Detrimental Dichotomies in the Art of Liu Guosong
By Cassie Sim
The 20th century was a tumultuous time in China. East and West were pitted against one another in a tense, geopolitical power struggle which interfered with civilian life, contributing to an ongoing identity crisis inextricably tied to nationalism and culture. For perhaps the first time, people openly questioned their place in the world, where their future was headed and what it meant to modernize—including artists.
The guohua and xihua dichotomy in Chinese visual culture resulted from this discourse, soon becoming an ideological battle on its own which served as the biggest impetus to the Chinese artist’s creative expression for the longest time. It permeated every aspect of their careers, leading to a widespread identity crisis which juxtaposed Western artists who created anything they wanted without fear of such blatant cultural or geographical associations. Lauded as the “father” of modern Chinese painting, Taiwanese artist Liu Guosong’s (b. 1932) works can act as a starting point of the investigation into the widely accepted notion that the modernization of this art form was due to the hybridization of Chinese tradition and Western styles and techniques. It also provides a commentary on the issues this poses. By examining Liu’s legendary status and how he achieved it, we can analyze the implications of the dual lens through which modern Chinese art has been, and continues to be viewed, and whether his works broke out of the mold or perpetuated the East/West dualism.
First, we need to understand the context of Chinese art in the 20th century and the harmful East/West binary coloring the art world’s perception at the time. Unlike the Japanese during the Meiji period, Chinese rulers refused to see European arts as aids to reformation or modernization. Guohua - literally, state painting - is a traditional Chinese style of painting which continues to be practiced, with ink as the main medium. Western painting, or xihua, chiefly associated with oil paint, was the antithesis of guohua in style and medium; conservatives viewed it as a threat to tradition, while radical artists, including Liu, embraced the new techniques and found in them ways to “modernize” Chinese art. Because of this, I contend that guohua/xihua can also be translated to traditional/modern.
An example of traditional Chinese painting: Fan Kuan, Traveling Among Streams and Mountains, c. 1000, Song Dynasty (960 – 1279), Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk, 206.3 x 103.3 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei.
On one hand, the introduction of Western art provided some Chinese artists the means to liberate themselves and explore new forms of art-making. On the other hand, it created an artistic and cultural division between itself and guohua, a binary pairing that determined the artist’s identity and criteria of art education and criticism through the 1980s. Each merely existing highlighted the presence of the other. Knowing this, artists and art critics alike called for such terms (guohua/xihua) to be completely eradicated. Critic Li Xianting argued in 1986 that people had to “do away with the concept of guohua and develop ink painting into pure abstraction.” Liu Guosong concurred that ink painting should stop associating heavily with nationalism in order to modernize, and was influenced by Abstract Expressionism during his stay in the United States. He came up with the experimental, mixed-media Space series (1960 – 1970) two decades before Li Xianting made his proposal; inspired by the Apollo 8 space mission, he combined ink, color, photography and spray paint to create saturated, Pop-esque landscape compositions of the cosmos.
An example of the Abstract Expressionism that influenced Liu: Mark Rothko, Detail from Untitled (Yellow and Blue), 1954, Oil on canvas, 242 cm x 186cm. Image courtesy of sothebys.com.
In Eclipse (1971) we see a panoramic stretch of land and sky dividing the long strip of paper laterally in half. The deep indigo sky shows the changing moon in sequence during the titular event of an eclipse. The minimalist silhouettes of the moons contrast with the land, recalling the more traditional aesthetics of Chinese ink landscape paintings, albeit in a heavily abstracted manner. Painted in alternately fading broad, textural strokes, the ambiguous strip of land appears to be floating in space like the moon does in the sky, but in this work, the moon graphics are really crescent-shaped absences of color, static elements existing on a flat plane, while the landmass moves like calligraphy across a multidimensional surface. This painting represents one of the many from this series that earned Liu his international acclaim as “the outer space painter” and a maverick who could blend East and West.
Liu Guosong, Eclipse, 1971, ink and color on paper, 120 x 519 cm. Image courtesy of liukuosung.org.
Liu was determined to synthesize East and West cultures to revive Chinese art. For a long time, he was an outcast in his own nation, with many people condemning him for being “unChinese.” On the contrary, he is proud of the Chinese past, at least up to a certain point. According to him, Chinese painting has already evolved into the lyrical stage in the Tang Dynasty (c. 618 - 960), an era he greatly admired. Indeed, we see lyricism and energy of Tang-style splashes in the bottom half of Eclipse, just like we see the flatness, obscurity and bold, expressive use of color in a Mark Rothko painting. We also see general similarities to ancient Chinese painting in the limited color palette, the use of material and the reverence for nature. However, contemporary flavor dominates. According to critic Jia Fangzhou, Liu abandoned the traditional techniques on how to use the ink brush, even abandoning the brush altogether, thus abandoning bimo (brush and ink), thus abandoning guohua.
Is this what is meant by achieving a synthesis? Does this imply that merely having a few Western or xihua elements changes the fundamental nature of Chinese ink painting, transforming it into something totally new? And is it even really new? Through formal analysis, we have established that Eclipse is the outcome of splicing traditional Chinese materials, themes and concepts with recognizable Pop, Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist elements, with a historical US phenomenon as the subject matter on top of that. Unsurprisingly, the response from Western critics was overwhelmingly positive; those back home who did not attack him praised him as daring and unconventional. There were many rules to Chinese painting and he broke them, making him an outcast in the art world for a long time. He attributed this to neither being fully Western nor fully Chinese.
As the “father” of modern Chinese ink painting, Liu Guosong represents the Chinese artist’s ongoing struggle with the East/West dichotomy since the 20th century. His artistic successes and achievements are undeniable, but his journey was lonely, difficult and inherently defined by these divisions. This seemed inevitable as what he and all other Chinese artists are trying to overcome is the historical and cultural narrative that had been decided for them for ages. Since the 21st century, the West and China have undergone even more transformations, including the current US-China trade war exacerbating what was already a tense relationship between these two major economic superpowers. Since politics and nationalism formed the East/West dichotomy, we can only imagine how current events will continue shaping the narrative of modern Chinese art going forward.