If the standard exhibition catalogue of Chinese art is a collection of topical essays and entries that describe individual items, then Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is both more and less than what we normally expect. Wen C. Fong’s book neither provides sufficient description of the exhibition’s contents, allowing the reader to know what was in it, nor tells him or her what proportion of the exhibition is represented in the catalogue. In its 114 color plates, Between Two Cultures, one of the few published works in English on modern and contemporary ink paintings from 1860 to 1980, reproduces ninety-five sets of painting that are done in ink, usually with water-based color pigments, and known either as “traditional painting” or by the neopolitical term guohua (“national painting”). The need for specific description of the paintings is obviated by the detailed accounts found in the earlier three-volume record of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth’s collection (Ellsworth et. al., Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: 1800–1950 [New York: Random House, 1987]). In Between Two Cultures, Fong treats the paintings and the biographical accounts of their twenty-nine (male) artists as elements of a narrative that is located simultaneously in two separate but parallel discursive contexts.

The metanarrative is based on a notion of painting as representation or re-creation of the underlying principles of nature, or as reflection of the painter’s ethical nature. This narrative postulates the paintings in a linear and organic development of Chinese pictorial art from the early imperial era (third century B.C.E.) to the present. The historiographical narrative places new artistic movements in the context of political and economic incursion by the West, beginning in the first half of nineteenth century. As an affecting result, reductive dichotomous terms, which resonate in the book’s title (tradition vs. modernity, East vs. West) are used to characterize a complex array of forms of artistic training, innovative transformative artwork, and physical displacement or dislocation, all of which were constituent of the experiential lives and art of the painters in the concerned period.

The book is made up of an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction Fong raises three points that frame much of the following discussion. The first is the primacy of calligraphy, in particular, brush traces, which through kinetic energy embody and project the subjectivity of the artist in calligraphic art, pictorial art, or a combination of the two. According to Fong, subject and its representation through aesthetic (and attendant ethical) gesture is the primary motive of the artists. The creation of mimetic illusion alone has never been their collective objective. This leads to Fong’s second point, that mimesis and realism are conceived as symbolic marks of distinction and tension, and as a product of contact between the artists of China and of the West. Moreover, he argues that the engagement of mimesis and realism by Chinese artists in the early Republican period (1910s–1930s) and in the People’s Republic of China (1950s–1970s) is directly tied to political and ideological agenda. Third, Fong asserts that Japan was considered a site that mediated Western artistic practices and as a market that helped advance the popularity of the important seventeenth-century Chinese individualist artists Bada Shanren (1626–1705) and Shitao (1642–1707), as well as later artists like Wu Changshuo (1844–1927) and Qi Baishi (1864–1957). Finally, Fong also points out Japan’s importance as an Asian state that legitimized the construction of “national” art beginning in the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 examines eleven well-known artists, most of whom operated in the cosmopolitan commercial port of Shanghai. As Fong points out, the continuing influence of the eighteenth-century philological tradition of kaozhengxue (“evidential research”)—particularly in its interest in epigraphy, bronze and stone inscriptions, and seal-script—became embedded in the pictorial innovations of both Wu Changshuo and Zhao Zhiqian (1829–84). Fong describes the eleven artists as professional painters. Whether trained as scholar-officials and intellectuals (such as Zhao Zhiqian and Li Ruiqing [1867–1920]) or as commercial portraitists (Xugu [1823–96] and Ren Bonian [1840–95]), they made their living selling art. All lived in difficult times marked by Western imperial incursions, large-scale local rebellions, and the settlement of foreign concessions in Shanghai. These foreign residents, in turn, introduced technologies that had originated in the West, such as photography and photolithography, to the Chinese art scene. Foreign influences, such as the dominance of linear perspective, the large overlapping forms of Japanese woodblock prints, and the newly-evolved Nihon-ga (“Japanese-style painting”), sometimes transparent and other times shown in the form of gesture, became apparent in their own painting. Their artwork successfully skirted the line between professionalism and self-representation, broad enough in subject matter and theme to appeal to large audience, while still embodying both traditional cultural values and personal subjectivity.

