研究期間：10108~10207;The term “compromised painting” (zhezhong hua, sometimes called “eclectic painting”) usually refers to the Lingnan school and its blending of Chinese and Western painting styles, but the scope of the term is actually not limited to the Lingnan school—it refers broadly to any painting that blends Chinese and Western styles. In the 1930s, the painting community recognized four different types of these artists, depending on their training: (1) artists who had studied Western painting, and then returned to do Chinese painting; (2) artists who studied Japanese methods and applied them in Chinese painting; (3) artists who were firmly rooted in Chinese painting, but who later incorporated Western methods in their work; (4) artists who used traditional Chinese paper, brush, and pigments to execute watercolors and who claimed to be doing Chinese painting. From this classification, one can tell that there were different levels of acceptance at the time for paintings that blended Chinese and Western styles. To what extent could Western methods be applied in a painting for it still to be considered a “Chinese painting”? Was an artist’s training background one of the standards for criticism? Such questions were frequently raised in the Chinese painting community before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and they affected how paintings were classified in various exhibitions, including the National Fine Arts Exhibitions. This also explains why early Republican-era artists like Tao Lengyue (1895-1985) and the Shanghai calendar artists, who were once considered reformers of Chinese painting, were later denied and not accepted into the circle of Chinese painting, and why the painting methods attempted by Xu Beihong (1895-1953) and others came to replace them. To this day, people are still discussing whether painting with watercolors and ink should be called “Chinese painting.” Since no scholar has thus far attempted to unravel the origins of this debate in the early Republic or its background, I hope to re-present the aesthetic standards in the art and education areas that had been applied on paintings blending Chinese and Western styles during the Republic era.
