Shanghai Art and Crafts

Liu Yuyang, a Rem Koolhaas collaborator, Shanghai MOCA is at the heart of the city and counts the Shanghai Art Museum, the Shanghai Museum and the Shanghai Grand Theater among its neighbors. Described in press materials as "endorsed" by the municipal government, the new institution is privately funded and run.

Shanghai MOCA launched with an exhibition of photographs by the French duo Pierre et Gilles, thereby marking the end of the official Year of France in China. The facility joins Zendai Museum of Modern Art as the second private art museum to open in Shanghai this year [see "Front Page," Sept. '05]. It is a project of the Samuel Kung Foundation, named for the Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-based jade dealer who is also the museum's chairman and acting director. "This took two years of planning" Kung told A.i.A. He declined to specify how much he invested in the 19,400-square-foot museum, only quipping that "it was a lot of money for me, but not that much for a big corporation" In addition to income from the $2.50 admission, Kung hopes to gain support through museum memberships and major gifts, a novel gamble for China. "The Chinese are starting to give to social concerns, but arts patronage is totally new for us, so I will just have to push my friends to contribute," he said.

The museum plans to stage five to six shows per year, with a Swiss contemporary design exhibition up next, followed by "Italy Made in Art" curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. While planning to show Chinese artists in the long term, said Kung, "we will start with more international exhibitions, since we're new and have no collection, and gradually build relationships" Shanghai MOCA's staff includes curatorial director Oscar Ho, formerly the exhibition director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, and creative director Victoria Lu, concurrently the artistic director of the Bund 18 Creative Center and previously on the board of the Taipei Contemporary Art Museum. Author Lisa Movius. More on Buddhist art you can find here.

Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei
China's Palace Museum strives to become top world museum
The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures
 

Chinese paintings are famous all over the world for their unusual combination of materials and different techniques.

Chinese painting is a traditional form of painting and has been in existence since a very long time. A large number of exquisite wall paintings were produced in the initial period of China's history, but very few of them have managed to survive. Many of the Chinese paintings enable historians to understand the Chinese way of life in early periods and offer insight into the styles and tastes of the early artists.

Some of the main features of Chinese paintings include colophons and seals, and different materials. The Chinese brush, which is used for painting, has a very fine tip to draw in different styles. Brush techniques include line drawing, cunfa (texture and shade), and dianfa (dotting methods). The brush strokes in Chinese paintings impart a kind of rhythm as well as aesthetic beauty. Brush strokes can greatly vary according to the individual styles of the painter. Different types of Chinese painting brushes include the "hsieh chao pi", which is a crab claw brush available in large and small sizes, and the "hua jan pi" brush, which is specifically used for painting flowers. A "lan yu chu pi" brush is generally used for painting bamboo and orchids. Chinese artists hold their painting brush in a peculiar fashion.

Typically, artists use Chinese paper or thick silk for painting. Different varieties of Chinese papers are available and the painting on each variety will come in diverse finishes. To paint on a silk cloth, it first must be treated with glue and alum to make it less absorbent. Contemporary Chinese artists usually prefer paper for their varied textures.

Chinese artists use different shades of a color to depict the features of a particular subject and to give it a natural feeling. These artists enjoy the freedom of structural composition and manner of expression. To emphasize a particular subject, artists may leave the background blank to enhance the impact.

A bright red seal is seen in Chinese paintings that indicate the name of the artist or the owner of the painting. The position of the seal may vary from one painting to another.

Paintings provides detailed information on Paintings, Oil Paintings, Famous Paintings, Abstract Paintings and more. Paintings is affiliated with Oil Paintings For Sale. By Ken Marlborough

 

CHINESE ART COPY

The village of the ten thousand painters, Dafen - Shenzhen, China, the China plant for cheap art, about six million painting - usually copies of old masters – are completed in the artist village Dafen and go into export every year.

The fastest artists make up to 30 paintings a day.  The artist “village”  is actually a part of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. This creativity brought prosperity for the artists and some kind of fame for the city.

In 2005 the local art factories exported paintings for about 34 million dollars. The artwork copy is ordered by container loads from dealers in USA and Europe .  

The “golden age” of Dafen and Mr. Huang Jiang began when he got a order from Wal-Mart  -the US mall giant- to produce 50,000 pictures in one and a half months. In the early years – early to mid 199X’s – he made every year up to 240.000 dollars, a fortune in China of that days.

Today the business is less booming for him, because of the competition; he employs now 40 painters and has a turnover of about sixty thousand dollars per year. 

The competition is hard since his former employees started their own “art factories”.

Maybe sooner or later McDonald's philosophy will take over. One of his former employees Wu Ruiqiu has annually over 300.000 paintings shipped; his company “Shenzhen Artlover” is a very prominent success story in Dafen.

Approximately five million oil paintings are manufactured in Dafen annually created by roughly 8000 to 10,000 painters, each year a few hundred join the “club” also a lot of real artists are moving to the village every year, here they can have continuous income. About 10% of the paintings created are done only by the creativity of the artist, no copy work.

By the end of the year a private art school is planned to raise new talents, actually for this kind of art not much talent is needed.

The “Dafen Louvre” shopping mall was set up to offer all kind of non copy art direct from the artist, they move in very slowly.

You want something special? No problem, everything is done quick, high priced good quality to low priced low quality.

