ALTHOUGH the Chinese painter Xu Beihong (1895-1953) came from a generation that was proficient in brush and ink, he was aware that it was a tradition gone stale by the late Qing (1644-1911). When the imperial system collapsed, one of its casualties was the literati artist. He was considered irrelevant to the cause of nation building in republican China (1911-1949) that was making a transition into a modern state. A product of his time, Xu was a patriot, preoccupied by reform of literati painting that had ‘degenerated into mere copying’ since artists ‘still copied the four Wangs and the two Stones’ (Shitao and Kuncan). Xu found his solution in Western scientific realism. He was one of the first to use Western fixed-point perspective and the study of anatomy to depict new forms in Chinese ink and in oil painting.
By the 1930s, Xu Beihong’s Western-style compositions were considered an achievement. Not mere portraits or monumental compositions, some harboured messages fostering Chinese nationalism in the face of Japanese aggression. This outlook made the Nanyang chapter of his life meaningful in more ways than one. Nanyang is the Chinese term for ‘southern seas’ and refers generally to Southeast Asia and the tropics. Between 1919 and 1942, Xu transited through Nanyang seven times. Not many Chinese artists passed through the region and if they did, they did not stop to contribute. The Sino-Japanese War had broken out in 1937 and Xu was a rare creature that descended south, painting profusely in Nanyang from 1939 to 1942, to spearhead war relief in China. In the process the modernisation of southeast Asian art received a much needed shot in the arm. He also introduced the ‘new’ Chinese painting to India.
The exhibition, Xu Beihong in Nanyang at the Singapore Art Museum is devoted to his significant but little-known sojourn in southeast Asia. A collaboration with the Xu Beihong Museum in Beijing, the 90 works assembled, many of which have never been on show, explore his trajectories and cement ties Xu formed in southeast Asia as well as in India. Around World War I, when Xu studied at the Universite Aurore run by Jesuits in the Siccawei (Xujiahui) area of Shanghai, he had already formed ideas about Chinese art. In his Treatise on the Reform of Chinese Painting (1918), he declared it was ‘in a state of extreme decadence’ and needed to be reformed through ‘corrective actions on old methods’. ‘Remarkable lifelikeness’ achieved via the ‘balanced representation of both form and spirit,’ was for him, ‘the highest goal of realism’. Xu’s axiom, ‘sketching is the foundation of all formative art’ remained with him throughout his life.
In 1919, he left for Paris and spent eight years focused on the European classical tradition. Enrolled at the Academie Julian and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, he later studied under Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, a pupil of Corot. The 1920s were a period of intense artistic ferment in Europe yet in Xu Beihong’s works, Cubism, Fauvism and Expressionism are conspicuous by their absence. A realist intent only on marrying European classical techniques to Chinese themes, he worked in no other style.
When he returned home, Xu created some monumental works of epic proportions. One notable specimen was the three metre-long Tian Heng and his Five Hundred Followers (1930), whose Han dynasty figural subjects were much admired and but also maligned. Traditionalists deplored his portrayal of historical figures using Western realism. Others thought his antiquated European techniques were wholly unsuited to Chinese subject matter. His themes were grandiose, surfacing as odd anachronisms devoid of human and natural content. These exercises, some went on to say, were consistent with neither fact nor fiction. They opened a bitter debate in art circles throughout China as to whether ‘modern’ subject matter should be true to history.
Along the equator, these preoccupations mattered little. In the 1930s art and art education was in its infancy in Nanyang. The colonial authorities of the then British Malaya and the Straits Settlements had other pressing concerns. Art was a diversion best left to the Chinese émigré artist descending south. It is true to say modern art in southeast Asia owes its debut to the China-born. The Salon Art Society founded in the Straits Settlements of Singapore and Penang - renamed the Society of Chinese Artists in 1936 - had members who were alumni of institutions from Shanghai and Xiamen (formerly Amoy). As an entrepot, Singapore attracted a few itinerant but renowned Chinese artists such as Wang Jiyuan, Zhang Dannong and Liu Haisu who held exhibitions between 1938 and 1941 in aid of war relief. They created an awareness among the locals of the art of their homeland. But more important, they spurred a newfound confidence that led directly to the founding of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1938 by a coterie of painters who had fled war torn China. It was a tall order for its principal, one Lim Hak Tai who came by way of Xiamen.
In 1939, when Xu Beihong stepped off the boat in Singapore, he stayed for two years. By then a respected academic at foremost art institutions in Beijing and Shanghai, he had with him several hundred scrolls to raise funds for Chinese refugees. Proceeds from works that he painted locally, were donated to the resistance movement. He was an enthusiastic teacher and contributed much to local art appreciation, offering lessons both in traditional calligraphy as well as in Western art. A memorable composition he painted is Confucius and his Students (1939), an allegory on the relationship between teacher and student, illustrated by a scene from the most poetic chapter of the Analects. It refers to the Straits-born community leader Lim Boon Keng, a British subject who ‘lives his life according to Confucian principles’.
