MODERN ASIAN ART IN THE 20th CENTURY - CHINA, JAPAN, VIETNAM

By the beginning of the 20th century, Paris's reputation as the unanimously and globally recognized capital of all arts was already well established. The city of Impressionist scandals, its dealers, its critics, the Louvre, and its Salons attracted young Asian artists, most of whom had been previously trained in the Fine Arts schools of their home countries. The reasons for them moving to France, and specifically to the Montparnasse district in Paris, varied. However, the desire to join the world's most dynamic and avant-garde center of creation and art market, and notably to exhibit at the Salon d'Automne, was common to all Asian painters and sculptors. Chinese, Japanese, and Indochinese artists broke free from the examples of the past after studying them during their education, leaving their countries to "see" what was being done in Paris. Young Chinese painters resided in Paris, and most enrolled in the Beaux-Arts to study the classical foundations they would import back to China upon their return, blending them with Asian styles. Indeed, from the late 1910s, after drawing inspiration from Japan, the Chinese found in Paris the source of the Western models they had glimpsed in Tokyo. For thirty years, the Beaux-Arts de Paris was the primary hub of activity for Chinese artists in France and an important center for cultural transfers between China and the West. Sanyu arrived in 1921 and, along with Xie Shoukang, Sun Peicang, Xu Beihong, and his wife Jiang Biwei, founded the Tiangou (Tiangou Hui) association, or Celestial Dogs. T’ang Haywen belonged to the second generation of Chinese artists who left for France after the Second World War; however, unlike his contemporaries Chu Teh-Chun and Zao Wou-Ki, who had attended classes at the Hangzhou Academy, T’ang had received no formal artistic education. It was the teaching of calligraphy and the principles of Taoism by his grandfather that shaped his intellectual development and perspectives. The rise of oil painting in Vietnam is associated with the founding of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi in 1925. Its director, Victor Tardieu, having studied under Matisse and Rouault in Gustave Moreau's studio, ensured an excellent quality of instruction. Many students came to Paris to fulfill their potential in the 1930s. Notably, three friends—Mai Thu, Le Pho, and Vu Cao Dam—found in Paris a natural extension of their young careers. About twenty years after the signing of trade treaties between the archipelago and Western countries, Japan sent already recognized painters to Paris around 1897 to study oil painting. Shortly before this, the arrival of Japanese items on the French art market—notably prints by the great masters, fans, and kimonos cited by Impressionists such as Degas, Manet, Monet, and Van Gogh—triggered a style of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts inspired by Japan: Japonisme. The composition, technique, flat colors, and linear lines of the Japanese revolutionized perspectives. When, at the beginning of the 20th century, the students of these pioneering Japanese painters arrived in turn, joining hundreds of foreigners and French painters of their generation, a new era of Japonisme was born. These were primarily Tsuguharu Foujita, Toshio Bando, Sei Koyanagi, Misao Kono, Yuzo Saeki, and Takanori Ogisu.