Someone likes a good Gustav Klimt copy, or Van Goghs sunflowers for 50 dollar in quality, Miro, Warhol, Rembrand, all here, if you take hundred its half price.

This are painted by young graduates of the best art schools of the country. If one wants to have it cheaper, ok, only maybe 10 dollars? No problem, but don’t look too close afterwards.

Even in the tourist centers in Thailand you can find dozens of small galleries stocked with these imports. The Thai –as usual- try some tricks to make the foreigner think the paintings are done in the gallery, they put a few artists in front of the pictures to do some painting of their own, but no one is so stupid to believe this because every gallery is showing the same paintings.

The artists don’t get a fixed salary, only according to paintings finished the money comes in, all in all a nice work.
 

Images of Guanxiu's Sixteen Luohan in eighteenth-century China

A familiar image in eighteenth-century Chinese carving in jade is that of the recluse--usually a Daoist immortal or Buddhist monk--situated within a cave or rocky outcrop (Fig. 1). Such items relate to a category of jades that include complete mountains carved in the round and often on a large scale (Fig. 2). (1) Both types reflected a preoccupation on the part of the elite in Imperial China--the so-called scholar-gentry class--with objects that evoked the natural world and underlined the importance of solitude for spiritual regeneration. Mountains were seen as an intermediary realm between heaven and earth and so carvings of mountain landscapes, and figures of monks and immortals placed within them, provided tangible evidence of this other dimension. Set on a table or desk, objects like these would have reminded the viewer of this ideal world.

Of symbolic significance too was the material itself. By this period, above all because of its hardness and seeming indestructibility, jade had long been associated with immortality. Used in ritual burials as early as the Neolithic period (c. 6000 BC), its associations with immortality and rebirth reached their extreme during the Hart dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), with the shrouds of Hart royal burials being made up of thousands of jade plaques sewn together with metal wire which were intended to preserve the body. Even with the decline of jade as a burial material and its secularisation after the Han, these associations were not lost on later generations, who would have recognised the appropriateness of objects carved in the form of immortals set within their dwelling-place.

The carvings discussed in this article constitute a distinct group within this genre. They are all figures of luohan (Sanskrit: arhat, meaning venerable or worthy), legendary figures whose relation to the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, was much like that of the Apostles to Christ. Originally they were four in number: Mahakasyapa, Pindola, Kundadhana and Rahula; along with Sakra and the four Devarajas, they were entrusted with the defence and propagation of the Buddhist faith. Although masters of the four great truths, free from the fetters of earthly existence and transcendent of nature, time and space, their task was to remain on earth to protect the four quarters of the world until the advent of Maitreya, the future Buddha. (2)

In China, however, the original four were augmented to sixteen, possibly following the translation into Chinese by the monk Daotai in the early fifth century AD of the Mahayana-vataraka, where sixteen luohan were first mentioned. (3) The Chinese traveller and monk Xuanzang (596 664 AD), further reinforced the number as sixteen with his translation from Sanskrit of the Da Aluohan Nandimiduoluo suoshuo fazhuji (Record of the Duration of the Law Spoken by the Great Arhat Nandimitra), in 653-54 AD. In this text, not only are sixteen luohan mentioned, but each is given a name, and the places over which they preside and the number of their attendants are listed. (4) However, as Masako Watanabe has recently pointed out, there is no description of their individual iconographic features in the text. (5) This was left to later artists to interpret. One in particular, the poet-painter Guanxiu (832-912 AD), created what has turned out to be a hugely influential rendition of each luohan's iconography, and it is the work of Guanxiu that links directly to the group of jade carvings under discussion here.

Carvings like the example in the collection of the National Museums of Scotland (Fig. 1), are found in a number of public and private collections. (6) Usually of a pale green or grey-green jade, they are worked to a high standard and are generally dated to the eighteenth century largely on stylistic grounds. The subject too tends to be rendered in a formulaic way with the figure positioned centrally or slightly to one side within a rocky hollow or outcrop and either crouching or seated. A particular group, to which this first example belongs, have inscriptions incised into the face of a piece of rock situated to the left, right or immediately above the figure. Although these inscriptions have been remarked upon and sometimes translated--if only to ascertain which of the Sixteen Luohan is represented--no-one has yet related these inscriptions and the iconography of the figures directly to earlier representations in other media, the most pertinent of which are the striking images created by Guanxiu. A number of commentators have suggested woodblock prints, such as the Gu yu tu pu, an eighteenth-century catalogue purporting to be of the collection of the Southern Song Emperor Gaozong (1127-62), as being a likely source for these carvings. (7) This may indeed be the case for the generality of this type of carving, but not for this inscribed group. For a source, rather than just a stylistic progenitor, we must look again to the representations of the Six teen Luohan by Guanxiu. (8)

Guanxiu (family name Jiang, but also known in later life as Chanyue Dashi), was born in Jinhua prefecture, Zhejiang province, in 832 and educated as a monk at a Chan Buddhist monastery. (9) His talents as a poet, calligrapher and painter were recognised at an early age, and it was in the execution of these arts that Guanxiu became famous throughout China. From his native Zhejiang province he travelled first to Nanchang in Jiangxi province, where at the Yuantang Monastery he painted a series of luohan images, and then to the Beijingde Temple at Fuzhou, where he painted a further series. At the age of sixty-three, he went with an official mission to Hangzhou and it was in that city that the third and perhaps most celebrated series of luohan paintings by Guanxiu was executed and kept in the Shengyin Monastery. Guanxiu died in 912 in Chengdu, then the capital of the Shu Kingdom.

