SHANGHAI & THE CHINESE ENCOUNTER WITH EUROPEAN ART

The Shanghai Fine Jewellery and Air Fair takes place in a venue whose history spans the emergence of Shanghai as a modern city. The Shanghai Exhibition Centre, as it is now called, was formerly the Sino-Soviet Friendship Hall, a building designed by a Russian ar- chitect, Sergei Andreyev, and erected in 1955, during a period of close collaboration between the two communist states. But what is perhaps even more evocative of Shanghai’s transfor- mation from a Chinese port into an international hub is the site on which it stands. Until a fire destroyed them, the mansions and extensive grounds of what was popularly called the Hardoon Garden stood on the site.

The Garden was the private paradise of Silas Aaron Hardoon (1851-1931), a tycoon who exemplifies the rags-to-riches stories in which Shanghai abounds. Born in Baghdad to a poor Jewish family, Hardoon started his career modestly, working in a lowly job for the merchant- prince David Sassoon, first in Bombay, then in Hong Kong, and finally in Shanghai. There, he overcame his humble beginnings as a rent collector and warehouse watchman at the Shanghai branch of the Sassoon family firm by dealing in opium and land, quickly amassing a fortune. At one point he owned nearly half of Nanjing Road and counted two of its fourswanky department stores as his tenants. When Chinese observers, noting his dual interests, said that Hardoon’s millions were made from the clod, they were being quite accurate, for the Chinese word for earth is tu, as is the Chinese word for opium.

Hardoon’s rise to riches occurred in tandem with Shanghai’s equally spectacular growth, itself underpinned by opium and real estate booms. It was to sell opium, and to lever open a closed market, that imperial Britain fought China in the first Opium War. And it was by the terms of the Nanjing Treaty, the 1842 agreement marking China’s defeat in that war, that Shanghai was opened as a treaty port admitting British, French, American and other Western traders and residents. Combined with disorder in the hinterland, the economic opportunities this first ‘opening’ produced spurred a great influx of Chinese immigrants, the labouring poor as well as the well-heeled. To the gratification of people like Hardoon, Shanghai’s market- place was rapidly expanded for not only goods but housing.

The Westerners had lost no time in establishing their footholds. Ranged north to south along the Huangpu river front – which the British had named ‘the Bund’ after the Hindi word for ‘embankment’ – the foreign enclaves had quickly taken shape, with the Americans located furthest to the north, the British next, and the French to the south. The American and British settlements presently merged to form the jointly administered International Settlement, while the French, who could not possibly be expected to join forces with Anglo-Saxons, ran the French Concession on their own.

Though Shanghai was not annexed as a colony, these Western settlements nevertheless came to resemble colonial outposts like Bombay and Hanoi in the way they were laid out and run, and in the way the imperialists, particularly Britain, imposed their own ideas and practices. It was not a Chinese tune (‘The East is Red’ today), for example, that rang out from the clock on the Custom House tower, but the chimes of Westminster. The French, for their part, were keen to introduce Christianity, but perhaps a deeper imprint they left in Shanghai was in art. The Jesuit settlement they established to the southwest of the city included an orphanage and a workshop, and the children there were the first generation of Chinese in Shanghai to be taught painting in the Western manner. One of the orphans it later trained was Zhang Chon- gren (1907-98), a Shanghai gardener’s son who went on to study sculpture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Hergé, the comics artist, befriended him when he was there, and named a character in one of his Tintin strips after him. This was The Blue Lotus, in which Tintin’s adventures take him to a remarkably well-depicted Shanghai.

The treaty port was moreover the child of the age of steam, electricity and international exchange, and by all these Shanghai was affected, just as it was affected by being China’s open window on the world at large. The draught blowing through that window was to rattle the traditional Chinese system, and the pieces that came loose were to be reshuffled with oth- ers imported from outside to produce a new China. Technology apart, these imported pieces included notions of democracy and Marxism, ideals that would be successively pursued by the men and women who made the two Chinese revolutions, the first in 1911, the second in 1949. The first revolution ended 2,000 years of dynastic rule by emperors; the second gave birth to a new communist state. So great was Shanghai’s hospitality to imported creeds and conspiracies that it was in its French Concession that the Chinese Communist Party was secretly founded in 1921.

