Talk for Pan Tianshou Symposium, Hangzhou, December 1994
It's a very great honor to be asked to be the initial foreign speaker at this distinguished symposium on the great modern master Pan Tianshou, and to speak in the place where he spent so much of his career--first as the head of the Traditional Chinese Ptg. Dept. at the National West Lake Academy of Fine Arts, the first art academy in China, and later, for twenty years from 1945, as the Director of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, before his tragic persecution and death during the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution.
As a foreigner who had, and still has, a very limited comprehension of the problems that artists faced and the conditions they endured during those early years of the P.R.C., I would find it easiest to talk about Pan Tianshou's paintings purely in terms of style, staying safely out of the more difficult topics of their historical position and political implications, topics about which others can speak with far more knowledge and insight than I can. What I want to do, however, is to offer an outsider's view of this matter, acknowledging that it is partial and no doubt somewhat distorted. It may nevertheless convey to my Chinese friends and colleagues some sense of how their situation was perceived by those of us outside. And I want to use this as a tribute to Pan Tianshou.
In 1970, the year before Pan Tianshou's death, a great international symposium on Chinese painting was held at the Palace Museum in Taibei; of course, no mainland Chinese scholars were involved. After the symposium some of us came to Macao; and the first place we were taken by our guide, the exciting place where all American tourists wanted most to go, was the border with "Communist China." A road ran from one side to the other, but an invisible barrier separated our side from the other; we all stood looking across with fascination at scenery that was exactly like what surrounded us, but seemed mysteriously different--it was as if we expected the trees and grass to be red instead of green. China was then a remote, inaccessible place for us, and vaguely sinister.
Two years later, in 1972, Nixon made his visit to China; and in the following year I and ten others came in the first delegation of art historians and archaeologists for a month-long tour; and the mysterious realm at last became a living reality for us. Hangzhou was the last stop on our tour; in 1977 I came again as head of a Chinese Ancient Paintings delegation, and again we came to Hangzhou. But it was not until 1982 that I visited the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, met some of its faculty, and saw some of its collection of old paintings. Since then my association with it has become very close, I have visited it many times, and I feel very much at home here.
In the mid-70s I prepared, for delivery at a symposium at our Center for Chinese Studies commemorating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the P.R.C. a lecture on the vicissitudes of traditional painting during those years (a topic on which Judy Andrews has since published a serious study.) I concentrated on the problems that traditional Chinese artists had faced in adapting their art to the new conditions, under political pressures and perils of a kind we could only imagine. (It was not until several years later that we learned about what artists had really undergone.) In my ill-informed presentation of this subject, based largely on a survey of paintings done by traditional masters during those years, Pan Tianshou had a prominent place. I will summarize briefly what I said then, with slides.
S,S. Qi Baishi, as an old and revered master with peasant-carpenter origins and an international reputation, was permitted to continue working with only minimal accomodation to the new requirements; often it was simply a matter of adding an inscription with a patriotic or political message to a painting not essentially different from what he had done before, or adding symbols such as doves of peace to his paintings.
S-- Qi Baishi was able to continue doing this in a relatively unproblematic way until his death in 1957 (when this painting was done.)
S,S. There were precedents, of course, for this practice; Chinese painters had for centuries been giving their conventional images of ink bamboo or blossoming plum a diversity of meanings and functions by adding appropriate inscriptions; and more recently Xu Beihong had done the same: painting over and over his standard image of a spirited horse, but adding inscriptions with more specific messages,
--S for instance this one, on an example dated 1945, indicating that it was intended on this occasion to celebrate the defeat of the Japanese. The image of the horse is the same as always.
S,S. By the later 50s, and for artists not so old and established, more thorough-going and conspicuous kinds of adaptation seemed to be required. Attempts were made to incorporate the new imagery into the settings of traditional landscape paintings, such as in Ying Yeping's 1957 picture in which the traditional figure of the sage gazing into the void is replaced by a foreman supervising the building of a bridge, or Li Shiqing's 1958 work titled "Moving the Mountains, Filling the Valleys." The ideal of harmony between man and nature had given way to one in which man's technological domination of nature was celebrated. For those of us outside China who were familiar with traditional landscape painting, works of this kind seemed rather anomalous, even bizarre. But at the same time we tried to understand the problems and pressures facing these painters, and tried to be sympathetic rather than critical.
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