Guanxiu's conception of the Sixteen Luohan is highly distinctive and unique, contributing to his reputation as a painter during his lifetime and up to the present (Fig. 3). He conceived each luohan as a grotesque; they were aptly described by Osvald Siren as 'more expressive of dynamic force than of peaceful harmony.' (10) The earliest description of their appearance is given in the Yizhou Minghua Lu (Biographies of the Painters of Yizhou), written in about 1006, which includes the following account:

As a painter he followed Yen Liben. His Sixteen Luohans had bushy eyebrows, large eyes,
hanging cheeks and high noses. They were seated in landscapes, leaning against pine
trees and stones. They looked and behaved like Hindus or Indians. When someone asked
where he had seen such men, he answered: 'in my dream'. He also painted Shakyamuni's ten
disciples in a similar fashion. The people found his pictures very strange, but his pupils
treasured them highly ... At the beginning of the Taiping Xingguo era [976], when the
emperor Taizong searched everywhere for old pictures, Chengyu, who then ruled over Shu,
made the emperor a present of Guanxiu's Sixteen Luohans. (11)

The image of the eleventh Luohan, Rahula (Fig. 3), is typical of the Guanxiu type described above. Seated cross-legged on a rock with his right hand raised in the act of teaching, Rahula's facial features reveal him as a 'foreigner', with large eyes, thick eyebrows, prominent nose, moustache and swarthy complexion. When compared with other luohan in the series (for example, Chuda Panthaka [Fig. 7]), the bodily and facial exaggeration of Rahula seems less of a caricature. This may be accounted for by virtue of the fact that this image appears to be a self-portrait of Guanxiu, reinforced by the artist's inscription located in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. (12) Nevertheless, the overall iconography of the figure, as well as its style and setting, complement perfectly the others in the series.

If during his lifetime Guanxiu benefited from imperial patronage, the reference in the Yizhou Minghua Lu makes it clear that less than a century after his death his work was part of the imperial gifting process, a highly prestigious activity with, in this case, significant consequences for Guanxiu's reputation and that of his famous Six teen Luohan. (13) While a number of sets of the Sixteen Luohan have been recorded in different locations over the centuries, one set in particular, held for a long time in the Shengyin Monastery on the West Lake (Xi Hu), at Hangzhou, has taken on a pre-eminent position. (14) To a great extent, this pre-eminent position was due to the attention paid to these paintings by one of the most powerful and influential of all the emperors of China, the Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736-95 AD). Versed in the arts, especially poetry, painting and calligraphy, Qianlong was also a great patron, an enthusiastic collector and antiquari an, with an active interest in developments in the decorative arts or handicrafts, which included jade carving. He spent a great deal of time in improving the general level of scholar ship and connoisseurship which, under his instruction, included the compilation of a number of books and illustrated catalogues of the imperial collections.

On 28 February 1757, Qianlong embarked upon a tour of inspection of southern China. Such trips were major exercises lasting four months and involving thousands of officials, soldiers, horses and equipment. This was the second of a total of six such tours during his lifetime, ostensibly to inspect the irrigation works along the Yellow, Huai and Yangzi rivers, but which also provided an opportunity to visit historic and religious sites along the way and make manifest the imperial presence. Each trip ended in Hangzhou, the commercially rich provincial capital of Zhejiang--the cultural and economic heart of the empire. During his stay in Hangzhou, Qianlong resided at a palace which he had built on the southern shore of the largest island on the West Lake, Gu Shan (The Lonely Hill). Adjacent to the palace was the Shengyin Monastery (Fig. 5); it housed a set of Guanxiu's Sixteen Luohan, which Qianlong requested to see.

There is little doubt that the Emperor bad long been aware of their existence. Not only were they celebrated in various published accounts, but the Shengyin Monastery would have been part of any visitor's itinerary, those eminent enough being granted a viewing of the works and on occasion recording the event. (15) There is every indication too that the set in the Shengyin Monastery was that recorded in the imperial painting catalogue, the Xuanhe Huapu of 1120. (16) In the accompanying text to a two-volume book consisting of twelve jade tablets illustrating Guanxiu's Sixteen Luohan, now in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and to be discussed below, it states:

Guanxiu of the Tang dynasty painted true portraits
of the Sixteen Luohan, which may be seen from the Xuanhe Painting Album. They have
been transmitted from the Guang Ming period [880 AD], to the present, a space of a thousand
years, in the province of Zhejiang. The paintings were dedicated and preserved in the Shengyin
Temple in Qiantangxian [Hangzhou]. (17) If, as is suggested here, the jade books in the Chester Beatty Library were products of the imperial workshops and carved shortly after Qianlong's tour of inspection in 1757, this inscription would indicate an important association that was made with the paintings in the Shengyin Monastery and with the Song Imperial Collection.

