Without the benefits of a gradual and natural evolution, the sudden appearance of Western-style art jolted and challenged the artistic world in China. As Michael Sullivan points out, a “titanic confrontation”[1] between the two traditions –– Chinese and Western –– ensued, and artists thrust into this environment felt its impact and were compelled to react. So began what is regarded as the modernization, or Westernization, of Chinese art, together with the dilemmas and conflicts this modern art discourse held in store for its participants in particular and for the course of Chinese art history in general.[2]

One of the problems the reformist artists faced was that the art culture they were trying to implement was completely borrowed. The very secondary nature of this imported culture imbued it with a sense of displacement and frequently imparted values inapplicable or inappropriate to the indigenous environment.[3] Some subscribed to academic realism, others to more modernist concepts, but most swept aside the legacy of traditional Chinese art. Therefore, the transfer and hoped for assimilation were, at best, imperfect if not completely unsuitable. This became a source of contention for the reformers, of which there were many diverse voices. Examining and exploring Western art was a useful exercise for reevaluating traditional Chinese art and to develop a new pictorial language, but it most certainly was not compelling enough to challenge or dislodge the mainstream trajectory of traditional Chinese art. The frustrations and disenchantment felt by these Western-style artists resulted in an almost unanimous return to traditional Chinese. Indeed, a “dual artist personality”[4] emerged as a unique feature of Chinese art of this period in which many individual efforts at Westernization were distinctive enough to pave the way for new forms of expression, some, albeit. overly contrived and overtly derivative. In this process, a new vocabulary arose ushering in a new genre that had an irrefutable impact on modern Chinese art history. This historical moment with its particular convergence of modern and traditional comes into focus by examining the career of the artist Ding Yanyong, who struggled to modernize his creative vision while recognizing the legacy of the Chinese artist tradition.

Unlike most of the first generation Western-style artists who switched from traditional painting to Western-style painting. Ding Yanyong began his career in the Western medium. In 1920, at the age of eighteen, Ding went to Japan to study art at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Japan, at the time regarded as the “cradle of modern Chinese painting”[5], attracted students from China due to its geographical and cultural proximity. In addition, the effective implementation of Western ideas during the Meiji Restoration gave students the impetus to emulate that model for China. During the first half of the last century, there was a total enrollment of ninety Chinese students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but due to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. Chinese students abandoned Japan for Europe.[6]

At the time Ding studied in Tokyo (1920–5), the European modernist movement was all the rage in Japan. Most of the teachers at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts had studied in Paris and tries to recreate the stimulating environment of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Art students were afforded the opportunity to attend exhibitions of not only these modernist–inspired Japanese artists, but also exhibitions of Western modernist paintings sponsored by government to encourage cultural exchanges with Europe.[7]

After one year of training in basic sketching and drawing techniques. Ding started to work with oils and experimented with the new Fauvist language of bold colors, which he found extremely rewarding and stimulating.[8] During his second year, Ding's successful exploration of color invigorated his art to such a degree that he was ranked first in his class. Two years later (1924), one of his oil paintings, On the Dining Table, was included in the Central art Exhibition, which was a major accomplishment for a young Chinese art student and earned him a notable reputation amongst his teachers and fellow students.[9]

Upon completion of his studies in Tokyo in 1925, Ding returned to China where he accepted a teaching post at Lida College in Shanghai and, together with Cai Yuanpei and Chen Baoyi, founded the China College of Art, marking a lifelong commitment as an educator and teacher of art. He also formed painting groups with other artists returning from Japan such as Chen Baoyi and Guan Liang to exchange and forge new ideas and, together, they organized exhibitions of Western-style Chinese art.[10] Early in his career, however, he discovered the inadequacies of art education in China. He lamented the over-emphasis on the academic style, which he found uninspiring and stifling. The students, though technically proficient, demonstrated an uncertain and tentative artistic identity and therefore produced what Ding considered unenlightened and lackluster art. He developed a suspicion towards the so-called modernist movement and its practitioners in China, believing all to be hypocritical and disingenuous.[11]

Committed to his role as art educator, Ding becomes determined to galvanize art education by formulating ideas on how to develop a new art for China. Increasingly, Ding felt that borrowing the language of Western art was taking Chinese artists nowhere. In learning from the West, he stressed the importance of absorbing the artistic idioms and transforming them into something uniquely one's own, declaring, “We do not want to be doing simply Western art!”[12] This line of thinking was not particularly shared by some of his contemporaries who were either uncompromisingly committed to academic realism or striving for an accurate transfer of Impressionism or Expressionism as practiced in Europe and Japan. There were certainly voices in support of assimilating the two traditions, but few had Ding's total conviction and immersion in the idea that to develop as a modern Chinese artist, turning to one's own past was an absolute necessity.[13] To accomplish this, Ding advanced two methodologies or approaches on how to draw upon the past to construct a future: an application of traditional Chinese painting concepts to Western-style art alongside an attention to ancient and primitive art. These ideas, formed while he was still a young artist, anticipated a more developed synthesis in Ding's mature paintings and, as he attained critical acclaim, served as testimony to his unique vision.

