Mixing with the modern world

James Fenton on artistic exchanges between Europe and China

The dilemma was the same for artists and writers all over the imperial world. Chinese artists of the early 20th century expressed it in a classic form. On the one hand, they loved their country, and wanted it rid of any foreign yoke. For China to progress it had to modernise, and this applied to the arts as much as to society as a whole. But, in order to modernise, the artist would have to learn from the west, and in doing so would run the risk of betraying his own heritage.

The aims of the outward-looking artists were very clear, and simply expressed in a document of 1928: "to introduce western art, to reform traditional art, to reconcile Chinese and western art, to create contemporary art". But these easily expressed goals were immensely difficult to achieve. How many artists had enough money to visit Europe and to study there? Who could afford to bring back western art of any quality in their luggage?

The evidence is now extremely hard to come by, since the artists who made this attempt generally had their work denounced and destroyed during the cultural revolution. "Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945", is an exhibition that looks at the cultural exchange between Europe and specifically Shanghai artists in this period. The show began in Munich and is at the Kunsthalle in Kiel until May 15. The subject is of great topical interest (it bears a direct relation to the current artistic ferment in China), and there is a very good catalogue published by Hatje Cantz, with some valuable and moving documentation.

Here we find the painter and designer Pang Xunqin recalling a time in Paris when he met a senior student of the expressionist dancer, Mary Wigman. Pang knew nothing about dance or about Wigman, but he was assured she was one of the greatest dancers in Germany, and was about to give her farewell performance. He rushes off to Berlin, where he sees Wigman, accompanied as ever only by drums, evoking a day "from dawn to nightfall": "The spotlight focused first on centre stage, where there was a lump of undifferentiated matter. Then, two hands began to emerge out of it as if they were growing from the ground. Then came the head, like a chain of smoke rising out of the crust of the earth." And so on.

At the end of the performance, the audience buries Wigman in petals. Pang goes off impressed enough to paint Wigman's Dance in the "structuralist" style. He tells us that "In 1932, the painting was displayed in the lounge of my studio on Rue Marcel Tillot [Xingang Lu, Shanghai]. The ultimate fate of the painting is now unknown to me."

That's the overall story in a nutshell. The lone individual seeks out the latest and most important work in Europe, and brings back a memory of it. But in China there is no tradition at all of public art exhibitions, no tradition of oil painting, life studies from the nude and so forth. Much of the work is greeted with utter incomprehension. Later it falls foul of the Red Guards.

One complete surprise to me was to learn that in the early 20th century the practice of printing from woodcuts had all but died out in China, and it was from the German expressionists, as well as figures such as the Belgian Frans Masereel, that the Chinese artists drew their first inspiration. On the evidence of this exhibition, they took to this kind of work much more naturally than they did to oil painting. This may be in part because artists who were learning from Van Gogh's paintings generally had to imagine them from photographs. But German graphic art was designed to be disseminated cheaply: that was the whole point of it. And there was a political sympathy between the largely leftwing German artists and their Chinese counterparts.

Another easily disseminated art was that of photography, and there are several works here by Long Chin San in which an attempt is made by photomontage to bring some of the values and traditions from Chinese landscape painting into the orbit of photography. Some of these curious works have been loaned from the collection of the Royal Photographic Society in Bradford. They date mostly from the 1930s and 40s. One of these is surprising in that it features what looks like an MGM lion in a Chinese landscape.

Contemporary works from the post-Deng thaw show Chinese artists looking, as their forbears looked, at the very latest trends, and producing film work and installations which would fit very easily into, for instance, the Hamburger Bahnhof - Berlin's equivalent of the Saatchi gallery. In a way, one wishes they would do something else. Then one recalls the Chinese visitors to Europe in the 20s, keen to acquaint themselves with the Bauhaus and the International Style. As the photos of Shanghai demonstrate, they did indeed take back something of that style. Today's version of internationalism seems to come to the new generation like a second nature.