Two final links can perhaps be made between Qianlong and the Sixteen Luohan at the Shengyin Monastery prior to his visit in 1757. Thomas Watters records an episode that presumably pre-dated the Emperor's visit: 'In the reign of Kienlung [Qianlong], of the present dynasty, an official, while on duty in the district, had copies of these pictures made by competent artists and sent them to the emperor'. (18) Unfortunately Watters does not cite a source for this statement. However, a not unrelated event is recorded in a colophon to a thirteenth-century handscroll painting of the Sixteen Luohan by an Artist of Tang. At one time part of the Chinese imperial collections and now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the painting includes thirty-six seals of the Qianlong Emperor which were applied in the New Year of 1753. (19) The four colophons on the painting were written in 1752 by Qiu Yuexiu, a high court official, the first of which records that in 1749 he saw Guanxiu's celebrated paintings held in the Shengyin Monastery for the first time. It relates that:

Later in the spring or early summer of 1752,when Qiu was chief examiner in Jiangnan
[Hangzhou region], he met Daheng, the abbot of Shengyin ci. The latter told him the
curious story that in the preceding year the paintings had been sent from Hangzhou to
Peking as a present to the empress dowager on her birthday. The gift was declined, however,
by the Qianlong emperor on the grounds that these precious scrolls should remain in the temple where they had so long been treasured. Thus, they were returned. (20) During his visit to see the paintings in 1757, Qianlong not only examined them closely but he also wrote a eulogy to each luohan image, copies of which were presented to the Monastery. (21) This event too is recorded in the text accompanying the jade books in the Chester Beatty Library, together with the facts surrounding Qianlong's re-ordering of the Sixteen Luohan and the transliteration of their names in Chinese during his visit:

The venerable ones of the temple enjoy great fame and are long practised in the translation
of the scriptures. But they did not adhere to the original Sanskrit sounds of the Luohan
names and the order of the names they observed was entirely different from that
established by the great abbots and priests. [So the Emperor made] the transcriptions
agree with the established standard and added the order of the names at the foot of
each of the slips on which he described the characteristics of the Luohan. Each comment
takes praise of the Luohan for its theme. The written slips are still preserved in the temple
for future generations. (22) The re-ordering that took place substituted that used by Nandamitra in Xuanzang's seventh-century translation with that used in the Tibetan Lamaist tradition. Thus for example Rahula (Fig. 3), fine eleventh Luohan according to Nandamitra, becomes the tenth Luohan; Chuda Panthaka, the sixteenth Luohan becomes the eleventh Luohan, and so on. Moreover, the text tells us that the transcription or transliteration of each name in Chinese was also changed to achieve a better approximation of the original sound in Sanskrit. In 1764, Qianlong ordered that each of the paintings of the Sixteen Luohan held at the Shengyin Monastery should be engraved onto stone tablets. (23) These were mounted like facets into a marble stupa for public display (Fig. 4)--a familiar method of preservation in China of important texts or images which also provided the opportunity for the dissemination of the works through rubbings or ink squeezes. (24)

Rather than usurp the order and replace the transliteration followed by Nandamitra (and presumably Guanxiu), with that provided by Qianlong, both orderings and transliterations were included. Therefore, the stone relief of Chuda Panthaka (Fig. 7) included, in the first ten characters at the top right-hand corner, the information that he was the sixteenth Luohan followed by his name in the traditional transliteration--Zhucha Bantuoka [jia]. In smaller characters below is the new transliteration of his name Zucha Banataka--followed by his revised order in the series, as the eleventh Luohan. The thirty-two character inscription in the top left-hand corner is Qianlong's eulogy on the Luohan, citing his appearance as a hunchback seated against a gnarled tree and commenting on his unpredictable nature sometimes he would welcome visitors with a two-fingered gesture, at other times he would dismiss them with a wave of his tan. (25) A similar formula is adopted with the other images, as can be seen in the stone relief of Rahula (Luohuluo or Lahula) (Fig. 8). This time the positions of the inscriptions are reversed. At the top left-hand side of the picture are the inscriptions placing Rahula as the eleventh Luohan, followed underneath by the revised order that places him as the tenth, with Qianlong's eulogy on the right-hand side. Rahula's staring eyes and bushy eyebrows are remarked upon in the eulogy, together with musings on the indivisibility of joy and anger. The Qianlong Emperor's seals are included below the text, the oval seal below the fourth column of characters at the top left hand corner of the image of Chuda Panthaka, clearly legible as 'yi zai bi jian' (26)

When comparing the paintings in the Japanese Imperial Household Collection, to which the image of Rahula reproduced here belongs (Fig. 3), with the relief of the same figure (Fig. 8), the closeness of the representation is apparent, even down to Guanxiu's original inscription in the bottom right hand corner. Only the gesture of the right hand differs between the two, with Rahula pointing outwards rather aggressively in the relief. This set of paintings has a strong claim to be the original work of Guanxiu; if not, it must at least be a close copy of the now lost set from the Shengyin Monastery.

This brings the argument back to the various carved images in jade which relate directly to Guanxiu's paintings. The most likely source and indeed stimulus for such carvings would have been the stone relief images commissioned by Qianlong in 1764, not least on account of his celebrated visit to the Shengyin Monastery and the ensuing project. Not only did the Emperor order reliefs to be made and set up in the Shengyin Monastery, but he ordered copies to be set up in the eighteen provinces of China. Some of these still survive in situ today. (27) Accessibility and the prestige surrounding these reliefs would have been enough to create a fashion for small copies in jade that most probably lasted for a number of decades after 1764, even possibly until the close of Qianlong's reign in 1795.