At a time when many of his contemporaries were to integrate aspects of Western pictorial language into their traditional art. Ding took the opposite approach by examining how Chinese traditional methods can influence Western-style painting. In a magazine article published in 1935, he states, “I wish to apply the lines and ink of Chinese traditional painting to my Western-style paintings.”[14] While other artists were incorporating into traditional brush and ink paintings modern subject matters such as buildings and airplanes or choosing Chinese subjects such as Peking opera for their oil paintings. Ding was examining how one might harness the essence of Chinese painting –– the calligraphic line, for example –– to enhance his Western-style paintings.

As early as 1929 and only twenty-seven years old, Ding started to collect paintings by Bada Shanren, Xu Wei, Jin Nong and other early masters, which invited criticism from a few of his contemporaries.[15] How, many felt, could one of the leading proponents of art reform return to the ways of the past? But Ding was convinced that an artist like Bada Shanren was able to describe the essence of painting through simplicity, thereby inducing a modernity surpassing the modernists he had tried to emulate in Japan.[16] In integrating Bada's calligraphic line, for example, into his Western-style paintings, Ding was practicing his own theory of turning to the past to forge a path to a modernized, not necessarily Westernized, future.

Although his second remedy for a new Chinese art –– the study of primitive art –– had already been undertaken by a number of Western artists, Delacroix, Gauguin and Picasso, to name a few, not many of Ding's contemporaries shared his views as early as 1932.[17] Like his Western predecessors, Ding felt art was in danger of becoming too superficial and that too much intellectual thinking was depriving art of its greatest strength –– a simple and direct way of human sentiments. While we know that Primitivism had a profound influence on European modern art, few in China in the first half of the last century turned to their own primitive, prehistoric or ancient art for inspiration in modernizing artist expressions.[18]

At the same time that Ding started to collect paintings by past masters, he also developed an interest in ancient seals and the art of oracle bone engravings. While many twentieth-century Chinese artists, such as Wu Changshuo, revisited the art of zhuanshu (seal script), their applications were basically modern representations of ancient scripts, not departing too far from the original forms of seal carving and shuimo calligraphy. Ding, on the other hand, drew upon seal script as inspiration for his Western-style oil paintings, conjuring a historical nuance and, at the same time, inventing a new form of Chinese modernism. This unorthodox approach, revolutionary during Ding's time, would prove to be visionary as prominent younger artists, such as Zao Wouki and George Chann and later Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, would expand on this concept to high critical acclaim.

As a member of Kuomingtang Party, Ding fled to Hong Kong from China after the Communist takeover in 1949 and under the circumstances, could not carry much more than his personal belongings. Little, therefore, is known of his work prior to 1949. Furthermore, due to his prolific output of shuimo paintings during this period. Ding was known primarily for these and not for his oil paintings. Only recently have collectors, galleries and auction houses started to pay attention to his oil paintings, which were mostly kept by his family and students. To date there has no study made of Ding's oil paintings and, aside from auction catalogues, the only other known published illustrations are found in the catalogue accompanying Ding's retrospective exhibition in which there are, still, only seventeen.[19]

Due to the paucity of oil paintings by Ding (there are less than 150 known paintings), this current exhibition, arranges according to subject matter (still lifes, portrait/nudes, landscape, historical/primitive and archaistic symbolic), will also take into account chronological developments within each genre. It is hoped that in this framework, certain iconographic and stylistic relationships will be revealed to better understand the artist's creative impulses and to demonstrate parallel developments and interplay with his shuimo paintings and seal carving –– a fascinating and compelling dynamic of Ding's life and art.

