Book review: "The Modernization of Chinese Art: The Shanghai Art College, 1913–1937"

In the waning days of the Qing Dynasty and the early Republican period, new educational reforms dramatically reshaped systems of art education and led to fundamental changes in the purpose, meaning and social function of art. These transformations were particularly visible in Shanghai, where the growth of art schools and societies was facilitated by internationally oriented forms of commercial art and an attendant expansion of the publishing industries. One of the largest and most influential institutions to emerge from this confluence of cultural factors was the Shanghai Art College (Shanghai meishu zhuanke xuexiao or Shanghai meizhuan) the subject of Jane Zheng’s extensive new study. Providing a comprehensive chronological overview of the first 25 years of the College’s history, she traces its evolution in the 1910s from a private tutorial school offering training in calendar poster painting techniques to a paragon of Western-style art instruction in the 1920s, and finally to an accredited institution that sought to fulfil Cai Yuanpei’s mandate on “aesthetic education” in the 1930s. In the process, she delineates how the College successfully weathered the vicissitudes of Shanghai’s changing socio-economic and cultural climate, navigating both market demands and the city’s burgeoning commercial sphere to emerge as a “pragmatic market player in Shanghai’s free market environment” (p. 327). The book argues that the College not only responded to artistic changes as they percolated into the mainstream of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan culture, but also illustrates how its pedagogical goals and institutional features played an integral part in this modernization process, demonstrating the seminal impact which the college exerted in professionalizing “Western-style” art training, legitimizing the continued practice of literati painting and in establishing art history as a modern discipline. Rich in primary sources, Zheng’s argument is supported by exhaustive research into the College’s archives, preserved in the collection of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, in addition to countless newspaper and periodical reports. Allied with a synthesis of the secondary literature, copious quotations from many seminal figures, including Liu Haisu, Zhang Yuguang and Pan Tianshou, bring to life the incongruous voices and competing agendas of those involved in the College’s operation.