Crossing the Boundary between Tradition and Abstraction: The Display of Lui Shuo Kwan’s Chinese Paintings in 1960s Britain

The study of modern Chinese painting had remained unexplored in Europe until the early 1930s. According to Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings of the British Museum, European collectors and connoisseurs were more interested in the rare beauty and fastidious style of early Chinese art, but not the art of modern China. In the early 1930s, Liu Haisu (1896–1994), Director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai, was instrumental in introducing the aesthetic beauty and innovative styles of modern ink painting to Western audiences. In 1934, he toured a successful exhibition of modern Chinese painting in Berlin, and subsequently toured it in over ten European countries, including London in 1935. While the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum enthusiastically enriched their collections of Chinese paintings in the second half of the twentieth century, other provincial museums in Britain also introduced the new subject to audiences through exhibitions.

This paper examines the roles of collector, art dealer, curator and scholar in promoting an appreciation and study of modern Chinese painting in 1960s Britain. It will lay emphasis on the 1967 exhibition of modern Chinese painting at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, in which Douglas Hall, Geoffrey Baker, Michael Sullivan and others contributed to the acquisition, display and interpretation of more than 50 exhibits by over 25 Chinese artists based in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. Special attention will be given to prominent artists, such as Lui Shou-kwan (1919–1975) and Fang Zhaoling (1914–2006), in order to reveal their reputation and participation in art exhibitions in Britain.