Chinese Oil Painting in Pursuit of Oriental Cultural Nature

In the history of human civilization, the cultural fusion of different countries and nations always results in shaping a new cultural productive force. The introduction of oil paintings into China meant not only European culture’s journey to the East, but also transplanting, reforming and regeneration of European culture onto China’s cultural land. In fact, a transgenosis has been generated in the course when oil paintings was transplanted and took root into China’s ground. China’s oil paintings are not a replication of European oil paintings. It is already not so important as whether or not Chinese oil paintings possess pure features of their original source than what have been transformed and how the oil painters have creatively developed the Oriental charm from oil paintings and therefore pushed this art to boost its contemporary features in the present era.

From dissemination of religion to self introduction

It has been nearly 500 years since oil paintings were introduced from Europe to China. The first 400 years witnessed oil painting art coming into China along with dissemination of the religion, though at that era China was hardly accessible for such an art. In the 20th century, The vanguards of Chinese intellectuals, when seeking Western civilization to save China, brought back oil paintings into China, thus commenced introduction of Western art education and transplantation of oil painting art and making it survive in China.
    In 1579, the seventh years of Emperor Wanli on the throne (1573-1620), Michele Ruggieri, an Italian Jesuit priest, came to China with some exquisitely-drawn portraits. In 1582, the 10th year of Emperor Wanli on the throne, Italian missionary Giovanni Nicola drew in Macao the oil painting The portrait of Savior, which was considered to be the first oil painting drawn by a Western artist on Chinese land that could be found till now. However, the missionary who really set up a foundation for the Society of Jesuit in China and could effectively and enduringly disseminate the Western arts should be Matte O Ricci Li Matou who first set foot on Chinese land during Wanli years. The trend that missionaries brought oil paintings to China had reached a summit during the Qing Dynasty when Emperor Qianlong was on the throne. Represented by the Italian missionary Giuseppe Castiglione and French missionary Jean Denis Attiret, these expatriate missionaries drew oil paintings for the imperial court by blending Western skills with traditional Chinese theme. However, it is regretful to say that the introduction of oil paintings to China was always limited by narrow access due to its dense religious color. After the Opium Wars, forced by prohibition of the religion, these foreign missionaries started to make a comeback. Tushanwan gallery set up in 1864 (the 3rd Tongzhi year) in Xujiahui, Shanghai was actually built by the Society of Jesus’ Chinese headquarters in the former Tushanwan orphanage. This workshop began the spread of oil paintings among ordinary Chinese people in a master-teaching-apprentice way. Obviously oil paintings were imported to China as an appendage to the region. Such a transmission was just confined within Chinese emperors and their families or officials, or those who professed the religion. In addition, Chinese culture looked these heterogeneous pictures which seemed so life-like just with astonishing eyes rather than identified them or accepted their concepts or skills.
