Beijing’s First Nude Art Show Breaks Another Taboo

A middle-aged policeman with a stubbly beard and olive-drab uniform seemed out of place in the mostly young crowd Thursday at the opening of Beijing’s first art show entirely devoted to nude paintings.

“I’m a policeman, but art is my hobby,” he said, adding that he had come to the gallery to view traditional paintings in another hall. When he saw huge crowds lined up for the exhibition of nude paintings, he bought a ticket and came in.

“I don’t understand why suddenly there’s this kind of exhibition or what its point is,” said the policeman, Liu, who was willing only to give his surname, with disapproval. “In the past, something like this was forbidden.”

The exhibition of 128 nude paintings by the faculty of China’s most prestigious art institute, Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, has broken another taboo in this country’s gradually liberalizing cultural world.

The works--which drew thousands of viewers on opening day--range from pieces so abstract that their subject can hardly be deciphered to paintings of almost photographic realism.

“This is not just the first exhibition of nude painting,” Wu Xiaochang, a professor at the academy, said earlier this year when plans for the exhibit were announced. “It is a three-week event, a new movement to celebrate the liberation of the body and the individual spirit in China.”

A question-and-answer exchange published in the Beijing Youth News captured some of the show’s cultural context.

“In the past few years there have appeared all sorts of fads such as body-building, billiards, break-dancing and, in the art world, nude paintings,” the Chinese reporter said. “Of course, nude painting is part of the basic training for students in art schools, but this kind of fad has extended to the publishing world. Photographic circles have also started to focus attention on nudes. What does this phenomenon reflect?”

The newspaper quoted Sun Jingbo, an associate professor at the art academy, as replying that this was partly a matter of education.

“Calendars with beautiful women are sold everywhere on the streets, and the covers of popular novels make you want to throw up,” Sun said. “But they fit the taste of some people. The level of culture varies, and the ways of appreciating beauty are different. I hope that through our exhibition, people can have a correct and healthy understanding of their own beauty.”

Policeman Liu, however, found little to respect at the show.

“Most of the spectators coming today don’t understand art and are just coming out of curiosity,” Liu said. “This kind of thing can easily lead to trouble. How can we justify running a public event like this that creates disruptive influences? These are little better than practice paintings, but they’re all done with nude models. They had to be done with nude models, right? This can cause trouble. This seems dangerous.”

But Chen Jiangang, an art student from a college in western China who traveled with several classmates to Beijing to see the exhibit, said that the event “is like opening a window for society.”

“It lets people enjoy beauty, and it certainly isn’t pornographic,” Chen said. “Art should be free. In the past, classes in nude painting were banned. They felt it was obscene and a bad thing. But things have been relaxed again in the past few years. This is related to the development of society and the opening up of the economy.”

Yin Qi, a 26-year-old instructor at the arts academy with pieces on display in the exhibit, said that “there are all sorts of negative opinions” opposed to nude paintings, but that as far as he is concerned, “there’s no difference between painting a nude and portraying a house or something like that.”

“To me it’s all the same,” he said. “All are things created in the natural world.”

The Ministry of Culture’s approval for the show “is related to more cultural openness,” Yin said. “I think it shows that people’s ability to appreciate art has risen, and their eyes have been opened wider.”