‘Canton Modern’ for the Here and Now

M+’s upcoming Special Exhibition, Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s–1970s, presents twentieth-century Cantonese art and visual culture in its full complexity as an important chapter in global modernism. The exhibition traces radically new ways of thinking about art and its purpose in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the early twentieth century, and explores how the artistic and cultural paths of the two cities diverged and intersected after 1949.

In this interview, curators Tina Pang and Alan Yeung reflect on the exhibition’s concept and key messages as well as its relevance to M+, Hong Kong, and beyond.

Can you explain the exhibition title, Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s–1970s?

‘Canton’ is the historical name of Guangzhou in English and several European languages. In this exhibition title, however, it refers more broadly to the Cantonese-speaking region centred on Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Between 1757 and 1842, Guangzhou was the Qing dynasty’s only port for foreign trade. It was thus in the paradoxical position of being located on the cultural periphery within China but open to the rest of the world. After Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1842, it gradually took over Guangzhou’s role. From these two port cities, the Cantonese-speaking diaspora spread to Southeast Asia, the Americas, and other places, expanding far beyond the geographical boundaries of Guangdong province. In the early twentieth century, many Cantonese intellectuals, including Sun Yat-sen, studied in Japan and were influenced by the Meiji Restoration. This long exposure to foreign cultures set the stage for Guangdong to become a hotbed for new ideas about art and politics.

The Chinese transliteration of ‘modern’ dates from the late 1920s and captures the period’s imagination of modern life and social progress. The corresponding notion of ‘modernisation’ evokes a national aspiration that has gradually taken hold in China since its defeat in the Opium War in 1842. In terms of art and culture, ‘modernism’ refers to a conscious departure from tradition.

Canton Modern’s timeframe begins roughly with the lease of Hong Kong’s New Territories to the British in 1898 following the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The exhibition spans major historical events, including the Xinhai Revolution, which overturned the Qing dynasty in 1911; the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945); the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949); the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949; the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); and the onset of China’s reform and opening-up in 1978.

In this tumultuous historical context, Cantonese modernism gained political urgency and social purpose. The earliest exhibit is a 1906 issue of Current Affairs Pictorial, a publication produced in Guangzhou and Hong Kong by the revolutionary party Tongmenghui to spread its political agenda. One page in this issue depicts cadets of a Guangzhou military academy reacting angrily as Japanese instructors project lantern slides showing negative Chinese stereotypes. Not only does this scene demonstrate the power of images, it also echoes the purported origin of modern Chinese literature: Lu Xun (1881-1936) abandoned his medical studies to pursue writing after encountering similar lantern slides in Japan around 1905.

What are some distinctive characteristics of Cantonese modern art?

In the history of twentieth-century Chinese art, Guangdong is often overshadowed by Shanghai and Beijing. However, the region’s paradoxical marginality and openness endowed Cantonese modernism with a distinctive tension between conservative and progressive tendencies. For example, Gao Jianfu’s (1879–1951) iconic Flying in the Rain appears at first glance to be a classical landscape painting, but it employs a subtle linear perspective and unexpectedly features a fleet of biplanes. Created in 1932, in the wake of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the painting uses the ambiguity of the ink medium to suggest both the excitement and the horrors of modern technology.

In Hong Kong, Cantonese modern art is often stereotypically identified with a group of ink painters who incorporated live sketching and Western and Japanese styles and techniques. Led by Gao Jianfu, this group later came to be known as the Lingnan School of Painting. In particular, Chao Shao-an (1905–1998), one of the four modern masters of the Lingnan School, enjoyed a tremendously successful creative and teaching career after moving to Hong Kong, and his lush paintings of flowers and birds gained worldwide recognition and renown.

Canton Modern presents a broader and more complex picture of Cantonese modernism. The exhibition juxtaposes works of different styles and media, including cartoons, prints, photography, and pictorials. It encompasses Cantonese artists with national or international careers, as well as artists from elsewhere who moved to Guangdong after 1949. The exhibition begins with a series of landscape sketches by Yip Yan-chuen (1903–1969) that anchor the viewer in a specific place and time. Made between 1942 and 1950, the sketches document Yip’s wartime displacement in Guangxi and Guangdong and his subsequent travels in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. A self-taught artist, Yip here switches freely between painting styles and at times even evokes photographic and cinematic representations of light. Such a hybrid way of perceiving and representing the world is one feature of visual modernity highlighted in the exhibition.

Many of the works featured in Canton Modern will be on public display for the first time. Among these is a set of nude female portraits from 1921 by Tan Yuese (1891–1976), an orphan who became a Buddhist nun in her youth. At the age of 31, Tan returned to secular life as the concubine of a prominent Cantonese statesman. Merging religious symbolism and eroticism, these intriguing paintings are some of the earliest known fully nude portraits from China. They reveal dramatic changes in the social roles and self-conceptions of modern women.

What are the themes of the exhibition?

