Page 277 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

315 Tseng Yu-ho (bom 1921). Hawaiian
Village. Ink on paper 1935.
The Japanese surrender in 1945 left China exhausted and long-
ing for peace. But hardly had the firing died away when this un-
happy land was plunged into civil war and all hopes of peaceful re-
construction were shattered. The art of the last years before the
fall of the Kuomintang regime was marked by anger and bitter-
ness on the part of the realist, or an almost defiant lyricism in the
work of P'ang Hsiin-ch'in, the wood engraver Huang Yung-yu,
and Chao Wu-chi (Zao Wou-ki), a young student of Lin Feng-
mien at the Hangchow Academy who had emerged from the ob-
scurity of the Japanese occupation with a highly sensitive and
original style which seemed to point the way to a new direction in
Chinese painting. In 1948, Chao Wu-chi went to Paris, where he
has since acquired an international reputation. Perhaps the most
remarkable metamorphosis occurred in the art of Tseng Yu-ho,
who, from being a competent academic painter in the manner of
her master P'u Ch'in in postwar Peking, has, since she went to live
in Honolulu, come under the influence of some of the most ad-
vanced movements in Western art.
For nearly three decades, Chinese artists living outside the Peo-
ple's Republic have been expressing themselves as Chinese on the
international scene. While the first Asian response to abstract Jl6 La Shou-k'un (1919-1976),
Mmmlain Hanging scroll. Ink on paper.
expressionism took place in Japan in the 1 950s, the Chinese paint- 190a.
ers who embraced the movement in the sixties gave it a new depth,
for their response was at the same time a rediscovery of the ab-
stract, calligraphic roots of their own tradition and not merely, as
it had been for somejapanese artists, a skillful adoption of yet an-
other new style from abroad. Yet, even when their work appears
most abstract it is, like that of the late T'ang expressionists, never
entirely divorced from the natural world, and the fact that we can
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