FAN BO

The seemingly irresistible rise of contemporary Chinese art to international prominence has tended to disguise a few problems.China has a rich tradition of art-making,stretching back many thousands of years.However,until very recently the technique of using oil paint-or,alternatively,acrylics-on canvas did not form part of this.In addition,though the human figure appears quite frequently in Chinese ink-painting,it usually occupies a subsidiary place in the composition.Exceptions to this are paintings of Buddhist immortals,and ancestor portraits.The Buddhists immortals are fantasies,which make no pretence of being realistic.The ancestor portraits,though seeking to offer a likeness,obey rigid conventions.In any case,most connoisseurs of Chinese painting give them a low rank,in the hierarchy of what they think art can and should achieve.

One result of this situation is that Chinese paintings in oils have often seemed rather stiff.It often seems that the artist is a very accomplished speaker of a language that is not in fact his own.From time of the triumph of the Chinese Communist regime,immediately after the end of World War II,to the end of the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1970s,most Chinese painting in ‘western' styles stuck rigidly to a stylistic language that had evolved in conservative academies in Europe during the first half of the 19th century,and which had later been modified in Russia to fit the theories of Socialist Realism.Despite the derision piled on its practitioners by European Modernists,this style was not without merits.Artists trained to use it had a strong grip on the actual appearance of things,and knew how to render what they saw convincingly.In addition,they were more observant concerning the evolution of society than their Modernist opponents.If one looks at the work produced by leading Salon-in other words academic-painters in Europe during the last two decades of the 19th century,it is surprising to note how much of its consists of vigorous critical commentary on the society that surrounded them.They may have been ‘academic' in a narrowly artistic sense,but politically they were not conservative.

It is worth noting this when thinking about the work of Fan Bo.Fan Bo,born in the mid 1960s,belongs to a small group of leading Chinese painters in oil on canvas who are now thoroughly at home with the technique,and use it with perfect fluency and without self-consciousness.There are traces,not always obvious at first,of the influence of major European masters.For example,though his figures do not resemble anything to be found in Cézanne,the actual structure of his paintings is informed by Cézanne's concern that every part of the composition,even the least important,should be alive and energetic.There are no dead areas in his paintings.

Without being overtly political,his subject-matter is eloquent about the way China is now,and also about the way the world is now.Much of his work consists of portraits,usually full length.The people seen in them seem to be people from the artist's own immediate circle-that is,they are young,or youngish artists and intellectuals,members of a new creative class in China that resembles the intelligentsia,neither bourgeois nor working class,that arose in Russia during the course of the 19th century,and which made such an immense contribution to Russian culture.

Other more ambitions paintings,with groups of figures,portray people of the same sort but contain narrative elements-that is,we read a story in the way the people shown relate,or fail to relate,to one another.The mood of these more complex compositions tends to be anxious.Typically,something mysterious but catastrophic may be happening in the sky,or in the background.Some of the figures are aware of this,others seem to ignore it.

Fan Bo has subtle ways of making the pictures his own.In most cases,the figures he shows are slightly elongated,like the figures in a painting by El Greco.He is also fond of painting spindly trees,which seem to echo the slenderness of the figures.These trees may also hace another function-they seem,often,to be sickly,and to symbolize the precarious state of nature in a China that is so rapidly,and sometimes so brutally,industrializing itself.

It is obvious that Fan Bo's art is far more indirect than that of the 19th century Salon artists I have cited.It is also obvious that he is anxious to overcome their main weakness,which was their tendency towards the photographic.Nevertheless,this is a fascinating contribution to the evolution of genuinely ‘social' painting-‘social' without artistic compromise.And it is doubly fascinating that it comes,not from Europe,but from China.

Edward Lucie-Smith

Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at Kingston,Jamaica.He moved to Britain in 1946,and was educated at King's School,Canterbury and Merton College,Oxford,where he read History.Subsequently he was an Education Officer in the R.A.F.,then worked in advertising for ten years before becoming a freelance author.He is now an internationally known art critic and historian,who is also a published poet(member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie,winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize),an anthologist and a practicing photographer,who has exhibited his work in Britain,Belgium,Spain,Italy,Russia,Macedonia,Slovenia,Malaysia and the United States.
He has published more than a hundred books in all,chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary art.He is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art.A number of his art books,among them Movements in Art since 1945 ,Visual Arts of the 20th Century,A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world.