditional ink painting to describe true scenes and objects was a new attempt, so our goals and requirements were relatively simple; they were: to paint some landscape paintings that have the style of traditional Chinese paintings, but are not the same old thing, and that have a touching authenticity.

The artists further recounted that they had seen many travelers and realized how much "the liberated people love the beautiful rivers and mountains of their motherland" and how fortunate the Chinese people are to live in "an environment that is like a painting." The artists briefly described the technical choices they had encountered. Their formulation appears to be a sincere attempt to make practical sense of the latest party pronouncements. Using phrases taken from speeches by Zhou Yang and Jiang Feng they asked important questions:

Among [our] most important [problems] were how to use traditional techniques and how to develop them further. If the question was whether we simply reject traditional techniques, thus using Chinese tools and foreign techniques to do ink sketches, or whether we use completely traditional techniques, thus making conventionalized descriptions of modern scenes and things, it would be simple. But it is not so simple if we intend to develop further the excellent parts of [our] tradition, to make them suitable for reflecting recent reality, and to blend modern foreign techniques into traditional styles, so as to enrich their expressive power. The difficulty really is not whether [we] have attained theoretical clarity; it is that we must attain a concrete resolution in practice.^[143]

In short, they rejected the uncritical continuation of traditional techniques and aimed to improve Chinese landscape painting by synthesizing Western techniques with native ones. Their ultimate goal was to reflect modern reality in the traditional medium. Li Keran, as the brochure claimed, avoided using con-ventionalized brush strokes for trees or mountains (fig. 45), and his landscape recessions were often very Western in feeling. Nevertheless, his sensitivity to

Image not available

Figure 64
Zhang Ding, Landscape Sketch, 1954,
ink and color on paper, collection of the
artist.

the varied tones of his ink lines and ink washes reveals a debt to his teachers, the traditional masters Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong. Zhang Ding, by contrast, relied largely on outline strokes and colored washes, thus presenting a more Western appearance (fig. 64).

There was little initial opposition to the general policy behind the ink sketch exhibition. The accompanying brochure adhered closely to Zhou Yang's theoretical stance and claimed patriotic motives for depicting the beauties of new China. In his National Day report of October 1954, Jiang Feng made particular mention of the ink landscape sketches by Li Keran and Zhang Ding as examples of the successful reform of guohua , saying that the works, though executed with traditional technique, were drawn from life in a relatively scientific manner.^[144] Not all critics were so approving. Hard-liners attacked Li and Zhang during the Anti—Hu Feng campaign of 1955 for the insufficiently political nature of their subject matter.^[145] The paintings were characterized as unhealthy, formalistic, and contrary to socialist realism. During

the Hundred Flowers campaign of the following year, conversely, traditionalists declared that the new way of painting was not guohua .^[146] Generally, however, the three Beijing artists' synthetic approach to landscape painting, which combined Chinese and Western painting conceptions, received favorable publicity and served as a strong influence in the development of guohua landscape painting.

Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming may have been the most innovative of those who made sketching expeditions, but many other artists were funded by art institutions to undertake similar journeys in 1954 and subsequent years. Indeed, the art academy system, since its founding, had required that students and healthy professors spend part of every year living and working among the peasants, a practice designed to enable them to "refine life" as preparation for subsequent art work. Between about 1954 and 1957, for example, Chinese painting professors at the East China campus of CAFA spent their Sundays on school expeditions to draw from life in the Hangzhou suburbs. Works by Pan Tianshou from this period (fig. 62) are more meticulously executed and more carefully composed than his previous paintings, which may be a response to his closer study of natural forms. Many bear titles referring to scenic spots in the vicinity of Hangzhou. As it came to be assumed that progressive art would be based chiefly on the artist's personal experiences, the government began to fund a wide variety of trips for artists to gain new creative insights.