    Only when the whole nation accepted Western civilization as a way of salvation, could oil painting be truly acknowledged by people of insight. It was encouraging that most renovators in the New Culture Movement around the time of the May 4th Movement in 1919 had tried to introduce Western paintings with a realistic style into China and considered the art as a part of the new culture they were endeavoring to establish. A great number of students who went to study in Japan, Europe or the United States took up European oil paintings with realistic style at a time when modernism was in vogue in Europe. Such a mismatch in the art history meant, on the one hand, that cultural exchange was non-diachronic; on the other hand, it reflected Chinese artists’ strong consciousness of studying oil paintings. Xu Beihong in 1919 went Paris to study under a prestigious professor at the école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Though he chose to learn the oils in classical realistic style that had already faded out of the artistic circle at that time, his aim was to renovate Chinese paintings. Xu’s oils featured his strictness, considerateness and exquisiteness in color application and formative art, as well as a cultural ethos that Chinese people uniquely possess. Above all, the figures in his paintings had already revealed Chinese physical and facial characteristics. Liu Haisu majored in post-impressionist and fauvist paintings that were enjoying a growing popularity in the world artistic circle at that time. The purpose for him to choose post-impressionism was to seek, from the joint point of the Chinese paintings and Western art, a vanguard perspective in the worldwide artistic development. In his article Shi Tao and Post-impressionism, he tried to internally link Shi Tao with the post-impressionists. Liu brought oils and paints into play on his pictures, which always maintained the characteristics of traditional Chinese painting of keeping a right degree of exposing and hiding, obviousness and obscurity. Lin Fengmian went even farther. He directly put forward his idea of mediating Chinese and Western arts, which not only simply meant “to play paintings in the paintings’ position”, but also expressed a deep deliberation that only by learning from each other could different cultures go forward. Unlike Xu Beihong or Liu Haisu, Lin started his study of the Oriental culture on a foreign land while waking up from his indulgence in naturalistically realistic style of oil paintings. Instructed by his teacher, he took in nutrients from Chinese folk arts such as Dunhuang frescoes or clay sculptures at a time when Western art was coincidentally seeking modernist elements from Oriental art. He was attempting to graft Oriental art into oil paintings after transplanting it from abroad.
    The pioneering generation like Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu and Lin Fengmian, shouldering the mission of the times, had devoted all their life to transplanting and developing oil paintings. Their efforts had accomplished them as the most influential educators of arts who had conscientiously imported oil paintings into China. As an expatriate artistic category, oil paintings in the process of transplanting and spreading were facing unavoidable challenge of collision and confliction while experiencing a permeating and integration of Chinese culture and its national aesthetic feelings.

