Chen Danqing: Seeing the Chinese Face in Sculpture

Transcript *This transcript was edited by Vistopia and does not contain the complete talk. I. Seeing the Chinese Face Again China's sculptural tradition is roughly two thousand years old. The West has its own sculpture, and the two traditions encountered each other a little over a century ago. In other words, that was when we suddenly saw Greek and Roman sculpture. The encounter gave us a particular feeling: Chinese art—landscape, meticulous painting, and the literati tradition—was the earliest and the best, but when it came to representing people, especially in sculpture, we were inferior. So we began to learn. After the May Fourth era, Chinese artists began studying in Europe. Xu Beihong was among the first to bring back the Western system of modeling, arguing that drawing was the foundation of all plastic art. In the 1930s, Yan Wenliang purchased more than five hundred European plaster reproductions of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and shipped them to China. He later founded the Suzhou College of Art and, with pioneers such as Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu, and Lin Fengmian, created China's first generation of twentieth-century art academies. Following Xu's principle that drawing underlies all modeling, and that drawing begins with plaster casts, they launched China's twentieth-century New Art movement. It continues to this day. At roughly the same time, a little over a century ago, Western photography entered China. Even today, I think many of us feel that Chinese faces are somehow disadvantaged in photography and film when compared with Western faces. There is a phrase, “outdoor looking.” Under strong outdoor light—or artificial light—the contours of Western bone structure, the sense of form, and even what we take to be beauty seem more pronounced than ours. But look back at ancient Chinese painting—from the Tang, Song, Wei, and Jin—and you discover that Chinese artists had long possessed their own methods. Whether through meticulous painting or sculpture, they represented our comparatively flat faces with complete mastery and maturity. This is a contradiction. In the twentieth century, our aesthetics and our entire approach to form became Westernized. Against that background, the sculptures I saw in Shanxi last year produced an unexpected revelation. In temple sculptures of Ming people, and in somewhat earlier works from the Yuan or Liao, I suddenly saw our own faces. It was a strange discovery because it should have been self-evident. The problem lies precisely in what I have described. After more than a century of large-scale Westernization in form and aesthetics, we need a medium, a reason, to see our own faces again. In the temple sculptures I saw last year—the bodhisattvas, arhats, guardian deities, demons, and ordinary folk—I suddenly felt very strongly that their faces revealed the people to whom I belong. That shared character has been lost in our sculpture today. I paint figures myself. I have a complete set of methods learned from Western modeling, and many techniques for painting a Chinese face. Yet when I saw the faces made by these ancient artists, I realized that I could not create a Chinese face as naturally as they had. Where is the difference? Over the past forty years, enormous sculptures have appeared across the country: the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, Nüwa, the Foolish Old Man, Qin Shihuang, Confucius and Mencius, Laozi and Zhuangzi, Li Bai and Du Fu. At Huaqing Pool, where Yang Guifei is said to have bathed, an almost nude statue of her now stands. One glance tells you that the conception of form in these modern sculptures derives from ancient Greece and Rome: it uses Western bone structures and Western bodies. The sculptures I saw in Shanxi last year offer a striking contrast. II. Finding Our Own Features in Ming Sculptures from Five or Six Centuries Ago I visited three Liao temples in Datong filled with enormous sculptures twice the size of living people. I also saw two Tang temples in Shanxi. When it comes to surviving Tang and Song temples, perhaps no province has preserved more than Shanxi. Foguang Temple is said to have been discovered and identified by Liang Sicheng in the 1930s, and its architectural aesthetics have been extensively discussed. When I entered and saw the principal group of Tang sculptures in the main hall, however, I was not greatly surprised. If you have seen sculpture at Dunhuang, Yungang, and Longmen, the group in Foguang Temple's main hall is not especially outstanding. What astonished me was a vast group of five hundred Ming-dynasty arhats, now fenced off around the hall. The Ming, roughly the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, corresponds to the European Renaissance. I also visited Yunlin Temple, a remote Ming temple in a mountain village, likewise filled with sculpture. The Ming sculptures at Foguang and Yunlin temples suddenly revealed two things. First, as I have said, these five- or six-hundred-year-old sculptures showed me, with tremen…