Attributed to Jin Shangyi

Private Collection, Europe

The Many Realisms of Contemporary China

The tradition of oil painting in China is now quite established, the result of efforts to copy historical European painters, training in European universities during in the early decades of the 20^th century, and even the Cultural Revolution itself (1966 to 1976), in which a major effort was made to make accessible art with a propagandistic intent.  In fact, the notion of joining art to life had been an important topic of discussion in art circles in the years immediately after the May 4^th movement and well into the 1930s; a poster style with radical intent, inherently figurative in nature, evolved shortly thereafter, and in response to the evolving ideas of Chairman Mao in the years before the revolution, many artists placed politics before art, or took to extolling Mao and the masses. 

This attitude became dominant among Chinese oil painters immediately following 1949.  In the years of recovery after the Communists took power, major artists continued to follow what they then perceived to be politically progressive paths, even when they had been educated in the academy in France before returning to Mainland China. Then, in 1976, once the Cultural Revolution had passed – and with it the emphasis on Social Realism as the agreed-upon dominant style for artistic production – the art academies were nearly overwhelmed with applications from talented young artists whose interest in portraying reality, in a style whose themes and materials came from the West, was paramount.  

To some extent the subsequent tendency in Chinese realist painting has been a turning away from the political propaganda of Social Realism, as well as a rejection of negative subject matter, itself the consequence of many years of social and cultural hardship.  To Western eyes that value the long string of stylistic innovations by which advanced Modern painting has historically been assessed, however, the world of neorealism may seem retrograde.  But for the group of Chinese contemporary painters who worked in the style, the tenets of the movement were needed to break free of historical or propagandistic motifs, even if their language was similarly figurative.

The technical abilities of the artists who came of age in the 1970s are nearly unsurpassable, and there existed in their art a willingness to paint beauty as they wished to see it—particularly in the form of beautiful women.  Inspired by a humanism owing much to the Western Old Masters, both in technique and temperament, painters began to practice a neorealism that actually owed its expressiveness to a policy of greater tolerance by the Chinese government.  It is difficult not to be impressed by the classical idealism that inspired these artists, who portray a reality that is far removed from political ideology and the representation of gritty urban or rural life.  The notion of painterly skill is deeply important to the practitioners of neorealism.  Such an approach incorporates a love of technical expertise for its own sake, which gives the nod to the history of Western oil painting even as it resorts to the depiction of Chinese themes, among which young women, countryside minority peoples, and landscapes feature prominently.  To some eyes, the subject matter and style of these works incorporate what is pejoratively termed an “academic approach.”  Yet there is a truthfulness and independence in the Chinese subject matter, and an accomplishment of the hand, that sets these artists apart from the deliberately cloying appropriation of effects or sentiments.

What is particularly interesting about neorealism is its refusal to forego Chinese themes; in many ways the art continues to celebrate the Chinese people, the countryside, and traditional interiors.  Viewed by some as nostalgic or idealizing, by others as the definition of beauty in painting, this body of work begins to emerge as an important branch of contemporary Chinese production, its historical evolution an important chapter in the annals of modern Chinese art.