In Chapter 2, Fong discusses six painters: Gao Jianfu (1878–1951) and his younger brother Qifeng (1889–1933), Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Liu Haisu (1896–1994), Fu Baoshi (1904–65), and Feng Zikai (1898–1975). All held important teaching appointments; some served in leading positions in influential art academies or were responsible for the direction of a national art agenda. These artists studied or traveled abroad in Japan or Europe and experimented with Western art forms, either serially intermixed with Chinese art forms or by modes of fusion with native techniques. On the one hand, the fact that their work appropriates so much from Western art can be seen as an aspect of nation building by “learning from the West,” as well as a product of the general program of early twentieth-century cultural reform. On the other, the artists could be described as internationalists. They were familiar with the techniques and issues of both Chinese and Western art, knowledge of the latter frequently obtained through the mediated site of Japanese pictorial practices. However, as Fong points out, most of them returned to ink paintings and traditional artistic values, with the engagement of emphatic brushlines and familiar subject matters and in their adherence to early critical terms in the latter part of their careers.

Standing in contrast to these six “Westernizers” are what Fong refers to as the three “Traditionalists” in the Chapter 3: Qi Baishi, Huang Binhong (1865–1955), and Zhang Daqian (1899–1983). These men were from different social backgrounds and came to art in different ways. Qi Baishi began as a carpenter in a woodcarving shop who then learned to paint by copying painting manuals and photographs. Zhang Daqian observed textile weaving and dying techniques in Kyoto before studying calligraphy. Of the three, only Huang Binhong received what might be called a traditional literati education. Their paintings all allude to earlier canonical Chinese painters or early nineteenth-century artists that had been interested in epigraphy. (Beijing and Shanghai count among the Traditionalists’ significant places of residence.) The reputation of the three artists has also been enhanced in other ways. The appealing paintings of Qi Baishi were available in popular woodblock-print editions. Huang Binhong wrote extensively as an art critic and coedited an important anthology of descriptive and critical writings on different artistic media. Zhang Daqian was a talented painter, a virtuoso forger, and a collector-dealer.

The careers of the nine artists discussed in the book’s concluding chapter are placed amid the political history and national art policies of the People’s Republic of China from the 1950s to 1980s. Official art training took place in influential art academies that were headed by leading artists already discussed in the preceding chapters: Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu, Qi Baishi, and Huang Binhong. Another artist and teacher of great influence is Lin Fengmian (1900–91). All these artists were therefore familiar with or were trained in Chinese and Western art technique. Their diverse practices influenced the next generation of artists: Pan Tianshou (1897–1971), Li Kuchan (1898–1983), Wu Zuoren (1908–97), Li Keran (1907–89), Shilu (1919–82), Wu Guanzhong, (b. 1919), Lu Yanshao (1909–93), and Cheng Shifa (b. 1921). The paintings done by these men show a range of styles and interests too diverse to group together. What seems to bind them is their status as students or disciples of the prior generation, the suffering they underwent in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and their international reputations.

Between Two Cultures is a book that will be of interest to different audiences. It provides updated biographical accounts of the leading ink painters of the period. At the same time, it directly or indirectly raises important issues and assumptions that are embedded or are implicated in the interpretive understanding of the art and artists concerned. Should modern and contemporary art be wedded seamlessly to the metanarrative of the linear development of the pictorial art of China? In a similar vein, what meanings do such critical terms as qiyun (“spirit” or “breath resonance”) and xieyi (“writing of concept [as opposed to form]”) connote in the discourse of the early twentieth century? Can important but generalized terms like “realism” and “form-likeness” (or their obverse), which are used throughout the book to summarize the categorical distinction between Western and Chinese art and which are reencountered in the discourse of modern Chinese artists, be elaborated and differentiated? These questions are more directly and satisfactorily addressed in essays from Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith’s volume Chinese Art: Modern Expressions (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2001). These articles, first given in a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition, present a far more analytical and revisionist view of the period than Fong’s catalogue.

Still, Between Two Cultures is an important book, a benchmark in collecting and presenting disparate historical and biographical material that was heretofore generally unavailable in English and in one place. It also draws on the most recent secondary material, which is set in Fong’s historicized narrative. If Between Two Cultures is used alongside the symposium essays, which generally tend to favor culture over politics while probing some of the abstract descriptive and critical terms, both the traditional and modernist arguments about modernity and the development of modern and contemporary Chinese art are problematized in a productive way.