Deepen the local notions on the returning way

    In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese painters studied European tradition of oil paintings that could be positioned between realism and impressionism by making a detour in Russia. It is no doubt that Russian Peredvizhnik’s realistic expertise and the aesthetic ideology of critical realism once had a far-reaching influence on the Chinese oil painters growing up in that age. In the new era when China implements its reforms and opening-up policies, Chinese artists acquire a cultural opportunity of tracing to the source of European traditional and modern oil paintings, that offers them a clearer mind in pursuit of the local notion of oil paintings.
    The artists whose oil paintings have been selected for this exhibition were mostly born in the 1930s or 1940s. Their artistic education was affected by the first generation of Chinese oil painters while boasting of a solid foundation obtained from Russian educational system of realistic oil paintings. Moreover, these artists under the reforms and opening-up policies enjoy an opportunity to seek the roots of European oil painting, thus deepen their studies of the tradition of oil paintings, and once again find out the aesthetic feature of Eastern culture. In the cultural span from 1950s and 1960s to 1980s and 1990s, prestigious Chinese artists like Jin Shangyi, Zhan Jianjun, Quan Shanshi, Jin Zhilin and Zhong Han had played important roles in inheriting the preceding oil painting art and passing it on to the next generation. For heriting the preceding oil painting art we refer to the fact that they had personally received the trainings from the first generation of oil painting masters like Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren and Yan Wenliang and under the creating guidance of keeping a watchful eye on social life and expressing reality, they had grown up as new China’s representative artists of realistic oil paintings in the 1950s and 1960s. When speaking of passing on the art to the next generation, it refers to the historic role they had shouldered from the beginning of the new era. While they reviewed the European tradition of realistic oil paintings, enriched them and replenished the perception to European classical realism in oil painting art, they deepened their research into the application of realistic language and gradually formed their own artistic style. On the other hand, the advanced art academies where they were working placed important responsibility of teaching and training young artistic talents on their shoulders. As it were, some excellent oil painters that grew up after new China was founded were mostly their disciples.
    As honorary president of China Artists Association and former president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Jin Shangyi has exerted a profound influence on the realistic drawing method of China’s contemporary oil painting. From his artworks we can sense Johannes Vermeer’s meticulousness and elegance, and Claude Oscar Monet’s magnificence and simplicity, yet there is no lack of implicit and restrained depiction, a symbolic feature of Chinese culture. His figure portraits, in particular, reflect a perfect combination of European classicism and Chinese cultural spirit. Zhan Jianjun, honorary president of the Chinese Academy of Oil Paintings, started early to engage himself in the exploration of expressively realistic style. Some of his theme artworks are brimming with allegorical meanings, showing Chinese cultural imagery aesthetic method. The complanation in his formative art as well as the exaggerative expression when applying paints, strokes, or knifes expose his profound cultivation and accomplishment in Chinese painting art. His expression is no doubt characteristic of freehand brushwork of traditional Chinese paintings and personal unification of restrained culture and untrammeled feeling. Zhong Han is showing more interest in artistic spirit rather than in depiction, which makes his works full of metaphorical meanings. The spiritual implication reveals his pursuit of the local spirit of oil painting art in comparison of Chinese and foreign cultures rather than his philosophic thinking with a poetic temperament. Quan Shanshi, who used to study in Russia, has gradually built up his own artistic language in portraying Xinjiang minority ethnic people, in which he masterly interweaves his sound sculpting gift with unrestrained drawing strokes. Jin Zhilin, who has devoted half a lifetime to the folk arts in West China, has formed his local perspective of oil painting after absorbing in elements of the folk arts that mixes with the vigorousness and broadness of the Qin-Han cultures, and a rural flavor as well, while mighty panorama and majestic atmosphere make up major aesthetic tone of his works with Oriental nature.
    This generation of artists has more profoundly transformed the transplanted oil paintings into formative art with local features. In the process of expressing historic and present themes they not only have created numerous artistic masterpieces that will surely shine through ages, but also have a deeper understanding of the Chinese cultural appeal in these artworks.
    The younger generation of Chinese artists like Chen Junde, Yan Zhenduo, Zhang Zuying, Shang Yang, Wang Huaiqing, Sun Weimin, Xu Mangyao and Nie Ou mostly studied in fine arts academies in the 1960s to 1970s and thereafter began their painting career. Among them, Zhang Zuying, Sun Weimin, Xu Mangyao and Nie Ou focus on realistic drawing while keeping different features that were formed from various interest and emotion of different European masters from whom they studied the art. Of these painters, some have shifted from realists to modernists. Wang Huaiqing and Yan Zhenduo both have sought after some abstract implication in their pictures. Such abstract expression and complanation embody a poetic charm of Chinese culture. The colors on Chen Junde’s works feature a hallucinatory sense blended with a fair-tale-like feeling and romantic tone. Shang Yang transferred his expression to symbolism, then from there moved to more contemporary ways of diverting, juxtaposition and pasting up, and fused contemporary artistic images with the emptiness of Chinese artists’ paintings. In short, their exploration into modernism not only shows their intention of overpassing realistic creation by altering methodology, but also shows their preference to the independent spirit in the artistic works’ principal parts.