This mixing, of the native with the foreign, came to characterize life in Shanghai to a degree unknown in any other Chinese city. Hardoon himself encapsulated it by marrying a half-Chi- nese and half-French woman named Luo Jialing, and raising 19 adopted Chinese and Eur- asian children. Luo was called Liza in English, and it was by taking the first syllable of that name and punning on it that the Hardoons arrived at the formal name for his garden – Aili, which could mean ‘Loving Couple’ or ‘Beloved Li.’ For living a thoroughly Chinese lifestyle and hobnobbing with Chinese dignitaries in keeping with his wife’s preferences, Hardoon would have been thought eccentric by some of his fellow-foreigners and to have gone dis- gracefully native by others.

Though he was British by nationality, and is said to have had an English ardour for garden- ing, Hardoon had his grounds landscaped in Chinese garden style, in an aesthetic reminiscent of the Summer Palace in Beijing – pavilions, pagodas, rockeries, humped bridges, bamboo groves, ponds, artificial hills, vistas and classically inspired inscriptions. As befitted a Chi- nese garden, names (172 in all) were given to each construction, from Corridor of Butterfly Shadows (Di ying lang) to Waiting-for-Rain Mansion (Dai yu lou). Unsympathetic observers might call the garden a folly on a grand scale, but as a private residence the estate’s magnifi- cence and flamboyance was unrivalled in Shanghai.

When Hardoon collected cultural artefacts, he did so according to Chinese taste – sparing no expense, for example, to build up a collection of oracle bone inscriptions dating from the Shang period (c. 1300 BC), the oldest of all forms of Chinese calligraphic script, and to engage specialists to study and catalogue them. Collectors and connoisseurs were regularly invited to the Garden to view exhibitions of private Chinese collections of bronze and stone inscriptions, and of paintings and calligraphy. When he died in 1931, much decorated by the Chinese government, the funeral rites were Chinese, with Buddhist monks and nuns chanting from morning to night, and offerings of paper ingots (the ‘spirit money’ the deceased would need in the next life) consigned to flames as Chinese custom required.

Hardoon’s inductor into Chinese culture was Huang Zongyang, a Buddhist monk whom Mrs Hardoon, herself devoutly Buddhist, took on as a trusted adviser to the Hardoon household. The scholarly Huang became an intermediary between Hardoon and Chinese circles of artists and intellectuals. No other foreign businessman had closer ties to the Chinese world than Silas Hardoon. Through the vermilion portals of his estate passed most of the protagonists of China’s political and cultural life – men like Dr Sun Yat-sen, whose revolutionary cause Hardoon supported, and Kang Youwei (1858-1927), a political reformer and key figure in the intellectual history of modern China.

One of Kang’s many ideas was that the decline of Chinese pictorial art came of the hold which ‘literati’ ideals and theory had had over painting. This had prized individual expres- sion over verisimilitude, and freehand brushwork (derived from calligraphy) over naturalistic depiction. His views were echoed by the young protagonists of the New Culture Movement, and by the pages of that movement’s house journal, Xin Qingnian or, as it also called itself, La Jeunnese. As well as urging the modernization of China, the journal called for a ‘revo- lution in art’ and an end to the repetitiousness of Chinese painting. Conventionalized and repetitively executed, in the eyes of the new generation the style made for a stultified art that an injection of European pictorial realism might revitalize.

In the history of China’s encounter with European art, another figure who stands out is Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), one day to become President of Beijing University. Cai Yuanpei, who had studied philosophy, aesthetics and psychology at the University of Leipzig, became the newly founded Republic’s first Minister of Education upon his return to China. A milestone in his career, for the historian of art if not for the man himself, was the publication in 1912 of his essay advocating aesthetic education (which he went on to suggest could take the place of religion). European drawing techniques were already being taught in Chinese schools, but more for purposes of illustration, cartography and drafting than for aesthetic and expressive ends. His essay paved the way for a truer appreciation of European art.

Crucial to the growth of that appreciation was the founding in 1912 of the Shanghai Art Academy, the first of its kind to teach European fine art in China. Shanghai still remembers its precocious founder, only 16 years old at the time, in the museum it named for him, the Liu Haisu Art Museum, and in the frequent retelling of the story of how he nearly got him- self arrested for introducing the European academic practice of drawing from nude models. In 1913, just a year into the new Republic, the systematic study of art as an academic dis- cipline, with courses in archaeology, art history and aesthetics, was inaugurated in Chinese universities. China’s own art became far more widely accessible as public museums rapidly opened in the succeeding years, the greatest of them the National Palace Museum that was formed from the Qing dynasty imperial collection.