They may have served as souvenirs of a visit to the Monastery or have been part of a vogue for Guanxiu images that enriched the well-established tradition in desk-top carvings. (28) What is clear from surviving examples is that most of the sixteen were carved in jade (Figs. 9-11), indicating that they might have been produced in sets in the same manner as the original paintings and the stone reliefs. This is reinforced by the existence, not only of the jade books in the Chester Beatty Library, but also of table screens depicting all sixteen (Figs. 13-14). The screens illustrated here are one of two different pairs. Each shows eight luohan in the Guanxiu style depicted in succession. Although both screens follow the number order as laid down by Qianlong and include his eulogy on each luohan, only one (Fig. 14) includes the inscriptions which detail their revised order and their names--in Qianlong's transliteration.

This intriguing inconsistency is not untypical in the jade carvings, nor is the adoption (when it is included), of Qianlong's revised numbering and transliteration. Unlike the stone reliefs which at least give precedence to tradition, on the whole the jade images of the Sixteen Luohan adopt the Emperor's version wholeheartedly, none more so than those found in the jade books in the Chester Beatty Library, as illustrated by Chuda Panthaka (Fig. 6), where he is described as the eleventh Luohan and transliterated as Zucha Banataka. This, together with the already quoted text which accompanies the images, makes the set a strong contender as a product of the imperial jade workshops in Beijing, or at least provides evidence for the inspiration which Qianlong's activities engendered in the artistic field.

On the other hand, there is little likelihood that many, or indeed any, of the surviving carvings were produced by the imperial workshops, despite the consistently high quality of both materials and workmanship. It is just as likely that most of the carvings were produced at workshops in Suzhou, the largest centre of jade production, situated not far from Hangzhou. Indeed, it is tempting to think that the craftsmen who produced the carvings might have been working from designs sourced from rubbings made at the Shengyin Monastery. This would account for the close adherence to the iconography contained in the stone reliefs, while such factors as the variations in size of boulder, rendering of the surrounding landscape, the inclusion or not of a name and number, would point to the use of an intermediate design. Furthermore, the carving of a number of jades--such as the National Museums of Scotland's Chuda Panthaka (Fig. 1), and the fifth Luohan (eighth by Nandimitra's reckoning), Vajriputra (compare Figs. 9 and 12)--in mirror image would also indicate the use of an intermediate source.

This fashion for Guanxiu's Luohan also coincided with an increased supply of nephrite jade from Khotan and Yarkand available to both imperial and commercial carving workshops. In 1759, Qianlong annexed both these regions, thus ensuring a constant supply of nephrite which lasted from 1760 to about 1812 well beyond the period when such carvings would have been at their most fashionable. (29) Indeed fashion would have played a large role in creating a market for these figures, fuelled as it was by Qianlong's revival of interest in Guanxiu's paintings. Despite the long held belief in the West that imperial China remained an unchanged 'static' society--an attitude fostered from the late eighteenth century onwards largely through ignorance and misunderstanding--China had a highly commercialised money economy with a sophisticated elite ever conscious of changing tastes and the shifting status of commodities such as works of art. Jade carvings of Guanxiu's Sixteen Luohan would have been a product of this economy, fashionable items for a moment but surviving to the present day and holding the key to their original creation.

(1) These imaginary three-dimensional landscapes became fashionable during the late Qianlong period following the carving by the lapidaries of the imperial workshops of a series of massive boulders, the largest of which, depicting Yu the Great pacifying the, flood, was finished in 1787. it is 224 cm high and weighs seven tons. For a discussion and reproduction of this piece, see Yang Boda, 'The Glorious Age of Chinese Jades', in Roger Keverne (ed.), Jade, London, 1991, pp, 172-75.

(2) See T. Watters, The Eighteen Lohan of Chinese Buddhist Temples, Shanghai, 1899, p. 7; see also Henry, Dore, translated by M Kennelly, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, Shanghai, 1922, vol VII, pp. 332, 338-40.

(3) Ibid., pp 340 42. At a later stage the number of luohan was increased still further from sixteen to eighteen Representations of the Eighteen Luohan, however, are not found in the series of stone reliefs or jade carvings under discussion here.

(4) See Edouard Chavannes, 'Les Seize Arhat Protecteurs de la Loi', Journal Asiatique, vol. VIII, July-August 1916, pp. 6-24.

(5) Masako Watanabe, 'Guanxiu and Exotic Imagery in Rakan Paintings', Orientations, vol. XXXI, no. 4 (April 2000), pp. 34 42, especially p. 35.

(6) In addition to those illustrated here, there are examples in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Museum of History, Taiwan, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Joseph Hotung Collection

(7) James C.Y. Watt, Chinese jades from Han to Ch'ing, New York, 1980, pp. 122 23, no. 104; Jessica Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, London, 1995, p. 410

(8) Ibid., p. 411.

(9) The following biographical details are taken from Chavannes, op. tit, p. 277, and Appendix II, pp. 298-304; Osvald Siren, Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, 7 vols., London, 1956-58, vol I, p 154; Susan Bush and Ilsio-yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, Cambridge, MA, and London, I985, p. 314.

(10) Siren, op. cit, p. 155.