New realism and image expression

    The social revolution focusing on economic reforms and opening-up turned a new chapter of China’s history at the end of the 1970s, the time period from which onward has been defined as the new historic era. Since then, China, that had been closed too long, has rapidly integrated into contemporary and modern cultures of Western world, and then started to seek its own cultural position and way out. This is a proposition Chinese artists have to ponder over in pursuit of an independent development after several years of trudge on the long historic journey of modernism and post-modernism that European and American artists spent nearly one hundred to go through. Obviously, this generation of artists’ consideration over the local meaning of Chinese oil painting art is a deeper exploitation on the base founded by the first and second generations who have introduced oil painting art and developed it in China. While profoundly tracing the source of traditional European oil painting art, and measuring and adjusting artistic level of Chinese artworks, Chinese artists are endeavoring to establish their own creative pivot with aesthetic individuality and improve the quality of Chinese oils to a new height.
    The refreshment of vision of the realistic oil paintings commenced from works of the generation born after the 1950s, represented by Yang Yunfei, Wei Ershen, Wang Yidong, Chao Ge, Guo Runwen and Leng Jun. They studied oil paintings from masters of French modernism, and then traced to new classicism, or even farther, hence China’s new realistic school coming into existence in the 1990s. Their works have shifted gradually from direct thick strokes of the impressionism to the classicist concealed and subtle strokes, while aspiring for a classical mathematical proportion on the figures they painted. They seek after more about the formative sketch links than the real expression of outer light and color while showing their worship for European classical oils with dark brown tone. They never painstakingly reflect the truthfulness of realistic or historic themes, even keep a proper distance from the truthfulness. Instead, they express Chinese humanistic emotion based on their understanding of the European classical aesthetic principles. Of course, these painters have very distinctive artistic characters and styles. Yang Yunfei’s works possess a fine and smooth, yet firm, imagery formative sense. It seems that Wei Ershen follows some religious rite while he designs his characters’ action. The Oriental female figures on Wang Yidong’s works are symbolic signs of China’s rural land. The images of painful figures on Cao Ge’s artworks are endowed with a spiritual tensile force. Guo Runwen pursues simplicity and honesty in reproduction of his seemingly real images. Leng Jun tries to reflect the depth of his figures with extremely rational touches. All these are based on their comprehension of realistic oil painting art. It is not difficult to find out their own artistically creative accomplishment added to their works when they refer to the European classic oil paintings, in addition to the humanitarian feelings and visual effect that have been permeated into their works, consciously or unconsciously.
    Apart from developing the aesthetic meaning of Chinese realistic oil paintings from studying European classical oils, many painters also attempt to graft freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese paintings onto European and American modernist expression. Xu Jiang, Yang Canjun, Yu Xiaofu, who had works on display at the 2012 Chinese Oil Painting Art Exhibition, are among them. Though they do not want to give up concrete description of real images, they permeate more expressive elements into the visualized description, and such demonstration more often than not was realized by emphasizing on the style of drawing which is similar to those belonging to Chinese paintings of men of letters. The oil paintings are endowed with more Chinese cultural features by applying unrestrained and forceful, yet refined, writing strokes. Sun Jingbo and Hong Ling’s landscape paintings have shifted from perspectivity of spatial focus to two dimensional constitutive feature. Such a change in insight exposed from a deeper level that landscape oil paintings, compared with the viewpoint of “traveling extensively and watching from a lying position” for the landscape paintings of Chinese men of letters, are shifting toward a natural aesthetic appreciation.
    Among the artists of this generation, some have been dedicated to the exploration of abstract painting art. Much to our surprise, these abstract painters are probing mathematical relation in vision by imaging the perceptual world rather than simply from the composition of geometric graphics. For instance, the expression of the abstract meaning of complementation in Zhou Changjiang’s artworks is full of separation and recombination when imaging figures in reality. There are images in Chen Wenji’s works, but the images there are lack of narrativity. Rather, he pays more attention to expose wit and the implied meaning of the idea. He tries to study an artistic expression of perceptive morphology with classical language of oil paintings, therefore, to reflect the contemporary nature of realistic imagery.

