Lingnan School

The Lingnan School was an art movement launched in Guangdong in the late Qing dynasty by the 'Three Masters of Lingnan' - brothers Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng with Chen Shuren - to modernize Chinese painting by borrowing from other traditions. Trained in the Cantonese lineage of Ju Lian, the three went to Japan in the mid-1900s and absorbed the Western perspective and color taught by the syncretic Nihonga and Shijo schools. Nationalist revolutionaries as well as painters, they promoted a 'New National Painting' through Shanghai exhibitions and their magazine The True Record, winning national prominence in the 1930s. War and anti-Japanese sentiment checked the movement, but its students carried it on in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; it remains one of the major movements of twentieth-century Chinese painting.

Defining characteristics

• Western perspective and modeled light grafted onto ink-and-color painting
• 'Boneless' (mogu) washes building form without outlines, inherited from Ju Lian
• Atmospheric landscapes alive with mist, storms and dramatic skies
• Realistic, boldly modeled animals - tigers, lions, eagles - used as heroic allegory
• Bright saturated color and regional flora: kapok blossoms, banana leaves
• Romantic yet realist scenes of storms, struggle and heroic exertion

Key figures

• Gao Jianfu (1879-1951) — Co-founder; atmospheric landscapes and the 'New National Painting' program
• Gao Qifeng (1889-1933) — Co-founder; realistic large animals used as revolutionary allegory
• Chen Shuren (1884-1949) — Co-founder; delicate bird-and-flower scenes and later strong-lined landscapes

Example works

• Spring Scene in Lingnan — Chen Shuren (1928)
• The Roar of the Night — Gao Qifeng (1916)
• Landscape — Gao Jianfu (1926)

Sources

• Lingnan School - Wikipedia encyclopedia

← Back to the catalog