1 āThe New Chinese Landscapeā in the Cold War era
Lesley Ma
From 1966, as the Cultural Revolution was reaching full force in mainland China, until 1968, The New Chinese Landscape: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists toured the United States. Sponsored by the John D. Rockefeller III (JDR 3rd) Fund and managed by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) in New York, it was the first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in the postwar Western hemisphere.1 Organized by Chu-tsing Li, a Chinese-American art historian, the exhibition introduced a new style of painting, one that not only referenced traditional Chinese landscape painting but also incorporated the ideas and techniques of American and European abstraction. The exhibition featured 60 works by mainland-born artists living in Taiwan and the United States: C.C. Wang, a mid-career artist in New York; Chen Chi-Kwan, an architect and artist who had moved from New York to Taichung; Yu Cheng-yao, a self-taught senior painter in Taipei; and Liu Kuo-sung, Chuang Che, and Fong Chung-ray, three young painters of Wuyue huahui (Fifth Moon Painting Society), a modernist art group in Taiwan. The timing was remarkable. While the Red Guard denounced tradition and artists produced socialist-realist paintings in mainland China, this exhibition brought to America a cosmopolitan version of a traditional painting genre, created by Chinese artists living outside of the mainland, thus announcing divergent, contrasting developments of art on either side of the Bamboo Curtain.
A multi-city US tour of Chinese contemporary art at the height of the Cold War invites further exploration of the complex web of forces involved in its making. Against the backdrop of Cold War geopolitics where the Republic of Chinaās Kuomintang (Nationalist) government in Taiwan was an American ally on the Pacific Rim and the only āChinaā recognized by the Free World, the exhibition was a product of the alignment of various interests: a US-based Chinese curator championing artists in Taiwan; a group of young artists modernizing their painting traditions by embracing American and European modernist abstraction; and funding from a prestigious New York-based private foundation promoting Asian art in the US. The exhibition press release effused positive internationalism:
Recently emerged and flourishing are many painters of all ages whose techniques refer to the great and ancient tradition of Oriental painting, but carry it forward in many highly personal ways due to the impact of modern Western art styles.2
Celebrating a highly adaptive and cosmopolitan version of Chinese art, the statement announced an unprecedented moment where Chinese paintingāa discipline with its own system of training, technique, vocabulary, and circulationādiscovered new creative potential by absorbing Western, āmodernā influences and entered transnational dialogues. While international exchange in the form of touring exhibitions is a familiar trope in cultural diplomacy, that an American private foundation proselytizing modernist ideals supported Chinese painters honoring centuries-old ink painting philosophies, and that landscape painting, a traditional art form, found affinity in modernist abstract art from America and Europe, are curious phenomena. This chapter thus parses the factors contributing to these developments.
Previous scholarship on the exhibition has focused on the personal triumphs of the artists. Indeed, a celebratory exhibition at the National Museum of History in Taipei prior to the tour demonstrated the endorsement from the Taiwanese establishment and officially crowned the Fifth Moon artists as the vanguard of Taiwanese art. As a result of the exhibition, Liu Kuo-sung, Chuang Che, and Fong Chung-ray, who had never been abroad, received JDR 3rd travel grants to the US and Europe that transformed their lives and careers.3 However, the geopolitical circumstances and art historical significance of the exhibition merit deeper examination. My research reveals a curatorial framework and the aesthetic choices conditioned by Cold War geopolitics that impacted the modernization of Chinese painting in the mid-20th century.
The exhibition cannot be understood without taking into consideration the underlying national interestsāeven though its organization did not involve any government; these included American cultural influence in Taiwan and the Nationalistās self-promotion as the bastion of legitimate and enlightened Chinese culture. For the curator and artists, these forces created an urgencyāas well as an opportunityāto construct a modern Chinese cultural identity distinct from that of Socialist China and the prewar era. They chose landscape painting at this critical juncture for its aesthetic value in Chinese culture, its role as a platform for intellectual expression during national crises, and its formal and conceptual affinity with abstract art, the lingua franca of the art world at the time. On a macro level, their work expanded the political dimension of landscape painting and brought new meanings to the genre. The exhibition, conceived in part due to the physical inaccessibility of mainland China, became a marker for the artistic and ideological differencesāand synthesized the artistic with the ideologicalāon either side of the Taiwan Strait. As a result, Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and a peripheral island in Chinese history, was elevated to become the new center for Chinese art, expanding its geographical footprint to include the Chinese diaspora in America. The circulation of The New Chinese Landscape in the US, as this chapter lays bare, inadvertently validated contemporary ink painting from Taiwan and the diaspora as the representative voice of Chinese art in the postwar decades.4
The geopolitics of the exhibition
Chu-tsing Li (1920ā2014), who immigrated to the US from China in 1947 and was one of the first scholars to establish modern and contemporary Chinese art as a field of study in postwar America, conceived The New Chinese Landscape in 1964 under serendipitous circumstances. At the time an art history professor at University of Iowa, on a research trip to Taiwan on Yuan dynasty paintings, Li saw the works of several young painters in Taipei, describing his discoveries as follows:
I found the situation in art inā¦Taiwan very much the same as that of the time when I left China. There is still a sharp dichotomy between traditionalism on the one hand and Westernization on the other. Young artists simply have to choose between the two, but are not supposed to embrace bothā¦.Howeverā¦I did encounter a number of interesting artists who seem to be able to absorb both the Chinese tradition and Western influence to achieve a new expression. The number of artists in this direction is very small, but, from my point of view, they represent the genuine creative effort in China today outside the mainland.5
After almost 20 years abroad, Li seemed delighted to observe novel attempts to solve a lingering issue that in his view had rendered Chinese art stagnant. His observations summarized the high stakes for 20th-century Chinese art; at the heart of the question of modernity in painting is its compatibility with Western art. This perennial question was raised by the May Fourth movement in 1919, when ātraditionalismā and āWesternizationā became two sides of the cultural debate. Painting practices in China since then were divided into ānational paintingā (guohua), which referred to painting in ink on paper or silk following the centuries-old tradition of Chinese ink painting, and āWest...