(11) Translated and quoted in ibid., p. 155.

(12) A self portrait is recorded in the Zhongwu Jianwen of 1174. See Watanabe, op. cit, p. 39. For a translation of the inscription, see Siren, op. cit., p. 156.

(13) "As well as the reference in the Yizhou Minghua Lu to Chengyu giving a set of the Sixteen Luohan to Emperor Taizong, Guanxiu's luohan were recorded in the Xuanhe Huapu, the catalogue of the Northern Song Imperial Collection, published in 1120. These are presumably the paintings given to Taizong in 976. See Watanabe, op. cit., p, 39.

(14) In addition to those already mentioned in the biographical sketch above, Chavannes, op. cit., pp. 277-83, records other sets that have been documented at various periods at temples in Guangzhou, Shaoxing in Zhejiang Province, Chengdu and Belling, Surviving individual paintings and complete sets of the Sixteen Luoban, whether attributed to Guanxiu or later copies, can be found in a number of public collections, including the Collection of the Imperial Household in Tokyo and the Kodai ji in Kyotn--both complete sets. For further details, see Watanabe, op. cit., pp. 39-41

(15) The eminent poet, calligrapher, artist and connoisseur, Jin Nong (1687-1764), first saw the paintings as a boy and again in 1743, when he wrote new title pages for the set alter they were remounted by a friend. Jin Nong's pupil, Luo Ping (1733-99), who painted a pot trait of his master, was also familiar with the set. See Gu Linwen (ed.), Yangzhou Baijia Shiliao (Historical Materials Related to the Eight Masters of Yangzhou), Shanghai, 1962, p. 57, cited in Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600-1900, Cam bridge, 1992, pp 106, 166 67, note 143.

(16) See n. 13 above.

(17) William Watson, Chinese Jade Books in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, 1963, p. 34 (translated by Watson with modern transliteration provided by the author).
(18) Watters, up. cit., p, 6.

(19) See Wai-kam Ho et al., Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting. The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City and The Cleveland Museum of Art, exh. cat., Cleveland, 1980, pp 86 90, no. 68.

(20) Ibid, p 88 (with modern transliteration provided by Laurence Sickman).

(21) Chavannes, op. cit., p. 279; Dore, op cit., p. 379.

(22) Watson, op cit, p 34. Watson cites as a source a Japanese text published in 1862, Tetsutei, Rakan-zu Sanshu (Collected Pictures and Eulogies of Luohan), in which Chinese texts concerning luohan are compiled. This source is also cited and quoted by Chavannes, op. cit., p. 277, note 1.

(23) See Wang Zi Yun et al, Zhongguo Meishu Quanji (Encyclopaedia of Chinese Art), vol. XIX (Engraved stones), Shanghai, 1988, p. 38, note 105.

(24) The photographs of the stupa (Fig. 4), and the entrance to the Shengyin Monastery on the West Lake (Fig. 5), were taken by the German photographer Ernst Boerschmann (1873-1949), during a journey he made through China in 1906 1909. See Ernst Boerschmann, translated by Louis Hamilton, Picturesque China: Architecture and Landscape. A Journey Through Twelve Provinces, New York, n.d.

(25) For a complete translation of this and the other fifteen inscriptions, see Watson, op. cit., pp. 32-34.

(26) See Victoria Contag and Wang Chi Ch'ien, Seals of Chinese Painters and Collectors of the Ming and Ch'ing Periods, Hong Kong, 1966, p. 587, no 124, where it also appears on an album by Wen Bairen, dated 1572,

(27) Abe Capek, Chinese Stone-Pictures, London, 1962, pp. 48-50, for reproductions of three rubbings taken from one such set in the Huagalan Monastery in Guilin.

(28) It is interesting to note that few images sourced directly from Guanxiu seem to have been carved in other media. I know of only one carving in bamboo that can lay claim to Guanxiu iconography, a figure of Ajita, the fifteenth Luohan, reproduced in Simon Kwan, Ming and Qing Bambino, Hong Kong, 2000, pp 310-11, no. 82. Even here the figure sits alone without any contextual landscape.

(29) See Yang Boda, 'Qingdai Gongting Yuqi' [The Jades of the Qing Court), Gugong Bowuyuan Yuankan (The Palace Museum Journal), no. 1, 1982, pp. 49-61.

Nick Pearce studied Chinese art and archeology at the Percival David Foundation, University of London. from 1983-87 he was a curator in the Far Eastern Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1987, he became Curator of Far Eastern Art at the Burrell Collection in Glasglow, and in 1994 Deputy Keeper of the Oriental Museum, University of Durham. Between 1992 and 1996 he was Visiting Lecturer in Chinese Art in the Department of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, and now lectures in Chinese Art for the Department of History of Art, University of Glasglow.

Author Nick Pearce COPYRIGHT Apollo Magazine Ltd. and Gale Group
 

The Selling of Shanghai

When Shanghai's Pudong International Airport opened in 1999, it was meant to symbolize the rebirth of China's largest city as a 21st-century commercial metropolis. A soaring glass structure by French architect Paul Andreu, designer of the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is of a quality and scale apart from other air facilities in China. Inside, travelers can sip espresso while reading uncensored international newspapers.

