by Jon Lackman | 11 January 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books, Museums
On to the third and final nominee for the Alfred Barr, Jr., Award: The exhibition catalogue Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-Century China, edited by Xiaoneng Yang, is another doorstop of a volume, 450 pages on heavy paper, on which feature a variety of gorgeous and painstakingly assembled illustrations. “All the works were expressly photographed for this catalogue … Due to the large size of some of the painting, the Zhejiang Provincial Museum had to build a special studio to photograph them.” Drawn largely from Chinese collections such as the one in Zhejiang, the exhibition and its catalogue (produced by Stanford University) trace the lives and works of four artists active in the early 20th century: Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi, Huang Binhong, and Pan Tianshou. The catalogue includes an introduction by the editor, an essay by Richard Vinograd, and a short biography of each artist, but it consists mostly of detailed catalogue entries that read like mini-essays. Twelve authors contributed in all.
These painters are unjustly ignored in the West, Yeng writes:
The tradition of studying and collecting historical Chinese art is well established, and during the last several decades, scholars and collectors have taken up the cause of contemporary Chinese avant-garde and experimental art in earnest. An extraordinarily rich category of Chinese art, however … has gone largely unremarked in the West … These four artists, in ways unique to each, understood and absorbed the essence of centuries of Chinese painting and aesthetics … they successfully met the challenges associated with the advent of China’s “discovery” of Western art, and overcame the suspicion–sometimes outright rejection–of the Chinese tradition that it provoked … and they consistently maintained artistic integrity in spite of an increasingly commercialized and politicized art market.
Yeng argues also that the Chinese contemporary artists who are today so popular among Western elites owe a debt to their countrymen of a century ago:
Even though some established contemporary diaspora artists are not actively ink painters, their successes were built upon the integration of Chinese cultural elements and Western avant-garde idioms … Chinese ink painting in the twentieth century has given rise to a new generation of artists who critically absorb their cultural and artistic heritage and innovatively reinterpret rather than mimic the past, who understand the trajectories of artistic progress, and who have the ability to “draw” the future. Qi Baishi once said, “Who imitates me, his art dies.”