Taking refuge with local families, notable among whom were the Huang brothers, Xu Beihong went on to paint the formal likenesses of the then Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas (1939), as well as that of a socialite in Portrait of a Young Lady (1940), amongst others. One work later went to Indonesia, in an exchange of ideas that his Nanyang visit generated. Portrait of Mrs Tchang Ju Chi and Daughter (1939) depicts the wife and child of a local China-born artist trained in Marseilles. The work remained in then Jakarta-based artist Lee Man Fong’s possession until it was donated to the Xu Beihong Museum in 1986.
In late 1939, Xu Beihong received an invitation to visit and exhibit in India. It came from Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the poet-philosopher and first Asian recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore had founded the Viswa Bharati, a private university at Santiniketan in west Bengal in 1921, whose focus was music and the fine arts. A visit to China in 1924 imbued in him a spirit of friendship, and when he returned to India, a Chinese Buddhist scholar was appointed to head Chinese studies at the Viswa Bharati. Later, the Sino-Indian Cultural Society founded in Beijing in 1933, was reciprocated by an Indian chapter with Tagore as president. In 1937, the Cheena Bhavana (China College) was set up at Santiniketan.
In his message of greeting to Xu in February 1940, Tagore said: ‘We welcome you as a messenger of China’s great culture, you have brought to us in India the gift of spiritual sympathy which, centuries ago, united our ancient humanities.’ He added poignantly: ‘You have come to us with the vision of art, with the sensitive appeal of truth which must triumph over rude shocks of circumstance; your visit will strengthen us, and bring our effort nearer to fulfilment. With great joy I look forward to an era of warm kinship between our neighbouring lands and to the assertion of historical forces in the east that will save us from encroaching darkness.’
Xu and Tagore found in each other a kindred spirit. They were allies of a kind. Both were patriots believing in the magnificence - momentarily eclipsed - of their respective civilisations. During his stay in India, Xu painted more than 10 portraits of Tagore. The bespectacled Nobel laureate is depicted, western style, reading a book against the dense foliage of bodhi trees in Chinese ink and colour, a setting that ran against conventionally understood conceptions of space. Tagore had himself started painting late in life, in 1928 when he was into his 60s. But his style, favouring the woodblock print and bordering on German expressionism, was a clear departure from Xu’s. Through Tagore, Xu met many Indian dignitaries. Mahatma Gandhi, described as ‘living today with the soul of all India’ is featured in a charcoal sketch, complete with his autograph. Xu also made the acquaintance of a close Gandhi associate, Nandalal Bose, perhaps the most influential 20th-century Indian nationalist painter who taught at the Viswa Bharati and played a role in India’s eventual path to independence. Even the Queen Mother of Cooch Behar sat for Xu. She emerges seated on a chair in Portrait of an Indian Lady (1940), painted in Chinese style and mounted as a scroll as well as in a pencil drawing.
Xu was much moved by the flora and fauna of the Indian subcontinent and produced many views of its landscapes, particularly the Himalayas. But China was never far from his mind. In Darjeeling, he painted the 4.21 m long horizontal scroll, The Foolish Old Man who removed the Mountains (1940), a panoramic composition based on the classic Beishan Yugong, ‘The Foolish Man from the Northern Mountains’. It tells the tale of an old man who, knowing he was incapable of removing mountains, left the task to his sons and grandsons. Decidedly muscular Indian figures are portrayed cutting and removing rocks, a metaphor for Chinese resistance against Japanese aggression. Here Xu’s sketches of Indian student models at Santiniketan were put to good use: ‘While making this painting in India, I found the perfect model for the strong Lu Zhishen type (a character in the Chinese classic, On the Water Margin) … this man (was) magnificent in physique but straightforward in character …’.
In 1941, when Xu returned to Singapore from India, full-scale war had erupted in China. Venturing north along the Malay peninsula, he visited the capital, Kuala Lumpur as well as in Ipoh and Penang. He continued feverishly to raise funds by painting and sketching the local merchant and tin mining communities, and introduced modern Chinese art in the process. Despite his prolific Nanyang output, Xu Beihong was not without detractors. One critic said: ‘His most irksome pieces are the landscapes - they are mediocre in terms of composition with no artistic ethos whatsoever, and marred by excessive ink and colour washes … there is no brush technique to speak of. To produce a wide range of paintings and end up with such results is simply to waste paper, ink and time. What good can this do for art?’
Still, Xu remained an inspiration to struggling southeast Asian artists. Among them were the would-be pioneers of the Nanyang school, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, Liu Kang and Lee Man Fong who made their mark only after the war. Returning to China in 1942, Xu subsequently found favour with the new Communist leadership. His patriotism was rewarded with a post as head of the Central Institute of Fine Arts in Beijing. When he passed away in 1953, he was buried as the ‘father of modern Chinese art’ and his home was turned into the Xu Beihong Museum.
Xu Beihong in Nanyang is at the Singapore Art Museum, 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 189555, until 13 July, www.singart.com
