Page 268 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

12
The Twentieth Century

It was toward the end of the nineteenth century that China began
to stir once more to life, roused by the aggressive penetration of
the Western powers. But it was to be decades before her response
to Western art was anything more than passive or reluctantly imi-
tative. China's rulers, unlike their Japanese counterparts of the
Mciji period, did not sec the arts of Europe as an aid to moderni-
sation and reform. If they had any attitude at all to Western cul-
ture, as opposed to Western guns and machines, it was one of
hostility and contempt, and the problems of the cultural confron-
tation were left to take care of themselves.
ARCHITECTURE From the mid-nineteenth century onward. Western-style com-
mercial buildings, schools, and churches were rising wherever the
foreigners penetrated. If those put up by the foreigners were bad,
the Chinese imitations of them were even worse. A hybrid style
combining Chinese and Western elements soon came into being,
but until well into the present century, practising architects knew
too little about traditional building methods to be able to adapt
them successfully to modern materials, and the results were gen-
erally disastrous.
In 1930 a group of architects founded the Chinese Architectural
Research Society to remedy this defect and to explore new ways of
adapting traditional forms to modern needs. It was joined in the
following year by Liang Ssu-ch'eng, who became the dominating
influence in Chinese architecture for three decades. The results of
their work, and that of foreign architects such as I lenry K. Mur-
phy, can be seen in government and university buildings put up in
Nanking, Shanghai, Peking, and elsewhere during the few peace-
ful years before the Japanese invasion of 1937. Attractive as some
of these are, they are still essentially Western buildings Sinicised
with a traditional curved roof and enriched with detail translated
from timber into painted concrete. A recent, deplorable example
of this style is the National Palace Museum in Taipei, beloved of
tourists. These architects had not yet discovered the truth, long
since grasped by thejapanese, that the essence of their traditional
architecture lies not in the curved roof, lovely as it is, but in the
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