The earliest extant painting by Ding is a self-portrait (no. A1) completed during his final year (1925) at the Tokyo School of Fine Art and was a requirement for graduation. Fortunately, these self-portraits, considered part of the students' academic record, were kept in the archives of the school allowing us to have a glimpse at many of the Chinese students' earliest forays into oil painting, which given the chaos at home, would not otherwise be possible.[20]

The remaining 93 paintings[21] in this exhibition are from his post-1949 period with only ten from the 1950s and the rest executed between 1963 and 1977. During the 1950s, the artist usually signed his paintings Y. Ting[22] in an English cursive script and dated them with the binary system promoted by the Kuomintang or Nationalist, government, which uses 1911, the year of the founding of the Republic, as the base year. Therefore, when Ding dates a painting 44, he is referring to the 44th year of the Republic, or 1955. After 1956 there is a lull of some six years with only five known oil paintings, and when he resumes in the early 1960s, his paintings are dated with the internationally understood Western dating system and signed in capital letters.

The reduction in his oil painting activities may be attributed to a renewed interest in exploring shuimo painting. His friend, Hwang Meng-tien, recalls that it was not until the 1950s that Ding started painting with shuimo.[23] His admiration for Bada Shanren and other traditional masters would inevitably entice him to try the traditional medium. He once confided to a friend, “The oil medium was after all foreign to me. Besides, who would take notice of a Chinese artist doing Western art? I felt much more comfortable with Chinese art. Moreover I felt that Western art had reached a cul de sac. At first, it was too realistic. It looked too much like the things it depicted. Now it has gone too far the other way. It is too superficial. It has no depth. Chinese art is superior in the sense that its artistic expressions are limitless –– because it is not tried to any exterior form.”[24] As critical acclaim for his shuimo paintings grew, he disclosed, “Now fewer and fewer people know that I have been an oil painter, with the exception of art-lovers who were my contemporaries.”[25]

Since his fundamental conceptual and technical framework for painting was informed only by what was available in Japan, never having gone to Europe to study. Ding may have found it difficult to validate himself as a Western-style artist. The statement to his friends may simply have been provoked by this insecurity, but while he developed a great interest in traditional Chinese painting, he still could not resist working in oil, and the majority of Ding's extant oil paintings were done in the years between 1963 and 1971, the same period his shuimo paintings attained a high degree of maturity, demonstrating how he could move between the two system in a dynamic and self-invigorating way.

Still Life Paintings

Fish in a Basket (no. A2), dated 1954, one of Ding's earliest extant paintings, illustrates why he was referred to as the “Chinese Matisse”. The Fauves, Matisse in particular, held a special appeal to many Chinese artists who borrowed their language of simple but strong lines executed in a bold palette, as evidenced in this painting. Ding, however, resented any implications that Matisse had influenced his art.[26] He noted that, rather, it was actually Matisse who aimed to integrate Orientalism into his art, which is precisely what Ding was striving for in his Western-style paintings, making it an abstract concept to determine which cultural context was being influenced. “Influence” it has been noted, “is a curse of art criticism primarily because of the wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient.”[27] Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Ding, who admired Matisse immensely, engaged in a dialogue with him and that his “words” gave new meaning to Ding's art.

In Flowers in a Vase (no. A3), dated 1955, Ding introduces a compositional innovation –– two vertical bands, each decorate with archaistic symbols, flank the central subject area –– inspired perhaps by Han-dynasty bricks that were molded with a central decorative panel flanked on either side with formal borders. Ding will reuse this compositional device in his later paintings, thereby creating a stylistic signature based on his inventive interpretation of an ancient art form.

Ding reportedly developed an interest in Taiwan's aboriginal culture,[28] whose forms and motifs he quoted in several still lifes and one figurative painting (nos. A4 to A10). Given, however, the anonymous and generic design of the objects he depicts –– urns and statues –– he could actually be describing a number of primitive cultures, not necessarily any specific one. Ding distinguished these paintings with uncharacteristic colors such as earth tones in muted values, realizing perhaps that his distinctive Fauvist palette was inappropriate in conveying the indigenous culture. In Still Life with Wood Carving (no. A6), the yellow ground is over painted with a crimson patch above a black band on which the artist articulates the image by scratching or incising lines thereby revealing the bottom yellow layer. This carved effect reflects the directness and simplicity of primitive art that Ding admired and can be related to his seal carving which preoccupied the artist at this time.

A Bird, a Frog and a Goldfish (no. A11), dated 1965, and Two Fish (no. A12), dated 1968, attest to Ding's exploration of traditional Chinese painting during the preceding years. The artist covers the surface with a textured monochromatic ground, in both cases yellow, over which he paints the subject of the brush strokes and aside from the color and texture of the oil medium which permits the artist to express his Fauvist proclivities, these could just as well be shuimo paintings. In place of the flattened table typical of many modernist still lifes, Ding encloses his objects in a rectangle resembling a canvas on an easel, creating the effect of a painting within a painting and serve the same compositional purpose as a table. The perched bird, also a compositional feature favored by Bada, resembles the archaic bronze inscription for bird.[29] These two paintings are instructive example of his synthesis of the two artistic traditions of Bada Shanren and Matisse.