One important early expedition was made by a group of artists including Ai Zhongxin, the CAFA oil painting professor, and Shi Lu, vice-chairman of the Xi'an CAA branch, to observe the construction of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang and the Gaocheng Railways in 1954. Ai was inspired by the magnificent western Chinese landscape to produce a series of monumental oil mountainscapes, including one about railroad construction called On to Urumchi , which was exhibited in the 1955 national exhibition.^[147] Shi Lu, like Li Keran, attempted a series of color-and-ink landscapes. Unlike the sketches of Li Keran, however, Shi Lu's published paintings are socialist realist "creations" in which the observed scenery has been reworked to depict specific projects of socialist construction. His Clouds Across the Qinling Mountains , for instance, depicts the construction of mountain tunnels for the Gaocheng Railway. A second color-and-ink painting from the same trip, Beyond the Great Wall (fig. 53), portrays a section of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railway that passes through the Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous Region of Gansu province.^[148]

The northwestern military artist Huang Zhou depicted a highly romanticized view of Uighurs and Han surveyors traveling by camel in a snowstorm (fig. 65). The painting is a celebration of the workers who built a new road across the northwestern desert. Flecks of white paint on the surface give an immediacy to the picture that speaks of the artist's personal experiences, even if the low vantage point and sharp contrasts in scale between foreground and

Image not available

Figure 65
Huang Zhou, Snowstorm on the Steppes,
1955, ink and color on paper, 73.4 cm ×
117 cm, Chinese National Art Gallery.

background figures reflect Soviet conventions. The artist, then serving in Tibet, recalls that his group ran into the surveying party in a deserted place called Ge'ermu. He was very moved by the unexpected meeting in such a forbidding place.^[149]

Works more closely related to the landscape sketches of Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming continued to be published in spite of attacks from both left and right. They include caimohua landscape paintings by CAFA faculty Wu Jingding and others from the fall of 1955 that attempt to combine relatively traditional brushwork with more realistic, Western conceptions of space.^[150] Li Keran persisted in his new approach, as published views of Beijing attest.^[151] Shi Lu's travel sketches of the same year resemble realistic Western watercolors, but he softens his landscape images with effects of ink possible only on Chinese paper.^[152]

There is little question that such works are more appealing to the eye than most socialist realist figure paintings. Moreover, their combination of tradi-

tional and modern elements was justified by the theoretical stance taken by Zhou Yang in 1953. The further linking of Chinese landscape painting to patriotism, as was done by Li Keran and his colleagues in the preface to their exhibition brochure, significantly broadened the permissible range of Chinese artistic expression. The landscape-drawing-form-life movement was one of the most significant events in the development of guohua , as we will see in later chapters.

The Traditionalists

The Shanghai guohua artists, in 1953 still impoverished, finally obtained funding from the CAA and the municipal cultural bureau to run a production cooperative. The cooperative obtained fans from a government export corporation, decorated them, and then sent them to be sold in the Soviet Union. Once an artist's pattern was approved, which had to be done in advance, he normally painted the same design for a year or two. An artist would receive between twenty and ninety Chinese cents per fan. If the fan was ruined by the artist or rejected by the export corporation for poor-quality work or deviation from the approved pattern, the cooperative owed $2.20 renminbi (RMB, people's dollars) per fan, an amount that was divided among the members. Lai Chusheng, Zhang Dazhuang, and Jiang Handing are reported to have produced the largest proportion of rejected fans because of the strength of their personal styles. Later the product line expanded to include lanterns. Extremely well known artists, such as Wu Hufan, Wang Geyi, Tang Yun, and He Tian-jian, were among the participants in the cooperative.^[153]

Beijing artists complained of the same inadequate employment. In the fall of 1956, People's Daily published an article by Yu Feian entitled "How Much Money Is a Guohua Painter's Labor Worth?"^[154] He condemned the poor pay artists received for decorating crafts objects: decorating a piece of hand-painted stationery yielded an average of seven cents; decorating Sichuan bamboo blinds paid better, between $1.00 and $1.20 RMB each, but there was not enough work to go around. In some cases, finished work would be rejected as insufficiently "national" in style, thus leaving the artists with no recompense. This complaint was followed by the official change in policy toward guohua artists. In October 1956, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and President Sukarno of Indonesia were photographed viewing a guohua exhibition.^[155] Within the month, People's Daily editorials had blamed administrative sectors for ignoring the aesthetic quality of the guohua artists' decorations and for viewing them only from an economic point of view. The party admitted that most guohua artists could not support themselves working for the co-ops.^[156]

The cooperative as a solution to the guohua problem was hardly the answer. In September 1956, as part of the Hundred Flowers campaign, the

State Council publicized plans for improving the artists' lot.^[157] A Chinese Painting Institute was established in Shanghai to employ famous artists from all over eastern China, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. Former mayor Chen Yi, who had been promoted to foreign minister by this time, personally inscribed the sign for the front door.^[158] Plans were made for a similar institute in Beijing, and one under local auspices in Nanjing.^[159]