3.2 Sublime simplicity and Avant-garde art in Taiwan
3.2.2 Folk culture and sublimity in Taiwan and in European Avant-garde art
Besides Austronesian aborigines and Chinese archaic period, Taiwanese Avant-garde art has an opportunity to persuade simplicity in the feeling of the sublime in one more form. The classical Avant-garde art searches for it through the form of folk studies and folklore. It is the feature of Russian Avant-garde art.419 In particular, such female artist as Natalia Goncharova is strongly interested in traditional forms of folk art, folk paintings, folk songs, popular prints and folk religious images. Kandinsky before his studies of modern art in Germany is not only an amateur painter and student of the law, but he also participates in ethnographic exhibitions,420 his early works in Germany are Russia-themed and show deep interest in the folk culture.421 In 1911, before founding Blue
Knight, Kandinsky writes to his colleague Franz Marc (1880-1916), where he expresses
the intention to create through the new art journal both a "mirror" and a ''complex synthesis'': "a Chinese [work] next to a Rousseau, a folk print next to a Picasso".422418 Quoted as in Susan Bush (2012), The Chinese literati on painting: Su Shih (1037-1101) to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636), Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, p. 44.
419 Tatyana P. Alekseeva, Natalia V. Vinitskaya (2016), ‘Folklorism in Neo-primitivism of the Russian Avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century’ in Bulletin of Tomsk State University. Cultural Studies and Art History, vol. 4 (24).
420 Sergey V. Chernov (2011), ‘Creator of memories of eternity: Vasily V. Kandinsky’ in Historical, philosophical, political and legal sciences, cultural studies and art history: Theory and practice, vol. 3 (9), p. 184.
421 Good examples of the works of this period can be Sunday, Old Russia (1904) and The Russian Scene (1904).
422 Quoted as in Pegg Weiss (1982), ‘The Blue Rider: Exorcism and Transformation’ in Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, p. 68.
Kandinsky and Larionov hunt for luboks (Russian popular prints) at marketplaces.423 An approach to popular prints is created in the beginning of the World War One by a group of the biggest Russian artists of that period, Malevich, Goncharova424 and others.
According to Marina Tzvetaeva, Picasso shows the Spanishness in his ballet Tricorne and Natalia Goncharova 'through the same riverbed' shows Russianness through the application to the folk culture in her cooperation with ballets by Sergei Diaghilev.425 The Taiwanese art world also shows signs of the same interest. In Taiwan in the 60s there is Xi Dejin (席德進) and his book Taiwan Folk Art (台灣民間藝術).426
What is the ground of the interest in folk culture during the Avant-garde art?
According to Yurii Lotman (1922-1993), it is important that luboks, a form of traditional Russian popular prints, ''not an analogue of known forms of 'cultured' visual art, but an antipode of it''.427 Lotman compares the luboks and the way children are drawing428 and viewing pictures429: the method is the same, because for both, children and for lubok artists, it is not the result which is important, but the process itself. Unlike the mode of the post-Renaissance art the viewer of lubok is supposed to participate, rather than passively 'receive' the artwork. Lotman sees a parallel of the life of text in written and folk forms: in the former there is a production of text and its passive 'consumption', in
423 Andrey D. Sarabyanov (2010), ‘Lubok (popular print)’ in Enciclopedia of Russian Avant-garde art, (eds) Andrey D.
Sarabyanov and Vasily I. Rakitin, Moscow: Global Expert and Service TIM, http://rusavangard.ru/online/history/lubok/
(accessed on the 8th of December, 2018)
424 Yu. Yu. Polyakova (2014), ‘Popular prints in the works of N. Goncharova and T. Churilin during the period of the First World War’ in Kremenets Comparative Studies, vol. 4, pp. 204-215.
425 Marina I. Tsvetaeva (1995), ‘Natalya Goncharova’ in Tsvetaeva's Collected works in seven volumes, (eds) Anna Saakyants, Lev Mnukhin, vol. 4, p. 121.
426 Xi Dejin 席德進 (1978), Taiwan Folk Art 台灣民間藝術, Taipei: Xiongshitushu publishing 雄獅圖書股份有限公司.
427 Yurii M. Lotman (2002), ‘The artistic nature of Russian folk pictures’ in Yurii M. Lotman, Articles on the semiotics of culture and art, Saint Petersburg: Academic Project Publishing, p. 339.
428 Ibid.
429 Ibid,, p. 323.
the latter text is a thing to play with, a game.430 After the autonomy of art is fully established and Renaissance art impulse is replaced with that of Avant-garde art, artists start to dismember the art form itself, and the border between the viewer and the creator should be breached too. This can be the reason of the actuality of folk culture for the Avant-garde art. This removal of the form corresponds with the Kantian demand of the formlessness of the object to qualify for the aesthetics of the sublime (5: 245).
