Infamous Tea & Honey show
The glory days of Shanghai-style oil painting have gone with the wind. Since the death of the famed Chen Yifei, the fine art circle of the city has begun to wither.
The diversity and idiosyncrasy of the once great art hub seem to have migrated northwards to Beijing and areas like 798, the Dashanzi Art District, where the Central Academy of Art, Central Academy of Drama and Beijing Film Academy have been gathered together to form a large clique of cutting-edge and experimental institutions. Statistics show that among the top 100 galleries worldwide, 50 have branches in Beijing; not one has set up shop in Shanghai.
It’s a far cry from the state of affairs back in the 1930s, when Shanghai was indisputably the heart of cultivation in China, boasting a thriving art, music, theater and film industry.
This trend continued into the 1950s and 60s with the dawn of the Shanghai Fine Arts School, which became a household name during its brief six years of existence and spawned a group of graduates who gained renown as influential oil painters, including Lai Lixiang, Qiu Ruimin, Wang Yongqiang, Liu Yaozhen and Yan Guoji. The most prestigious of the group, Chen Yifei, Wei Jingshan and Xia Baoyuan, are still hailed today as the ‘Three Giants of Shanghai Oil Painting.’
Digging into what made this period so prolific, Xia Baoyuan recalls the education he and his peers received. “During the 1950s and 60s, the educational system was greatly influenced by Soviet-Russian culture, due to the politics of the era,” he remembers. “The whole generation, therefore, has a deeply embedded Russian background – we studied the works of Russian painters such as Ilya Yafimovich Repin and Valentin Alexandrovich Serov.
“Compared to them, Shanghai artists’ paintings were regarded as ‘Westernized paintings.’ Though we directly studied realistic painting from the former Soviet Union, we were actually much closer to the European cultural vein. That is what created so-called Shanghai-style art.”
Students were actively encouraged to delve into the gold mine of European ideals lying beneath the surface of the Russian greats, leading to studies in French impressionism, “even medieval art on the sly,” adds Xia, “regardless of political restrictions.”
These prosperous decades were short-lived. The healthy, fresh, vivacious atmosphere of the Shanghai Fine Arts School was soon attacked by future proponents of the Cultural Revolution and closed in 1965. Shanghai’s aesthetic dominance within China declined drastically. The ensuing 10-year Cultural Revolution emphasized creative unification; paintings were expected to be in the mode of ‘yangbanxi’ (model revolutionary works).
“Deeply influenced by yangbanxi, painters made purposeful exaggerations in their works,” says Xia. “They had to flatter and present overly uplifting images of workers, peasants and soldiers, as all artistic works at that time served the government.”
It’s a part of history Shanghai-born Chen Danqing, the artist who burst into the global consciousness with his realistic portraits of Tibetans in the 1980s, vividly remembers. “Artists had no choice but to cater to political propaganda,” remarks Chen. “In the late 60s, the local authority employed a group of young graduates from the Shanghai Fine Arts School, including Wei Jingshan, Xia Baoyuan, Chen Yifei, Lai Lixiang, Wang Yongqiang and Qiu Ruimin. But their techniques were repeatedly criticized and their produce vetoed.”
Ironically, many of the pieces made to suit a particular propaganda program were later denounced when judged purely from a critical standpoint. It was a bitter joke that Xia Baoyuan experienced first hand with his Yellow River series, which the painter was asked to create in response to the Japanese invasion of Chinese territory. By the time he had finished, the two nations had resumed diplomatic relations and his contributions were rubbished as lacking in taste.
At the dawn of the 1980s, exasperated Shanghai artists chucked their paint brushes, palettes and canvases into a suitcase, and went overseas in search of more picturesque horizons, leaving the younger generation without guides and role models. “The earliest went abroad in 1979,” says Xia. “If you were still here in the late 1980s, it was considered a shame. Others thought you were incompetent. It was as if you had been married for three years, but still didn’t have a child. Others would despise you! I caught the last train and went to the US in 1988.”
Chen Yifei, ever the weather vane for the changing winds in the motherland, was one of the earliest to go abroad in 1980 and returned in 1992. It wasn’t until then, over a decade after the initial exodus, that China began to open up again and the artists started to return from foreign climes.
The turbulent history has left an unmistakable gap in the natural progression and development of art in Shanghai from which it has yet to recover. It remains to be seen whether local youngsters can regain the prestige held by their predecessors or whether the city is destined to remain in the shadow of Beijing.
