The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History

6. The Chinese dimension to the Furen Christian art

The teachers, students and graduates of the Furen art department now produced lively and evocative examples of Christian images in local style. In this way, they resumed the work of artistic adaptation that had occurred in the time of the Zhangzhou sculptors and in that of João da Rocha and Giulio Aleni, discussed in Chapter 1. Whereas in the age of the French protectorate the French statues, paintings and pieties had overshadowed Chinese Christian images, these Chinese images now began to reappear. Chinese Christian communities and influential missionaries supported their return, as did numbers of foreign Catholics. The work of these artists is reproduced in a number of publications, of which the Society of the Divine Word priest Fritz Bornemann’s Ars Sacra Pekinensis has the richest collection, containing ninety-nine reproductions , including several in colour.1 There was much debate, however, about the quality of the Furen artworks and whether or not the dream of the future was sufficient reason to persevere with the work of the present. Bornemann argued that there were significant reasons why the enterprise should be continued, insisting that the works already produced could indeed be called Chinese ecclesiastical art. Essentially, he argued that there were five distinct reasons why the works should be considered both ecclesiastical and Chinese. They were Christian because of their subject matter. They were Chinese for the following reasons: first, the unique Chinese characteristics evident in the format and materials used to create the art; second, the use of traditional painting techniques; third, the inclusion of aspects of the natural world such as trees, shrubs and so on; fourth, the deliberate use of Chinese flora and fauna in the scenes the artists chose to depict (even in a traditional Christmas scene, for instance); and finally, the substantial representation of Chinese objects like buildings, tools, musical instruments and furniture.2 6 The Chinese dimension to the Furen Christian art 176 The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History Given that Bornemann was neither an art historian nor, seemingly, even an amateur artist, his judgement was most likely based on the opinions of other writers, including people like Berchmanns Brückner, his fellow Divine Word missionary who was an artist. It is also helpful—and indeed necessary—to consider these arguments in relation to the paintings and works of art as well. The Furen graduates mostly used Chinese calligraphy brushes to paint onto paper and silk scrolls, even though their art training had included Western painting techniques: the artists were obviously making conscious decisions about both the medium and the method they employed. Furthermore, the scrolls were mostly vertical, with the cloth, silk, or card borders typical of Chinese paintings. Examples of paintings in the vertical format include Chen Yuandu’s Mary, Queen of the Angels (1938) and Lu Hongnian’s Our Lady’s Lantern Festival (1936; see the accompanying illustrations). Examples of paintings in horizontal format include works from the Guanganmen workshop, like The Angel Visiting the Shepherds by Luke Hua (Lujia Hua) painted in 1948 (not shown here). The artists almost universally employed traditional painting techniques and visual tropes to depict water, clouds, branches, grass, figures and so on. This included techniques like using the empty spaces of the scrolls to create a sense of distance, as was common in the shanshui (mountain and water) genre, and applying ink in certain formulaic ways. Such time-honoured methods were described in classic manuals like the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden (Jieziyuan Huazhuan), published in the late seventeenth century.3 These traditional styles were the strengths of Furen professors like Pu Quan and Pu Jin; it is therefore no surprise to find that the curriculum was heavily weighted towards these techniques. The Furen Yearbook of 1946, for instance, reveals that first-year students were obliged to take fourteen hours of tuition each week within the Chinese painting section of the department. These hours were given over to courses on practical calligraphy, on seal-making (the stones or pieces of jade carved with a signature or defining mark) and on the depiction of living creatures, flowers and birds and natural scenery. This last subject, called “animate beings”, involved “training in the fundamental techniques of landscape painting, composition of simple pictures and a general introduction to brushwork.”4 Several years after the establishment of the university, Chen Yuandu and Lu Hongnian taught the class on animate beings, while Pu Jin and Pu Quan were listed as teaching...