But the place is depressingly empty. Shanghai's air traffic doesn't begin to fill such an enormous hub, and travelers prefer the musty old Hongqiao airport 20 minutes from downtown. Pudong, by contrast, lies more than an hour away--necessitating a trip across a huge expanse of rice paddies being cut up into factory tracts before one reaches the Huangpu River, the city's head.

In fact, the new airport is an apt metaphor for Shanghai's art ambitions: lots of new infrastructure applied to a place with few of the underpinnings of a modern society, plus an exasperating emphasis on "face" over function. In the last five years, the city government has made a huge bid to become a new Asian culture capital. In 2000, its world-class antiquities museum and high-tech, $150-million opera house were joined by the new Shanghai Art Museum, which houses a collection of post-Imperial (after 1911) painting and sculpture.

Despite these advances, censorship can be repressive even by Chinese standards. The city's arts activities are overseen by the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, a leftist throwback known abroad for blocking the Shanghai Kunqu Opera from traveling to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1997 Next Wave Festival. The new opera house often plays half-empty for lack of interesting programming. The art museum, which occupies the renovated 1930s home of the old Shanghai Museum, juxtaposes a budding collection of contemporary Chinese art with propagandistic Socialist-Realist paintings portraying Mao, Deng and other political figures in heroic poses.

Embracing the Bund's Art Deco magnificence on one side and the steel-and-glass postmodernity of the Pudong district on the other, the view from the Huangpu River evokes Shanghai's schizophrenic identity. In the 1920s and '30s, Shanghai, with its reputation as a freewheeling nexus of international money and culture, was easily the most cosmopolitan city in the country. After Japan invaded in 1937, it became increasingly unlivable, although the International Concession (composed of the former U.S. and British zones) remained beyond hostile control until December 1941, and the French Concession was effectively independent even after that. (Established in the mid-19th century, the "concessions" were autonomous foreign sectors with their own legal and military systems.) Following years of civil war, on May 24, 1949, the Communists finally "liberated" Shanghai. The area then became the focus of intense ideological indoctrination, to the extent that it later formed the main power base of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Today's city, its efficient and pervasive security apparatus left over from earlier times, is more like Singapore than the prewar Shanghai. Unlike Shenzhen or even Beijing, it maintains an economy driven by the state, not by entrepreneurship, often through artificially inflated real-estate projects. The political tension simmering elsewhere in China is lacking; most Shanghainese appear to be happy with the current authority as long as it stays pragmatic and business-oriented But this megacenter of 13 million people must somehow reconcile its global ambitions with its conservative politics.

"Politics in China is not about ideology," says Biennale curator Hou Hanru. "It's about competing agendas, and not losing face." Local Party officials often use cultural institutions as vehicles for personal ego trips. A high-ranking cadre, for example, reportedly interrupted the renovation of the Shanghai Art Museum to order the use of white marble and chrome so "foreigners can see this is a truly modern museum."

Except during special events like the Biennale, unofficial exhibitions have never flourished. "You can't trace tendencies here, unlike in Beijing where artists band together in movements," says Zhou Tiehai, 35, probably Shanghai's best-known artist overseas. "There's not really a story or a narrative," adds Lorenz Helbling of ShanghART, Shanghai's most important contemporary art gallery. "It's much more individualist. Everyone has to make his own way. Artists here don't form schools, they don't even socialize."

For a while the underground club scene provided a focus, led by DJ Coco Zhao and Generation Y heroine Mian Mian, who besides writing immensely popular novels about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll also promoted parties showcasing new Chinese art and music. However, worries about "decadent influences" that loom with China's upcoming entry into the World Trade Organization led to a crackdown. Popular nightclub areas like Maoming Road were mostly shuttered, and books by Mian Mian and other young writers were banned.

One of the few constants has been Swiss native Helbling, a tireless promoter of local artists, from abstract painters like Ding Yi to Generation X conceptualists like Zhou. Most of his gallery's clientele, however, drawn by chic bar-restaurant Park 97 next door to ShanghART, are foreigners, underscoring the artists' sense of isolation. "Sometimes I feel closer to Switzerland," says Zhou, "than to my next-door neighbors."

Since the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), the Yangtze River delta has been China's economic and cultural center of gravity, even though the capital usually remained in the north. The wealthy merchants of Yangzhou, Suzhou and Hangzhou supported a complex artistic life.

These sophisticated cities overshadowed the coastal areas until 1842, when the Treaty of Nanking granted the British and French their extraterritorial "concessions" in the port town of Shanghai. The 1850-64 Taiping Uprising destroyed the great delta cities and drove their artists and intellectuals to Shanghai, a flight which accelerated in the ensuing decades of national implosion.

By the 1920s, Shanghai was booming even as the rest of China collapsed. Most of its newly rich industrialists toyed with the arts. For many Chinese, Shanghai meant not only freedom of expression but also access to Western ideas. A kind of creole culture evolved, featuring clubs like the Association Amicale Sino-francaise, Anglicisms like "misi" and "daling" in the local dialect, and the arrival of several hundred thousand Jewish and White Russian refugees from the USSR. Art Deco flourished, while innovative graphic artists fused Japanese, Chinese and Western design.

Several currents emerged at this time, all of them Western-inspired in different ways. One group centered around Xu Zhimo, a brilliant Cambridge-educated writer whose friends included Katherine Mansfield, Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry and Rabindranath Tagore. His Shanghai circle argued for an opening to the West, especially to the modernism of the School of Paris. Xu died in a plane crash in 1931.