The next series of still life paintings (nos. A13 to A40), all from period 1968 to 1971, continue his development towards synthesis, characterized by strong colors and linear spontaneity. Increasingly, Ding exploits the calligraphic line, linking these paintings with his shuimo works of the same period. Unlike Fish in A Basket which was more straightforwardly Western. Chinese painting elements, as well as Chinese subject matter (Vase with Zhongkui, no. A33 and Tang Horse, no. A34), are introduced in these later works.

Archaic Script-Inspired Paintings

Hong Hu I (no. A41) and Ancient Meditation (no. A42), both dated 1955, are two of the earliest examples of Ding’s intrigue with epigraphy. Following the custom of traditional Chinese artists, Ding had several pen names, two of which were ding hong and ding hu, meaning ‘wild goose’ and ‘tiger’, respectively. He chose the former to signify his involuntary and solitary (his family remained China) retreat to Hong Kong to escape the Communist regime, not unlike a wild goose migrating south,[30] and the latter because he was born in the year of the tiger. The ideograms on these paintings are taken from Shang dynasty bronze inscriptions representing hu and hong.[31] The pagoda-like symbol at the lower right of Hong Hu I is derived from the oracle-bone script for the character yong, Ding’s given name, and serves, as it does in several other oil and shuimo paintings, as his signature. When Ding took up seal carving later in life, he used these symbols developed in his oil painting to make seals.[32]

When Ding resumed his oil painting in the 1960s, he revisited archaic scripts once again mining this genre for imagery and inspiration. Tiger (no. A45) dated 1963, is an evocation of ancient pictorial iconography with its geometric and linear grid and schematic of a tiger which is the artist’s animal zodiac sign. Ding was so fond of this image that he recreated the head in a painting a year later, Tiger Head (no. A46) and carved a seal with the same image which he used on many of his shuimo paintings. The surface of Tiger Head is heavily textured with a thick layer of gesso replicating stone, much like Chinese stone and seal carvings, and is a technique the artist used frequently on his oil paintings to create an archaistic effect. Bone Script I (no. A43) and Bone Script II (no. A44), both dated 1963, reveal the creativity called forth by Ding’s interest in epigraphy, and while the inferences to oracle-bone, bronze and seal script are clearly visible, he tended to take some liberty with their representation.

Ding’s playful reinterpretation, creative reinvention and modernistic rendition of ancient script-inspired symbols are evident in the following five paintings of the next year. Hu (no. A47) bears what might be the character for gu (ancient) on the left and yue (moon) on the right, together forming the character hu, which has various meanings, such as ‘foolish’, as in hu shuo, or to signify something foreign, as in hu ren. It also has a less common meaning signifying a sacrificial vessel used in ancient rituals, an interpretation that may be more in line with the spirit of using oracle-bone script for a painting.[33] A second painting, Guan (no. A49) dated the same year, bears a similar triangular flag symbol, but mirrored to represent a men (door) radical enclosing si (silk) to form the character guan (a frontier pass or gate).[34] Bone Script Diversion (no. A48) features a central dong (east), the four compartments of which contain the oracle-bone script characters for, counter-clockwise from the upper left, cao (grass), si (silk), hu (see above), and ge (spear). This painting is signed, in addition to his usual English signature, which an inverted triangle, the oracle-bone script for ding. Composition I (no. A50), while clearly a pictorial representation of fish, is so stylized as to make a more precise reading difficult.

The script on the fifth painting, Xiang (no. A51) could be interpreted in a number of ways, but taking into consideration what is painted on the reverse, Woman in Kimono (no. A82) of the same year, to read the symbol as xiang (mutuality, reciprocity) makes sense. This portrait painting shows a woman in profile wearing a kimono and holding a fan. According to an auction catalogue entry, Ding confided that the women depicted was his Japanese girlfriend whom he met while a student in Tokyo.[35] Dated 25/12, 1964, he is most likely reminiscing their relationship, or mutual affection, hence xiang, on a Christmas day some forty years later. While both sides are signed with the artist’s English signature, the script side has the triangular ding signature beneath the xiang, making the composite image resemble an eye with a teardrop –– appropriate for the subject of this painting.

