ART REVIEW : Chinese Artists’ Works Fall Short

A few years ago, a friend came back from a trip to the People’s Republic of China with a present--a hand-embroidered blouse. In polyester. Cotton, he said, was no longer fashionable and very hard to find.

So much for the benefits of Western influence, which has also infiltrated the fine arts with dubious results. The country that gave the world one of the greatest, most highly refined art traditions of all time is now producing artists who want to be the next Andrew Wyeth.

“Contemporary Realist Paintings From the People’s Republic of China,” at the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana through Jan. 31, presents the work of six artists in their 30s and 40s who specialize in Western-style scenes of their homeland.

Whatever real-life information these paintings contain is filtered through a curious mixture of 19th-Century Western art cliches (the lone figure struggling against the elements or looking off into the distance, the gaunt victim of oppression, the romantic light of daybreak) and Chinese art cliches (the sweet young woman who embodies the virtue of purity).

If these six artists are representative of the status of contemporary art in China, things are as confused over there as they are over here, but in a vastly different way.

These are young people who were attracted at an early age to the mysteries of oil painting (traditional Chinese painting is done with brush and ink), and who were keen to be brought into contact with any photographs or prints of Western art their professors could show them.

Banished to the countryside for years of heavy labor during the Cultural Revolution, they continued to paint when possible (portraits of Mao were always in demand) and stored up images of rural life.

After Mao’s experiment ended, these artists rose to positions of prominence within academic hierarchies that had embraced the Socialist Realism of the Soviets years earlier. A few of the artists immigrated to the United States, where they discovered a market for quaint views of Chinese peasants.

But any notion of extending the realist tradition in insightful and personal ways seems alien to this group.

Like the Chinese scholar-artists of eras past, patiently absorbing the teachings of their masters, the six young artists in the exhibit seem to have approached Western art, cliches and all, with an unquestioning reverence.

Traditional Chinese art is full of rules and regulations. There are even guidelines for the number of objects of the same kind that may be depicted in one painting and whether this number should be even or odd. An individual artist is obliged to choose his theme from a menu of certain stock symbolic subjects (scholars walking in the mountains, fruits and flowers, birds, rocks).

The great Chinese artists of the past developed subtly individual brush styles and amused themselves by quoting the styles of other contemporary and long-dead masters.

In Western tradition, however, trying painstakingly to master an already existing style is not valued as a special accomplishment. (Sophisticated viewers take it for granted that an artist working in a realist style can paint anatomically correct figures and render textures convincingly.)

Stylistic originality, a fresh point of view and an authenticity of feeling and experience are the true measurements of excellence in Western art. A viewer would expect canvases, reflecting memories of life in bitter and desperate times, to yield gripping and unforgettable images.

That’s surely what Li Quan Wu intended in his three-part piece, “The Tragic Years,” with images of a terrified nude girl, her arms crossed over her breasts (“Violated”); a haggard, nude-to-the-waist older woman (“Plundered”), and a young woman in army uniform, rifle at the ready (“Unshackled”).

But despite the brooding landscape backgrounds, these figures have a kitschy air about them. We’ve seen these folks before in poster shops, and we don’t necessarily believe in them any more ardently this time around.

Wang Yidong is an oddly eclectic artist. His approach ranges from homey simplicity (a painting of a girl who parked her bicycle in a wood, leaning against a tree and looking into the distance) to a schematic, linear portrait of a woman (reminiscent of an Early American primitive) with eyepoppingly detailed flowered embroidery on her dress.

Al Xuan, on the other hand, has a distinctive style boasting a Wyethlike faithfulness to texture and a relish for the moody effects of gray. His dwarfish Tibetan figures bundled up in heavy coats often turn their backs to the viewer, although he’s also capable of turning out a winsome portrait, like that of the young girl with big eyes, rough red cheeks and a shock of black hair.

But despite his technical accomplishments, Xuan so far lacks the keenly developed personal vision we expect of serious artists.

The other artists don’t even come close to this level. Jin Gao, whose grasp of such academic subjects as the musculature of a horse seems shaky, works in the drearily rigid style of a hack illustrator.

Zhang Hong Nian is the sort of artist who will shamelessly milk all available bathos out of “Daybreak,” in which a peasant sleeps on a cute little horse as the rosy glow of dawn blushes in the sky. And Chen Dan Qing seems to specialize in stagy, heavy-handed compositions in which fur coats seem to be made out of the same stuff as paving stones.

Aside from curiosity value and the sanitized travelogue aspect of the show, there’s precious little to savor in this exhibition, the second show in the Modern Museum’s brief history.

Of the 32 paintings on view, all but two were lent by Grand Central Art Galleries and Hefner Galleries, both in New York. This is contrary to normal art museum practice, whereby pains are taken to distance a museum from the activities of commercial galleries by including loans from a variety of sources.

After all, the “imprimatur” of a museum show for its artists offers a big boost to a gallery. It’s entirely possible that some gallery clients might read the words “Modern Museum” too hastily and infer that the works had been on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which would be most surprising.

And what of the Modern Museum’s much-vaunted “modern” educational activities, which supposedly account for its peculiar name? Two days after the official opening of the exhibit, a brief brochure essay, written by chief curator Mike McGee, and artist biographies on the walls appeared to be the sole learning tools.

Whoever wrote these biographies lacks a sense of art-world context. What goes on at these state art academies most of the artists are hooked up with? (Are some artists still working in the traditional styles? What happened to the heritage of such 20th-Century masters as Ch’i Pai-Shih?)

What does it signify that these artists have won this or that award in the People’s Republic? Should we care that one artist has shown at the Boston City Hall Gallery as well as the Brooklyn Museum? What conceivable point is there in comparing the technical competence of one of the artists with “the finesse of a Renaissance master” except to make the museum look silly?

Part of the mission of an art museum is to interpret art, not just to throw out bald facts about it. Aside from the dubious quality of the work on view, the opportunity the work offered to discuss contemporary Chinese art in a thoughtful, historical context was utterly squandered.

“Contemporary Realist Paintings From the People’s Republic of China” remains on view through Jan. 31 at the Modern Museum of Art, 5 Hutton Centre in Santa Ana. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Call (714) 754-4111 for more information.