Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng.

• Author: Laing, Ellen Johnston

Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng. By JEROME SILBERGELD, with Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 1993. Pp. xxii + 242 + illustrations.

Twentieth-century Chinese Painting is a collection of papers originally presented at the Symposium on Twentieth-century Chinese Painting held in Hong Kong in 1984. As with many such compilations, the essays are uneven in quality. The foreword by Mayching Kao does a superb job setting a context for the subsequent essays. The introduction is the keynote address given by Michael Sullivan, "Art and Reality in Twentieth-century Chinese Painting," a distillation of his 1959 Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, updated to include comments about the art of more recent decades. This is followed by three essays grouped under the heading "Tradition and Continuity": Arnold Chang's "Tradition in the Modem Period," James Cahill's survey of painting in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Shanghai, and Chu-tsing Li's sweeping "Traditional Painting Development During the Early Twentieth Century" in Beijing, Shanghai, and Canton. The accounts by Cahill and Li are valuable for their broad classifications and descriptions of artistic events and attitudes for this period.

The section headed "A Search for Modernity" contains Laurence C. S. Tam's "Lingnan School of Painting," presenting work by the Cantonese masters: the Ju cousins, the Gao brothers, and Chen Shuren. Tam discusses their efforts to combine traditional Chinese painting techniques with Western chiaroscuro and perspective, but the emphasis on landscapes and birds-and-flowers by the Cantonese school makes it difficult for the reader to interpret what Tam means by the assertion (p. 127) that the two Gaos and Chen "aimed to make use of painting to improve the social conditions of the time." And Tam himself does not explain this claim. (Incidentally, Tam's contribution is the only one without footnotes.) Mayching Kao's "The Quest for New Art" is a shining model of an articulate, thoughtful, and sensitive account of artists who sought to synthesize Chinese and Western art. She begins with the little-known Li Shutong (the first Chinese to study Western art in Japan, 1906-10) and Li Yishi (who was a pupil at the Glasgow Academy of Art for nearly ten years before returning to China in 1916), then turns to the famous practitioners of Western art in China: Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, Liu Haisu, Ding Yanyong, Lin...