A note should be made of Ding’s propensity for double-sided paintings in this exhibition, 23 are double-sided. According to Mok E-den, Ding’s pupil, Ding frequently over painted panels or use the reverse side due to his frugality and a lack of affordable materials.[36] While this is undoubtedly the case, it is worth nothing that double-sided painting also recalls double-carved seals and the practice of side carving (biankuan) on seals, both methods of which were explored by Ding, as well as the tradition of fan paintings on which both sides of the fan are painted. Aside from Women in Kimono and Xiang, there appears to be no direct correlation between the verso and recto of Ding’s paintings.

The following year, Ding created one of his most intriguing paintings, Composition II (no. A52), which resembles an ancient bronze vessel and suggests a possible variation of an oracle-bone script. Looking at another painting of this year, One-Stroke Bird (fig. 1, p. 46), painted with Ding’s yibi, or one-stroke style of painting, one can conjecture that perhaps Ding was expanding upon this technique for his archaistic symbols, abbreviating them to such a degree as to render deciphering difficult. Ding’s curvilinear fluidity lent itself easily to yibi style of painting prompting his comment that “I only paint in the yibi style: that is, not aiming at verisimilitude but following the inclination of my will in depicting objects. This is not to say I do not try to capture the essence of their physical forms but I give them lives of their own.”[37] It is likely that Ding was inspired in part by the one=line drawings developed by Pablo Picasso who similarly declared. “Drawing is no kidding. It is something very grave and very mysterious that a simple line could represent a living being. Not only his image, but moreover, what he really is.”[38] Although, as noted previously, he thoroughly explored one-line painting in shuimo, One-Stroke Bird is the only example of this technique in oil.[39] Modernistic representations are created in Face (no. A54) and Frog (no. A55) by combining the spirit of yibi and elements of primitive art.

Ding’s interest in archaistic symbols continued to find expression in six paintings of 1968. Ding Hu and Hong Hu III (nos. A56 and A57) each feature an unrecognizable symbol combined with the script for ding in one and niao (bird) or, possibly, a simplified hong (wild goose) in the other. Given these compositions the mysterious symbol may very well be some rendition of hu (tiger) keeping in mind that ding hu was one of his pen names. Moreover, having juxtaposed hong and hu in the earlier paintings (see nos. A41 and A53), Ding could be repeating that play of imagery but with a new spin. The remaining four paintings deal with the universal symbolism of the simple stick figure, illustrating the appeal primitive art held for Ding. Showing them in an enclosed space in Men in House (no. A58) and Men Under Heaven (no. A61) may signify an expression of unity and a spiritual embrace of mankind. In addition, the two paintings featuring three figures together conjure the pictorial script for the character zhong, meaning the masses, reinforcing this notion.

Pictorial seal iconography continues to intrigue Ding can be seen in Hong Hu IV (no. A63), Owl (no. A64), dated 1968, Niu Jun (fig. 2, p. 46) and Purple Owl and Bird (no. A65), both dated 1969. Niu jun, one of Ding’s pen names, was chosen as s tribute to Niu Shihui (17th century), an artist Ding held in high regard not only for his artistic skills, but also because he was, like his friend Bada Shanren, very patriotic.[40] As a member of the Ming Imperial House, Niu was defiant of the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty and evidently Ding admired his recalcitrance. In 1979, a year after Ding’s death, his students formed The Niu Jun Painting Society to honor their teacher. Ding used the ideogram for niu jun for several of his seals, but this is the only known oil painting for the subject.

Hu (no. A66), one of Ding’s largest oil on canvas paintings, demonstrates the artist’s boldness in simplicity despite the large size. The uneven and layered texture suggest a seal or stone carving and the single line delineating eyes and nose gives it a surreal, yet life-like effort. The hollow gaze does indeed stare at the viewer with an almost piercing intensity.

Landscape Paintings

The earliest landscape painting in this exhibition, Guilin (no. A67), dated 1955, painted in a Post-Impressionist style popular with many artists who had studied in Japan, is one of the two extant examples that demonstrate the artist’s rare use of perspective with the mountainous coastline receding to the horizon, and of light, as seen in the sky and reflected in the sea. The other, Harbor (no. A68), dated 1956, continue to reveal a concern with light and reflection in its depiction of a harbor scene, most probably the artist’s recently adopted home, Hong Kong. In Seaside (no. A69), dated nine years later, the artist shows his experimentation with reduction and abstraction and the introduction of Chinese painting elements, such as the two figures in the foreground, continued in his modernist rendition of the traditional dragon boat race[41] in Dragon Boats (no. A70), dated the same year.

