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  • Looking Backward for the Avant-Garde
  • Mary Scott (bio)
Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement by Xiaobing Tang. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. pp. xii, 310. $75.52 cloth.

The cover of Xiaobing Tang's Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde makes his central question clear at a glance. It is a 1935 monochrome woodcut by Luo Qingzhen that shows a line of boat haulers, their backs bent with effort and their faces hidden under identical straw hats. Behind them, under a lowering sky, lies a river with a few sturdy trees on its opposite bank. Although the image's humble, anonymous subjects and scratchy crosshatching seem simple or even crude at first, a complex pattern of triangles soon emerges in the ropes that link the pullers to one another and suggest their kinship to the trees across the river. One begins to see how subtly the various cuts and lines evoke the textures of earth, rock, water, and sky. Yet it remains a straightforwardly readable 1930s social realist image that might have come from the hands of Rockwell Kent, Rufino Tamayo, or Franz Masereel. For anyone who expects that an avant-garde worthy of the name will deliver the shock of the new, these images seem too familiar, too easy to read, too naively realist to qualify. In what sense, then, were the works of the 1930s Chinese woodcut artists avant-garde? Were they part of an international avant-garde? Were they the forerunners—as the book's title seems to imply—of a contemporary Chinese avant-garde? Or were these images avant-garde only in relation to the Chinese art and politics of their time? [End Page 315]

Xiaobing Tang's book presents the case that the Chinese woodcut movement of the 1930s was indeed an avant-garde in the broadest sense because it maintained a critical distance from the existing art field and because its innovative exhibition practices promoted radically new conceptions of art, creating a new audience and new kinds of subjectivity for both artists and viewers. As he puts it,

It was a truly avant-garde movement because the first generation of woodcut artists not only challenged the existing institution of art, the prevalent visual order, and aesthetic tastes, but also greatly extended the reach, vocabulary, and grammar of the woodcut as an incomparably expedient and politically relevant visual Esperanto of the modern age.

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Although his argument is ultimately persuasive, it also shows how far the definition of avant-garde must stretch to accommodate twentieth-century Chinese experience.

First of all, Tang's argument raises the question of the woodcut movement's relationship to the existing art field in China, which he describes with great sensitivity. Photography, photolithography, linotype, and other imported technologies for text and image reproduction had dramatic effects on modern Chinese visual culture, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. These technologies made reproductions of Western and Chinese art and new kinds of images like advertising much more widely available, but they also supplanted older technologies of image making, especially Chinese woodblock book printing. Painting and calligraphy in ink survived, but Western-style oil and watercolor painting flourished alongside it, and some artists painted in several modes or actively tried to synthesize them. The historian of all this must also address continuing innovation within the inherited modes of ink painting, and artists' responses to successive waves of European modes of representation—some avant-garde in their own context, some not—without getting trapped in the assumption that work in ink on paper or silk is necessarily traditional or that work in oils is necessarily more modern.

Tang begins by introducing us to well-known modern painters whose works now sell to mostly Chinese buyers for vast sums of money, but whose names are still unfamiliar to most collectors and historians of twentieth-century art in Europe and the United States. Among them were Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, and Xu Beihong, all of whom studied in Europe and returned to China to occupy [End Page 316] prominent positions in China's new art academies and its modernist art pantheon. Another was Feng Zikai, whose paintings and drawings reflect...

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