Page 274 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

After tentative beginnings here and there in the coastal cities,
the modern movement in Chinese art was launched in 191 6 by
Kao Chien-fu, who had recently returned to Canton from Japan.
While in Tokyo, he had come under the influence of the Nihonga
movement, dedicated to the revival of the Japanese tradition by
introducing Western techniques such as shading and chiaroscuro,
and contemporary subject matter: one of Kao Chien-fu 's most fa-
mous early hanging scrolls depicted a tank and an aeroplane. The
work of Kao Chien-fu *s Ling-nan p'ai (Cantonese School), as it
was called, was too Japanese in feeling, and too deliberately syn-
thetic, to command a wide following, but it showed that the tra-
ditional medium could be adapted to modern themes. Since 1949,
shorn of its somewhat slickly decorative texture, the style created
by the Ling-nan p'ai has been developed in China as one solution to
the problem of expressing realistic, revolutionary content in the
traditional medium.
The first modern art school in the Orient had been founded in
1876 in Tokyo. But no developments took place in China until
1906, when Nanking High Normal School and the Peiyang Nor-
mal School in Peking each opened a department of fine art on the
Western pattern. They were soon followed in Shanghai by several
private studios modelled upon romantic notions of the typical
Paris atelier which had been acquired, very much at second hand,
from Japanese artists who had studied in France. Soon after the
end of the First World War, art schools were being opened in Pe-
king and Shanghai, Nanking and Hangchow, while the more for-
tunate students were flocking to Paris where they came under the
influence of the post-impressionists, Picasso and Matisse.
By the middle twenties, Hsu Pei-hung had returned to Nan-
king, Liu Hai-su to Shanghai, and Lin Feng-mien to Hangchow,
and there was beginning to flourish in the big coastal cities an art
which was for the most part just as academic as that of the tradi-