The exhibition is divided into four sections, each structured around a dynamic tension. ‘Image and Reality’ explores the notion of realism and the boundaries of visual representation of reality. ‘Identity and Gender’ examines the conflicts between the individual and the collective, and between traditional and modern identities. ‘Locality and Nationhood’ considers the mutual entanglements between Guangdong and China as a whole in their artistic expressions. ‘Parallel Worlds’ reflects on the connections and disconnections between Guangzhou and Hong Kong as well as between different social groups within each city after 1949.

The complicated dynamics of realism underpin the entire exhibition. On the one hand, realism refers to the faithful reproduction of sensory experience, perspective, and anatomy, especially in ink paintings that incorporate the influences of Western and Japanese art and of photography. On the other hand, the term carries strong social and ethical implications, as in the direct depiction of war and poverty and the use of art for political purposes. Realism aspires to bridge the gap between image and reality, art and life, even though this is ultimately an impossible goal. One focus of Canton Modern is to trace how Republican-period realism informed and evolved into the state-sanctioned Socialist Realism of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through the post-war careers of Cantonese artists of the Lingnan School and the New Woodcut Movement on the national stage. In ‘Parallel Worlds’, the relationship between image and reality becomes ever more tenuous: realism is deployed paradoxically to create theatrical and even utopian fantasies. In Liang Shixiong’s (born 1933) Harvest at Mount Wuzhi, for example, figures grasp at the golden ears of rice around them, as if to make this idealised vision of bounty tangible to the viewer.

How does Canton Modern relate to contemporary Hong Kong?

Before 1949, Guangzhou and Hong Kong were effectively the same place. People and ideas flowed freely between the two cities, which also formed a tight network of circulation with Shanghai and Macau. During the Chinese Civil War, leftist Cantonese artists such as printmaker Huang Xinbo (1916–1980) and cartoonist Liao Bingxiong (1915–2006) founded the Human Art Club in Hong Kong. They actively published their works in local newspapers, bringing the Republican-period tradition of leftist social critique to the Hong Kong art scene. After 1949, when the borders between Guangzhou and Hong Kong were officially closed, many Guangzhou-based modernists relocated to Hong Kong while leftist artists returned to the mainland to participate in nation-building in the new People’s Republic. Between the 1950s and 1970s, successive waves of Cantonese immigrants arrived in Hong Kong, creating a cultural flow on multiple levels. The legacies of Cantonese modernism played a pivotal role in shaping the city’s cultural identity.

The painter Wong Po-yeh (1901–1968), who lived between Guangzhou and Hong Kong throughout his life, exemplifies the subtle and sometimes ambivalent cultural connection between the two cities in the postwar era. In 1957, Wong created a painting of Sung Wong Toi, a monument to the last emperors of the Southern Song dynasty that, after the Xinhai Revolution, became a rallying point for Guangdong loyalists of the Qing dynasty who fled to Hong Kong. A tangible witness of Hong Kong’s ties to mainland China and its dynastic past, the monument was partially destroyed during the Japanese occupation. In 1956, the Hong Kong government levelled the site to make way for an expansion of Kai Tak Airport. When Wong painted it the following year, China had undergone yet another regime change. His painting was a layered expression of personal memory and nostalgia, loyalist sentiment, and pathos about the cycles of history. Although Wong is today regarded as a traditionalist, he was greatly admired by Lui Shou-kwan (1919–1975), the founder of the New Ink Movement, arguably Hong Kong’s first native artistic movement. In fact, Lui and Wong formed a painting society and exhibited together in 1957.

Canton Modern also explores the fraught sympathies between Hong Kong and the mainland during the Cultural Revolution through the personal stories of artists. Leftist Hong Kong photographer Meng Minsheng (1919–2007) replicated model operas and propaganda imagery in his makeshift home studio by posing objects that he purchased at Chinese goods stores or brought back from Guangzhou. The painters Guan Liang (1900–1986) and Ting Yin Yung (1902–1978) became close friends while studying in Tokyo in the 1920s, but they never saw each other again after Ting relocated to Hong Kong alone in 1949. Living in Shanghai and Hong Kong respectively, Guan and Ting both painted theatrical figures during the Cultural Revolution. Through a shared appreciation for the fine line between theatre and life, they engaged in a dialogue across space and time about the vagaries of history and individual destiny.

What makes this a distinctively M+ exhibition?

In line with M+’s vision, Canton Modern tells a locally rooted story from a global perspective. Whereas past narratives of modern art tended to be linear and monolithic, there is now a greater emphasis on multiplicity and the notion that each region or culture has its own trajectory of modernism. Correspondingly, museums and academic institutions are re-examining the pivotal period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are revising Cold War-era biases, such as the complete dismissal of political propaganda and Socialist Realism. Canton Modern contributes a Hong Kong perspective and voice to these ongoing trends in global art history.

The contemporary world is defined by images. Canton Modern reflects on how Cantonese artists helped bring this world into being through popular media and public exhibitions. Whether it is Kwan Wai-nung’s (1878–1956) advertising posters for Tiger Balm, Sha Fei’s (1912–1950) photographs of Lu Xun taken days before the writer’s death, or the 1975 propaganda print by Lai Shaoqi (1915–2000) and three younger artists, these works were created with the public in mind and with the aim to capture its attention and imagination. Like the images that saturate our real and virtual existences today, they were designed to go viral.