Joseph Mallord William Turner, one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art, is both familiar and strange to the Chinese people. While his name has often found its way into world histories and textbooks of fine art published in China, his works up till now have never been brought to China on any public display and the full extent of his achievement remains unknown to most Chinese artists and art historians.  This exhibition, Turner from the Tate Collection, finally presents us here in Beijing a rare opportunity to see and appreciate Turner at close distance. And I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks to my English colleagues whose dedication and expertise have made possible this exhibition which, I believe, is a major event in the history of cultural exchange between China and the UK.

Since Turner’s introduction into China nearly a hundred years ago, the impact of Turner’s creations has always been connected with the development of Chinese art, just as the study and appraisal of Turner in Britain reflect its own cultural context. The story of Turner in China seems to me can be broadly divided into three stages.

Turner’s name first came to be known to Chinese artists at the very beginning of the 20th century when China was caught in the midst of social upheavals, partly because of the encounter with the world. Under the banner of  “Revolution  in Fine Arts,”  Chinese artists believed that the established Chinese school of painting must be radically reformed by the so-called “Western learning” in art, much the same way as the active adoption of Western models in a wide range of areas to transform China in a comprehensive way.  The introduction of European painting was thus regarded as laying the very foundation of a “new knowledge” essential to the healthy growth of a new art. One can almost say that traditional Chinese art in the beginning of the 20th century was experiencing “the shock of the West” more dramatically than Western art was undergoing what Robert Hughes described as “the Shock of the New” brought about by modernism in the same period of time.

Generally speaking, Chinese artists exposed themselves to Western art by either studying aboard or doing translations. In the so-called “journey of Western art”, most of the Chinese artists went to Paris, while a few landed in America. Even those who went to Japan were taking courses on Western art offered in Japanese colleges. For some, the other way to learn Western art is to engage themselves to translating into Chinese Western art histories, art reviews, as well as various expositions of its techniques and styles. There seemed to be a huge demand in the Chinese market for stories about great masters and their unique styles. And J. M. W. Turner was one of the great masters.  

It was during this period of time that the artistic circle in China came to realize Turner’s important position in the European history of fine arts. Both artists and art historians began to take notice of his significant contribution to the English school of painting. Like their European counterparts they tended to attach labels to the various schools of modern art so as to differentiate them from one another. For instance, in the 1920s, Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu, two famous Chinese artists with Western education background, called Turner “the representative of naturalism” . Likewise, in 1931, Feng Zikai, a renowned art historian in China, brought Turner’s works under the category of “English Naturalism” in The Art History of the West. At the beginning of the 19th century, he asserted, the artistic school that could parallel French realism in Europe was English naturalism, and Turner was the very precursor to the school, and moreover, a harbinger of impressionism. In the opinion of Chinese artists at that time, both French realism and English naturalism could be utilized to facilitate a revolution of art in their own country. For Chinese painting, though strong in its time-honored tradition of ideographic expression, was relatively weak in its direct representation of reality, especially in its portrayal of human figures. Some radical critics, deploring the absence of social engagement in traditional Chinese painting, argued that French realism should be introduced into China as a means of redressing excessive attention to style. In addition, those critics believed that English naturalism was also of great technical value, particularly those oil painters of landscape. In their eyes Turner was an artist who was able to represent natural scenery in a faithful and vivid manner. Though to a certain degree detail-oriented English naturalism was at variance with the bold and free strokes of traditional Chinese landscape, Turner’s oil painting was, nevertheless, introduced to bear on the development of China’s new art. On the other hand, Turner’s watercolor painting also had a significant impact on the creative activities of Chinese artists. One of the indications is that since the 1930s many Chinese painters began to explore and body forth a new form of art, drawing their inspiration from Turner’s works. Some of them, such as Pan Sitong and Li Jianchen, became the masters of Chinese watercolor painting in the 20th century.  

Then follows the second phase of Turner’s reception in China. In the 1950s, for political reasons known to all, the art of the Soviet Union was considered as the paragon of artistic creation, and the so-called “socialist realistic style” had attracted vehement imitations. Although Western fine arts was not forbidden, its so-called formalism came under fire. Even in a rigidly ideological period, however, art critics still managed to bring to China a selection of Western artists including Turner since the Renaissance. In this phase the major focus of Chinese art students was on Turner’s landscape and historical paintings, particularly those with themes clearly presented. He was acknowledged as “a realistic landscape painter”, who developed his own unique style by studying nature and rejecting classical composition. Turner was therefore one of the few Western artists whose works were considered politically correct and of some value to Chinese painters, albeit the whole artistic circle at that time was vigilant against “pollutions” from outside. In terms of drawing techniques, Chinese painters tended to appreciate the remarkable way Turner depicted light and atmosphere in some of his works. Among the typical examples were “Snowstorm” and “Rain, Steam and Speed”, two masterpieces already well-known to Chinese painters by then. But it should be noted that not all the artistic features of Turner’s productions were positively accepted at that time. For example, some believed that the fashion in which he portrayed light was too impressionistic and formalistic, and thus ran counter to orthodox social realism. It was this alleged free play of formalistic elegance that blinded Chinese artists to Turner’s insight into the tragic fate of humanity in historical realities, and the seriousness of his theme and purpose.