Another group, associated with the novelist Lu Xun, favored an artistic engagement with China's deep social problems. Around 1930, Lu became fascinated by the prints of Kathe Kollwitz and Frans Masereel, organizing a show at the Uchiyama Shoten bookshop (Shanghai's Shakespeare & Company). This inspired the leftist Woodcut School.

The third group was typified by the society artist Xu Beihong, a Paris-trained oil painter who, according to Michael Sullivan in his 1996 Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, once dismissed Cezanne as "shallow" and Matisse as "inferior." A dandy with "long hair, velvet coat, flowing tie and detached languid mannerisms," Xu was a fixture in Shanghai society, being especially close to the family of Baghdadi-born mogul Silas Hardoon. After 1949, Xu abandoned Western approaches and focused on ink painting, particularly images of horses. His antipathy toward modernism influenced much of the post-1949 establishment.

Until just six years ago, the city remained a backwater frozen in time--in Paul Theroux's words, "a big brown city which looks like Brooklyn." The Shanghainese, though, never lost their sense of distinction. Ask local residents and they'll fill your mind with visions of Shanghai as the great metropolis of China and, soon, all Asia. But, at the moment, they seem more interested in assimilating international yuppie culture than in anything quirky or local.

Despite the lack of a vital "scene," Shanghai is home to many important artists. One of the first to emerge after the Maoist devastation was Wenda Gu, a provocative conceptualist who began with works deconstructing China's written language and now, from his studio in New York, makes challenging installations using organic materials such as human hair. The painter Yu Youhan, 58, was one of the leading artists of the Political Pop trend of the early 1990s, producing classics of that genre like Chairman Mao in Discussion with the Peasants of Shao Shan, a brightly patterned satire of an important Maoist propaganda image.

Many younger artists moved into abstraction, an unusual direction in China. Ding Yi (b. 1962) has focused since 1988 on limitless combinations of one geometric form, the cross. Xue Song (b. 1965) uses figurative imagery but in an almost abstract way, making collages of burnt paper. In one work, he includes text from a children's primer on painting horses as a means to parody Xu Beihong's famous motif; in another, he makes a "landscape" from the Chinese characters for the word "landscape" (shan shui).

"Ding Yi is one of the only artists in China doing pure abstraction," says Helbling. "That is, not derived from calligraphy or from Tapies or Daoism. But there is a tendency toward abstraction even in figurative painters here. They need to fill the space, it's a kind of horror vacui."

While Chinese painting dominates locally, an increasing number of artists now create more conceptual works. Shi Yong's New Image of Shanghai Today consisted of a "poll" which asked the public to "vote" on his hairstyle. Zhou Tiehai's pieces range from fake magazine covers to Joe Camel paintings to the listing of himself on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (as a "B" share, a category reserved for foreigners). "When I was in art school, I had a romantic vision of art as something pure," Zhou says. "I wanted to be someone like van Gogh. Later on, I began to realize it doesn't work that way."

Chinese artists' dependence on an unreliable Western art world is one of Zhou's major themes. Airport consists of an audio loop of boarding announcements, representing the air terminal not as a place of departure but as a place of waiting for curators to arrive. "For a long time," Zhou says, "the Chinese art world was controlled by a few curators who filtered the local art scene for those Western curators and journalists who bothered to visit."

Another bete noire for Zhou is what he perceives to be typecasting. "Whenever foreigners write about Chinese art, they always want to connect it to something political. It's frustrating, because you feel your experience as an individual getting lost in someone else's simplistic stereotypes." His video Will includes the pointed line, "Must our art live up to your standards?"
A notable exception to the dearth of "unofficial" shows was 1999's "Art for Sale," conceived by artists who thought that, if Shanghai art lagged because everything in the city seemed to be about marketing, why not make an exhibition based on that? They chose the Shanghai Square mall as a venue and got sponsorship from Evian, Bertelsmann and the German consulate.

Entering Shanghai Square on Apr. 10, 1999, visitors found new "products" on display--Shi Yong's toy model of an ideal citizen, or Canton artist Chen Shaoxiong's Commodity (Instruction Manual) Art Explanation. In the supermarket, Zhu Yu's Basics of Total Knowledge (jars containing bits of human brain) set the tone, continuing with Luo Zidan's performance, which Chinese-art.com reviewer Stephanie Tasch described as a "red-lit, beer-swigging display of male dominance and female subservience." Local multimedia artist Hu Jieming played music based on the EKG of a masturbating man. "Art for Sale" was closed after three days for not obtaining "necessary permits."

What makes "Chinese Art for Sale" important is that it happened in a public space. Most Shanghai shows are held in unused apartments or empty industrial spaces, and are seen only by a self-selected elite. A few new galleries have started to offer challenging fare. Li Liang, a returning Australian migrant, opened the Eastlink Gallery; local critic Wu Liang opened Room with a View; Italian Davide Quadrio and Katelijn Verstraete have opened a space called BizArt. But these are the exceptions to the rule, and it remains to be seen if a strong market for contemporary art can be created.

Author: Jonathan Napack writes about art and popular culture in Asia for the International Herald Tribune and other publications.

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A good source for everything on art in China - Shanghai - Chinese Art is http://www.artron.net