| Oil painting as a western work-type was introduced into China in the late Ming Dynasty.It has faced the issue of how to blend with Chinese visual art and recreate art on this base.The difficulty of the blending lies on the substantial heterogeneity between two visual cultures with their own history.The period of Republican China was the time that artists investigated and experimented the issue of blending and recreation.One of the methods of their artistic experiment was to create art through application of traditional subjects on oil painting.In other words,artists of the Republican China combined traditional Chinese subjects-renwu(figure painting),shanshui(mountains-and-waters)and huaniao(flowers-and-birds)-with their western counterparts,namely figures,landscape and still life.At the same time,poetic flavor of Chinese literature was injected into the blending.There are many artists in Republican China who studied and practiced this blending,represented by Xu Beihong,Liu Haisu,Li Yishi,Wang Yuezhi,Lin Fengmian,Guan Liang,Chang Yu(Sanyu),Pan Yuliang,and Yan Wenliang.With excellent cultivation in Chinese classics and art,they studied or travelled abroad,mainly Europe and Japan,to study western art and aesthetics behind it.Further,they investigated two different kinds of visual art,explored the way of blending,so that traditional subjects were reinterpreted modernized by Renaissance Art and Modernism,a unique approach of nationalization of oil painting.There are six chapters in this doctorate dissertation.The first chapter is to provide the investigation with historical background.It discusses the history of blending of traditional subjects and oil painting,including artistic and educational practice by those oil painters who taught in art schools,the blending in the movement of western painting in Shanghai,and oil painters’ return to traditional subjects in the Anti-Japanese War.From chapter two to chapter four,I do case studies in which two methods,realistic and expressionist ones,are investigated.In subject matters,the similarities and differences of renwu vs.figures,shanshui vs.landscape,and huaniao vs.still life are explored with support of analysis of artworks by ten artists mentioned above.Chapter five deals specifically with the practice of artists in bringing in poetic flavor,a critical characteristic of literati painting,into the blending.Chapter six is a theoretical one which investigates application of symbols of traditional subjects,diversity of intentional language of expression,calligraphic feature in form and coloration,and composition with eastern flattening and decorative art characteristics,all in the process of blending of traditional subjects with oil painting.Through the investigation on history,conception,and artistic cases in the blending,I would like to make a difference in the status quo which lacks systematic research on the blending of traditional subjects and its aesthetics in ink art with western art,including Renaissance art and modernism. |