Something which is not finished, which is supposed to be 'participated in' to exist, cannot have form, not only from a Kantian viewpoint but even commonsensically. Its form is becoming. For a passive eye of the beholder of classic post-Rennaissance artwork its purposiveness is inappropriate, controversial. Mikhail Bakhtin's research helps to understand this inappropriateness in a context of folk culture. Unlike the high culture, folk culture still preserves a link with older social order. Carnival refers back, to pre-Christian orgiastic festivities, to the removal of the borders inside and outside the human body.431 Lotman also shows how lubok of the 18th and 19th centuries presupposes different mores than that of the high culture of the same era. Lubok often speaks about adultery, not acceptable sexual behavior, sexual and gastronomic appetite far above the level acceptable according to the social norms.
Another element of lubok important here is co-existence of text and of picture, which resembles co-existence of often poetic colophones and image in traditional Chinese ink painting. Lotman stresses that in lubok the picture and the text do not exist in the same temporal dimension, like a comic book where the image of a character and the speech he 'produces' in the 'speech bubble' is supposed to be synchronic. Instead, lubok and text coexist in organic relationships, the whole of the text is meant by the picture and vice verse. Thus, the text of lubok can unfold the whole story of the
430 Yurii M. Lotman (2002), ‘The artistic nature of Russian folk pictures’ in Yurii M. Lotman, Articles on the semiotics of culture and art, Saint Petersburg: Academic Project Publishing, p. 322.
431 Mikhail Bakhtin (2010), ‘Francois Rabelais and folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1965)’ in Collected Works of M.M. Bakhtin in 7 volumes, vol. 4 (2).
characters (before and after the battle, for example).432 The space in the lubokian image is linked to that of a theater, especially a street theater of the marketplace. Thus, simple side scenes, slips, coulisses can be present in a lubok as well as a stage itself. And just as a stage can be a zone for a story to be unfolded, lubok's characters can go through the lubok's plot without leaving the lubok's border and a single scene this border encompasses.
Lotman believes lubok more resembles a tabletop game than a post-Renaissance European painting.433 The latter is supposed to be hung on the wall for the passive appreciation. In Kantian terms, free play is supposed to be more instrumentally implemented than in a Renaissance-like artwork. Both, Avant-garde art and folk painting is free of this necessity of viewer's stillness. Folk painting is free because it yet does not know the disciplining effect of the artistic autonomy. Avant-garde art, on the contrary, is free because it knows the autonomy but moves further.
Taken in this sense, Classical Chinese painting is free from the autonomy in post-Renaissance Western sense. The artwork is a scroll, it can be hung on the wall, but it can also be read, moving from one side to another. It is also a subject of additions, colophons can be added over and over again. After the artist has finished the ink painting, more and more new stamps or handwritten characters can be put on it by viewers or owners. Thus, the second inscription on Enjoying the Wilderness by Ni Zan (倪瓚; 1301–1374) is made by the artist more than fifteen years after the work itself was painted.434
In Taiwan the side of Avant-garde art linked with folk culture get a chance to develop only limitedly in the period of Taiwanese Avant-garde art (the 60s of the 20th century). The more than influential book, Taiwan Folk Art (台灣民間藝術) by Xi Dejin
432 Yurii M. Lotman (2002), ‘The artistic nature of Russian folk pictures’ in Yurii M. Lotman, Articles on the semiotics of culture and art, Saint Petersburg: Academic Project Publishing, pp. 326-327.
433 Ibid., p. 334.
434 Wen C. Fong (1992), Beyond representation: Chinese painting and calligraphy, 8th-14th century, New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, p. 483.
(席德進)435 can be among the few exceptions of the interest in folk culture by a famous Taiwanese artist. But even in the case of Xi Dejin, it is hard to trace influences of folk art in his own artworks. Moreover, ethnographic material presented by Xi Dejin is sterile, unlike the research by Lotman and Bakhtin of the 60s. In fact, around the same time Xi Dejin completely ignores all things sexual in Taiwanese folk culture. Probably the reason is again political, and the explosion of interest to adult themes in art after the end of the military law speaks in favor of this hypothesis. Such artists as Yen Minghui (嚴明惠), Chen Laixing (陳來興), Huang Zhiyang (黃致陽) and many others explores the theme of the sexuality in the 90s. Sometimes this exploration takes an ethnographic perspective.
