By vivax Lin Fong-ming, the well known!
"80 artist, whose work in the Art' Club Exhibition is service to! Chinese Art. He was valiantly en-favoured to be different in a world hostile to change: he has dared to the original, When the academic, or rather the age-crusted methods of the past are taken into account, his efforts are the more praise-worthy.
Foreign artists, even those who make a close study of Chinese art-seldom penetrate beyond a mere sketchy history, and must find it difficult to differentiate between old and now technique in painting. Like its prototype in Western countries, painting is a tradition in China, but it is open to question whether' this tradition should still further shackle the minds of New China, for there is no doubt that our very social life has changed and with it we assert, must change, our art.
It is a peculiar thing that in every country now ways of putting on paint and of drawing ave regarded 4s sacrilegious, yet we have no time to-day for the old fashioned steel engraving and wood block for news-Paper illustration, 'These old crafts have been superseded, so why not not scrap old, and for the most part, time-wasting' methods of painting Lin Fong-ming with a single stroke of his educated brush, gains the same effect as the painstaking col-Jeague who takes twenty.
Chinese Art has not advanced to greater heights because it is hidebound by tradition. And yet these traditions are not those of the great Masters of Chinese painting. sent-day artists lack the originality and strength of purpose of the masters because they have allowed them-Selves to be dominated by literary civilization. When art yields to literary standards of metre and aneasurement, originality, and therefore, true art, is stifled.
Lin Fong-ming is not the only de-Parture, there are others equally determined: but he is the most noteworthy. He represents already a not inconsiderable array of—both, Chinese style and Western style native artists whose ambition it is to rejuvenate Chinese art; to make it live, and to express the life of the people. Unhappily, Lin has not the range in education or genius to de-piet modern China, but in his way, and with his studies of nature in the new and therefore original, technique, he will inspire those whose works place Chinese art once more 01 healthy plane. Like every artist Fong-ming falls far tions but there is recaptured the of adventure we thought gone for ever from our painters.
He tries to draw majesty of movement. He endeavours to. free the density of the atmosphere by a single, vital line. The work is not particularly brilliant or strong, but! it is free and exhibits clear think-mtg. He depends for his effects upon the simplicity of his drawing. The old idea is to have a special way to draw everything, the tree, the face, the hand, the background. An unemotional system, and genius destroying. It tended to produce artistic machines, not artists. Every artist produced the same uninteresting copy. Very little was original indeed new ideas were at a discount. But masterpieces of art should be dissimilar. The commonplace, the ordered, the proper, are depicted, and as such have little emotional qualities, and are not art. There are Western critics who refer to Chinese art as a spiritual tonic, and, therefore, a much needed pan-coa for the. tortured world. Perhaps! But what has this stagnant, stultified, unresponsive literary art' done for China? Look' back to our' ig, sculpture and reached great heights, such heights indeed that the' world considers it marvellous.
Yot it is a fact that the artists who created those masterpieces regarded
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.