Beggars, black bears, and butterflies

Claypool, Lisa. Beggars, black bears, and butterflies : the scientific gaze and ink painting in modern China. Cross-Currents : East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal, 14 (March 2015). URL : http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-14 (consulté le 4 juillet 2015)

“Qi shi san” (“Begging for food, no. 3”) by Chen Shizeng, 1912

The ink brushes of the painters Chen Shizeng 陳師曾 (1876–1923), Liu Kuiling 劉奎齡 (1885–1967), and Gao Jianfu 高劍父 (1879–1951) were employed as tools of the nation in early twentieth-century China. Among each artist’s oeuvre were paintings dedicated to the welfare of the country—Chen Shizeng commemorated a week-long exhibition for flood relief; Liu Kuiling painted the Boxer Rebellion, which he had witnessed firsthand in Tianjin, from memory years later, during the Second Sino-Japanese War; and Gao Jianfu famously depicted skulls crying over the nation’s fate at about the same time. Yet any clear expression of a radical idealism about the new republic in these artists’ ink paintings was tempered by a tentative and self-conscious exploration of new ways of seeing. By synthesizing a “universal” scientific gaze with their trained vision as artists, Chen, Liu, and Gao created pictures that encouraged their viewers to cross the boundaries and binaries that would come to define guohua, or “national painting”: East versus West, oil versus ink, modernity versus tradition, painting versus graphic arts, and elite versus folk. It was through the scientific gaze of these brush-and-ink artists that political idealism and learning came to cooperate, and through their paintings that possibilities for news ways of seeing the nation emerged.

Lire l’article (PDF)

Voir aussi, dans le même numéro de Cross-Currents E-Journal, un essai photographique par Lisa Claypool intitulé : Picturing science in modern China. Cet essai est accompagné de 36 peintures des artistes étudiés dans l’article, commentés par l’auteur.
Voir l’essai photographique

Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

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