A young man who benefitted from Cai Yuanpei’s interest in European art was Xu Beihong (1895-1953), a painter who managed with Cai’s help to secure a government scholarship to study in Paris. Xu, whose days as a young struggling artist had begun in Shanghai, had also been indirectly helped by Hardoon. He had been brought to the college the Hardoons had established in the grounds of Aili to paint a series of portraits of Cang Jie, the legendary fig- ure credited with the invention of the written Chinese language. His straitened circumstances much eased by the chance to work also as a tutor, Xu benefitted from his encounters with Kang Youwei, who was often invited to lecture there and whose ideas on Chinese art rubbed off on him. In Paris he studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and with Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, a pupil of Corot and Gérôme. He returned to Shang- hai artistically ambidextrous – that is to say, he could paint with brush and ink on paper in the traditional Chinese manner, and also with oil on canvas in the European way, particularly in the way of academic realism.

After eight years in Europe, he returned to Shanghai in 1927 to find the artistic environment much changed. While painters in the traditional Chinese manner were still selling their work to private collectors (often through shops specializing in art materials), to a new generation of artists there was now nothing absolute or inevitable about Chinese ink painting, which they saw as only one of several possible means of visual expression. There was not only the lure of European oil painting, but European painting in all its styles, from Impressionism and Fauvism to Cubism and Dada. Filippo Marinetti’s manifesto launching the Futurist Move- ment had been translated in full, appearing in Chinese in the journal of the Shanghai Art Academy in 1921. Lin Fengmian (1900-91), later to become the first director of the influen- tial Hangzhou National Academy of Art, had put up the Chinese pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925, and Pang Xunqin (1906-85), who was to co-found the Shanghai avant-garde (the Storm Society, see below), had gone to see it before beginning his studies at the Académie Julien. Young Chinese artists were beginning to return from the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts, where they had been study- ing oil painting with Kuroda Seiki and, following the lead of Japanese painters, were pursu- ing Post-Impressionism and Fauvism.

This is the backdrop to a war of words between Xu Beihong and those of a more modern- ist persuasion. The occasion was the first ever national exhibition of art to be held in China. This took place in Shanghai’s French Concession in May 1929, in an auditorium in the French Park at Route Vallon. On discovering how many of the paintings were in modern styles, Xu Beihong, the staunchest of all advocates of realism, withheld his own works from the exhibition in protest. His quarrel, though, was as much with Chinese traditionalism as with European modernism: inside the realist painter, a harsh critic of the Chinese literati pictorial practice was signalling to get out.

In the publication accompanying the exhibition, he lashed out at the influence of Cézanne, Matisse and artists who could ‘churn out two works a day,’ only to find his extreme views hotly contested in turn. Because his opponent was the poet Xu Zhimo, art historians refer to the polemics as the ‘Two Xu’s Controversy.’ Xu Beihong, the other Xu said, reminded him of John Ruskin, the English critic who attacked Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold by equating it with ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ in 1878.

Xu Beihong must have seemed even more regressive as Shanghai entered the 1930s, a decade in which enthusiasm for modern European art reached a peak. Books discussed it, magazines published reproductions, while art societies and salons brought the works of modernist Chinese artists to a wider public. The degree to which Shanghai kept in step with art developments in the West may be discerned in a book published by Lin Fengmian in 1936: among other translations from French art magazines, it contains a critique of Fauvism and Cubism; a review of exhibitions held in Paris and Brussels; and a retrospective of the work of Max Liebermann, who had died just the year before. André Breton’s 1924 Surreal- ism Manifesto appeared in a Chinese translation in 1935, by which year the self-consciously avant-garde Storm Society, called Juelan She (‘the great wave’) in Chinese, had held four of its exhibitions.

The 1930s saw a flowering of modern literature no less than of art, with many writers gath- ering in Shanghai, attracted by its cosmopolitan culture and by the relative freedom from censorship its foreign concessions offered. Graphic art (illustration, book design, advertising, comics) flourished, its practitioners importing Cubism, Cubo-Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus and Art Deco from Europe and America, and the styles of such pioneers and masters of Japanese graphic art as Takehisa Yumeji, Koji Fukiya and Sugiura Hisui.