Chinese and Taiwanese folk arts are not avoiding the theme of fertility, or as Jin Zhilin puts it ''[p]ropagation of people and harvesting of crops were deemed as good fortune. In this way, fortune and longevity became the basic cultural consciousness of the people, which was also the main theme of folk art.''436 Unfortunately, it is not so in case of the book by Xi Dejin. It seems that some kind of self-censorship is at work in this book. Probably the same Puritan (or batter to say, Confucian) denial of human sexuality limits many of Chinese collections of folk art, especially the oldest ones. After all the interest in folk art is a very recent development. It belongs only to the Republican period of Chinese history. As Felicity Lufkin puts it, ''[a] hundred years ago, folk art's position in Chinese culture was quite different, if it can even be said to have had a position: in the early twentieth century, the very concept of folk art as a category was unfamiliar.''437 In the West the concept is also very recent and can be traced back to
435 Xi Dejin 席德進 (1978), Taiwan Folk Art 台灣民間藝術, Taipei: Xiongshitushu publishing 雄獅圖書股份有限公司.
436 Jin Zhilin (2004), Chinese Folk Arts, (tr) Wang Dehua, Beijing: Wuzhou chuanbo chubanshe 五洲傳播出版社, p. 12.
437 Felicity Lufkin (2016), Folk Art and Modern Culture in Republican China, New York and London: Lexington Books, p. xi.
brothers Grimm, which is not that long ago. But a century or two centuries is fundamentally different time frame for the development of cultural conceptualizations.
Beside Xi Dejin the same strange silence on all things fertile can be found in
Traditional Taiwanese Folk Crafts (台灣早期民藝) by Liu Senhower (劉文三).
438 Liu Senhower also considers a lot of objects from the 'high' culture. Xiao Jiahui ( 蕭嘉慧 ) also discusses the problem of the limited opportunity to express sexual related themes in art during the martial law in Taiwan.439 Xiao Jiahui's main object of research is art by Hou Junming ( 侯 俊 明 ), a later artist with a deep interest in folk culture, who is discussed below.The 'folk' in Taiwan Folk Art by Xi Dejin is a bit different from the conception used in international folk studies. Xi Dejin includes objects of high culture, like chineware440 and religious sculptures441 as well as other objects related not to a 'common folk' but rather to the members of the local elite. Xi Dejin even writes that ''the most extraordinary folk art of ancient China'' ('' 我 國 古 代 最 了 不 起 的 民 間 藝 術 '') are archeological artifacts from the Han dynasty tombs of the nobles, luxurious ceramic figurines (' 瓷 塑 ') of the Tang dynasty.442 These objects are important sources on folk culture, because sometimes some glimpse of the life of Chinese 'silent majority' can be caught through these objects. But they do not belong to folk culture themselves. Tang
438 Liu Senhower 劉文三(1978), Traditional Taiwanese Folk Crafts, 台灣早期民藝, Taipei: Xiongshitushu publishing 雄 獅圖書股份有限公司.
439 Hsiao Chia-Hui 蕭嘉慧(2013), ‘Observations of the sociology of art in Taiwan after the lifting of martial law – A case study of Hou Junming's prints 台灣解嚴後 的一個藝術 社會學觀察 —以侯俊明版畫創作為例’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Visual Arts 美學與視覺藝術學刊, vol. 5, p. 83.
440 Jin Zhilin (2004), Chinese Folk Arts, (tr) Wang Dehua. Beijing: Wuzhou chuanbo chubanshe 五洲傳播出版社, pp. 43-60.
441 Ibid., pp. 30-42.
442 Xi Dejin 席德進(1978), Taiwan Folk Art 台灣民間藝術, Taipei: Xiongshitushu publishing 雄獅圖書股份有限公司, p. 16.
sculpture no more belongs to folk culture, than the richly illustrated books of European Medieval, where sometimes an image of a villain or a hunter can be spotted. This material helps to understand what dress is used by the old representatives of 'lower' culture, but it is still 'high' culture.
Comparing Xi Dejing in international perspective, it is reasonable to start with Anglo-American tradition, since Taiwan Folk Art shows the deepest interest in scholarship in the English language. In English, the conception of folk art is forged by Holger Cahill (1887-1960), who ''remains today the most frequently cited authority on American folk art.''443 Cahill believes that folk art is an "expression of the common people, made by them and intended for their use and enjoyment."444
In German scholarship the bridge between 'high culture' and all things 'folk' ('Volk') is made possible by the immortal research by the brothers Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859). Later in Austria Alois Riegl (1858-1905) begins the theoretical approach to the art of often overlooked 'mere commoners' in the conceptual frame of his attempt to re-evaluate decorative art. ''In Volkskunst, Hausfleiß und
Hausindustrie Riegl sets out to construct a systematic method for considering the folk
art idiom in a modern era, ultimately stressing its importance for all the peoples of Austria-Hungary.''445 What occupies Riegel is again the work of commoners for their own needs. What Riegel calls 'Hausfleiß' and 'Hausindustrie' is standing in clear opposition to the high culture. Famous Avant-garde art era journal Blauen Reiter also443 John Michael Vlach (1985), ‘Holger Cahill as Folklorist’ in The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 98 (38), p. 148.