The third phase began at the beginning of the 1980s when China opened up to the world once again. Chinese artists set out to repair and restore the artistic tradition ravaged during the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand,   their own national tradition was rehabilitated and various schools of local classical art came back on the scene. They traced their art history back to a more remote origin on the basis of numerous recent archeological discoveries, which promised much more possibilities for future Chinese art. On the other hand, they showed to the full extent their enthusiasm for Western art, either classical or modern. In this new era of open-mindedness and cultural renaissance, Turner, as well as some other world masters, once again came into view with all his nuances and complexities. A large number of essays on Turner appeared in Chinese journals with an intention to revalue the great British artist. For instance, in June 1980, The World Art, the only magazine specializing in art outside China at that time, published a translation of the essay “English Landscape Painter Turner”. Meanwhile, Professor Ai Zhongxin, then the Deputy Dean of China Central Academy of Fine Arts, contributed a long article titled “Turner: a Precursor to Modern Expression”. It described Turner’s style as “sensuous realism” and maintained that his artistic expression was an indicator of the spirit of “the civilization of science in the 19th century”. More importantly, he pointed out, “Turner liberated oil painting from the restrictions of classical rules and pioneered its modernization, thereby exerting a significant impact on the European artistic community.  His art cannot simply be regarded as a product of formalism.” In March 1981, in The World Art again, a series of essays were published on British portraiture in the 18th century, as well as Gainsborough, Constable, and most importantly, Turner, whose entry also appeared in Encyclopedia of World Fine Artists published by Shanghai Peoples Fine Arts Publishing House in 1983. In sum, during this period, J. M. W. Turner received a most extensive treatment in Chinese publications in terms of his life, his artistic practice, his relation to British landscape painting, and his interest in history and poetry. It is worth noting that inspired by John Ruskin’s celebrated study of Turner, many graduate students at China Central Academy of Fine Arts chose Turner as the subject of their theses. By that time Tate Gallery had become one of the great museums that Chinese artists would love to visit in their travels abroad. Outside Mainland China, Taiwan has been publishing continuously a large quantity of picture albums and academic works on Turner in an effort to popularize his art in the Chinese community.  

Turner’s reception in China at this stage was closely intertwined with the renewal of Chinese art in the new era. From the 1980s on, Chinese artists have been intensely intrigued by the intellectual aspects of Turner’s achievements.  First of all, in Turner’s shift from “Geological Landscape” to the landscape of “Great Style”, they discovered that landscape painting was not only a faithful representation of natural scenery, but also a daring embodiment of all the subtleties of the creator’s mind. This new vision inspired a lot of Chinese painters to engage themselves in the creation of landscapes colored by their own individuality. Secondly, the fact that Turner painted and sketched wherever he went on tours around Britain and Europe gives further evidence to the truth of classical Chinese conception of the ideal artist who models art on nature to achieve a perfect communion between the observer and the observed.

As regards the practice of drawing, traditional Chinese wisdom has it that “one succeeds by traveling one thousand miles of roads and reading ten thousand volumes of books.” All these combined made Chinese artists hold Turner in great reverence. Thirdly, and perhaps also paradoxically, enlightened by their acquaintance with Western art, Chinese artists began to explore the rich variety of their local tradition as a source of inspiration. The historical sense and subject matter in Turner‘s landscapes are increasingly appreciated through a comparative perspective. With a sharpened awareness of the similarities and differences between traditional Chinese landscape and the Western counterpart as represented by Turner, they began to view features of Chinese and Western arts in a new and informed light. This sense of locality and difference came to the foreground in an exhibition held in the National Art Museum of China, where traditional Chinese landscapes and Western oil landscapes were displayed in juxtaposition for comparative study.

Across the long geographical and temporal distance, Turner’s art has found its way into China, exerting considerable influence on the drawing techniques of Chinese fine arts, and bringing about changes in people’s views of art. That is very much to Turner’s credit. This exhibition provides ordinary Chinese museum goers with a good chance to know him better: to place him in the context of Western art. In my opinion, his tragic consciousness needs to be further appreciated by Chinese artists, for the natural forces hidden beneath his landscapes were very often related by him to human frailty and fallibility. Such a consciousness is particularly relevant to this age of greed and globalization. Turner surpassed his contemporary artists by his attempt to capture by means of visual language the essence of the ongoing changes in the era of the Industrial Revolution. He gave form, that is, light and color, to such abstract concepts as time and speed, and provided people with an access to the traces of a particular period. These traces powerfully remind us of the concrete history of his paintings and also pose a challenge to artists of present day both in Britain and China: how should we express our own time through an adequate idiom for our posterity.

Fan Di’an
Director
National Art Museum of China