Yet darkening storm clouds were gathering, and the decade, for all its liveliness and bril- liance, was overshadowed by war. The art scene’s noontime was bracketed at one end by the Japanese bombs dropped on Shanghai in 1932, and at the other by the Japanese Army’s outright invasion of China in 1937. The war brought out the nationalist – and in some cases the leftist – in many Chinese artists. Where once there had been a desire to break with the Chinese past, in some areas of artistic production there was now an inward turn towards na- tive traditions. A number of Chinese artists were already radical; many more were not; but politics was difficult to avoid as Shanghai entered the 1940s, and as even the International Settlement came under Japanese occupation following Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

That same month, just days before the Japanese Army marched in, Mrs Hardoon died in her sleep, all but blind, the zest for life long gone out of her. Mourners dressed her body in pearl-bordered silk satin and brocade, in seven layers as Chinese custom dictated, and laid it out in a coffin stuffed with herbs to await burial beside her husband in the Garden after a 49- day Buddhist funeral. The Garden and most of its houses fell into Japanese hands – but not for long. A fire broke out in the servants’ quarters of the main house one night and reduced Hardoon’s paradise to cinders. What was not burnt was looted. In retrospect the destruction seems symbolic of the imperial twilight, a page turned on the last but one chapter of Shang- hai’s colonial history.

The page turned, that history now raced towards its final chapter. Tracing the sharpening conflict between the right and left (that is to say, between the Nationalists and communists), this last chapter was well and truly closed by the latter’s triumph in 1949. In the period leading up to that moment, most of the art schools had moved farther inland in flight from Japanese fire. Canvases produced there revealed not only the inadequacies of basic painting materials but the artists’ concern with the salvation of China. Now these artists emerged to find themselves co-opted by the new regime, many of them moved from Shanghai to swell the thin ranks of artists in Beijing. The transplantation was part of a larger shift of the centre of culture from Shanghai to the capital of the new People’s Republic. These artists quickly learned that a revolution was more than the abrupt overturning of a political regime; it aimed also to remake culture.

For a guide, the regime had the Talks on Art and Literature which Mao Zedong had famously delivered in 1942 in faraway Yan’an, the Red Army’s headquarters during the war. Following this guide meant using art to eulogize the proletariat, socialism and the Communist Party. For the task the regime had initially hoped to transplant the folk styles of Yan’an, but when this failed to take root in the cities, it co-opted Socialist Realism from the Soviet Union, at the same time privileging oil painting over other media. To this end it sent Chinese students to Moscow and Leningrad, as well as inviting a Soviet artist, Konstantin Maksimov, to Beijing to teach a handpicked class of young Chinese artists.

An act of deliberate forgetting estranged art students from modernism, and denied them access to what modernist artists had produced or were producing in the West. If by a rare chance they had stumbled across the art magazines of 1930s Shanghai, with their coverage of European art and exhibitions, they would have been utterly amazed, so little exposure had they themselves had to such material, and so ignorant were they of what their parents’ generation were producing 30 years back. So perhaps Xu Beihong had the last laugh after all, since Chinese Socialist Realism could be seen as an offshoot of his ideas, and indeed he had the approval of the new leaders, and was the artist invited to stand on the rostrum with Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Square when the People’s Republic was formally inaugurated on October 1, 1949.

He died not long after, and so was spared the pain of seeing his students and fellow-teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing smash the school’s entire collection of in- structional plaster casts at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. This was a repudiation of Western art at its most extreme, an art which Xu had believed would help renew Chinese art. In this belief he had been influenced, as earlier mentioned, by Kang Youwei, the thinker he met when he was teaching in the Hardoon Garden.

The ghost of Kang Youwei seems an appropriate one to summon to the Shanghai Fine Jewel- lery and Art Fair, not only because he had stood on the same spot, but because the bringing of so many excellent European artworks to this place may be said to signify the realization of his ambitions for a strong and prosperous China. He was a brilliant Confucian scholar, but also the earliest and most persuasive 19th-century voice to urge the Chinese Emperor to reform and modernize China. The removal of the restrictions of the Maoist period would have cheered him, while the reform and ‘re-opening’ of China in recent decades are just what he would have advocated. He would surely have congratulated the central government for giving Shanghai the go-ahead in 1992 to modernize itself overnight. About Shanghai, he was unreservedly enthusiastic, and indeed had urged the Emperor to quit Beijing and move there, for it was a centre for technical change and new thinking – a place, he told the Emperor, that was ‘open and unrestricted.’

Lynn Pan Gu Yinhai
Shanghai, August 2007