Veteran painter back in spotlight

After spending decades reshaping the landscape of China's art scene, Song Buyun is back, this time in the form of a grand and unique retrospective exhibit.

To those familiar with Chinese art, Song (1910-92) is a name that carries with it tremendous historical and stylistic significance.

A Chinese artist who went to Japan in the 1930s to study oil painting and water-colour, Song pioneered the introduction and assimilation of those two Western art forms into the mainstream of Chinese art.

A close friend and assistant of master artist and educator Xu Beihong (1895-1953), Song helped Xu to found New China's top art school, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

He was an ardent advocate of merging Western influences with traditional Chinese art and because of this he managed, in the later years of his life, to establish himself as one of the most stylish of Chinese painters.

The exhibit, running from September 26 to October 1 at the China National Art Museum in Beijing, is held in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the veteran artist's birth.

Displaying more than 100 oil paintings, watercolours and Chinese ink paintings by the artist, the exhibition will, as Beijing art critic Zou Yuejin puts it, "help viewers experience Song's artistic road that spanned 70 years." Besides paintings, the exhibit will also feature valuable historic documents and photographs that help recreate the life of a man who witnessed many of the most important events in 20th century Chinese art history.

Complementing the exhibition, a symposium on Song's art and life will also be held at Beijing's International Art Palace on September 28.

Born in 1910 in Weifang of East China's Shandong Province, Song began to study oil painting and watercolours at the University of Japan in Tokyo in 1934. It was in Japan that he created his early representative works like "Refugees" and his artistic talents began to be widely recognized.

When the War of Resistance Against Japan broke out in 1937, Song left Japan for the motherland and co-founded the China National Woodcutters Association, an active organization that played a significant role in encouraging the Chinese people during their battle against the invaders .

From 1940 to 1946, Song taught art at the National Central University and the National Art School in Chongqing, the wartime capital of China. While in Chongqing, he held six influential solo exhibitions to raise funds for the fight against Japanese invaders.

In 1946, he joined Xu Beihong and another artist, Wu Zuoren (1909-89), in establishing the National Beiping Art School, the forerunner to today's Central Academy of Fine Arts. Before the New China was founded in 1949, Song and Xu struggled to maintain the art school in Beijing in the face of pressure from the Kuomintang authorities, who wanted the school to move south.

Around the time he became a professor at the central academy, Song began to blend oil and watercolour techniques with traditional ink painting.

Influences of Western impressionist paintings and the simple, expressive nature of traditional Chinese art co-exist extensively in his most well-known watercolour landscapes and ink paintings of peaches.

According to the artist's daughter, Song Gaoping, this will be the first time Song's unique oil works will take centre stage in any exhibition.

Date: 09/18/2000
Author: YING SHI, China Daily staff
Copyright? by China Daily

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