Page 282 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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"bourgeois formalism." Wu's oil painting is fresh and subtle,
while his works in the Chinese medium, such as the landscape of
Szechwan illustrated here, show how easily he assimilates the
happy influence ofDufy to the language ofthe Chinese brush.
Behind these masters came the swelling tide of a new genera-
tion of artists, often inarticulate yet hopeful, facing the same chal-
lenges that had faced Chinese artists in the 1930s: to be contem-
porary yet Chinese, to be in touch with the feelings and
aspirations of the masses yet artistically free. In the art of this new
phase, propaganda was conspicuously absent; the nude was no
longer forbidden, woodcuts became colourful, even romantic,
while artists and students, for years starved of contact with the
outside world, showed keen interest in every aspect of Western
art, from that of the ancients to Picasso and Jackson Pollock.
Some of the work of the early post-Mao years is inevitably ama-
teurish because artists had forgotten—if indeed they ever knew
how to express their true feelings. But in the work of some of the
younger artists—of Li Hua-sheng, Yang Yen-p'ing, and Ch'en
Tzu-chuang, for example—we see a new assurance that seems to
proclaim that a painter need not go far beyond his traditional id-
iom to express thoroughly contemporary ideas and feelings.
By 1980 the Party had decided that freedom had gone far
enough. Democracy Wall in Peking was closed down, and the
"dissidents" who in risky unofficial exhibitions were expressing
the hopes and frustrations that many felt about contemporary life
were being viewed by the authorities with growing hostility. Cre-
ative men and women in China now live from day to day, never
knowing whether tomorrow will bring new freedom or tighter
controls, or both at the same time. In the summer of 198 1, for in-
stance, a Party spokesman repudiated Mao's insistence on the su-
premacy of politics over art, which had been Party dogma for
nearly forty years; yet at the same time some artists and writers
who had strayed too far from the narrow zigzag path were being
forced to confess their errors and told to mend their ways. In spite
of uncertainty, however, it seems that the trend that set in after the
death of Mao toward a broader and less simplistic view of the role
of art and the artist in modern Chinese society is irreversible, and
that a new era is slowly, sometimes painfully, dawning.
Yet lest the observer should imagine that the arts in China are
now, or could ever be, as free as they are in the Western democra-
cies, it is well to remember that there exists in China a rein on ar-
tistic freedom far older than that imposed by Mao and his heirs.
The belief that the individual must put his loyalty and responsibil-
ity to the group, be it his family or the state, before his personal
freedom is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. The over-
riding purpose is to achieve social harmony. It is only when that
harmony breaks down, at the decay of a dynasty or in times of in-
tolerable oppression, that individualism speaks with a strong
voice.
We should not, then, expect to find in today's China, except in
the case of rarely gifted and often eccentric artists, the anti-estab-
lishment stance taken by many artists in the West and considered
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