Page 275 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

ju Huang Yung-yu (contemporary).
Mountain Tribesptoplr. Woodcut. About
1947
tional painters, the only difference being that now the medium
was not Chinese ink but oil paint. The French Concession in
Shanghai became a little Mont marc re, the centre of a transplanted
bohemianism that was inevitably quite out of touch with the feel-
ings and aspirations of the mass of the Chinese people. In
Hangchow, on the other hand, Lin Feng-mien and his pupils were
beginning to develop a kind of painting that was both contempo-
rary in feeling and Chinese in medium and technique.
In the early thirties, as the menace of Japanese aggression rose
on the horizon, the atmosphere began to change. In Shanghai, the
cosmopolitan Societe des Deux Mondes founded by the modern
painter P'ang Hsiin-ch'in was dissolved, and the Storm Society
took its place. Artists and writers became involved in bitter de-
bates about their responsibility to society, the bohemians pro-
claiming a doctrine of art for art's sake, the realists urging a shift to
the left and a closer identity with the people.
Finally, all doubts about the place of the artist in modern China
were resolved by theJapanese attack on Peking inJuly 1937. Three
years of steady retreat brought the painters and intellectuals close
to the heart of the real China; and the later work of P'ang Hsiin-
ch'in, of the realists such as Hsiao Ting, and of the best of the
wood engravers is full of a sense of discovery—not only of their
own people but also of their own land. For they had been driven
by the war far into the interior, to come for the first time face-to-
face with the beauty of the western provinces, as yet untouched by
the hybrid culture of the treaty ports. As the war dragged on,
however, artists with a social conscience became bitterly disillu-
sioned by the moral decay and corruption on the home front.
Somejoined the woodcut movement, which had been founded by
the great writer Lu Hsun in the 1920s and was now being pro-
moted as a weapon of socialist propaganda; others turned in pro-
test to political cartooning or, to get round the censor, to an elab-
orate and indirect form of social symbolism.
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