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ABSTRACT
After 1949, with ‘serving the people’ established as the basic guideline of art, the reform of traditional landscape painting, which had been appropriated by the cultural elites for thousands of years, was put on the agenda as well. Beginning from the early of 1950s, there were continual debates on the reform of traditional Chinese painting within the art field, through which many artists gradually reached a consensus on the development direction of Chinese painting. At the same time, stimulated by the large-scale xiesheng movement sponsored by the government, Chinese landscape painting changed dramatically in subject, theme, and brushstroke technique, and developed a new style which has its own signifying system. Blending both Chinese and western drawing skills, the new landscape painting successfully created a unique scopic regime, which can establish an organic relationship between personal aesthetic experience and collective historical experience. As a prominent cultural achievement of Mao’s era, the new landscape painting embodies the cultural politics and the technologies of the self at that time.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Ni Wei is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He has published articles in journals such as Literature Review, Culture & Science. His research interests include visual culture studies, twentieth century Chinese literature studies, and media studies.
Notes on contributor
Ni Wei is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He has published articles in journals such as Literature Review, Culture & Science. His research interests include visual culture studies, twentieth century Chinese literature studies, and media studies.
Notes
1 Zong Bing (375–443 C.E.) was a famous painter and painting theorist in the Liu-Song Dynasty, whose hua shanshui xu (Introduction to panting landscape) is the first article discussing the significance of landscape in Chinese history.
2 Wu Guanzhong, a distinguished wash painting artist, praises this exhibition as
a milestone in the development of Chinese landscape painting … carrying about brushes, ink, Xuan papers and other guohua tools, they began to go directly into mountains, forests, and life to sketch from nature, and broke through the conventions of traditional techniques which had been gradually declining because of following the old routine, thus produced the first batch of new landscape painting which are fresh, vivid, and full of genuine feelings. (Wu Citation2007)
3 Sanfeng means to scatter the tip of brush and paint freely on paper, thus to make the lines and strokes appear to be more vigorous and dynamic.
4 In traditional Chinese landscape painting, cun is a technique of showing the textures of mountain rocks and the barks of trees by light ink strokes or dabs after sketching the outline.
5 For further discussion about this unique method, see Bu Dengke’s Research on Li Keran’s Art, chapter 3. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Fine Arts Press, 2011.
6 See Adams (Citation2002).
7 A painting knack put forward by Wang Wei, a distinguished poet and landscape painter in the Tang Dynasty, in his essay On Landscape, which means that everything in picture should keep appropriate proportions in size. Zhang, chi, cun, and fen are traditional Chinese length units; one zhang equals to ten chi, one chi equals to ten cun, and one cun equals to ten fen.
8 The three surfaces of a stone are the top surface, the front surface, and the lateral surface. Distinguishing a stone by its three surfaces means to represent it in third dimensions. The five colors of ink means five gradations of ink, which are dry ink, thick ink, ink, light ink, and clear ink.