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Transformational Traditionalist
| Article
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20156 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
752 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
Hailed as the greatest Chinese artist of this century, Chang Daichien (1899-1983) spun a highly successful career as a painter in a millennium of styles, and was also a key innovator in modern Chinese art.
In Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang-Dai-chien, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., has assembled the largest retrospective on this remarkable artists since his death. During his prodigious and lengthy career he produced some thirty thousand works, of which a hundred are shown here to represent the breadth of his oeuvre. As the handsome catalog by Sackler curators Shen Fu and Jan Stuart says, "Thinking himself to be a traditionalist, Chang was able to reinvent the past, bringing his fresh perceptions to painting styles."
Cheng was born in Sichuan Province. His first teachers were his mother, sister, and older brother, all accomplished painters. At the urging of his parents, he spent two years in Japan studying the manufacture of textiles, but at twenty, he decided to become a painter.
Like other Chinese art students, he learned by copying the works of his teachers and of ancient masters. (In the exhibition, Chang's copy of Clear Morning over Lakes and Mountains will hang next to the tenth-century original by Liu Daoshi.) But Chang also produced outright forgeries, putting his textile knowledge to use in creating the look of aged silk. These forgeries have ended up in museums from China to Europe, and he was later smug about pointing them out to duped connoisseurs and curators. With money from these efforts, he supported his extensive family, his students and his studio, purchased his own collection of masterworks from the past, and, in the 1950s, paid for his relocation to the West.
Throughout his life, Chang oscillated between secular and religious periods. In his worldly mode, he was a bon vivant and aesthete, cooking gourmet banquets, traveling widely, living in mansions he designed, and supporting a bevy of students and their families. He also revived--notoriously--the custom of polygamy, having four wives and sixteen children. In his spiritual mode, he would seek renunciation and otherworldly calm while residing in Buddhist or Daoist temples and monasteries. His intense live of both the profane and the sacred informs all of his life and art.
Early on, Chang recognized that "only if you are famous will your paintings be treasured." In his mid-twenties he grew a beard to look older and affected the distinguished
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