Page 278 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

"read" their abstractions as landscapes gives them an added, and
very Chinese, dimension. The pioneers were the Fifth Moon
group in Taipei, Lii Shou-k'un (Lui Shou Kwan), and members of
the lively Circle and In Tao groups in Hongkong. Notable among
Chinese artists in Southeast Asia, Chung Ssu-pin (Cheong Soo-
pieng) in Singapore, before he became an abstract painter and
worker in metal, was responding to the exotic beauty of the trop-
ics with a style refreshingly free from the obvious influence of
Gauguin. The time is now past when the work of the Chinese art-
ists living abroad was unacceptable in socialist China, and it is be-
ginning to be recognised as a uniquely Chinese contribution to the
increasingly international character of modern art.
ART IN CHINA Meanwhile within the People's Republic the total mobilisation of
SINCE LIBERATION hands and minds to the task of creating a modern socialist society
out of a backward peasantry put the arts firmly in the service of
politics and the state. Inspired by Mao Tse-tung's exhortation to
serve the people, artists in the 1950s, with varying degrees of en-
thusiasm, quit the academies and went down to farm and factory
to live with the workers and "learn from them." Modernism and
internationalism were forgotten. The art of these years, although
coloured by propaganda and anything but avant-garde, became
experimental in a purely technical sense when artists were called
upon to depict in traditional brush and ink such new themes as oil
refineries, construction work, and commune life. A few old mas-
ters, notably Ch'i Pai-shih, were left in peace, but more active
painters such as Fu Pao-shih, Ch'icn Sung-ycn, and Li K'o-jan
were expected to infuse some ideological content into their pic-
tures: the figure gazing at the waterfall must be no longer a dream-
ing poet, but a surveyor or hydraulic engineer.
One might have expected that the dictates of socialist realism
would have forced artists to abandon the traditional landscape-
conventions enshrined in such handbooks as the Painting Manual
of the Mustard Seed Garden and simply paint what they saw. There
is in China today a good deal of realistic art—or, rather, what is
called revolutionary romanticism; for it illustrates in semi-Western-
ised techniques not the actual state of society but what it ideally
should be. At a more sophisticated level, however, artists are not
abandoning their repertoire of conventional brushstrokes so
much as checking it against nature itself and making it accord with
their own visual experience. By thus "checking his ts'ttn" (the
phrase is Ch'icn Sung-ycn s), Li K'o-jan in his delightful Village in
the Mountains gives a new lease of life to the traditional language of
landscape painting. In the 1950s and 1960s, Li K'o-jan, Ch'ien
Sung-yen, Shih Lu, Ya Ming, and other painters of the older gen-
eration thus succeeded in establishing a new traditional style, and
their influence on younger artists has been considerable.
Although, by Western standards, the culture of the early 1960s
was limited and conformist, it became the target for the Great Pro-
letarian Cultural Revolution of 1966/69, which launched a devas-
tating attack upon current "bourgeois" trends in education, schol-
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