Page 273 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

catcd class, partly because "fine art" was in the custody of ama-
teurs and kept separate from their professional lives. Their work
and milieu might change, but when they took up the brush, it was
still to express themselves in the language of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang
and Wang Hui. Such was their belief in the validity of the tradi-
tion, moreover, that for the most part they could take what they
wanted from Western art without surrendering to it. When, much
later, Mao Tse-tung exhorted artists to "make foreign things serve
China," and to "make the past serve the present," he was pointing
a path forward that they found easy to follow, and one indeed that
had already been taken by some artists, notably Hsu Pei-hung (Ju
Peon, 1 895-1953), a decade earlier. In spite of the artistic contro-
versies that enlivened the twenties and thirties, Chinese artists on
the whole avoided the violent oscillations between acceptance and
rejection of the West that had shaken Japanese art since the Mciji
restoration of 1 868.
310 Hsu Pei-hung (Ju Peon, 1895-
953)> MagpieiMianOU Trtt. Ink on
paper. About 1944.