444 Quated as in Elizabeth M. Delacruz (1999), ‘Folk Art as Communal Culture and Art Proper’ in Art Education, vol. 52 (4), p. 23.
445 Sabrina K. Rahman (2007), ‘Industrializing Folk Art: Aesthetic Transformation in Alois Riegl’s Volkskunst, Hausfleiß und Hausindustrie (1894)’ in Kakanien Revisited, vol. 4. Online publication
http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/beitr/emerg/SRahman1.pdf (accessed on the 29th of December, 2018), p. 1.
plays a role in the popularization of 'Volkskunst'.446 And again the interest is in things of the 'commoners'.
In fact, the strange broadness of the approach to folk arts by Xi Dejin is not special in the case of Chinese folk art studies. Thus, famous calligrapher and folk art enthusiast Huang Miaozi (黄苗子) writes in 1936:
[f]olk art can then be seen to have two kinds of meaning, a broad sense and a narrow sense: the wood carvings of African blacks, or the sacrificial dances of Balinese aborigines, can both be counted as folk art in the broader sense. Folk songs about Lady Meng Jian, the Door Gods pasted on the main gate at the New Year, the candy playthings sold at the roadside, and the clay-molded figurines introduced in this issue can all be taken as folk art in the essential (or narrow) sense. Folk art also includes art that is not entirely a product of the masses themselves, but which is influenced by works introduced among the people by the scholar-gentry, whether deliberately or accidentally.447
The problem is that folk art, as it is shown above, is grounded in the opposition between 'high art' of the nobility of all levels and 'low art' of the commoners. Thus, the definition of folk art cannot be so broad as to include the opposite (art of the gentry) without loosing its meaning. The reason why this crucial feature of folk culture changes in Chinese and Taiwanese cultures is the different social structure in Confucian society.
The character of the opposition between commoners and nobility, absolute in pre-modern Europe, is not so radical in China. The traditional European nobility is a birthright based, the nobility of China is, in the idea, based on the system of imperial
446 Klaus von Beyme (2005), Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden: Kunst und Gesellschaft 1905-1955, München: Verlag C.H.
Beck, pp. 456-457.
447 Quated as in Felicity Lufkin (2016), Folk Art and Modern Culture in Republican China, Lanham: Lexington Books, p. 26.
exams (科舉). In a sense, it is an opposition of Indo-European civilization with its caste systems and that of casteless China. The civilizational difference again works as a differentially permeable membrane between Avant-gardes of European 20s and Taiwanese 60s.
Another problem which sets the uniqueness of the view on folk art in Taiwan is absence of Christianity in traditional period. The 'low'-'high' opposition is not only social but also religious in Christendom.448 There is 'high' official religion of the church and the 'superstition' of half pagan commoners. Confucian doctrine is of course not free from inter-religious tensions, but is much more open and inclusive in comparison with Christianity. For medieval Chinese bureaucrats it is irrelevant how diverse is the religious situation of the village, they can laugh at a ghost story or even believe in it, but they will hardly interfere in rituals commoners use to deal with the ghosts. This feature also allows shamanism and Daoism to coexist in the lower fringes of Chinese society with little intervention from the center.
The term 'religion' itself is problematic in China.449 Avant-garde art in Europe can be anti-Christian. The Malevich's Black Square, for example, is exhibited for the first time hanging in krasnyi corner («красный угол», literally 'beautiful corner') a place where religious icons of a household should be. It is an blasphemous act by Malevich. Picasso's interest in African fetishes is no less 'satanic' from a Christian point of view: pagans are Satan worshipers and the power they have is 'unholy' and 'unclean'. This view is most probably first formulated in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Jubilees and the Book of
448 For more detailed exposition of the relation between religion and art paradigmatic to my, please see Irina A. Tulpe (1998), ‘Was the ancient Greek an artist or the life of the myth in Antiquity’ in Almanac of Metaphysical research:
Culture, vol. 2 (5), Saint Petersburg: Aletheia.
449 For the further information on the vagueness of religion borders in China, please see the notion of Chinese popular religion, as for example in Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller (1996), ‘Introduction: Gods and Society in China’ in Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, (eds) Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 1-36.