In 1998, Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen curated the landmark exhibition and catalog A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998). Since then, they have contributed to numerous museum projects and publications on modern and contemporary Chinese art. Unlike these earlier collections of individual essays, however, their most recent collaboration takes on the daunting task of presenting an authoritative narrative of modern Chinese art in a unified voice. With the coherence and accessibility of a textbook, The Art of Modern China lays out a clearly written and thoroughly researched history of Chinese art from the First Opium War through the twenty-first century.
The authors open with the overarching question: “What is modern Chinese art?” While acknowledging the essentialist undertones of this query, they also emphasize its centrality to twentieth-century nation-building in China. The continual return to what constitutes “modern Chinese art” underlies the book's thirteen chapters. Organized according to significant political contexts, the text's chronological progression provides a sense of continuity as the reader thinks through the stakes associated with “modern Chinese art,” even as its criteria are redefined chapter by chapter.
The first chapter, which covers the broadest temporal range, from 1842 to 1895, also has the distinct challenge of demonstrating how artists' lives and practices changed, in a way that is accessible to readers with no prior knowledge of Chinese art. Through a focus on particular nineteenth-century artists, the authors introduce and navigate readers through concepts such as literati ideals, long-standing debates over form-likeness versus subjectivity, and references to earlier painters, such as Gu Kaizhi (ca. 344–ca. 401) and Ni Zan (1306–74). This chapter also showcases one of the strengths of this book. Within discussions of individual artists, the authors describe the visual and material dimensions of specific artworks in rich detail. Color illustrations furthermore allow readers to follow how artists departed from existing conventions through subtleties in composition, color, and brushstroke.
In chapter 2, the book launches into the twentieth century and the early Republican era. From this point onward, the authors direct more attention to the particular policies and institutional structures governing initiatives in art. They thus deftly weave biographical descriptions into accounts of education reform, artists' societies, new exhibition formats, relationships with Japan, and Western influence. While chapters 2 and 3 introduce competing institutions and debates in the art world, one of the interesting divisions that the authors subsequently set up pertains to artistic media. Chapters 4 and 5 are both devoted to the 1930s. However, the former covers graphic design, oil painting, and woodcuts while the latter is dedicated to the status of ink painting as guohua (“national painting”). Similarly, chapters 7 and 8 both cover the early Mao era from 1949 to 1966, but chapter 7 is dedicated to Socialist Realist oil painting while chapter 8 focuses on ink painting, serial publications, and woodcuts. Ink painting continues as a significant thread in the following chapter on the Cultural Revolution and through the final three chapters on contemporary art as well.
The attention to ink painting is valuable for the complexity it adds to understandings of art during the Mao and post-Mao eras. Through detailed visual descriptions, accounts of artists' lives, and analyses of negotiations in government policies, the authors unpack the nuances in the shifting meanings and manipulation of ink. For example, through the development of Socialist Realist ink figure painting and the revival of landscape painting, they present accounts of national salvation that extend beyond the domain of propaganda posters. Similarly, in the final chapters, the authors track the fate of ink painting as an experimental medium alongside performance art and installation art. This is especially timely given the recent scholarly interest in rescuing ink painting from being wholly dismissed as a “traditional” medium.
Although the majority of the book is dedicated to twentieth-century art from mainland China, chapter 11 takes an interesting detour into “Alternative Chinas.” Beginning with a century of Hong Kong art, followed by a century of art in Taiwan, this chapter brings much-needed attention to these still understudied regions of Chinese art. As in the preceding chapters, the art histories of each place are recounted through changes in artistic media, international relations, and institutional structures. By foregrounding a postcolonial framework for thinking about the shape of “modern Chinese art” in Hong Kong and Taiwan, these accounts help to complicate the themes of cultural ideology and national identity that are woven through the rest of the book.
The Art of Modern China is a long-awaited resource for scholars and students of modern and contemporary Chinese art and culture. While accessible to nonspecialists, this text extends far beyond an introductory survey. One minor quibble is that the biographical accounts of specific painters, particularly in the early chapters, sometimes come at the expense of other dynamic approaches to framing changes in visual culture or of explorations into more media, such as photography. Nonetheless, this text is packed with rich detail and presents a compelling art-centered narrative for thinking about China's tumultuous twentieth century and its legacy for the twenty-first.