In quest of new developing space for oil paintings from contemporary images

    The thriving imaging technology has not only made a change in traditional information transmission, but has also become an important medium, via which contemporary art has brought in new visual experience in seeking a space for the ready goods, original image and creativity. There is no doubt this new art form time and again brought forth a new challenge to visual experience given by traditional paintings, and the marginalization of painting art has become an indisputable fact in the evolution of art in some developed countries. However, such a diachronism in European-American art history once again shows a spatial dislocation. In the post-modern society where oil paintings are frequently substituted by synthetic materials, oil painting art in China has been developed rapidly and substantially since the 1990s. Chinese oil painters believe that even though imaging technology develops very fast, it can never replace harmonious and active action of hands and brains. A painting, above all, is the symbol for people to release their feelings and human nature, and then is an advanced human practice updated from graffiti. In fact, painting is not simply equal to imaging technology, since imaging has no way to obtain the imagination, creation and the human flavor that artists infuse into artworks when creating their work. What’s more, Chinese artists, rather than rest on the original artistic concept, are endeavoring to inject into this traditional painting medium contemporary visual information and experience to forge a link between oil painting and the present society, and meanwhile provide a new developing space.
    Among this generation of artists born mainly after the 1960s and 1970s, Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, Xin Dongwang, Zheng Yi, Wang Yuping, Shen Ling and Fan Bo render unto their pictures implied meanings with strong sense of reality. Nevertheless, compared with the older generation, they seldom discover poetic flavor from life in an aesthetic angle, but usually scrutinize, from self or individual point of view, some minutiae that are usually easy to be ignored in life, to find out the truthfulness of human nature often exposed unintentionally. They deliberately avoid depiction of grand social themes, instead, focus on revealing the trivialness and ignobleness of private life. Liu Xiaodong portrays the figures of the lower class living in present cities. Yu Hong records her growing up. Wang Yuping excavates the sense of humor in life, while Shen Ling indulges herself in exposure of her private life. All these demonstrate their work attitude of straight reflecting life and unearthing human nature via their paintings. They constantly seek proper language patterns in their exaggerative and bold visual drawings in order to better reveal their characters’ psychological state, never restrict themselves to just using traditional realistic method.
    The modernity of oil paintings enjoys more attention and exploration from this generation of artists. Just more of such modernity that enables oil painting language to stand by itself has been transferred to aesthetic mentality and the way of using mind to see and understand the true nature of life and people. There is a long name list of these influential artists, including Yan Ping, Wang Keju, Xie Dongming, Zhao Kaikun, Ren Chuanwen, Duan Zhengqu, Chen Shuxia, Zhang Xiaoming, Li Yanzhou, Bai Yuping, Jing Shijian, Yin Qi, Huang Ming, Jiao Xiaojian, Gu Liming, Jin Tian, Chen Hexi, Lei Bo, Liu Daming, Cao Jigang, Qin Xiujie, Zhang Lujiang, Zhao Peizhi, Zhuang Zhong, Sun Xun, Pei Yongmei, Chen Zijun, Pan Xinquan, Qi Haiping and Ma Lu. Their artworks respectively visualize their own way to link Chinese culture and their personal wisdom in a wide range of imagery and abstract expression. Xie Dongming, Yan Ping, Wang Keju show a tendency of pile sculpting. They usually apply paints with swift and strong touches to reflect mental state of their figures. The aesthetic core of such reflection is usually elegance and harmony of Chinese culture. The imagery expression in the works of Zhao Kaikun, Ren Chuanwen, Gu Liming, Pei Yongmei and Pan Xinquan reveal artistic charm of lines. Absorbing nutrients from calligraphic lines on traditional paintings of men of letters or from woodcarvings’ lines on folk woodblock New Year pictures, they are pursuing an untrammeled and vigorous style in the lines while applying gorgeous and luxuriant paints. Lei Bo, Chen Shuxia, Zhang Xiaoming and Zhuang Zhong seek an Oriental poem-like aura characterized by exquisiteness, refinement and mellowness. Such a poetic emotion is by no mean coquettish, greasy or unnatural, instead, they are sophisticated and philosophic poetry with historic profoundness that has sublimed from a solid feeling formed in bitter and agonized condition.
    Abstract expression is also a psychological experience of contemporary culture. Rather than working on the minimalist mathematical relation of abstract shapes and colors, they attempt to compose a void field where people can perceive something beyond their reach while growing a sense similar to the meaning of Chinese “Zen” that suffuses their abstract oil paintings.
    The artists whose works were selected for the 2012 Chinese Oil Painting Art exhibition are all active on China’s art stage in the late 20th and early 21st century and have made great contributions to the development of Chinese oil painting art. Limited by some unfavorable conditions in the collection of paintings and exhibition space, some of the showpieces may be just a kind of exercise works, or just fragments created in the process of pioneering oil paintings rather than their representative works. This, however, would not affect our presentation and comments of contemporary Chinese oil paintings. After all, the demonstration and research of the full picture of Chinese oil painting art has been an important theme of contemporary multicultural exploration. The fact that oil paintings with European cultural gene as their visual feature can take root and have borne fruits in China has been a typical example of cultural globalization. Merely such transformation from an expat art form to localized Chinese art has clearly embodied the conversion of gene.

June 3, 2012
Shang Hui
Doctor of art history, member of Chinese Artists
Association, executive editor of magazine Art