Art general knowledge sharing

2015 NO.4 Total 17th Issue

October 11, 2015 (Sunday) 15:00-17:00

Address: Report Hall, 2nd Floor, Guanshan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen

Cai Tao (Associate Researcher at the Art Research Institute of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts)

Engaged in research on the history of Chinese art in the 20th century.  once worked at the Guangdong Art Museum and planned projects such as "The Vanguard of Floating: The Chinese Independent Art Association and Modern Art in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Tokyo in the 1930s", as well as individual retrospective exhibitions of modern artists from the Republic of China era such as Liang Xihong, Zhao Shou, Yang Qiuren, and Wang Daoyuan. Visiting Curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea in 2009, Foreign Hired Researcher (Resident Researcher at the Kyoto National Museum) at the Japan Association for Academic Revitalization from 2010 to 2011, and Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Yenching Society from 2011 to 2012. In 2013, obtained a doctoral degree from the China Academy of Fine Arts. The monograph "State and Artists: The Great Wall Paintings of the Yellow Crane Tower (1938) and the Transformation of Modern Chinese Art in the Early Anti Japanese War" will soon be published by Shanghai Zhongxi Book Company.

The relationship between the state and artists is one of the fundamental propositions in art history. In the context of modern Chinese art history, especially in the cross linguistic context of the warring countries in the early stages of the Anti Japanese War, the relationship between the state and artists becomes particularly prominent. This article takes 1938 as the historical staging point for examining the history of modern Chinese art, rather than the usual 1949, which is a re interpretation based on this key proposition. The artistic history phenomenon that constitutes this interpretation was the Yellow Crane Tower mural, hosted by renowned playwright Tian Han and created by more than ten painters including Wang Shikuo and Li Keran in the Third Hall of the Wuhan Political Department in August and September 1938. The creation site of this large mural not only witnesses the establishment of the institutional relationship between the nation and artists, but also foreshadows the profound transformation of China's modern art movement. The appearance and exit of Ni Yide, a representative figure of the Chinese modern art movement and a painter from the Juelan Society, in this large mural symbolizing the comprehensive rise of nationalism provides us with a special perspective to examine the transformation process of the new relationship between the state and artists, as well as the rapid turn of modern art. This lecture aims to reconstruct this crucial but selectively forgotten art history event from a cross-cultural perspective, and discusses the overall understanding of the various causes that led to this significant turning point in modern Chinese art.