In Landscape (no. A71) and Blue Landscape (no. A73), both painted in the 1960s,[42] and Wondrous Lake (no. A75), dated 1969, Ding favors a Fauvist palette in which each feature of the landscape –– mountains, trees, figures, boat and pagoda –– is taken from actual oracle-bone script, but relocated in a modernistic composition with clean and sparse lines. After the six-years hiatus Ding returned to oil painting not only engaging archaic script-inspired subjects but also injecting poetic images borrowed from traditional Chinese landscape painting, of which Seaside (no. A69) dated 1965, By the Lake (no. A72) dated 1967, Riverscape (no. A74) dated 1968, Dragon Boats (no. A76) dated 1971, Boating in A River (no. A77) undated and Moonlit Serenade (no. A79) dated 1972 qualify as good examples. These landscape paintings that have close or, in the case of Moonlit Serenade, identical parallels with his shuimo paintings soundly confirm Ding’s ability to create a dynamic fusion of his dual –– Eastern and Western –– orientations, culminating in Boating in the Lake (no. A78), dated 1971, in which Ding’s visual vocabulary –– ancient script, calligraphic line. Strong colors, compositional simplicity –– though present, is subtlely restrained, thereby attaining a highly developed and unique eclecticism.

Portrait Paintings and Nudes

For the National Painting Exhibition in Shanghai in 1929, Ding exhibited a portrait of a young woman reading (figs. 3, p. 47), pointing to Ding’s early academic training and sensitivity to verisimilitude. The earliest extant portrait painting, Woman Reading (no. A80) although undated, points to a similar figurative representation. The background of repeated Buddha figures suggests the artist’s burgeoning concern with introducing native elements in his oil paintings. Woman in Kimono (no. A82), discussed earlier, while still showing an attention to likeness, begins to display the artist’s exploration of texture, color and patterning.

Beginning in 1965, Ding executed a number of portrait paintings. He enjoyed painting his students, asking them to sit for him during lessons.[43] Unlike his earlier tendency towards realist portrayals, his portraits of this later period are stylized to the point of being close to caricatures and like his one-line paintings, Ding strives to unveil the essence of his subjects, toying with their likeness with diminished regard for verisimilitude. Fauvist influence is apparent in the economy of form and bold, unconventional colors. The contrasts between the mottled and vibrant background, characterized by sweeping brush strokes, and the figures with their vivid features are so strong that, like Matisse, Ding needed dark contours to subdue them. As with all of Ding’s art, whether oils or shuimo, he held a certain disregard or indifference for correct drawing, capturing, instead, the spirit or essence of the subjects.

For his nudes, of which only six are known (nos. A81, A86, A87, A88, A101 and fig.4, p. 48). Ding makes no attempt at criticism or sensuality. They feature rather blank expressions not engaging with the viewer, suggesting, perhaps, the artist’s unease or awkwardness with this genre. Two Nudes (no. A101) dated jiayin (or 1974 according to the Chinese cyclical dating system) shows one nude with fair skin and the other, a rather androgynous figure, with darker complexion, as if symbolizing the artist’s dual artistic persona. The artist reinforces this dichotomy by assigning a Chinese signature, inscription and dating to a genre of painting –– nudes –– that is completely Western.

Chinese Subject Paintings

As if to demonstrate how the interchangeability of medium was driven by his artistic sentiments, Ding produced works in oil that would normally be expected to be shuimo paintings. Aside from Farewell My Concubine, Opera Figures I and II, A Dagger Behind the Smile and Zhong Kui Marrying Off His Sister (nos. A103 to A107) inspired by famous operas, the other four paintings (nos. A108 to A111) are of the bird and flower genre typical of Chinese painting, each with Chinese inscriptions (two with personal dedications, indicating they were gifts), signed in the same manner as his shuimo paintings and, interestingly, with the artist’s seal painted in red, simulating the seals on a traditional Chinese painting. To complete the effect, Ding painted the backgrounds white, like rice paper, in contrast to the colored and patterned backgrounds of his other oil paintings. In addition, he thinned the oil to better accentuate the brush strokes.

Ding painted two oil paintings with Buddhist subjects:[44] one a bronze statue (suggested by the footed base) of a Buddha figure rendered in a simplified and abstract form (no. A114) and the other, an unusually large painting of a standing Buddha (no. A112). A photograph of Ding with this monumental painting reproduced in a pictorial brochure for an exhibition in Japan attests to the artist’s fondness for it.[45] The standing Buddha’s serene expression with downcast eyes is contrasted by an uncharacteristic striped robe decorated with oracle=bone script. The cross-legged pose and hand gesture in Sitting (no. A115), dated 1963, suggest a figure in meditation.

