How 20th-century Hong Kong and Guangdong art stood out from rest of China

For China, the early- to mid-20th century was a time marked by political and social upheaval. It began with the Xinhai Revolution, which saw the end of the imperial system, before the Second Sino-Japanese War rocked the nation. The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution signified massive political and social shifts. In 1949, after the Communist Party took power, a border was put up between mainland China and Hong Kong. Against this complex backdrop, Cantonese artists adopted new...

For China, the early- to mid-20th century was a time marked by political and social upheaval. It began with the Xinhai Revolution, which saw the end of the imperial system, before the Second Sino-Japanese War rocked the nation. The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution signified massive political and social shifts. In 1949, after the Communist Party took power, a border was put up between mainland China and Hong Kong. Against this complex backdrop, Cantonese artists adopted new ways of expression that culminated in a modern artistic identity. This identity is now being examined in “Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s-1970s” at Hong Kong’s M+ museum.

The exhibition, which runs until October 5, brings together 200 works from the museum’s own collection, as well as from other institutions and private collections. Featured artists include ink painters, oil painters, printmakers, cartoonists and photographers from both Guangdong province and Hong Kong, though many migrated between the two places. The focus on Cantonese art comes from the museum’s desire to revisit modernism – as other global museums have in recent years – while telling a local story. “When people think about 20th-century Chinese art or modern Chinese art, they tend to focus on Shanghai and Beijing,” says Alan Yeung, associate curator of ink art at M+. “As a Hong Kong-based museum, it’s very important for us to address our own lineage and history. That’s the underlying motivation.”

Artists from Guangzhou in Guangdong and Hong Kong – international port cities in the south of China – were influenced by artistic styles from abroad, which helped make them different from artists in northern Chinese cities. “Guangdong, as a region, is culturally peripheral to China,” Yeung says. “So that created a kind of interesting tension, or a paradoxical relationship between a conservative impulse and a progressive impulse. That mixture actually creates a very interesting kind of modernism that is distinctive about Guangdong.” The M+ exhibition opens with a “Prologue”, where a series of landscape sketches chronicle artist Yip Yan-chuen’s life as a wartime refugee, and then as an explorer, in Guangxi, Guangdong province and Hong Kong. Viewed collectively, the pieces offer a glimpse into the diversity that follows in the exhibition, and how artists shifted from classical painting traditions to adopting other artistic styles. Some of Yip’s works give nods to classic ink paintings, while others showcase watercolour tendencies. Another piece reflects an almost photographic view. “It really brings up the theme of hybridity of visual modernity – different visual systems coexisting together,” Yeung says.

This hybridity is examined more closely in the first section of the exhibition, Image and Reality. In the politically turbulent early 20th century, Cantonese artists moved away from classical aesthetics and adopted realism as a way to represent life. “Cantonese artists were trying to reform society, so they had to reform the way people see,” Yeung says. Cantonese artists were increasingly influenced by Western and Japanese art. One piece that reflects this is Fang Rending’s painting Mother and Son in the Rain (1932), which shows the pair escaping either war or famine during a rainstorm.

The idealisation of the woman, and the use of mica – a shimmering mineral material – to depict raindrops, reflects what was seen in Japanese art at the time. Fang had studied in Tokyo. At the same time, Yeung says, “Cantonese artists also tried to represent [revolution and war] more directly in a way that classical art would not have.” He points out, however, that such depictions were still informed by older painting philosophies. “There’s always a tension in this kind of realism, because the scene is very sad, but then the depiction is quite idealised.” Gao Jianfu’s Flying in the Rain (1932) was created just after Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Stylistically, it embodies Chinese classical painting, but the addition of modern jet planes gives the work a sense of contemporaneity, seemingly reflecting the artist’s anxieties about war.

This second section of the exhibition also invites viewers to consider the role of images in distributing news and ideas during the early- to mid-20th century – a time when photographs, prints and pictorials began to be widely distributed for the purposes of advertising and propaganda. “We have a self-consciousness in the exhibition about the circulation of images,” says Tina Pang, M+’s curator of Hong Kong visual culture. The range of mediums shown “hint at the kind of visual cacophony of this era”, she says. Of note are pages from the ninth issue of Current Affairs Pictorial (1906), published by Tongmenghui. The secret society – founded in 1905 by Sun Yat-sen, Song Jiaoren and others to overthrow China’s Qing dynasty – used pictorials to spread their message. Other artists took on roles as documentarians and witnesses. The exhibition features a gelatin silver photographic print that showcases the aftermath of the failed Guangzhou communist uprising in 1927, while Barbed Wires (1946) by Huang Xinbo shows a haunting depiction of a soldier with his bloody mouth wrapped in a bandage. The second section of the exhibition, “Identity and Gender”, examines the multidimensional roles that artists took on in the 20th century. “Many of them were involved in fundraising, organising exhibitions together, organising publications together, to raise funds, to support people who were suffering during the war,” Pang says.

