In the waning days of the Qing Dynasty and the early Republican period, new educational reforms dramatically reshaped systems of art education and led to fundamental changes in the purpose, meaning and social function of art. These transformations were particularly visible in Shanghai, where the growth of art schools and societies was facilitated by internationally oriented forms of commercial art and an attendant expansion of the publishing industries. One of the largest and most influential institutions to emerge from this confluence of cultural factors was the Shanghai Art College (Shanghai meishu zhuanke xuexiao or Shanghai meizhuan) the subject of Jane Zheng's extensive new study. Providing a comprehensive chronological overview of the first 25 years of the College's history, she traces its evolution in the 1910s from a private tutorial school offering training in calendar poster painting techniques to a paragon of Western-style art instruction in the 1920s, and finally to an accredited institution that sought to fulfil Cai Yuanpei's mandate on “aesthetic education” in the 1930s. In the process, she delineates how the College successfully weathered the vicissitudes of Shanghai's changing socio-economic and cultural climate, navigating both market demands and the city's burgeoning commercial sphere to emerge as a “pragmatic market player in Shanghai's free market environment” (p. 327).

The book argues that the College not only responded to artistic changes as they percolated into the mainstream of Shanghai's cosmopolitan culture, but also illustrates how its pedagogical goals and institutional features played an integral part in this modernization process, demonstrating the seminal impact which the college exerted in professionalizing “Western-style” art training, legitimizing the continued practice of literati painting and in establishing art history as a modern discipline. Rich in primary sources, Zheng's argument is supported by exhaustive research into the College's archives, preserved in the collection of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, in addition to countless newspaper and periodical reports. Allied with a synthesis of the secondary literature, copious quotations from many seminal figures, including Liu Haisu, Zhang Yuguang and Pan Tianshou, bring to life the incongruous voices and competing agendas of those involved in the College's operation.

This meticulous unearthing of the minutiae of the College serves to dispel several misconceptions that have become imbricated with the College's history, reframing the infamous “nude model incident” less as a battle over artistic freedom than a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt. Similarly, what Zheng terms the “college upheaval incident” of 1928, in which a Leftist student strike was brutally crushed by the College's administration, is shown to be motivated more by political expediency than any “general commitment to art education ideals” (p. 323). While the material presented is certainly engaging, the “micro-sociological approach” adopted by the author, in which she interweaves social and political conditions at the national level with an adaptation of Bourdieu's concept of “artistic fields” at the local level into a “five-level theoretical framework to explain the modernization of Chinese art” (p. 30) does at times appear unduly cumbersome. The overall structure of the book, split into three sections, each of which is further subdivided into four chapters with numerous subdivisions and headings, could also have benefited from a tighter editorial focus. In a book that is richly supplied with previously unpublished images uncovered from the College's yearbooks and archives, including student artworks, documentary photographs and countless paintings produced by the renowned roster of artists who served on the College's faculty, it is particularly frustrating that the author has chosen to eschew any visual analysis or in-depth interpretation of images and objects. She writes, “artworks are understood as part of an institution, however, the interpretation of artworks is beyond the scope of this book,” and similarly, “the relationship between individual artists and their artworks is also not considered….” (p. 36). While textual sources are thus privileged over the visual, even in her cursory discussion of selected images, she reproduces certain art historical hierarchies by focusing predominantly on painting and overlooking the multi-disciplinary nature of the College, which encompassed training in sculpture, architecture, applied arts and design.

These quibbles aside, the book's most salient contribution lies in its “continued efforts toward understanding privacy within the public domain” (p. 335), successfully elucidating the crucial, generative role it played in fashioning artistic modernity at the beginning of the 20th century by highlighting “the continuance of the private purposes and interests that dominated the Institution and the art field” (p. 335). The book's final chapter, which includes a discussion of female artists in the public sphere, is particularly noteworthy in this regard, emphasizing how the College's coeducational policies merely served to reinforce pre-existing gender hierarchies, “as a relocation of their subordinate roles and the inequality of gender relationships from the private domain to the public domain” (p. 335). Joining a growing body of studies which serve to underscore the impact of the market on the multifaceted modes of art production and consumption in Republican-era Shanghai, The Modernization of Chinese Art is an informative account that will be of interest not only to specialists in the field but also to those looking for a richly detailed introduction to this important and complex period in Chinese art history.