Fantasy (no. A116), dated 1955, Transformation (no. A117) and Monopoly (no. A118), both dated 1956, with their rather eccentric subjects resist easy categorization. In Monopoly a man, sitting erect and wearing what appears to be a crown, holds four houses, one on top of the other. Each house contains random symbols –– a boat, a bridge, a bird and a man. It is difficult to say what the artist had in mind, but one is tempted to surmise that with the Communist takeover of the mainland seven years earlier. Ding is conveying a sense of entrapment and helplessness in the encasement (house) of symbols of escape (boat, bridge, bird), all ruled by a monolithic figure.

From this brief survey of the oil paintings in this exhibition, it is evident that while Ding was concerned with eclecticism from the start, as he matured, and particularly after the hiatus in his oil painting activities between the mid-1950s to early 1960s, he increasingly strove towards simplicity and towards depicting the essence of things. Even though he continued to explore the oil medium, he was doing so with a deeper commitment to the spirit of Chinese painting, applying its principles or ideas to his oil paintings. This elevated and sophisticated form of eclecticism tempts one to explain his works, oil paintings in particular, with references to outside influences. Matisse once said that he did not resist influence and, in fact, regarded it necessary to the creative process.[46] As discussed earlier, the question of influence is not nearly as interesting as that of dialogue. Unfortunately, however, not many first generation Western-style artists in China had opportunities for a dialogue with either the artists they emulated or their followers, or even very much amongst themselves, all coming from an art historical tabula rasa and not very conversant in this new language. Instead, they had little recourse but to create their own imaginary dialogue and to formulate their own artistic language. Ding, as we have seen, chose to converse with his past, but those conversations were shaped by his own persona and idiosyncrasies: He conversed with Bada, but didn’t share his melancholy: with Matisse, but didn’t assume his eroticism; with the art of jiaguwen and zhuanshu, but reinterpreted them playfully, making them at times abstract and undecipherable, and at times intermingled with aspects of primitive art. Ding created a lively scenario as he wove continuously between his conversations, invigorating them with his interplay between the oil medium, shuimo, and seal carving and their parallel, interchangeable and interconnected developments. Through this dialogue with the past and, finally, his self-dialogue, Ding invented a unique pictorial language that looks to the past to point to an enlivened present and, as this exhibition proves, an everlasting future.

1. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 26.
2. Concurrent with the development of Western-Style painting in China was the modernization of traditional brush and ink painting. This paper focuses primarily on the former.
3. John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 14–17.
4. Mayching Kao, “The Quest for New Art” in Mayching Kao ed., Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988), 131.
5. Liu Xiaolu, “The History behind the Portraits, Youth in the Archive: Self-portraits by Chinese Students in the Collection of the National University of Finbe Arts and Music (1905–1949)” in Meishu yanjiu, August 1997, no. 87, 37.
6. Ibid., 39.
7. J. Thomas Rimer, “Tokyo in Paris / Paris in Tokyo” in Shuji Takashina, J. Thomas Rimer with Gerald D. Bolas, Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting (The Japan Foundation, Tokyo and Washington University in St. Louis, 1987), 43 ff.
8. Ding Yanyong, “A Personal Account” in Meishu Xunkan vol. 1 no. 7, November 1932, 7.
9. Ibid., 8. Prof. Kao indicates, however, that it was actually in his fourth year that he ranked first.
10. Mayching Kao, “Biography of Ting Yen-yung” in K.W. Chen ed., Professor Ting Yen Yung Works (Hong Kong: Ting Yen Yung Art Club, 1986),154–155.
11. Ding, “A Personal Account”, 9–10.
12. Li Luoxia, “Interview with Ding Yanyong, 24 July 1976, Hong Kong” in Dada Yuekan, September 1976, no. 123, 23–24.
13. Ding Yanyong, “Bada Shanren and Modern Art” in Xinya Shenghuo shuangzhoukan, June 1961, 813.
14. Ding, “Gao Jianfu: Unifying Chinese and Western Art” in Yifeng, vol. 7, July 1935, 99.
15. Fang Yi-yuan, “Ding Yanyong’s Art of Painting”, in Mok E-den ed., The Painting Album of Ting Yin Yung (Hong Kong: E-den Studio, 1998).
16. Ding, “Bada Shanren and Modern Art”, 813–4.
17. Ding, “A Personal Account”, 10.
18. The Concept of fugu, “return to the archaic”, upheld as a Confucian ideal, has dominated the development of traditional Chinese painting. Ding was one of the few first-generation Western-style artists who applied this ideal to oil paintings. For a discussion on the notions of “archaic” and “primitive” in Chinese art, see Wen C. Fong, “Archaism as a ‘Primitive’ Style” in ChristianMurck ed., Artists and Traditions: Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 89–109.
19. A Retrospective Exhibition of the Works of Ting Yen-yung (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1979).
20. Liu Xiaolu, 38.
21. Of the 129 works in this exhibition, 2 are watercolors, 11 are pencil sketches and 23 are double-sided paintings.
22. The artist’s English signature adheres to the Wade-Giles Romanization system for his name. or Ting Yen-Yung. Following current practice, however, this writer has used the hanyu pinyin system.
23. Huang Meng-tien, “Of Oil Paintings and Water-ink Painting – In Memory of Ting Yen-yung” in A Retrospective Exhibition of the Works of Ting Yen-yung (Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1979). However, other sources cite 1929 as the year Ding began painting in shuimo (see Kao, p. 154 and Fang) but as there are no extant paintings prior to the 1950s, it is difficult to validate the exact date.
24. T.C. Lai, Three Contemporary Chinese Painters: Chang Da-chien, Ting Yin-yung, Ch’eng Shih-fa (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1975), 49.
25. Huang Meng-tien.
26. Xue Yongyi, “Ding Yanyong’s innocence” in Xinbao caijing yuekan, October 1978, vol. 2 no. 7, 81.
27. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 58.
28. Interview with Ms Ding Lizhen, the artist’s daughter, Hong Kong, 11 June 1998. Ms Ding stated that her father expressed an interest in the aboriginal cultures of Taiwan, but it is not known if Ding visited Taiwan prior to his inaugural exhibition there in 1972.
29. Li Congming, Art of Oracle-bone Script Calligraphy (Taipei: Chinese Cultural University, 1997), 13 and 61.
30. Kao, 155.
31. This writer is grateful to Prof. Bai Qianshen of Boston University and Mr Crix Wu of Quanta Gallery for their expertise in deciphering these paintings inspired by ancient scripts.
32. See A Retrospective Exhibition of the Works of Ting Yen-yung catalogue and K.W. Chen ed., Professor Ting Yen Yung Works (Hong Kong: Ting Yen Yung Art Club, 1986), jacket cover.
33. Prof. Kao proposes this repeated use of hu may be Ding’s way of remembering his second wife Hu Saibi.
34. Prof. Kao suggests that this painting may be in remembrance of Guan Zilan, one of Ding’s students at the Shenzhou School who later became a renowned woman artist.
35. Huachen Auctions, Chinese Oil Paintings and Sculptures, Beijing, 3 November 2002, lot 12. Also, according to Prof. Kao, Ding’s younger sister mentioned in an interview that Ding had a Japanese girl friend whom he wished to marry, but his father forbid it.
36. Interview with Mok E-den, Hong Kong, 12 June 1998.
37. Lai, 52.
38. Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso’s One-Liners (New York: Artisan, 1997), 8.
39. For very similar one-line drawings of birds by Picasso, see Galassi, 49.
40. Prof. Bai has pointed out the recent scholarship indicating Bada Shanren and Niu Shihui were neither brothers nor even friends. One must assume, however, that Ding, following the practice of his time, accepted the fact that they were either related or intimate, hence the symbolic references to Niu not merely for what Ding felt he represented but also because of his connection to Bada.
41. During the Dragon Boat Festival celebrated each year on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar year, dragon boat races are held to honor Chu Yuan, a scholar-statesmen of the Warring States period, who killed himself by jumping in a river to protest the inequities dealt him during his service to the King of Chu. In respect of his honor and honesty, the people in the area rushed in vain to their boats to rescue him This unsuccessful rescue attempt is commemorated each year in dragon boat races.
42. Even though both these paintings are undated, since the other side of one is dated 1966, the other 1969, and since stylistically they fall in line with this period, a 1960s dating designation is deemed appropriate.
43. Fang.
44. Ding signed some of his shuimo paintings with the term dizi (brother), signifying he was a follower of Buddhism.
45. Ding Yanyong shishu huazhuan keji (Nippon Shun Jyu Shodoin Hatsuko, 1976), plate 1.
46. Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 18.