A brush with storytelling

While portraits at a CAFA show offer intimate glimpses of their subjects, they also reveal the evolution of contemporary oil painting in China. Lin Qi reports.

Young Woman Singer, a portrait of Peng Liyuan, attracted much public attention when her husband Xi Jinping became China's president almost three decades after she modeled for painter Jin Shangyi.

Observers delight in talking about Jin's selection of his model from three young woman students of the China Conservatory of Music, but overlook the work's innovative spirit as a representative of the artist's "new classic" practice in the 1980s.

The painting is now displayed as an iconic portrait of Chinese oil painting, at an exhibition called Stories Behind the Faces at the museum of Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts. It displays 18 paintings and seven sketches from the museum's collection to testify how oil painting developed in China in different stages since the early 20th century.

Young Woman Singer shows Jin's solid basis as a painter that he acquired at CAFA.

After the founding of New China in 1949, Chinese oil paintings largely adopted the socialist realistic approach. Promising art students and painters were sent to the former Soviet Union, or attended master's programs at CAFA taught by the Soviet artist Konstantin Maksimov in the 1950s. Jin, then a CAFA student, perfected the techniques of drawing and oil painting at Maksimov's classes.

The reform and opening-up in the 1980s exposed Chinese painters to the diverse global art landscape beyond Soviet realism. Many turned to classicism and neoclassicism for inspiration.

Jin developed a personal style to form the "new classic" vocabulary. He placed the subjects in the typical composition of a classic oil painting. But he conveyed a humanistic spirit that was embraced by his contemporaries in the early 1980s in several paintings including Young Woman Singer.

"From a Western perspective, Jin appears as a leading artistic figure in the pivotal phase of Chinese art history that saw a shift from socialist realism inspired by Soviet models to more personal avenues of expression," New York-based art critic Jason Edward Kaufman wrote in a commentary on Jin's solo exhibition in 2011. "In this sense, Jin has been a gentle liberator of expressive freedom in China."

The exhibition also displays some works which are seldom available to public viewing but tell important stories, such as Li Shutong's (1880-1942) Half-Naked Woman.

Li is better known as Hong Yi, the reputed Buddhist monk. The discovery of Half-Naked Woman in CAFA museum's storehouse in 2011 reveals the master's artistic attainment before he dedicated himself to Buddhism in 1918.

The painting was recognized as a Li work by CAFA teachers during a "sorting-out" of the school museum's collections since its founding in 1918 (then called The Beiping Art School). It returned to the limelight after being kept in storage for about five decades.

Li portrayed a young woman who has just had a bath and takes a nap in an armchair. He gave the work to a friend who hung it in the living room of his apartment for years. After the friend died, his descendants donated the painting to CAFA.

Researchers at the academy estimate that Li created the painting between 1906-11, when he learned Western painting at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts). It is one of only three Li works known to existence.

Li's painting provides a glimpse into the important opportunity Chinese painters had to learn Western art in Japan, which became modernized and opened to the West earlier than China did. This has been overlooked, as people have paid more attention to the artists who studied in Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

The best of them are also represented at the exhibition, such as Chang Shuhong (1904-94), Wu Fading (1883-1924) and Xu Beihong (1895-1953), who all followed orthodox disciplines at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts de Paris (National School of Fine Arts in Paris).

This group not only spread out Western oil traditions, they also introduced to Chinese society the happenings of European art movements. The exhibition shows such influences with the display of two European woman portraits: one by Gustave Courbet (1819-77), the French painter and pioneer of the realistic movement, and another by Alfred Bastien (1873-1955), who once directed Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and mentored several Chinese painters including Wu Zuoren (1908-97), who studied there in the 1930s and became CAFA's head in 1958.

"The collections exemplify the scope of oil painting's expansion in Beijing at the time. They also show that the mechanism of the fine art academy was gradually established in China," says Cao Qinghui, a lecturer at CAFA.

Contact the writer at linqi@chinadaily.com.cn