Though some may consider Guangdong and Hong Kong art to be different, Yeung and Pang are more interested in showing the connections between the two. “Pre-1949, the artists were moving back and forth freely, and they were exhibiting together,” Pang says. “Some of them were more conservative, some of them were progressive, but ultimately, they were interested in seeing what each other were doing.” Yeung adds: “The emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong identity … you have to understand it in relation to Cantonese artists. We’re focusing on a relationship that is often overlooked.” During the late 1940s, for example, some Cantonese artists moved to Hong Kong and adopted identities as social critics as they became informed by leftist thinking and aligned themselves with the working class. The Human Art Club in particular – made up of Huang Xinbo and others – created poignant woodcut prints that portrayed those suffering during wartime. When some artists moved back to Guangdong province, their memories and experiences gained in Hong Kong influenced their careers even after the border closed.

This section also looks at how traditional social roles of women evolved over time. A trio of paintings by Tan Yuese called Moonlight Like Water (1921) is a rare example of nudes painted by a woman during that period. Another highlight of this section is After Labouring (1959) by Fang Rending. “His speciality is really painting beautiful, idealised images of women, but since he remained on the mainland, he had to find politically correct subjects,” Yeung says. At the time, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to promote women as equal participants of socialist transformation. “This was in 1959, so the politically correct subject would be a young female worker at leisure. You can see that there’s still a kind of sensuality to it, but it’s under the guise of the representation of a proletarian worker,” Yeung says. After Labouring is paired alongside Green Treasure House (1973) by Ma Zhizhong and Zhong Zengya, showing a woman working. “It shows how gender becomes almost effaced during the later times during the Cultural Revolution,” Yeung says. “You almost can’t tell that she’s a woman.” The third section of the exhibition, Locality and Nationhood, focuses on the relationship between Guangdong province and China as a whole. In Juyong Pass of the Great Wall (1935), for example, Huang Shaoqiang uses a classical handscroll format to depict a photographic panorama, combining visual languages while depicting the historic wall.

“If you read the inscription, he says the undulations of the northern plains reminded him of the waves of the Pearl River. He’s seeing the country from a Cantonese perspective,” Yeung says. There is also Sung Wong Toi (Terrace of the Song Kings) (1957) by Wong Po-yeh. “We end the third section with that painting partly to show the layers of history, because Sung Wong Toi [an important historic relic in Hong Kong’s Kowloon City neighbourhood] was a monument to the Song emperors who came through Hong Kong. But then in the Republican period, it got turned into a symbol for Qing loyalists,” Yeung says. “When that painter painted it in 1957, it had already been destroyed and levelled. So for him, it’s hard to say what it was a symbol for. Was it a symbol of personal nostalgia for him, because he came from Guangzhou? But also maybe general pathos about cycles of history.” The exhibition’s final section, “Parallel Worlds”, shifts the lens to the relationship between Guangzhou and Hong Kong after 1949. The two cities had been closely linked but were separated when Mao Zedong gained control of mainland China. Hong Kong became a prime destination for those who sought to flee the mainland. Cantonese artists in Hong Kong often chose to depict everyday struggles, such as the water shortage in the city – as reflected in A View of the Dongjiang Water Supply Project Construction Site, 1964, by Yam Chun-hon – and fires in Hong Kong’s squatter settlements. Cantonese artists in mainland China, however, tended to create works that reflected the priorities of the Chinese Communist Party. Young Eagle Spreading Her Wings (1973) by Ou Yang, for example, depicts a joyful young swordswoman who is part of a Communist Party youth group. It may be propaganda, but it is art all the same, Yeung says. “Within the museum world in general, there have been some efforts to revise, for example, Cold War biases. So the idea that propaganda art cannot be considered contemporary art – we’re challenging that bias by showing the continuation of certain artistic practices from the Republican period into the Socialist period.” Pang adds: “We have different media representing similar events to create a kind of contrast and comparison, to encourage you to think about which one is closest to reality.” It is precisely that ambiguity and complexity that Pang and Yeung want audiences to consider. “We’re very much led by the works,” says Pang. “It’s really an exhibition about the art of the era. “The historical underpinnings, it’s the background against which these works are made – it’s not our job to tell our history. It’s really our job to make an exhibition that reflects the individual experiences of artists and how they wanted to represent the world at the time.”