ART
A Chinese Painter's Views on Art
SOME time ago I wrote an article in The Spectator expressing my doubts about the value of Chinese art, and suggesting that the Chinese had limited the function of their art by thinking So much of the formal aspects of it, above all of calligraphy, that they had in the end come down to playing a series of exquisite variations on certain very limited themes.
To my great surprise I received a short time afterwards a letter from a Chinese painter, Mr. K. Wong, a student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Shanghai, who far from being angry at my suggestions (which I had feared might be the case if any Chinese saw what I had written) agreed with them, and explained the difficulties which faced him in the attempt he was making to introduce Western realism into China and to get free from the traditional mannerism of the country. His letter contained so much of interest that I have thought it worth while to summarise his views in this article.
Mr. Wong first explained that in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Shanghai they had been trying to introduce the ideas of Western realism in the arts, but that they had been hindered above all by the fact that the Chinese have no scientific idea of " Nature " at all. The idea of analysing a substance like blood, say, and of finding that it consists of certain kinds of corpuscles arranged in a certain order is to them either meaning- less or else smacks of magic. " Scientific investigations, undertaken in Europe with such amazing detachment, seem• to us merely a rather unworthy method of wasting time, probably with sinister motives." Given this lack of understanding of scientific method, it is clear that oriental artists will have no conception of the scientific study of nature in the arts. They cannot, for instance, undelstand why it is worth while studying a peasant whose limbs are not necessarily beautifully formed, when they can make a far more exquisite piece of calligraphy from a piece of bamboo. Indeed they can hardly understand the study of the human body at all as a subject for painting. The drawing of the nude they can only see as pornographic ; and the human figure is in their view only to be painted if it can be given the abstract beauty of penmanship, for which the scientific study of the model is entirely unnecessary. • When Mr. Wong tries to convince them that the study of nature in the Western sense is of value, he finds himself up against many difficulties presented by the history of European painting. He finds serious limitations in our kinds of realism. Limitations in subject, as with the Dutch who wasted much of their time painting mere architectural interiors ; or with the flower painters who, according to oriental standards, paint so few varieties of flowers and paint them with such feeble observation ; or in modern painters who neglect so many of the themes which Mr. Wong, who was a scientific student here for a time, expected them to paint—such as scenes in laboratories and dissecting rooms.
Finally, when the Chinese students begin to understand what the scientific study of nature means, they say.: " Then, why, if this study is so important in painting, do you not simply make scientifically accurate diagrams of the lungs, liver and so forth, which are interesting organisms ? Are exact drawings of them works of art ? " This is one of the problems often raised by people in Europe, to which the answer is that the scientific study of nature is not the whole of art. It is only a means which art uses to describe those things which the artist thinks interesting and to express his views and feelings about more general matters. The real difference between the Eastern and the Western kinds of art, as it emerges from Mr. Wong's letter, is that the oriental does not want to say the kind of thing which requires a scientific knowledge of nature. He is anxious' to give form to the " life " of nature in an almost mystical sense, for which ptupose the study of natural appearances is as useless as it was to the mediaeval sculptor who wanted to express a particular aspect of the supernatural world. But Western realists of the kind which Mr'. Wong has in mind want to make statements about the appearance, habits, actions and emotions of their fellow- men. They regard them as individuals, not as dots in a mystical unity called nature. And for this purpose they must study the natural world around them; not man only but all the things connected with him, including flowers and landscape, but in their relation to man. This is an idea quite foreign to
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